Its been a fantastic year for the Blazing Minds blog and over the past 12 months the blog has grown in its popularity with more commentators stopping by, some amazing guest bloggers producing some very interesting and informative posts and recently a loss of the blog due to it becoming so popular that I had to upgrade its hosting, big thanks to Tim @EvoHosting for sorting that one out for me

So as we are nearly at the end of the year I thought its time to bring you a tasty Infographic of the Blazing Minds Top Posts For 2011, thanks to @DragonBlogger for the inspiration on this and for the advice on how to get this working on my blog
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So you must have seen the blog post I made about the @ApolloCinemas Winter Weekend that I posted up recently, well it was a great day, but the surprise came when I was asked if I wouldn’t mind being interviewed about my film reviews and my blog!

Surprised! You’re Not Kidding!

Suffice to say I was really surprised that anyone would find my blogging exploits of any interest, but Craig from Apollo Cinemas got me upstairs and sat down to be interviewed on @PointFMRhyl. My nerves were all over the place as I sat down with a microphone in my hand waiting to go LIVE on local radio!

But I do have to say that I was put at ease and besides my voice blasting out through the Apollo Cinema foyer and outside above the sound of the fun fair and across the car park, it was fun.

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Blogging isn’t a one-person endeavor. For a blog to truly thrive, the writer and readers must engage in conversation, feeding off of one another’s ideas. Blog readers who develop relationships with their readers often find a treasure trove of ideas for future blog posts and a greater likelihood that readers will share posts with their friends and acquaintances.

Readers aren’t just going to comment on your blog posts unless you actively encourage them to get involved, and doing that is relatively simple.

Provide engaging content

You want to engage your readers, so your content must be interesting, timely, and fresh. Keep up with the current events and news in your industry; share information that your readers can actually use; and make sure your content reads smoothly. When you provide engaging content on a consistent basis, readers learn to know what to expect from your blog and are more likely to keep coming back to it.

Request comments

One of the best ways to encourage discussion on your blog is simply to ask your readers to provide you with feedback. For example, at the end of a post, you might write: “What do you think,” or “Have you ever found yourself in that situation? Share your story by posting a comment below.”

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Yes indeed folks today is the last day for you to get your mits on what has become the the buzz phrase around the world via the blogging community for the crazy low price, yes folks I’m talking about CommentLuv Premium!

So at 8am on December 1st you will no longer be able to get CommentLuv Premium at the crazy low price that it currently is, so my advice is “grab it while you can”! As when the price goes up you’ll have really missed out on this amazing deal!

Not only will the price go up, but you’ll miss out on the amazing bonuses that are currently available on this special discount!

Surely You Cant Be Serious, The Bonus Will Go!

I am and don’t call me Shirley

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Those of you who have read Blazing Minds for some time will have seen the posts about the brilliant CommentLuv Premium plugin for WordPress, but did you know that you can search for blogs using CommentLuv with the Global CommentLuv Enabled Blog Search.

By using this search system you can find blogs that are posting on the same topics and interests that you may be blogging and will enable you to comment on not only blogs that you have an interest in, but also have the superb CommentLuv enabled as well.

Subscribe And Search For CommentLuv Enabled Blogs

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So there I was the other day preparing a new blog post when something rather bizarre happens, all my blogs categories and tags disappeared from WordPress!

What Was Happening And Why Was This Happening?

After looking around several sites and trying to find out the reason this had happened I really couldn’t find any help anywhere, with some places saying it was the fault of a plugin, some saying it was WordPress causing the issue and some saying that it was the fault of PHPMyAdmin!

So I wasn’t really getting anywhere with a solution to the issue that had now made all my posts listed under ”uncategorized” and no tags being listed anywhere, which in turn also caused a of category and tag pages disappear from the blog as well.

Upon further investigation and testing, I also found that I couldn’t even add new categories or tags to the blog. So this led me to believe that it’s not an issue with the WordPress installation, but it was actually a problem with the database used by WordPress.
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The Anchor text linking to your targeted page tells the search engines what the page is about. If the links are pointing to the targeted page using a particular keyword then the page must be a relevant source of information with reference to the anchor text.

But having hundreds of links linking to the page using the same anchor text is not a great idea. It worked very well in the past but now it is a good strategy to vary the anchor text so that the links look natural.  A link profile consisting entirely of the exact match links doesn’t look natural and is easy for Google in the future to degrade the value of a huge proportion of your link profile in one fell swoop. With the Google Panda update a partial match is much better than an exact match for the anchor text.

So what is partial match?

If your keyword phrase was Mac balloons then some partial anchor text that you could use would be: Mac has the biggest balloons; Balloons for parties; I love balloons etc. So if you are building 100 links for the keyword then use some exact match anchor text and a lot of partial match. This way you will have bigger broad tail and long tail queries that you can rank for. You should get the more traffic. The most important – the ranking will not fluctuate or dip easily as these links will have longer long-term value, and it is just going to deliver you a better and natural looking link profile.

How do you Vary Anchor Text?

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