G'day sweet friend and welcome to my bloggy home Down Under! Are you ready to share your blog posts at the weekly Sundays Down Under Linky Party? I hope so!
I'm afraid that I don't have anything too exciting to share this week. I've had so many things going on at home and at school it's been quite crazy!
I did however want to quickly share my first Periscope video that I shared a few weeks ago. If you aren't too familiar with Periscope you might want to read a post that I published about it to learn more. It recently hit 13 million users in 5 short months so this is obviously a very popular and worthwhile social media tool to be engaging with!
Welcome lovely friend to the weekly Sundays Down Under Linky Party. Are you ready to share YOUR fabulous blog posts with bloggers and readers from all over the world?
I love visiting your blogs each week and sharing your amazing content with an international audience on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Flipboard.
I also love pinning YOUR posts to my Sundays Down Under board each week and sharing your talent with my 3000 followers!
Today, August 18th, is Vietnam Veterans Day. The day was originally known as Long Tan Day, a day to commemorate the Battle of Long Tan in 1966, Australia's most significant campaign in Vietnam. Now, we use this day to formally acknowledge the service and sacrifices of all Australians and New Zealanders who served in Vietnam.
On that day, 108 Australian and New Zealand soldiers fought a pitched battle against over 2,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in a rubber plantation not far from the small village of Long Tan. The Australians prevailed, but only after fighting in torrential rain for four hours. They were nearly overrun, but were saved by a timely ammunition resupply, accurate artillery fire from the nearby Australian base, and the arrival of reinforcements by armoured personnel carrier. Eighteen Australians lost their lives and 24 were wounded, the largest number of casualties in one operation since the Australian task force had arrived a few months earlier.
Long Tan action, Vietnam, 18 August 1966 by Bruce Fletcher (Wikipedia)
Many of the soldiers who served in Vietnam are still psychologically and physically wounded by the war that no-one wanted to take part in. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, of the 60,000 Australian troops who served in Vietnam, 74% are classified as suffering from some form of health impact as a result. Many veterans, like my father, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and many more suffered from cancer related to Agent Orange. On top of this, when the Vietnam vets returned home many were ignored, spat on and shunned. Most of these soldiers were conscripted and did not want to be there.
This Vietnam Veterans’ Day I want to remember the sacrifices made by our young men and women in a conflict that spanned a ten year period. I especially want to thank my dad for overcoming PTSD, being a great dad, inspiring my kids to try their hardest in everything they do and for being a great Australian.
Please thank a Vietnam Vet today if you know one and remember the sacrifices that they made throughout the war and on their return.
Last week I shared some tips on how to ensure that your beautiful and informative blog images get more pins by suggesting that we add good qualityimage alt tags and title tags.
This week I'd like to explain a little more about SEO and why we need attention grabbing headlines.
G'day from Oz sweet friends and welcome to my little bloggy home Down Under! Welcome to this week's Sundays Down Under Linky Party.
This link up keeps getting bigger and better each week and I am so grateful to YOU for your support! This week I've been super busy at school so have been a bit slack with my pinning. Incredibly, however, I'm still receiving heaps of great traffic from Pinterest...where would we be without that amazing site?!
I'm sure you would all agree that Pinterest is amazing source of traffic for our blogs and I LOVE pinning YOUR posts to my Sundays Down Under board.
Pinterest is an incredibly useful resource for bloggers so this week I thought I'd share a few quick tips to help us all get more traffic. I've found over the last few weeks that I've been spending a lot of time adding descriptions and details to my pins so that they sound good and read well when I cross-share to Twitter. I've realized that images that have good quality image alt tags and title tags get more pins! So this week's blogging tips are all about the importance of image alt tags and title tags for better SEO.
Just imagine...I'm busy pinning away to find the perfect recipe for choc chip cookies and I land on YOUR gorgeous site. I click on the 'Pin It' button on your delicious image and to my dismay I find the words DSC-1234.jpg comes up. Alternatively, maybe the phrase Choc-Chip-1 pops up as the description. I have to either type in a good description for the image or just give up and move on. Now, not only have you as a fabulous food blogger missed out on getting your amazing recipe pinned, but, the magical search engine spiders have completely ignored your blog as well and found another picture to crawl and another blog to optimize!
This is why it's absolutely essential that you rename your images using keywords and good descriptions detailing what the image is about.
Here's the five best ways to make your images SEO rich:
G'day from Oz lovely friends and welcome to this weekend's Sundays Down Under Linky Party. I'm so thrilled you have been able to spend some time down under this Sunday!
