RSS Feeds are a great way to get regularly updated on the latest news on your favorite blogs. But there are people who don’t know much about RSS feeds or about subscribing to them but could be used to reading PDFs(ebooks). So, if you don’t want to lose such readers, xFruits is a great tool to get PDFs out of your feeds.
You can have readers directly read the PDF version of your feeds. xFruits has a handful of useful tools to get more out of your RSS feeds. Using the RSS-to-PDF tool, you can easily convert your RSS feed to PDF format. Or if you like, you can add a download PDF button to every post on your blog so that readers directly download the PDF from any post they come across. Isn’t that cool?
Most of the popular blogs have their content available for the mobile users and have a fully optimized mobile version of their sites. But everyone may not have the resources to run a mobile version of their websites. xFruits comes in handy for this purpose as well. xFruits lets you make a very simple HTML version of your blog with its RSS-to-Mobile tool. Add your feed URL to the RSS-to-Mobile tool, add relevant tags, click publish and you’re done. After this, the feed gets published via a URL on your xFruit profile which displays all of the latest post titles from your feed in the left navigation bar. The content on the other hand is displayed in the main panel.
The site generated by xFruits isn’t cool at looks and is extremely simple. But it opens and loads fast and is perfect for opening with mobile browsers like Opera or Firefox’s Fennec for mobile. Besides this it also sends your new data feed to other syndication services like Technorati and MyYahoo.
xFruits is a great tool to use your RSS feed in multiple ways. Go ahead and give it a try.
Have you started blogging yet? It starts with a basic set-up at Blogger or WordPress or even your own personal domain, and later, some search engine submissions, social media work, and getting the word out by means like emailing your friends. Now that your blog is ready, let’s have a look at what can go wrong in it—what can put your readers off!
1. Design & Speed
There are a million coolest looking blogs in the Blogosphere. That means the readers are no longer looking for great website designs. They want information in a neatly arranged place that loads faster. The standard loading time for a blog should be less than 4 seconds, and make sure you have it. Otherwise, you know what it will be. 70 per cent of the readers get out of a site if it doesn’t load within the first 4 seconds.
2. Advertising
Readers are smart now, and know well about Adsense or any other ad network you are using for monetization. They frown upon banners and suspiciously descriptive links that attract clicks. So, my piece of advice to you is this: it’s always best to put off ads till you start getting some 100 visitors daily.
3. Web Widgets
Readers are easily put off by fancy widgets such as analog clocks, pics on social networking profiles, and visitor statistics. Add as few of the widgets as possible. Your blog is a utility website, and not like your profile on Facebook or iGoogle. Certain widgets like the translation widget, RSS subscription widget, and social networking icon list are necessary. Do away with all others.
4. Search Box
Have only one search box on your blog. Some bloggers, as I have seen, put up two search boxes (Adsense allows maximum of two). This is ridiculous.
5. Fancy RSS Icon
Do away with it if you have a fancy RSS subscription icon on top. All it does is distract users. Have a small simple RSS icon with an email subscription box optionally.
6. Traffic Stats
If you have mediocre visit stats, don't put up a stats count at all. With trackers from StatCounter, Sitemeter etc., you can opt for invisible trackers. Otherwise, obscure the tracker icon.
7. Personal Blog Posts
You put up a topic-specific blog and posted extensively about your day-to-day life, affairs with your family, the condition of your vehicle, and all that you saw on a day. How much longer do you think your readers will stick around watching you ramble on about your personal life? Two days? Three days? A week? They are gonna stop reading sooner than you realize.
8. Fast Navigation
You have a blog concentrating on a topic. If so, create links to posts with descriptions your users will be interested in. If your topic is for instance “Insurance for vehicles”, then put up home page links to ‘insurance firms’, ‘basic info’, ‘getting cheap insurance’, etc. Don’t put up links to the most advanced articles. Let them have a way with the site, and then browse to the advanced sections.
9. Enable Printable Pages
Most readers will be interested in printable formats. Some users wish to have a single printable page that loads faster than individual pages suitable for web-based reading.
10. Associated Links
Users want to see related topics. They wish to bookmark important links about what they just read. Put up all the useful links you can find about the topic in question. This will come handy for most users.
