A New Year Brings A New Network

Looking for some new programming to watch in 2011?  One woman is making sure there will be plenty.  As Oprah Winfrey’s network talk show completes its 25th and final season, a new Oprah endeavor is born.  OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) is set to launch January 1st, 2011 debuting a lineup of shows that would interest any Oprah fan and then some.

OWN will begin airing on what we all currently know as the Discovery Health Channel.  Some shows you may already watch like Mystery Diagnosis and Deliver Me will still air on OWN along with the new lineup.  If you’re not too sure about what to expect from the new network, you should tune in January 1st at noon when Oprah will host a show to let viewers in on the new lineup as well as share her vision of OWN.  

On January 2nd you can expect to settle in with Oprah’s most famous experts like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and Suze Orman as they host a 2-hour special called Ask Oprah’s All-Stars.  Another show that will debut during OWN’s launch weekend is Oprah Presents Master Class, where some of our most influential public “thought leaders”, like Diane Sawyer, will share their wisdom.  

Oprah will also reveal what it takes to make her long-running network talkshow so successful.  Season 25: Oprah Behind The Scenes will debut on Saturday with two episodes.  There will also be cooking shows, design shows, reality shows including Miracle Detectives about detectives who investigate events that have defied logic, a show hosted by a sex and relationship therapist that makes house calls, and much much more.

Why Turning Off The TV Could Save Your Life

Eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly may not be enough if you’re looking to stay healthy in the long term.  You will probably want to keep your television viewing and web surfing in check as well if you want to live a long and healthy life says a new study.

The study, conducted by a group of international researchers and reported about on ABC News, reveals that people who watch TV, surf the web, or play video games for a period of time totaling 4 hours or more a day actually increase their chances of suffering a heart attack and stroke by 113 percent compared to those who spend 2 hours or less performing these activities.  People who spent 4 hours or more viewing TV’s or computers also increased their risk of death by  about 50 percent.  

One interesting aspect of the study is that it doesn’t seem to matter whether the TV viewers worked out or not, they still suffered the same health risks when they watched 4 or more hours.  The study’s lead author, Emmanuel Stamatakis, explains why he believes so many people who sit in front of the set for 4 hours a day end up with health problems.  Stamatakis says, “Assuming that leisure-time screen time is a representative indicator of overall sitting, our results lend support to the idea that prolonged sitting is linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and premature mortality.  Doing some exercise every day may not compensate for the damage done during very long periods of screen time.”

One reason watching so much TV can be bad for a person is that the act of sitting burns very few calories.  Simply standing or shifting your weight from side to side is actually double the metabolic rate as sitting.  People who sit in front of a computer at work all day and then go home and park themselves in front of the TV seem to be especially at risk for cardiovascular problems.  

What do you think of the latest study revealing TV viewing can be bad for your health? Do you spend 4 hours or more a day watching TV, surfing the web or playing video games?

Interlinking Blog Posts For Better Search Engine Optimization

In the last post i talked about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and more to the point the lack of SEO on many blogs.In this post we will look at how simply linking within your blog can have a very positive effect on how your blog performs in search.Once again we have to remember Google love links and like the little guy from Pac Man following the dots the Google bot crawls around following every link it finds.You will often hear people talk about the importance of links to your blog from other sites and in the same manner links within your blog have a positive effect.Another important factor in links to your blog is how those links are formatted.The anchor text of a link helps Google index the linked page.So when you write your posts you should be creating 2-3 links to pages from within your blog using relative anchor text.It's very easy and  adds one minute to the time it takes to write a post.

Interlinking Your Blog Posts

Anchor Text - Anchor text is the text that makes up a link, the actual words people click on.On many blogs i see people create links with the text Click Here.You should however be using Keywords that describe the destination of the link.If for example i wanted to link to the last post i mentioned above called "Best SEO Tips And 150 Free Backlinks Every Day" i would create the link with text like this, Best SEO And Backlink Tips not Click Here.By adding keywords and describing the page linked to we help Google index that page.There is a bit more to it than that but you get the idea.You can just pick one or two words in a sentence and turn them into a relevant link, remember the goal is not to get people clicking these links but to get Google following them.

As well as linking to posts you can link to labels pages, this is something i regularly do on Spice Up Your Blog.If you have a second blog you can link to that blog within your post.Once you have links throughout your blog you are sending 'Link Juice' right through the heart of your Blogs archive !

Lets imagine Google crawl you latest post and follow a link to a previous post, on that post they follow a link back to another post, there they follow a link to a labels page, they follow the most recent post using that label and so on.Be careful and don't stuff every post full of links as this can be seen as spam.

A Live Demo ? - Apart from the example link i created in the second paragraph  i have added 4 links to this post.Two links to labels pages and two links to posts, i didn't change the post in any way to accommodate the links but just used the natural relevant key words.