Zoey Martin from Good Goog understands what I’m on about! Yes!
From henceforth known here as the Good Good SuperParent, Zoey will be championing gentle discipline on Ministry of Discipline.
I have long believed that SuperParents is more than just one person. Any parent willing to help other parents is warmly welcomed to join us and take SuperParents as your own. I am confident that our team will make it worth your while.
The first post from Good Goog SuperParent is scheduled for tomorrow morning.
A friend of mine requested I come up with this post on SEO for Blogs. I am big on search engine optimisation and online marketing, and I hope that you will agree that SEO-friendly content will benefit all of us in the long run. I have used these tactics and have created top ranking websites and have a personal blog (aside from SuperParents) that is recognised as being one of the best on the internet.
Keywords: Keywords drive everything. I use Google Keyword Suggestion Tool for research, ensuring that I choose ‘English, Australia’ to tailor results (this option is on the upper right of the screen). You should always try to optimise for the region you want to focus on. You should use key terms that are relevant to your category, your own web assets, and to your audience.
Distribution of Keywords: Your post should focus on 1-3 relevant key words or key terms. Using any more keywords dilutes the focus and search engines get confused. Key words and key terms should appear on a) The Title of Your Post, b) On the First Sentence of Your Post, c) Somewhere on the First and Second Paragraph, d) Image Filename, caption and ‘Alt’ text, e) External Links Chosen to Highlight Your Content, and f) at the end of your content. SEO for Blogs however is not all about keywords – remember that keywords are only good with great relevant content. You need to write interesting article that people would want to read.
Deep Linking: Google loves websites with interlinked and relevant content. If you write an article about children’s health, you should look for other related posts on your blog and include that link either within your post or at its end. If you are industrious, you should also create a link from older relevant posts back to your new post.
Referred Links: If you have a related post on another website or blog, you should establish a link from that site back to the post in question, and to ensure the link text includes the proper key words you have chosen.
Google Reader: Get a list of like minded blogs onto Google Reader. When you create posts, do a keyword search for similar posts from other blogs you’re following. Embed links from your post to other relevant posts – then go tell them about it.
Automation of SEO: There are some SEO processes that are automated by widgets, and I highly recommend you to check out services which create links to main pages, generates Google compliant XML sitemaps, and the creation of automated feeds to your twitter accounts.
Unique Content: If you create posts for a particular site and intend to cut-and-paste it on another blog, you must change, modify or add to that content so that at least 25% of it differs from the original post. It is beneficial for you to modify formatting in order for the content to look different from the original post.)
Integrate Your Blog and Website: Integrate your blog and website – make both point to specific and related pages.
Signature: All your posts and your emails should end off with your signature and an html link back to your site.
Blog Roll or Link Exchange: Start a link exchange program for your blog and your website. Make sure to exchange links with sites that rank highly for key terms appropriate for you.
Google Analytics: Install Google Analytics on all your other blogs and websites. Use Google to track where your traffic comes from and major keywords used to get to your site. Google analytics gives you an understanding of the key terms you are found for – look to build on those strengths, and if you have keywords that aren’t bringing you much traffic, work on increasing the use or prominence of those key words. (more…)
Perth’s SuperParents has been playing around with how our parenting blog would interface with our SuperParents FaceBook Page and our SuperParents_au Twitter Account since the start of the year. Just recently, we decided to make a bold move and disconnect the automated Blog-to-FaceBook RSS feed.
Our belief was that readers don’t want to get blasted by their Google Reader, Tweets, and FaceBook updates with the same boring blog posts over and over again. So why subject them to this abuse?
SuperParents takes a new crack at it on FaceBook
The RSS feed originally meant that whatever parenting article of ours which was posted on the blog would also immediately feature on our FaceBook page. Taking this automated publishing out seemed counter-intuitive. However, SuperParents felt that there was a new direction for us on FaceBook.
FaceBook would act as a behind-the-scenes hub – highlighting other great parenting and care-giving articles from other parenting blogs. Like other things we’ve done in the past, our philosophy is to help other parents – after all parents need parents – and this will bring value to our audience and the other bloggers on the net.
Our fan base on FaceBook grew to have 50 members in the first 7 months. In the last two weeks however, our FaceBook page has doubled to over 100 members with this new direction.
Please come and join our FaceBook page. Joining SuperParents on FaceBook makes it much easier for us to help you promote your own blog and interesting articles.
The School-at-Home Program and Art over Maths posts were about an activity in the holidays that included art, history, cooking, and poetry in an integrated course by yours truly. Let’s cut through the chase, while the kids kinda like that sort of thing, what they really like is the SuperParents Holiday Driving Program.
Yes you heard it, DRIVING.
We go to a large semi-deserted carpark, and the kids hop on my lap and take over the wheel. I control the pedals and provide some instruction, but otherwise, they get to steer the car and drive. This is a great opportunity to discuss safety tips like looking left and right, how to be aware when you drive, and how the car handles on the road. The best thing is that they have lots of fun feeling how a real car behaves.
My latest survey Elections – Does the Spin Make You Dizzy does not cover typical issues from this blog. But I thought it would be fun to see what other parents thought of the candidates and how they would fare in the upcoming elections. Please take a moment to have your say.
This is dedicated to all the parents who pick up, who give up, and who tidy up. It’s soul destroying to do this menial work day-in, day out AND have to nag the household to constantly lift their game.
To all of my friends, I feel for you … it’s time to SHOUT OUT LOUD.
I moved house a couple of months ago and left some archery equipment in my mother-in-law’s house. When I retrieved it recently, she insisted that I don’t store ’sharp things’ or ‘weapons’ under the bed. She even went so far to say she didn’t want me to take my equipment back until I confirmed where exactly I was going to put my gear.
