RSS FEED IDEMS: Book of Tips
- Showing Link Field in Beta Blogger
To enable the Link field, go to Settings Formatting and scroll all the way to the bottom, then set Show Link Field to Yes then click the Save button:
Then, paste this code into the appropriate place in your template:
For Classic Blogger Template:
<BlogItemTitle>
<BlogItemURL>
<a href="<$BlogItemURL$>"></BlogItemURL><$BlogItemTitle$></a>
</BlogItemTitle>
Source: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42051
For Beta Blogger:
<b:if cond='data:post.link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.link'>Related Article</a>
</b:if>
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:26:00 +0000
- Five Humane Ways to Increase Traffic Effectively
Written by Angel Cuala from Humane Blogging Tips
High traffic is high income and that is common sense. You may find effective ways to increase your traffic from almost every blogger. Each of them has proven testimonies on how they effective they are, and you can also try it. Some bloggers even make experiments on their blogs to make it more attractive. But the big question is, are you being humane? Or just doing it for your self? If so, then I do not blame you. Blogging is an individual activity and all of us have different and unique purposes. But one thing is for sure, we do everything do increase our traffic. Since we all have the same agenda, I have some humane ways on how to do it:
Be yourself. If you are blogging like another person you cannot increase your traffic the way it should be. This is because although readers may not see it once, they will see it soon and they will not like it even if your topic is interesting to them. If you are just blogging about something that you think can bring you a lot of money, but not related to your character, then you will not succeed. You cannot earn good money from being somebody else.
Be ageless. If you post about a hot topic, you can surely feel the effect. People love hot issues, either they can learn from them or not. But the question is for how long will you feel it? Then on the next day, you find another controversial topic and the routine goes on and on. Consider this, post about a timeless and quality topic and you can still feel the effect even if you are already gone. Your article will go everywhere and you will be surprise to meet a new blogger thanking you for a very old post.
Be informative. Valuable information is what visitors need. Giving tips on how things are done properly and effectively is the best niche topic you can do. Although you can also blog about your feelings and personal journey in life, you must also include the valuable lessons you have learned. In this way, you are also giving away tips and people can learn from your past experiences, no matter how hard your life was. However, just make sure you tested the tips first before sharing them.
Be a smart spender. You can use money to earn more traffic and if you are smart enough, the money you spend will be doubled or even tripled. But how can you do that? First, avoid spending too much money. Instead, spend time in researching and evaluating what kind of strategy that is applicable to your capability and interest. Do not just believe when experts tell you that you will be rich if you follow his way. Note that you are a different person and you cannot do exactly what he did.
Be human. Please do not get me wrong; what I mean is to consider people first before search engines. Keywords help search engines to be attracted our blogs, but you must remember that it is still humans who created them. Moreover, you can still maximize your keywords to increase traffic if you treat your readers as humans like you. Being creative is the characteristic you should have in order to use your keywords repeatedly, and you can make your articles readable to humans and non-humans simultaneously.
Getting high traffic is not a burden to stop us from being humane. Actually, being a blogger can also make us be a better human being but only if we want to.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:55:00 +0000
- Tips On Increasing Comments On Your Blog
* Write on controversial topics/ debatable topics
Write about Britney or Barack Obama. Or about how Twitter is stupid. Get the point? Pull in people to write comments. You have the risk of spoiling your reputation but everybody would appreciate your efforts later.
* Leave room for discussion
Always end your articles without a conclusion. Give the reader two or more options, let him select his choice. And leaving room for discussion is always a good way to ensure that people start commenting.
* Ask questions
This applies to people who already have a following. Ask your readers an interesting question. They will respond for sure. But make sure you don’t keep mum after asking the question. Write back to them as well. They’ll appreciate it.
* Reward commenters
You could reward them in many ways. Either give away goodies/cash to frequent and top commenters on your blog on a weekly basis or gift them a surprise link in one of your recent posts. I prefer the second way. Make it a point to read your commenters blogs and respond to one of his articles through your post. Post a link to it. He’d be happy.