The following is the image of a comment: This comment was sent to me today. You see, this looks a lot like a very legitimate comment, with a proper link, and other details.
But wait! Google a sentence from the comment. You will find that there are dozens and dozens of blogs and other pages, where the same comment appears. This is a comment spam! You see, I readily hit the 'Reject' option.
Here is another copy. In this, the link is different from the first one. I don't know, who publishes these comments as the Blogger profiles from which they are posted are not available. But one thing is for sure. If you allow such comments to be published, you will victimize yourself to the duplicate content penalties. Please read this post to see how severe duplicate content problem can be.
This is why I have posted an image of the spam, and not the text itself.
This is not an isolated attempt. There are people creating identical comments and posting them across domains to see their links appearing in others' blogs. Here are a few steps to stay safe from these commenters.
Comment Moderation Tips
1. Don't ever let a comment go unmoderated. Automated spam filters like Akismet are still pretty useless. One thing you can do, if you get massive amount of comments, is disabling further comments in quite established conversations.
2. Enforce a very strict comment policy, and show an example by deleting any comment that doesn't follow the policy.
3. If you get an elaborate comment, do check in Google for one of the sentences to see if it is a legitimate comment or has copies allover the Net. Any comment that is elaborate, grammatically perfected, touching the topic only lightly, or not touching the topic at all, may be a spam.
4. If you find any such spam comment in any blog, let the blogger know of it.
5. Stop anonymous comments, and set your blog up so that only verified users can comment.
In the real world, you need new issues of the Yellow Pages as new businesses arrive and some of the old businesses close operations. It's the same online—new websites pop up and old ones change URLs, content, and ownership every now and then.
Link rot is applied to the situation of gradual disappearance of resources to which existing links point. When you click such a link, you can get a page not found error or an entirely new page if the target has changed ownership and content has been revamped.
Studies have estimated that every month, nearly a thousand links disappear from the Web. None of us wants the links in our blogs and websites to point to non-existent or irrelevant resources. Therefore, we should add link rot checking to our list of blog maintenance tasks. Let's see how in this article.
Broken Link Maintenance
In order to completely correct link rot, you need an intelligent application, such as the IBM Peridot, which actually replaces your outdated links with correct, information-rich links to new web content.
Here are various ways in which you can actually protect your blog from link rot.
1. Use links to the Wayback Machine, Archive.org, which keeps an archive of thousands of websites and their entire content in permanent, accessible links.
3. Always set your blog to have permalink structure. Most blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger are enabled for this by default, so you don't have to change anything.
You should check for broken links and link rot at least once in two months for your blog. Better to do it more often if you have a huge website or blog. Several broken links doesn't sound like a good web practice to search engines as well as normal users.
For bloggers, the traffic and ad impressions are measured in two ways: daily visits and daily pageviews. In most cases, pageviews are far more important than the visit count. A visitor can come and go, and it will be counted as one pageview. But visitors who view more than one page are the interested parties. They can give more ad impressions and more earnings. So, it is your responsibility as the blogger to gather more pageviews per visit. At least two pageviews per visit is pretty good, though too hard to achieve.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is an important measure of how your traffic is behaving. A bounce happens when a visitor exits without checking any other page of the blog. Your analytics program will show you how much bounce rate you have. It is likely to be above 50 per cent for most starting bloggers. As you mature as professional blogger, you should reduce to as small as 20 per cent.
Tips to Generate More Pageviews
You can generate more pageviews, by making each visitor to check out an internal page. Here are ways for that.
1. Link to Internal Content
You need to consistently link to any interesting and relevant internal page from practically every blog post. One link is enough, and at least one link should be there.
You can place related post links at the end of the blog post, besides within the content.
2. Show Off Popular Posts
You can use widgets to show off the most popular and featured posts on your blog on the sidebar. If you are manually adding them, then use as catchy phrases as possible for the users to click them.
3. Design a Home Page With Links
Many of your blog's users come first to the home page. If you have a home page with only links, and no posts, like mine, that will help you reduce bounce rate, as the user has to click one or more links to visit post pages. You can use the Blogger expandable posts hack for this purpose.
4. Strip Content Off Archive and Label Pages
Making your label (category) pages and monthly archive pages with only links to individual posts not only helps reduce the size of these pages, but also reduces the bounce rate. This is because each user has to click on these links to read it. Check out this tutorial to know how you can strip post content off category pages.
