What do you think with How-to articles

[athlon24]

Most of the prominent money making bloggers are all thumbs up with how-to articles or giving a list in your post. do you think this method is still effective to catch or drive traffic in your blogs?

[akira07]

i think it's still effective, i love it also
Because i love to see "step by step" article....
About that affect to traffic, it's not too related, i think

[athlon24]

Money Making Bloggers are saying that How-to articles are catchy to the eyes and most of their how-to post are the most popular in the blog. thus, it is related to traffic somehow. :D

[akira07]

haha, maybe because of it, i often go to blog which provide how-to article
i will prepare how-to article to be placed in my blog then :D

[sarahG]

Tutorial articles will usually attract a lot of search engine traffic over time. They're a long term (slow traffic) article more than a short term (quick traffic) one. I've not written tutorials on PHP on my site for well over a year yet PHP is the most popular word used in phrases to find my site.

You'll also find people will maybe bookmark tutorials, and if they use a social bookmarking site such as delicious, and tag it well, then others can come across your tutorial in searches there too.

Also, rather than letting your tutorials get lost in amongst your other posts, have a page of your best or all of your tutorials that's easy to find, which will also catch the eye of any new users who may be interested in your tutorials too.

[akira07]

Maybe you can make a label category "Tutorial"
So, if someone looking for it, they just click it :D

[navjotjsingh]

I am yet to start with this category though I have done 2 or 3 such posts but that were pure humor...as a serious tutorial post, I am yet to start writing that. I once made such a post on my old blog for Yahoo! Messenger on How to find invisible members on Yahoo! Messenger and that got the maximum traffic and even got picked up from ReadWriteWeb blog - one of the most read blogs on the internet.

[sarahG]

Maybe you can make a label category "Tutorial"
So, if someone looking for it, they just click it :D

Besides 'Tutorial' being a bit too general, you'll often find a category will end up with posts of just information that could be loosely related to that category too. For example I have WordPress how tos on my site, however within that are other WordPress related posts too. I'm not a fan of too many categories otherwise yes you could have WordPress News, WordPress Tutorials etc. Same with PHP, however I have a page up top that lists not only my PHP tutorials but in a logical order, whereas I haven't necessarily posted them in a logical order.

[Donace]

i've written a few how-to's and tutorials (http://thenexus.tk/category/how-to/) as well and as mentioned it is a a traffic grabber. I get on average 50 or so SE hits to the tut's daily.

The reason they work well is because they target a lot of longtail keywords and 'question' searches therefore a long tutorial will rank well for a number of longtail and in consequence short tail keywords once it ranks.

[athlon24]

i didn't know that it works well with the search engine. What do you think makes it SE friendly? The title or content? Because for me, sometimes, my content is how-to but I make my title a little bit artistic and now straightforward to make it catchy.

[ap4a]

but I make my title a little bit artistic and now straightforward to make it catchy.

What do you mean? A 'how-to' article shouldn't be treated any differently to aney other content. Your titles should describe the content. Donace's example isn't too bad, but I'd make it even more specific as it's a how to use Photoshop to airbrush an image article, so: "How to airbrush an image using Adobe Photoshop", and if it's version specific that could be included too.

[athlon24]

ooops, im sori for my typo error. I mean, my titles is not straightforward like your example. Taking note of your example, my title would be "Airbrushing Tricks in Adobe Photoshop".

[Swtrose]

Most of the prominent money making bloggers are all thumbs up with how-to articles or giving a list in your post. do you think this method is still effective to catch or drive traffic in your blogs?

I have written a few how to articles and they are popularly searched in Google.

[sarahG]

i didn't know that it works well with the search engine. What do you think makes it SE friendly?

There's no difference in optimisation on a quick news post or a how to article. The difference is usually at the tutorial has substance, has a reason for people to link to and is more likely to be searched on for months/years to come. Yes, it also usually has more content, but that won't necessarily make it rank any higher than anything else, it's the subject.

Say I have two posts on my site. One is a post about something in the news, the second is how to use multiple if/else statements in PHP. The latter will continue to get searched on long after the news has died down. Plus more people will write about the news so it's a saturated market.

[Donace]

@ people who dropped by thanks for that; I actually didn't really think much about the title; that was my first one focused on Photoshop.

Though looking at the hits I get from SE's they are usually from keywords based around my meta keywords and tags as well as the text actually in the article.

Though with hindsight what you could always do is using SEO plugin edit titles etc to rank in different key areas.

[akira07]

if you have make how-to article, try to submit it at article ezine or some social bookmarking, it's effective also in way to gat trffic to your site. Make it creative and people will like it, so their will visiting your site to looking for more...

[athlon24]

@Donace
In the SEO plugin, when you change the title in that post, that is the one that will show up in SE?

[sarahG]

@Donace
In the SEO plugin, when you change the title in that post, that is the one that will show up in SE?

The All in One SEO pack will allow you to change the page title (appears between the title tag in the mark up, appears in the very top of the browser window and will be the anchor text for that particular page in the search engines), meta keywords and meta description. The latter two won't do much to improve your ranking (as opposed to not using them), however an appropriate title will.

But that said, I've never found a need to change the page title of a blog post from its main title (ie. what goes in the h1/h2 on the page from the_title() tag). Also, I wouldn't advise deviating too much from the main post title either because the page title and the post's title should ideally contain the key words/phrase associated with that page as in importance terms for on page SEO, a page title is the most important followed by the h1 header then the h2 header.

[athlon24]

@Sarah
So, basically, you are saying that if I put a title for in SEO plugin, those words should also be in the title of my post? Because what I am thinking is that I will use the SEO plugin for Search Engines and I the crafty title of my post is for comment luv, and rss live bookmark, so it captures attention. e.g. Title of my Post: "Mom, the maid is overheating." Title is SEO Plugin: "Maid Robots can Learn from Mistakes."

Something like that. can I do that?

[ap4a]

@athlon24 yes, the all in one SEO plugin will allow you to do that. There are a couple of other useful plugins that work well in conjunction with that one, including the page menu editor (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-menu-editor/) written by our own SarahG (http://www.stuffbysarah.net/wordpress-plugins/page-menu-editor/).

[Donace]

@ athlon, yea basically, I am going to experiment with that now and see how it goes :D

[athlon24]

wow, and SarahG has her own plugin? I just realized that she's very famous and the same time really kind. She helping me tweaking my theme. :D

[sarahG]

My plugin is designed for pages not posts though ;)

Although my other plugin (What Others are saying) is basically Blogrush but with you in control of the sites you link to.

[wahmsuzanne]

My plugin is designed for pages not posts though ;)

Although my other plugin (What Others are saying) is basically Blogrush but with you in control of the sites you link to.

Sarah ~ do those listed come from your commenters or do you manually add them? *SmiLes* Suzanne

[sarahG]

You add them via your links manager in WP Admin. When you add a site as a link, lower down is an advanced section where you can also add an RSS feed link. My plugin is set to check for feed links, and if one exists it will grab the latest post from the site and include it in the list.

You can control how many sites are shown, whether they're shown as the most recent (if you have more than 5 sites say, you can show the 5 most recent, or a random selection of the latest post from 5 of your sites), and how often it checks for updates on the other sites.

The page at http://www.stuffbysarah.net/blog/wordpress-plugins/what-others-are-saying/ explains it all and more :)

[kocharvimal]

nice way to attract userz i guess..!!