* Comment on other blogs
A very easy thing to do. The principle is - do things proactively to others what you want them to do to you. So comment on other blogs that you think has relevant content. Write authority comments that are relevant. You will grab the webmasters attention and he’ll ultimately notice you.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:51:00 +0000
- WordPress Snippet: Complete List of Posts
query_posts($query_string.'posts_per_page=-1');
while(have_posts()) {
the_post();
the_time();
the_title();
}
This will display the time and title for all your posts. This could result in a very long page, and a more usable way of doing it would be to change the posts_per_page parameter, and add Next and Previous links to navigate the whole list. Code snippet by Otto in the wp-hackers mailing list.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:40:00 +0000
- Improve Social Media Profile Rankings with Internal Links
If you want your social media profile pages to rank highly in the search results, it's important to build links for them. There are billions of pages in Google's index and only those pages with enough linkjuice are going to reach the front page in a competitive query.
Getting quality external links to social media profiles can be difficult, but you can often get good internal links with just a little bit of participation. And those internal links are a very powerful, underrated SEO ranking factor.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:39:00 +0000
- 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts
Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Our search quality and Webmaster Central teams love helping webmasters solve problems. But since we can't be in all places at all times answering all questions, we also try hard to show you how to help yourself. We put a lot of work into providing documentation and blog posts to answer your questions and guide you through the data and tools we provide, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve the visibility of that information.
While I always encourage people to search our Help Center and blog for answers, there are a few articles in particular to which I'm constantly referring people. Some are recent and some are buried in years' worth of archives, but each is worth a read:
1. Googlebot can't access my website
Web hosters seem to be getting more aggressive about blocking spam bots and aggressive crawlers from their servers, which is generally a good thing; however, sometimes they also block Googlebot without knowing it. If you or your hoster are "allowing" Googlebot through by whitelisting Googlebot IP addresses, you may still be blocking some of our IPs without knowing it (since our full IP list isn't public, for reasons explained in the post). In order to be sure you're allowing Googlebot access to your site, use the method in this blog post to verify whether a crawler is Googlebot.
2. URL blocked by robots.txt
Sometimes the web crawl section of Webmaster Tools reports a URL as "blocked by robots.txt", but your robots.txt file doesn't seem to block crawling of that URL. Check out this list of troubleshooting tips, especially the part about redirects. This thread from our Help Group also explains why you may see discrepancies between our web crawl error reports and our robots.txt analysis tool.
3. Why was my URL removal request denied?
(Okay, I'm cheating a little: this one is a Help Center article and not a blog post.) In order to remove a URL from Google search results you need to first put something in place that will prevent Googlebot from simply picking that URL up again the next time it crawls your site. This may be a 404 (or 410) status code, a noindex meta tag, or a robots.txt file, depending on what type of removal request you're submitting. Follow the directions in this article and you should be good to go.
4. Flash best practices
Flash continues to be a hot topic for webmasters interested in making visually complex content accessible to search engines. In this post Bergy, our resident Flash expert, outlines best practices for working with Flash.
5. The supplemental index
The "supplemental index" was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query.
6. Duplicate content
Duplicate content—another perennial concern of webmasters. This post talks in detail about duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and also references Adam's previous post on deftly dealing with duplicate content, which gives lots of good suggestions on how to avoid or mitigate problems caused by duplicate content.
7. Sitemaps FAQs
This post answers the most frequent questions we get about Sitemaps. And I'm not just saying it's great because I posted it. :-)
Sometimes, knowing how to find existing information is the biggest barrier to getting a question answered. So try searching our blog, Help Center and Help Group next time you have a question, and please let us know if you can't find a piece of information that you think should be there!