5. Get Navigation Easy
Adding category links and archive links in an accessible region of the sidebar will help reduce bounce rate a lot. You can also add a search box in the sidebar. View mine for reference.
Conclusion
Reducing the number of unique visitors is important. You need to make every visitor a returning visitor, and strategic planning is involved in it. By redesigning navigation and testing several of the above tips you can achieve good results. If any other means worked for you, share them through the comments.
As you know, these days, a Google PageRank is in progress, I thought it important to mention a few ways you can lose your PR. If you wish Google not to decrease your PR, simply don't follow these tips. But not to follow them, you need to know about them. So, read on.
1. Make Hidden Links
Go anywhere on your blog and put up a number of links, which have the text and hover color the same as the background. You can make all these links DoFollow. This way, you can help increase the PR of all the sites you link out to and help decrease yours.
Other ways to make hidden links is making the link text, real small. Don't take trouble to make any of these links NoFollow, because that will kill your effort. If you put links to illegal content, Casinos, pornography, and other bad neighborhoods, you can get Zero PR faster.
2. Make Hidden Text
At the top of your pages, make hidden text, with your major keywords. For this, create as many keywords and search queries as possible in a list and put them all at the top of the page, right below the title, with the same text color as the background. Make the font real small to include much more text. With this, you can see your blog chasing for the lowest spot on SERPs.
3. Enable Trackbacks to Bad Neighborhoods
Simply enable trackbacks on your blog, and make all trackbacks DoFollow. Don't forget to disable trackback moderation. There are hopefully many splogs or spam blogs, which will pick up your posts and link to them simply to get a trackback backlink from your site. These links will readily make your blog too look like a splog, which in turn translates to real low PageRank.
4. Don't Moderate Your DoFollow Comments
There are many spam commenters out there. Give them a chance to get DoFollow links from comments in your blog by disabling comment moderation altogether. You will get rich comments that all link out to bad neighborhood sites, and within a few days, you will not only come to zero PR, but also can get your site out of Google's search result pages.
5. Create Pages Meant for Keywords
Stuff keywords on your major pages, which have (sadly) high PageRanks. Put these related keywords at the top and bottom of the respective page.
Conclusion
If you really care for your blog, then do only white hat SEO techniques, which will satisfy all your needs. Black hat SEO may give you some instant traffic and money, but will soon put you out of business.
Here today, let's see how JavaScript can be used to change the font size of your blog pages in real time. This is pretty convenient for your readers as they will be able to increase the size of the text at their wish.
Just include the following JS code in the head section of your blog (after <head> tag) or import through an external JS file. Please note, with this code, we are increasing and decreasing the font size for the entire body HTML element. If you wish to localize the effect, use a separate tag such as 'p', 'font', or 'span', and use the tag on the body of your HTML.
var minSize=6; var maxSize=24; function plusFont() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('body'); for(i=0;i<s.length;i++) { if(s[i].style.fontSize) { var t = parseInt(s[i].style.fontSize.replace("px","")); } else { var t = 10; } if(t!=maxSize) { t += 1; } s[i].style.fontSize = t+"px"; } } function minusFont() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('body'); for(i=0;i<s.length;i++) { if(s[i].style.fontSize) { var t = parseInt(s[i].style.fontSize.replace("px","")); } else { var t = 12; } if(t!=minSize) { t -= 1; } s[i].style.fontSize = t+"px"; } }
Here are the buttons to increase and decrease font size: In order to see the code in action, simply click these buttons now.
You need to create buttons like these on your blog's page as well with the following HTML code.
Many blog publishers have put up RSS feeds to gain more readers. The importance of readers is that they are returning users of a blog. They read content, social-bookmark it, link to it, and tell their friends about it. They create the wagon for your blog to progress smoothly. But making mistakes with RSS feed delivery can alienate your readers. Here a few of them.
What Is RSS?
Thanks to my reader, Renee Lemley, who put in great effort to create the following presentation describing all aspects of RSS syndication. You can view her comment as the first below. Here is the presentation:
Readers hate to read a summary and click on the link to reach your ad-rich slow-loading blog to read the full article. So, first step in alienating more than half of your readerbase is providing summary feeds.