For more information about Feng Shui and what my mother in law is on about, check out Feng Shui Guidelines for Storage Spaces, its point 5 reads:
Avoid under-bed storage if you can. If you must use this space, use it for extra bedding and for soft, seasonal clothing such as sweaters. Never store any kind of sharp objects, information (books, videos or DVDs, paperwork), or exercise equipment under the bed; …
Apparently any storage of weapons or sharp objects under the bed prevents me from having a good night’s sleep, may lead to exhaustion and worse of all – and this is according to my mother-in-law, may cause arguments between my wife and I.
My wife and I hardly argue – we are not the bickering type. Already in our 11th year of being married, we have done quite well to myth-bust and disprove point 5 – having always stored some form of Feng Shui labelled contraband under our bed. A sharp object isn’t going to start an argument. If anything is going to start an argument it’s going to probably be my pig-headedness, rather than a sharp object.
I’m not saying that the Feng Shui guidelines are impractical. Look through them, they actually mention sensible things like not to overload shelves and not to clutter up the room. Those are practical ideas that anyone should follow.
However, to blame marital problems on symbolic objects under your bed is utter CRAP. If you’ve got personality problems, call it that. If you’ve got financial issues, child rearing disagreements, character differences, or whatever, sure – argue away. But to blame your disagreement on Feng Shui or to argue without seeking to resolve your problem – that’s criminal.
Business Mums Daily features websites and blogs by Aussie Business Mums every week day. Last week 29 July 2010, the SuperParents Blog was picked and featured as one of their daily blogs. It was great to get complimentary feedback on the ‘wide variety of topics’ and the ‘many articles on parenting.’ What I liked was they noticed many of our posts ‘included links to related topics.’
We generally don’t have enough representation from Perth-based family and parenting blogs amongst Australia bloggers. I’m very happy that SuperParents – a wholly Western Australian resource for parents and care-givers is steadily increasing in prominence.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a remote control for your child? You can finally leave your child and they’ll probably be safe, and will probably behave more or less within the bounds of what’s acceptable. This remote control will have some simple functionality – your child won’t get into a situation where they won’t get too hurt, or too much into trouble. They’ll probably be fed automatically come the right time, and of course toileting with occur without too much of a hitch.
Don’t laugh but the child remote does exist! It’s not an electronic remote control unit. It’s available in most Asian countries and is called a domestic maid. Many asians hire these domestic helpers from poorer developing nations to help in the home. The typical day for a maid is quite long – they wake up at about 6am to clean the house and prepare meals, and stay up until all the dishes are washed *manually*. Through the day their role could involve anything from cleaning the car to carrying the shopping bags. And of course, in line with this post, they will literally spoon feed your children and ensure they are accompanied while you finish your meal. There is no such thing as work choices for maids.
I happened to see a family with not one but what seemed to be two domestic maids at the Singapore airport earlier this year. Whipping out my trusty phone camera, I videoed two short clips of children running around whilst the child remote control maids go into standby mode. This standby mode basically allows the kids to play so long as they don’t trigger any of the previous parameters we discussed above.
This is not parenting, mate. You can’t let children be brought up by someone who has no clue of your culture, hardly speaks the language, nor has received very much of an education. Most likely coming from a village setting, these maids are struggling with the appliances at home, the amount of work they’ve got to do, and the expectations from their boss. They are also mostly very young girls with little or no parenting skills.
It is already commonplace to hear stories of child abuse when children are left alone with the maid, or children who grow up with Indonesian or Filipino accents. What is more telling are stories of maids doing whatever is needed to pacify the child – from holding the child in arms and rocking to sleep, to constant feeding, to giving in whenever the child so much as squeaks. What kind of tyrant is such a child potentially growing up to be?
Having such maid is illegal in Australia. There are of course ways in which you can get temporary and very inexpensive help into the country; and this was offered to us about 10 years ago. Back then, we were living in a small town house. Trying to visualise another occupant in the house, and their role to keep a small patch of floor clean was enough to indicate that we didn’t need our privacy invaded. I don’t want any maid or domestic help living in my family home. I want to parent my children. And I’m willing to make sacrifices in order that I’ve got a hand in it. Of course that’s a luxury that not all people have.
If you had a choice, would you hire someone to live with you so you could reduce the amount of work you have to put into cleaning and cooking?
Isn’t that title a bit of a throwback to when I first started the SuperParents Family blog?
Keywords certainly are important to gaining the right search engine traffic, but to really excel as a parent blog in Perth, what is more important than SEO is the networking amongst other parent bloggers that will draw traffic your way and making sure that you are able to maintain output as the author of your blog. Of course I had no illusions that there was any other way – except of course my mind was only obsessed with seeding those keywords properly through my text and titles.
I expected a general reluctance to SEO and thinking that was contrary to my own. But a comment about ‘being true to oneself’ appearing early on in an email dialog kept popping up in my thought clouds. My previous clients didn’t really care about ‘being true to themselves.’ So what is the issue here?
As I worked more on SuperParents and bonded more with my new online family, I realised that it isn’t so much about quality of posts; ‘being true’ is all about using ensuring your voice comes through clearly. While it really isn’t mutually exclusive, it hasn’t got anything to do SEO! Confused?
Bloggers who have improved their SEO knowledge know that “small sustainable changes” are quite easy to do. You can have a search-friendly family blog without ‘compromising your content.’ But if you’re thinking only in keywords and only appealing to a search engine, you’re missing the entire point of having a blog. For instance, an SEO company would never understand why anyone would put shoes on a blogroll, upload a random video of their daughter rock climbing, or post a Pregnancy FAQs joke on a site that has commercial aspirations.