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:34:00 +0000
- 40+ essential resources for Google Blogger
Written by Amanda Fazani
While Blogger may not be seen as the most powerful blog management system, it certainly has a loyal following. Beginners and advanced users alike appreciate the simplicity of Blogger, the free hosting and ease of customization.
So for those of you who choose Blogger as your publishing platform, here is a selection of essential templates, tools and resources to help you build a better blog.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:26:00 +0000
- Blog:Tweaks Tips Tricks Widgets
I found this great blog that has alot of tweaks that prove to be very useful in improving your blog. He laid it out so that you can easily customize your blog to add new features like tab views, showing related articles, breadcrumb trail, adding frontpage to your blog and alot more...
Dont forget to add comments regarding this tip! Happy Blog Tweaking!!
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:05:00 +0000
- How Yahoo Search Assistant Changes SEO
On Tuesday Yahoo became the last of the four major search engines to offer blended search. Last, but definitely not least as Yahoo’s Search Assist may just be the killer app to get some switching back from Google. Search Assist also has the potential for changing a few things when it comes to optimizing for Yahoo as people begin to unknowingly build more advanced queries.
Yahoo’s been rolling out some of the changes recently, but on Tuesday they all came together. There’s already been a lot of coverage and instead of trying to repeat what’s been said I’ll leave you with the links towards the bottom of this post. However the best way to see the changes is by going to Yahoo and searching.
SEO Related Observations About Search Assist
In using search assist the last couple of days a couple of things have become clear to me. The first is that whether they realize it or not people will be performing more long tail searches. The second is that when search assist is open one less organic search result is visible above the fold.
In the above image you can see search assist in action for the single word ‘cavern.’ The phrases on the left are search suggestions and one of the nice features is that cavern doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the suggested phrases. The two columns of phrases to the right are concepts around the word cavern you can explore.
As an aside you might notice the Beatles as one of the concepts and it might seem strange for it to be there, but the Beatles got their start playing at The Cavern club in Liverpool. Just a little trivia for you non Beatles folks.
Getting back to the cavern search I selected Howe Caverns from the suggestions on the left and then selected ‘adventure tour’ in the concepts that showed up.
You can see that Yahoo is now showing results containing adventure tour. While it doesn’t show in the search box the actual search now being performed is
howe caverns + “adventure tour”
Notice that adventure tour is being searched in quotes as an exact match while the howe caverns part of the search isn’t. The query above is somewhat more complex than a user will typically type on their own. It’s not overly complicated, but now thanks to search assist we’ll be seeing more advanced searches that will go deeper into the search tail.
Combined with the observation that one less result will be in front of people (at 1024 x 768 resolution one organic result is visible) I think it becomes more important to optimize for long tail queries for Yahoo traffic. It may not be enough to simply have all the words on the page either as the second half of the query is an exact match.
As you start to use search assist more your attentions naturally ends up more focused more at the top of the page on search assist itself. If you don’t see a good result quickly you may decide to further refine the search as opposed to digging deeper into the results and clicking beyond the first page. It wouldn’t surprise me to see less results being clicked, but more clicks leading to good results. That would likely lead to more satisfied Yahoo users.
Long tail optimization has been good advice for awhile now. Search Assist makes the advice better and should also require more focused long tail optimization. Additionally with one less organic result showing the paid listings take on a greater percentage of the space. It’s very possible Yahoo will start seeing more clicks on their ads.
Suggestions For Search Assist
I’d like to see Yahoo display the actual search being performed when using search assistant. In the above howe caverns + “adventure tour” search why not show the entire search in the search box? Showing the actual search would help users better understand what is happening and it would educate them about advanced search operators. If Yahoo tested the idea and found users were more confused by seeing the search change I could understand, but otherwise I think it would be a nice touch.
Exploring concepts is a great addition and I wonder if it could be expanded one more level. Instead of only exploring concepts around the original search why not allow exploration around the more advanced modified search. It would add one more level of refinement and for Yahoo it would keep more people on Yahoo’s search results page
If possible I wouldn’t mind seeing more advanced search operators gain inclusion in search assist. Right now search assist will include an exact match phrase on top of your initial search. Perhaps they could add a way to exclude certain words or phrases as well.