2. No Email Subscription
Many readers don't know of RSS. They may find that reading the updates in email is convenient. Don't provide an email form and subscription button, if you wish not to tend to these readers.
3. Not Knowing Your Feed's Condition
If you yourself don't track your feed's availability and health, then who else will? Subscribe to your feed both in a reader and in email. In FeedBurner (FB), you can track the feed's health from FeedMedic in Troubleshootize tab in dashboard.
4. No Frequent Updates
Don't update daily or at least thrice a week, if you wish to get rid of your readers. A pretty good option for the bloggers who don't like reviews and criticisms.
5. Don't Describe RSS
Many readers know of 'subscribing', but they don't know of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). So, don't give a description of what RSS is, and you will successfully keep half of your blog's users at sea.
6. Create a Really Tiny RSS Feed Icon On the Bottom of the Blog
Create tiny RSS icons and email subscription forms, with little or no description, at the most insignificant part of your blog. Don't provide large RSS subscription banner in every post. Don't even tell them that if they subscribe to the feed, they will get updates daily automatically.
Conclusion
If you can share any such mistakes that can really drive your users away, please share them.
Blogging doesn't involve writing and publishing a new post in your niche alone. It's far more than that. In essence, a blogger is a social person, with strong and valuable views in his topic. He has to update himself daily of whatever is happening in the niche, and post opinions. Also, the blogger has to have tight relationships with the readers and users. Let's see some of the social interaction tips for bloggers.
1. Create About Me Page With Credentials
Your readers, after looking at first few of your articles, want to know who wrote them. So, it is very convenient to display your personal information, with credentials. If you are blogging on behalf of a group or organization, you can make the blog more authentic this way.
2. Read and Embed News Aggregators
A blogger keeps current on the topic news. Also, most bloggers will find it beneficial to show the niche news on the blog itself as a widget. You can do this by showing most dugg posts, Google News widget, or any social widget that concentrates on his niche.
3. Read, Moderate, and Reply to Comments
Keep a strict comment policy, and reply to any comment that requires a reply. The readers of your blog should evolve a belief that you are there to help them.
4. Read and Interact With Reader Blogs
Though on becoming more and more popular it may be almost impossible for you to do this, try your best to visit a reader's blog on similar topic occasionally and imparting valuable suggestions through comments. If possible, even consider guest-posting in them.
5. Acquire Suggestions and Make Changes
It's very important that you ask suggestions to your readers. Improve your blog according to these suggestions. You can be more user-friendly in this through polls, surveys, etc., besides just comments.
6. Social Media Interaction
You should ideally place icons to your social media profiles in your blog. This will help you acquire more friends and build a better network. Remember, however, not to place links to inactive profiles (something I have yet to do).
7. Contribute Globally As Well As Locally
Most bloggers have top publications (online and offline) in their niche. There are publications with a more global reach as well as a local reach. It is very important for you to contribute well to these publications, after becoming quite an authority in the niche with your blog.
Conclusion
Those and many different strategies can be used to develop your blog. If you have more suggestions for better social growth of the blog, please share them through the comments.
Quite a while back, I had three occasions with extraordinary surge of traffic. On those occasions, I found almost three times more traffic a day than that I would normally get. The reason was pretty straightforward, I had written about something hot at the time.
If you are a starting blogger, with somewhat good amount of search engine optimization done on your blog, so that your new posts are picked up by the search engines pretty much overnight, then you are in for a decent amount of traffic with the help of Google Trends.
This Google service is just right for the news buffs. You are to get the hottest keywords of the time. Here is what you need to do.
Go to Google Trends website, look for the keywords at the 'Today's Hot Trends' section. They are updated daily with the most searched keywords from your particular geographical area. Which means, if you write an article about any of the hottest trends listed, you are sure to get a surge of traffic.
Now, your particular niche keyword may not be listed in the hottest trends list. It's not every day that an important event in your niche comes to be listed as among the first ten of the hottest.
But you can pretty much estimate with Trends, which keywords you need to give greatest emphasis to, while writing articles. For this, you need first to make a list of keywords you need to focus on your latest article. Then search in Trends with these keywords separated by comma (maximum five of them), and see the result.
