Great writing tips

I read a pile of blog postings this weekend about how to improve your blogging. There were three articles that I really enjoyed and wanted to share them with you. They are all short, so check them out and benefit from their authors.

First was a post about checking your grammar and spelling. These are simple things, but often over looked. I know that I don’t always catch typos and poor grammar, but I do try. Here is a great quote from the post.

In the online world, all people really have to go on is what you present to them in your writing.

Jump on over and read what else Kev has to say on the subject.

Secondly is a post along the same lines with 10 great tips on proper grammar. The particular one that I liked was number 4:

Slang. As tempting as it is to write as you speak, even with the idea of appealing to a certain audience, slang is clunky to read, tends to reduce your assumed authority on a topic and may alienate more people than it attracts on the basis that they have no idea what you’re talking about.

And finally, I read a post on what your readers do and don’t need to know about you. There is certainly some personal information you want to share and some you want to keep personal. Here is the summary statement, but be sure to read the whole article.

Sharing your house address can be deadly, sharing your phone number is not advisable, sharing your photo is alright, and sharing your email and real name is recommended.

Please leave a comment at their blog postings if these were helpful to you.

Famous Friday: Planet3rry

This is the first in a series of Friday blog postings where I will attempt to make someone famous. I will do a review each week (if I remember) on Fridays of a blog that I enjoy reading.

This week’s Famous Friday pick is Terry at Planet3rry. Terry is a regular commenter here at MTS. I first heard about his blog through the Phedippidations podcast. Terry’s blog mostly focuses on his running, but like MTS, there is just about everything there. You might even get a look into how efficiently kids can paint each other with markers.

He participates in PhotoHunters, which is a weekly blog posting of a theme through pictures.

Jump on over to www.planet3rry.com and leave a few comments for Terry.

Discover Spanish With Us

I am pleased to announce the new website! It is still a work in progress, but we have started putting some content on there to get it moving.

Discover Spanish With Us is an English speaker’s perspective of the Spanish language. It is not an attempt to be scholarly or theoretical. What my wife and I are trying to share there are some observations we have made as we’ve learned–and are learning every day–about Spanish.

One of the words that recently struck me as interesting is the use of the word “discover“ in Spanish. It is not just to find something, but it carries with it the meaning of pulling something apart or uncovering it…investigating. While the English word can be used this way, it is a very common usage in Spanish.

Here is a short excerpt from the entry to the word descubrir/discover:

I first encountered this word used this way in the story of the Bible when four men brought their paralytic friend to Jesus. They were unable to enter the house through traditional means and resorted to discover (uncover) the roof of the house. Here is the wording from Mark 2:4 in the Spanish Bible.

Y como no podían acercarse a él a causa de la multitud, descubrieron el techo de donde estaba…

In the English the word used is uncovered.

Thus was born the idea to share our discoveries, investigations or pulling apart of Spanish words with the world.

If you want to learn some new vocabulary or have an interest in words and their meanings, then jump on over to Discover Spanish With Us and look around. Please leave a comment if you have something to add to the discussion. I am sure it will become a thriving community of like minded students.

Better Google ranking

A couple of months back I gave a list of podcasts that I broke down into 5 Podcast Categories. That posting was inspired by a group writing project that was being sponsored by Darren at ProBlogger.net. It garnered a lot of links back to My Thought Spot. So much so that my Google page ranking went from 2 to 4. For those who may not understand that, it basically means that Google now sees MTS as an important website when returning search results. If you do a search for something that I have blogged, I am more likely to show up towards the top of all the search results.

This month Darren is hosting another writing project that has the theme of blogging tips. This will probably generate a lot of links back to My Thought Spot. This is a good thing since Google ranking is based on the links you have coming into your blog. Those links can be external coming in, or internal links to your own pages.

With group writing projects you are able to get a good number of incoming links. If these links come from other highly ranked blogs, that adds authority in the algorithm which can bode very well for you.

Therefore, the two main factors to rising in Google rankings is to have many links coming into your blog and then have those links be from highly ranked sites.

There are many other factors as well, but those are the two big ones.

One thing I have seen that shows a lack of understanding in how the web works is that I have read many pages that talk about people or websites, but do not give links to those sites. A link to the main page is all it takes, though a link to a specific post or page at the linked site is always more preferable (also if they have trackbacks/pingbacks turned on, you will get a link back to your site just for deep linking to a specific post.)

Get out there and link to other sites and spread the joy of helping others move up in the rankings. They may return the favor by linking back to you. If not, someone else will.

Good things to come

I am working on a couple of projects that I hope to reveal here in either the next few hours, or days.

The first is a new website. It will be about Spanish and the curious words we find. Sometimes the information will revolve around grammar and usage, but mostly about the nuances of the meanings of words. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, I think you might find some of our discoveries to be interesting. We are in the design stage of the site now, but I will announce it here while still building long before I start promoting it to the general public. You will get a chance to take a gander and tell me what you think of it.

Also, I am working on a new episode of MTS Podcast. I finally got my sound editing software installed on this machine (I was without this for almost a month). I had to do my last couple of episodes on my notebook for both MTS and Missionary Talks.

I should be able to get out an MTS Podcast tomorrow morning.

Good things are a-coming.