Resources
These are some of the posts I had been collecting for tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post. If you haven’t yet spent any time with Yahoo’s search assist the posts below will fill you in more about how it works and the general changes Yahoo made. Eric Lander’s Search Optimization Guide will walk you through a variety of the changes and how they relate to seo.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:45:00 +0000
- Make Money From Your Blog: Syndicate Your Blog
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:41:00 +0000
- 10 Tips On Raising Your Site In Google
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.
That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content
The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:35:00 +0000
- Top 15 AdSense tips
AdSense Tip #1: Find your keywords
Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. A free and advanced tool for finding the most prominent keywords in a page can be found here: SEO Density Analyzer. Copy the most important keywords to a text file ([web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt).
AdSense Tip #2: Improve your keywords
Get keyword suggestions from Overture Search Inventory and from Google AdWords Sandbox. Get new keywords that can help you improve your ad relevance. Enter the keywords from [web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt and save the suggestions to [web page name]-adsense-suggestions.txt.
AdSense Tip #3: Keep your website focused on a theme
Use the keyword suggestions to enhance your web pages and to build theme-based content. And also try to get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. Don't forget that Google AdSense is keyword-targeted advertising: Google AdSense bases its advert topics on your websites content, this means that content-rich websites of a popular topic should attract a large amount of ads.
AdSense Tip #4: Write a new page every day
One of the best tips is to add a new page to your web site every day. The more content you have, the more visitors you will get. Put an Adsense unit on each and every content page of your site. But where? You will find more about that from the next AdSense tips.
AdSense Tip #5: Choose the right AdSense format
Wider formats are successful because the ads are compact, easy to read and are complementary to the content. The top three AdSense formats are:
1. 336x280 large rectangle
2. 300x250 medium rectangle
3. 160x600 wide skyscraper
Another successful format is the 468x15 horizontal ad links, that can be placed under your navigation bar.
AdSense Tip #6: Color tips
When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.
Create a custom AdSense palette:
* border color = background color of your web site
* background color = background color of your web site
* link color = blue, color of your links
* url color = black, #999999
* text color = black, #333333, color of your main content
You can also rotate your color palette: select multiple color palettes that blend with your site to create variety.
AdSense Tip #7: Position tips
Visitors tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links.
Place the AdSense ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page or under your headlines, where your visitors are most likely to look at.
If you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is a good place for AdSense ads because your visitors read the text and then they want more resources.
AdSense Tip #8: Increase the number of ads, but not too much
If you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple AdSense units. You can use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links.
Link units allow the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.
AdSense for Search allows visitors to search Google.com or your sites (up to 3 domains). You earn money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. If you click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox in the AdSense for Search settings, you won't lose your visitors.
AdSense Tip #9: Preview Google ads
You can find out what ads will be served by Google AdSense if you install Google AdSense Preview Tool, a very simple tool available only for Internet Explorer 6.0. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list. Because AdSense uses geo-targeting, Google serves different ads for other countries. Instead of faking your IP or travelling abroad to test your ads, use this AdSense tool to see what ads see your visitors from France, Germany or other countries.
There may be no Google AdSense ads available for your webpage, so Googlw will display Public Service Ads. You can hide them using alternate colors or images. Make sure you include the image in a simple html file as a link (use target="_top"). The image size should be the same as the dimension of AdSense units. In the alternate url box, enter the absolute url of the html file.
Read more about alternate ads.
AdSense Tip #10: What not to do
* Don't click on your own ads
* Don't ask others to click on your Google ads
* Don't manually change AdSense code
* Don't place Google ads on sites that include prohibited content (e.g.: adult sites)
* Don't employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links
* Don't use AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads (e.g.: Yahoo Publisher Network)
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:27:00 +0000
- Underline Text in Blog
Want to underline some text in your blog post? It is very easy. However, to do this, you must use the EDIT HTML mode and not the COMPOSE mode. You will need to do what they call Inline CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) which is CSS inside a HTML element.