Google Trends will show a graphical view of how popular each of your keywords currently is. This gives you a pretty much estimate of which of the keywords you should give highest emphasis to in your article in order to drive the best amount of search engine traffic.
Trends Tricks
Here are a few tips and techniques you will find handy when using Trends.
1. You can separate the keywords by vertical bar (|) instead of comma to know trends about the searches that contain any of the terms.
2. In order to estimate searches for a collective term, put it in parentheses. As in (Weather in Alasca)|(Weather in Britain)
3. Exclude your search terms by preceding the term with a minus sign. As in Alaska -Ohio
4. Click this to get the trends delivered to your RSS feed reader.
If you run a blog, you must have used analytics to track your visitors. While using analytics, you may have noticed that some of the posts on your blog are popular than the others. So, many of you must have inserted a popular posts widget in your blog, showing the ones that get a good amount of traffic.
For WordPress blogs, these posts can displayed via the Popular Posts plugin. For Blogger blogs, you need to manually customize your template to insert some codes which in turn will show up the popular posts.
Showing popular posts on your blog has many advantages.
As popular posts widget includes the posts that the users prefer to read, you'll gain more traffic for them and new visitors will tend to spend more time on such posts.
If you have social bookmarking link embedded to each of your posts, such as the "digg it" button, it will be more fruitful. Your visitors who are into social bookmarking will possibly bookmark these posts. As a result, a lot of traffic will pour down from the social bookmarking sites.
You can add a "link to this page" item for each of your posts to generate its permalink dynamically. Popular posts are the ones that are generally liked by people. This will help increase your PageRank too to some extent.
Popular posts widget can be inserted via JavaScript. So, the links generated from JavaScript won't bleed out your page rank much.
Popular posts widget inserted through JavaScript can be customized to stand out, so that more people will tend to click on them.
The popular posts plugin for WordPress blogs ranks the posts based on the comments that they have accrued, i.e. the more comments a post gets, the higher it ranks in the widget. But, you can also add a popular posts widget for your blog based on your Google Analytics data, showing the posts that attract the highest number of traffic. You'll need to use Yahoo Pipes for aggregating the traffic data and also need to use a bit of JavaScript for inserting the widget into your blog.
All in all popular posts widget is a must have for any blog to get more traffic and attention.
Guest-posting is a mutually beneficial way of blogging. The guest-blogger provides content to the blog, thereby giving the blog owner some freedom and relaxation, while in turn driving traffic to his own site in the order unimaginable.
Guest-blogging in high traffic blogs can drive crazy traffic to your blog. For instance, if you get to publish in ProBlogger, which gets an average 20,000 visits daily, you will be able to draw in quite a decent traffic after you publish the post. In this article, let's see some guidelines of how to publish a guest post.
1. Read the Contribution Guidelines
Always the first step is reading and understanding the contribution guidelines of the blog you want to pitch. There are specific requirements every blogger is looking for.
The quality guidelines, formatting guidelines, and various other things may be found in the contribution guidelines of the blog. In order to sell your article (figuratively of course, as no payment is involved), you definitely have to abide by these guidelines, especially in the case of large and important blogs.
2. Find the Niche and Topic
Always look for contributing to the superior blogs in your niche. Not in any other niche. If you are a financial blogger, contributing an article to the top travel blog mayn't help you much, even if it is an article about financial management while traveling to your country.
Besides niche, the topic is also important. In order to find the topic, you had best look for what is hot. You can write an opinion post about any latest or breaking news story that attracts a lot of attention.
3. Edit and Reedit
You may find this editing guidelines post helpful. Editing and reediting the article to correct even the slightest of grammar and structure errors is important when submitting your guest entry.
Most probably the professional blogger has a higher standard for grammar and structure, which you may not ordinarily follow in your own blog.
4. Link Out With Care
Most probably the professional blogger has a recommendation as to how many links to your site can be placed. This should be noted. If you place more links to your site, the article may be rejected. Also, if possible, include the links to any relevant sources as necessary. This also has to be done after looking at the general trend followed by the professional blogger. If he wishes to maintain the external links with NoFollow attribute, make necessary changes in your article to reflect his preferences.
5. Pictures and Multimedia
If you believe that pictures or videos can enhance the blog entry, by all means do so. Pictures and videos can easily increase the user engagement of the content and can be deemed as a good practice by the professional blogger.
