Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice
As I did my research for the Popular Parent Bloggers list, I was surprised at a few of the trends I found. As an Internet marketer, I could see a few things that definitely needed attention repeated over and over again. So, here’s some general, technical advice to all mom bloggers (and please don’t feel targeted if you’re on the PPB list; I think you’re already awesome).
- Although every blogger and his/her dog will tell you that if you’re serious, you should be on your own domain, I don’t think that it really hurts your blog’s popularity if you’re a momblogger. Sacrilege, I know. However, nearly 50% of the original Popular Parent Bloggers list are hosted on BlogSpot (12) or Typepad (2), including 3 of the top 10. However, you may still want to have your own domain, if it’s available. That topic deserves its own post, maybe next week.
- If you have your blog on your own domain, and you have control over your hosting, implement a 301 redirect to create a canonical URL inmediatamente (immediately).UPDATE (27 June 2007): If you run your blog on WordPress, UrbanGiraffe has a handy plugin that will do all this for you, Redirection. (This particular trick is found under Manage>Redirection>Options.)
If you don’t have WordPress, don’t worry, I’ll tell you how. Probably the most general way I can tell you to do this is to get into whatever kind of file manager your hosting service offers and find a file named .htaccess . Edit it, adding this:
RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L](For some reason, mine only worked if I put it after the WordPress stuff already in my .htaccess file, without the first two lines above.) Of course, if your site isn’t .com, change it to the correct extension.
What does that do? That makes it so when someone types in or links to “yourdomain.com,” it’s automatically redirected to “www.yourdomain.com.”
Don’t want the www? Use this code to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com:
RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]Why does that really make any difference? Your traffic, links and search engine ranking are divided between the www and non-www versions of the site until you implement a 301 (permanent) redirect like this.
- And, as always, I like to refer you to Michelle at Scribbit, a blog about motherhood in Alaska, for her latest tip: The Biggest Technorati Tip in the World.
Mom bloggers, if you have any other technical blogging questions, feel free to e-mail me blog (at) mamablogga.com
5 replies on “A little advice to mom bloggers”
I think that Technorati tip was more than most of my readers wanted to know about Technorati. But I sure found it interesting.
I thought your list was fun, of course I’m biased, being on it and everything, but if you noticed there were a couple other lists and blog awards that were announced this week and I found it interesting that yours was the only one that listed any criteria. Most seemed to be more of a private blogroll. I thought yours was very professional and relevant. Thanks.
I certainly didn’t know that about Technorati. I thought it was interesting!
I gonna have to check out that 301 redirect thing. Thanks for the tip!
What about the difference between laragallagher.com/blog/ and laragallagher.com/blog/index.html ?
It drives me crazy that I am linked both ways. So where do I put that code in my .htaccess file? Does it matter?
Thanks for the tip!
Hey Lara. I think this should do it (it’s supposed to only be two lines; the first starting with “rewriteCond” and the second with “rewriteRule”):
rewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
rewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
And of course, replacing example.com with laragallagher.com (you don’t have to include the directory /blog/; the rule automatically takes care of that)