However, don't be scared by the technical jargon as you need not know what I mean by the above. All you have to do is to examine the HTML I used to display It is very easy inside the scroll box below and just copy what I do:
<strong><span style="e;TEXT-DECORATION: underline"e;><span style="e;text-decoration:underline;"e;>It is very easy</span></span></strong>
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:27:00 +0000
- Top Ten Study Tips For Success In Tests And Exams
There comes a time in every student's life when those things that you dread begin to loom on the horizon. Depending upon how confident you are about them, your horizon will either be measured in months, or maybe days. What am I talking about? Of course I mean examinations. You may be about to go into mid term mock examinations or you could be facing your final tests.
Whatever your situation and whenever you are going to be sat in an examination room it is never too early to start getting ready for those tests. Thorough preparation will provide you with a strong foundation and will give you the confidence and belief that you can do them and that you will get the grades you want.
But where do you start and which of the hundreds of study tips and study skill ideas do you use?
I am often asked for my top ten tips when it comes to exam success and over the years I have accumulated many ideas, some of which are more effective than others. However if I were to limit myself to just the top 10 that I felt were the most powerful based on all of the work I have done in this field, here are the ones that I think are the most powerful:
1. Find your own deep and compelling reason to successfully learn your subject and pass your exams.
This really is the most important of the study tips I shall share with you here because your success will be deeply rooted in your motivation to learn. Many kids at school do not want to be there and can't be bothered to try which is often why they fail. It does not mean that they are unable to learn, it just means that they have not applied themselves to the work at hand. I know that this is often true because I have met literally hundreds of people who "failed" at school by conventional standards yet later in life made the decision to go back to studying a subject because they wanted to do it. And because of their motivation to succeed the did.
So what does that mean to you? Well understand that you are driven by emotional needs and not necessarily logical ones. If we were driven by logic, the world would be a much better place. So you have to find a deep emotional reason for achieving success as a student. And if you can dig deep and find that reason then nothing will stop you because you will find a way.
2. Plan your time to include study, revision and social commitments - a balance of having fun, taking breaks and studying is vital.
Balance is very important to have a successful and rewarding life and the same is true when you are a student. OK you could spend every waking hour reading every book you could find and learning everything you could and yes you would pass your exams provided you had not burnt out. But it would not be fun, you would have no friends and you would definitely be out of balance.
Taking appropriate breaks and giving yourself little rewards when you have finished an essay or learnt something new for your exams is vital for your success. This is because it keeps you in balance and gives you a degree of variety that keeps you fresh and alert. Yes having a night out with your friends is good for you - but only if it is as a reward for doing good work and is as part of your overall plan.
3. Use multi-coloured Mind Maps for your notes.
My friend and mentor Tony Buzan developed the most powerful thinking tool ever (and I am not exaggerating here) when he invented the Mind Map. Imagine being able to get the key facts from an entire book on a single page in a way that was not only easy to remember but would stay in your memory for as long as you wanted it.
Imagine having a thinking tool that allowed you to prepare essays and assignments in a fraction of the time than you do at the moment AND have them much better. Imagine being able to give a powerful hour long presentation from a single page of colourful notes that you put together in about 10 minutes.
Well all these are possible with the Mind Map. It is an amazing tool that combines the power of association, the fact that we have a very strong visual processing mechanism and that it combines right and left brain processing.
I have seen what Mind Maps can do for students of all ages and all abilities and if I had my way it would be a compulsory tool taught to kids from a very young age.
4. Review your notes regularly to reinforce your new-found knowledge.
This is another very simple but extremely powerful tip for you. The experience of most students is that the learning that takes place in the classroom is really an information gathering exercise. When it comes to revising for their exams at the end of the year they go to their notes and often can't remember ever seeing that information before. They know they must have because the notes are in their handwriting but they can't remember anything! So the preparation for exams becomes a re-learning exercise.