Conclusion
That's pretty much it. I hope I don't need to stress that you have to come up with the best of your articles while publishing for professional blogs. Also, having a gripping title is important. It goes without saying how important it is to get links from professional blogs in one's niche.
If you are interested in guest-posting in this blog, please check out our Contribution Guidelines
Let's say you started your blog today. After setting it up basically, you did some search engine submissions, some social media work, and emailed your contacts. Let's see what can alienate your readers from your first blog.
1. Theme Vs. Loading Time
There are already coolest looking blogs in the blogosphere. The readers are no longer looking for really a great design. All they want now is content that loads really faster. The era of Flash and design gimmicks is long gone. So, make sure your blog loads within the first four seconds.
2. Advertisements
Readers know of Adsense and various other forms of ads. They frown now upon links with tiny descriptions and a URL at the end, as they have already on banners. It is always best to wait until your blog starts getting at least fifty daily search engine visits before adding advertisements.
3. Widgets
Don't think readers love it if you spice your blog up with widgets like the fancy clock, social network profile pics, etc. Add only as few widgets as possible. The must-have ones like translation widget, archives widget, RSS subscription widget, social network icon list, etc. may be added.
4. Search Form
Have one search form and only one. I have seen some bloggers have two Google Adsense search boxes, as Adsense allows maximum of two. This is ridiculous.
5. RSS Widget Icon
Do you have that large, fancy RSS subscription icon on the top? Get rid of it. It distracts users. Only a simple, standard-color RSS icon is enough with optional email subscription form.
6. Visit Stats
If you have small visit stats, don't put up a stats icon at all. With StatCounter, Sitemeter etc., you can opt for invisible trackers. Or at least, you can place the tracker at an obscure spot.
7. Personal Posts
You have a brand new blog on a specific topic, and the first few entries are about how hard up you were for the last few months, how you managed to buy this new domain and put up this blog, and how your last night's dinner was. You have already alienated most of your readers. Don't put up any personal post at all (even an about me page) until you start getting a decent traffic. And post the most useful entries first, and also let users know of them through a 'featured entries' widget.
8. Streamlined Navigation
If you have a new blog concentrating on a topic, create links with keywords a possible reader wants to see. For instance, if your topic is "car insurance", then place home page links to topics like "insurance firms", "basic info", "get cheap insurance", "local insurance", etc. Don't give your first visitor the most advanced article. Let them browse to it as they wish.
9. Enable Print Pages
Printable versions of your pages are very easy for most readers. If you publish entries in a number of pages, a user might expect to see a printable page, which loads all the content on one page faster.
10. Related Links
Have there something for the reader to bookmark. Create a directory listing or one-page link list for all the related information. This is something that most users love to see. And they will most likely bookmark it.
Google gadgets are free; they are powerful too. With this service, you can get great add-ons to your websites or blogs. In this article, let's look at some of these gadgets that you will find very interesting.
This translator gadget adds a tiny translator widget to your site. This widget has country flags to guide your readers unlike the traditional Google translator widget.
This is a highly customizable RSS reader, which can be installed on your website. This means, your readers will now be able to read the content from popular RSS feeds directly from your website. And the reader has options to customize HTML and CSS, and is most suitable for advanced users.
If you don't wish to go pay professional polling services to create polls for your visitors, then use this simple Google gadget to create polls for your readers.
With this great chat client, you can let your readers chat while browsing through your website itself. You can use this to be in touch with your readers in real time.
Conclusion
That's pretty much it. Though external Google gadgets don't have great power in building a website or blog as WordPress plugins do, they are pretty powerful indeed. If you have any other suggestions or additions, please let us know through comments.
Facebook, the largest social network in the world, with over 175 million active users is a great platform for you to publicize and market your blog. Here, let's have a look at some of the coolest Facebook applications for bloggers.
1. Facebook Pages
First of all, let's create an easy forum and tiny social network around your blog through Facebook pages. Go to Facebook for business and click pages. Now create a page specifically for your blog. Promote it through your blog, with a link as the one on my sidebar. When creating pages, you can choose Brand or Product and then Website.
2. Networked Blogs
Networked blogs is one of the most advanced blogging applications in Facebook. With networked blogs, you can have all your posts be published through the Wall, thus sharing it with all your friends. This makes your blog get more traffic. In networked blogs, you have to be authorized as the owner of your blog. This can be done by recommendation by friends or through widget.
3. Simplaris Blogcast
Simplaris is another cool application for bloggers. With this application, you can easily integrate your blog's entries on Facebook and share them with your friends. You can also check out blog casts by other friends who actively use Simplaris. It can thus help you in traffic building.
4. Blog It by TypePad
With Blog It, you can have a blog within Facebook itself. You can update all sorts of blogs, such as TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, Vox, etc.
Conclusion
If you have suggestions of other Facebook applications for bloggers, please let us know through comments section.
In today's blogging tip, we will see how we can show only post titles on the monthly archive pages and category lists on Blogger. An individual post page will be displayed normally.
Before going into the tweak, let's analyze its benefits. If you are a prolific blogger, you may write at least one post daily, sometimes more. There are bloggers who post five times a day. In a month, thus, you may have at least thirty posts published. When search engines rank pages, they often return Blogger monthly archive pages as results.
Gladly, since the label pages on Blogger are excluded from search engines, they are not returned as results.
These category pages and archives consist normally of the entire post content and tend to be extremely large. With this tweak, you will be able to reduce the size of these posts to that of a mere link list.
Imagine if you have posts of a thousand words and a lot of images on certain days. These posts individually take a lot of time to load in browser. Together in the monthly post archive, they simply will continue to load for minutes after minutes. A slow Internet user may have quit the blog by this time. Also, when a reader looks for category pages, they don't like to see text content, but only linked titles. They can then choose whichever title they want to read.
For these users, showing only a link list on label pages is pretty convenient. This is what we do now.
Go to Layout editor in Blogger and expand the widget templates in HTML edit view. Replace the code, <p><data:post.body/></p> with the following:
That's it. Now you have only the post title links on the label pages and archive pages. With this code enabled, view the entire post history of CuteWriting for 2009 January. It now loads in seconds. Without the tweak it would attempt to load full text content of over 30 posts, which would take minutes after minutes to load!
Let's say you have a primary domain which you have built content on. But you can increase the visibility and reach of your content by purchasing multiple domain names and making them show the same site. Here are some tips and guidelines in that.
1. Domain Name Topic and Keywords
When purchasing new domains, always look for the ones with related keywords. Don't just choose a domain name that is not related to your primary site at all. For instance, if your original website is "flowersandfruits.com" then you shouldn't purchase "armsandweapons.com" and point it to the original domain.
Choose domains that have related keywords and topic, so that you get maximum search visibility.
2. Do 301 (Permanent) Redirect
Never purchase a domain and point it directly to your content. This is as good as content duplication and search engine will easily penalize all your sites. This issue is severe when you have a few hundred domains purchased and all are made to point to the same content.
So, always point only one domain to your original content, and point all other domains with a permanent 301 redirect to your primary domain. Learn how to set up a 301 redirect. Look at the image below; this is how you should point your domains.
3. Link Building for Each Domain
Always build links for each of your domains separately. Otherwise, they are as good as nothing. Also, you can get maximum exposure and benefit by building links from the most keyword-relevant sites.
For instance, if you have "flowersandfruits.com" as your primary domain and you are purchasing "roseflowers.com" to point to the primary domain, then build more links for it from sites that talk about rose flowers than fruits or just flowers.
Also, you are far better off if you point the new domain to a more topic-specific page in your main domain.
Yesterday, one of my friends put forward a doubt. She wanted to have individual Meta description tags for her WordPress self-hosted blog. There is an all-in-one SEO plugin that helps in it, but her description says she couldn't get it to work. Well, here is what you need to do to manually enable the Meta descriptions on your WordPress blog.
First, go to the theme editor, and look for the header file (which would be named header.php).
Now, simply insert the following PHP code right before the </head> tag.
<?php if (is_home()) { ?> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <meta name="description" content="Enter the description for the blog home page here." /> <meta name="keywords" content="Generic keywords for the entire blog here." /> <?php } ?> <?php if (is_single()) { ?> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <meta name="description" content="This page contains details of:<?php wp_title('',true); ?>" /> <?php } ?> <?php if (is_archive()) { ?> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> <meta name="description" content="This page is of the topic:<?php wp_title('',true); ?>" /> <?php } ?> <?php if (is_page()) { ?> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <meta name="description" content="This is a page about:<?php wp_title('',true); ?>" /> <?php } ?>
Edit the descriptions to match your blog.