This study tip is so simple and powerful yet most will not bother. If at the end of every day, every week and every month you quickly scanned what you have learnt, made a few key word notes and then reviewed those ultra-condensed notes regularly, you would be amazed at how much you could remember. This only need take 10 minutes at the end of the day, half an hour at the end of the week and maybe an hour or two at the end of the month.
Each time you review what you have learnt, even in condensed key word format, it is more deeply engrained in your memory.
5. Swiftly skim through your text books and course material before you read them in depth to give you an overview of your subject.
Now there is not enough space here to explain why this tip is important because it is a fundamental part of learning how to read faster and absorb more information. Just trust me on this one and before you start reading, skim through your book (no more than 10 minutes) to get a feel for the contents.
As you read in greater depth later on, some of what you have got from the quick scan will help put into context that information and allow you to make the necessary links in your mind and memory.
Doing this will often stop you from getting stuck at any point because you will have a flavour of what is to come later in the book and this added preview can help the understanding of earlier information.
6. Learn how to remember lists of things by linking each item to a location on a journey or route you are familiar with around your town. You could even use your own home.
At some point, once you have understood your subject, you will need to be able to memorise it. Many people think that just understanding it is enough to learn it but unfortunately that is not the case and so some memorization is necessary.
The most powerful way of doing this is to create a "filing system" in your mind. One way to do this is to create a little journey in your imagination (it can be a real place or you can make it up). See for example the chair, the bed, the TV, the door and the window in your bedroom. If you wanted to remember a sequence of items you would link an outrageous (and therefore memorable) picture to each location.
To recall the information, simply revisit the journey in your own mind and "see" the information in the silly pictures you have created.
7. Before you do any revision, warm up by doing some gentle exercise to relieve any tension in your body and to get a rush of healthy oxygen flowing to your brain.
There is a saying - "a healthy body, a healthy mind" - and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to learning. Two things happen when you physically warm up before studying. First of all you get rid of any physical tension that will create stress in the body and mind (not good for learning) and secondly you will get a rush of oxygen to the brain which will help you think more clearly (definitely good for learning).
8. Do past papers under thorough exam conditions as often as possible to familiarise yourself with the format and the pressures of working under exam conditions.
If you are training in a sport or practicing a musical instrument, you will practice the plays or rehearse the pieces for the big day. It would not make sense to spend months doing push ups and then turn up on the big day and expect to play soccer really well. It would also be unwise to only practice scales on your instrument and then when the big performance comes up expect a perfect recital.
So the same is true of exams. Fortunately these days you can get hold of past exam papers from previous years. Do these, under the same exam conditions, over and over again so that when the big day comes you will have exam experience under your belt.
Doing this will give you more confidence, much better exam techniqe and an insight into how the examiners for your subject think. Remember practice makes perfect.
9. In an exam, make sure you read the question completely and fully understand what the examiner wants before you allocate your time and begin answering the questions.
This is commonsense but you would be amazed at how many people do not do this. Take your time, plan what you are going to write and then write it.
10. If you are faced with a mental block breathe deeply, relax and ask yourself "If I did know the answer to this question, what would it be?"
This might sound silly but if you do it with a positive expectation that your very powerful subconcious will give you the answer, then you will be amazed at what comes to mind. The combination of the breathing, relaxation and expectation is the key. Of course you have had to have done the preparation beforehand because this won't work with information that you have not previously learnt or covered in class.
So there you have my top 10 tips. Each are very powerful and just doing one of them will make a big difference to your success...but if you do all 10...Wow!
Good luck and please do let me know how these work for you.
About The Author
Michael Tipper makes it very easy to be highly effective at learning and passing exams in a way that any student can easily achieve. To receive your free 7 day mini-course on being a highly effective student visit http://www.the77habits.com.
himself@michaeltipper.com
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:53:00 +0000
- 10 Easy Tips To Make Children Smarter
Scientific research shows that intelligence is both genetic and environmental. Intelligence is also not fixed but can be increased because the brain develops new neurons and interconnections with stimulation.
A supportive environment fosters numerous aspects of intelligence. The following 10 easy ways to stimulate intelligence in children will provide an "enriched environment" for brain growth.
One: Love and Self-Esteem Improve Academic Performance
In a long series of experiments, Prescott Lecky, an American educational researcher, found a high correlation between low self-esteem and learning problems in children.
He correctly theorized that by raising a child's self-esteem, learning performance would also improve.
His success stories include a poor speller who averaged 55 in six months, a Latin student who went from 30 after three encouraging conversations with a teacher, and a student considered to have no aptitude for English who improved over a semester to win the school's literary prize.
Two: Breast Fed Babies Are Smarter
Danish researchers found that mother's milk contained essential micronutrients for brain development. In fact, the longer the child was breast fed, the more the brain was nourished. For example, infants breast fed for 9 months were smarter than infants only breast-fed for two months.
Three: Proper Nutrition Improve Health And Nerve Conduction
Diets high in sugar, Trans fatty acids, and salt decreased health in children. Junk food failed to provide sufficient iron for healthy brain development, resulting in poor nerve impulses. Children with nutritional deficiency also missed school more often because of illness and fell behind their peers.
Four: Proper Breakfast Improves Attention At School
Thirty years of research has shown a strong correlation between breakfast and mental alertness. Children who had nutritious breakfasts had better memory. They also concentrated better and absorbed more information during class. Those who had no breakfast or poor breakfast were more irritable and distracted during class.
Five: Exercise Benefits Intelligence And Personality
Research conducted by the University of Illinois showed that fitter children performed better academically. Besides the obvious physiological benefits of improved oxygen intake, blood flow, immune stimulation, and neural transmission, there was also a psychological and sociological component, too. Psychologically, fitter children showed higher self-esteem. Sociologically, those who participated in organized sports displayed more confidence, more cooperation, and spontaneous leadership.
Six: Musical Training Improves IQ Into Adulthood
Long-term research by the University of Toronto showed that organized music lessons benefited children all the way into adulthood. The longer the child studied music, the higher their IQs as adults. Music students also displayed better grades throughout their schooling.
Seven: Some Video Games Enhance Mental Acuity
Research by the University of Rochester found that certain video games improved sensory perception, strategic thinking, and planning ahead of time. The video games that created positive mental improvements had an educational element that improved motor skills and enhanced memory.
Eight: Mind Games Do More Than Entertain
Board games like chess, checkers, creative games like Lego and jigsaw puzzles, and brainteaser games like crosswords, cryptograms, riddles, and Sudoku improved intelligence. Specifically, they stimulated better decision-making, smarter analytical thinking, and more accurate problem solving.
Nine: Reading Improves Both Creativity And Logic
Whether a child was read to at bedtime, or actively read their own books, silently or aloud, they displayed increased left and right brain intellectual growth. Both fiction and non-fiction books improved creative imagination and logical, sequential thinking.
Ten: Nurturing Curiosity Creates An Open, Absorbent Mind
Curiosity, the urge to seek knowledge, is essential to improving intelligence in children. Conducting educational outings, teaching new skills, and supporting hobbies encouraged the development of curiosity.
These 10 ways of raising intelligence in children are easy to apply, practical, and within the reach of parents and teachers. Research has shown that they are highly effective in creating the environmental support children need to develop their intelligence.
About the author:
Learn more about your childs development and child education at http://childrenlearnmore.info
Article copyright BookOfTips.Blogspot.Com - Find helpful tips that can help you with your daily activities. All rights reserved. No part of an article may be reproduced without the prior permission.
Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:52:00 +0000
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