That's it. You should now see individual Meta tags and descriptions for your pages. The robots Meta tag is completely optional and only if you don't want your category and tag pages be indexed in search engines, use the noindex attribute. Otherwise, leave it out.
Yesterday, I happened to check source code of one of my friends's WordPress blog. The blogger was looking for a new WordPress theme and she fell prey to this good looking new theme. I won't mention the name of the theme or the company that prepared it. It's an affair I need to deal with the company itself.
The issue is thus. The theme, once installed, leaves out a white bar on the top. There are a larger number of links at the bottom, as (supposedly) credit to the theme designer.
I have a particular way of analyzing things. As you well know I am a W3C-valid theme geek, I went to W3C validator and checked the source of the blog. It showed a particular error regarding a hyperlink.
When I looked at the source, I found that this hyperlink pointed to some casino website, which of course is against all search engine terms of service and can get your site blocked. But more peculiar thing was the link was to be seen nowhere on the blog with naked eye. When I selected the entire blog with Ctrl + A, I could see the link to this casino site on the white bar on the top. A white invisible link! Something that will make you look like a black-hat SEO man to the search engines.
Decided to remove the link, I checked the entire theme files but nowhere could I find the link code. It was a hyperlink dynamically written to the blog with a PHP function. If search engine ever indexes this blog and finds out that there is a hidden link, the website will suffer greatly, but the casino site will have a good enough boost in rankings.
I found the link was written at run-time through a PHP decode function. I found this decode function within the header file of the theme&151;A gibberish of a code, which was decoded to the exact hyperlink. A highly unethical practice to promote the casino website!
I promptly removed the hyperlink for my friend. I also advised her to remove all the other credit links as well, so that whoever did this stratagem doesn't get any benefit from the blog.
A more interesting aspect is that a professional theme designer company designed this theme; this made me conclude that it was stolen by whoever put up that ploy. What I did next was I alerted the original theme designer that a theft had happened for one of their themes and they should be wary.
Anyone, including you, can fall in such a condition. Here are the steps you need to take to ensure you are protected.
Always look for any hidden links or text in the theme.
Check the theme after installation and see if it has links to any bad neighborhood sites, like casino, sex, or drug dealing.
Look for any unknown functions or decode functions within the theme files to see if it could write anything potentially dangerous on any of your pages.
Don't download the theme if you don't trust the provider. It is always best to download only themes provided directly at WordPress.org. They are checked for any malpractice before made available to the users.
If you find out that a theme has been stolen and used for promoting websites, alert the theme owner immediately.
Conclusion
Deception is everywhere. It is our precaution and discretion that will save us. Don't let the crooks get away with their stratagems. High-end professional bloggers may not take this issue seriously because they have their own themes built by professionals, and are more busy making money than taking interest in fellow-bloggers' problems.
As bloggers, with some earnings, you may find time to travel a lot. Professional bloggers have this great flexibility that they can work from anywhere. They only need a laptop and an Internet connection. Blogging in travel can instantly churn out great content for your readers, as you will be able to share your experiences through pictures, recordings, and videos.
Let's see in this post some preparations you should make for perfect blogging on travel.
1. Do Keep All Equipments Ready
When on travel, nothing helps you more than your equipments. Your laptop, video camera, recording equipment, still camera, etc., are very important in a blogging trip. Snap up anything you find interesting and record short narrations.
2. Keep Traditional Writing Equipments Ready Too!
Just as those mentioned earlier, traditional writing and drafting equipments are also important on a trip. Let's assume you are in a museum into which no electronic equipment is allowed. How would you depict your experiences? You don't have a camera, a voice recorder, or even your cell phone.
In such cases, nothing other than a pen and a notepad will help you.
Being a good doodler will help you draw small sketches of what you see inside. Take short notes and draw pictures. You can edit it later and even post your doodles on to your blog.
3. Don't Waste Free Time
You are sure to get free time on your travel. You may get to wait at the airport or at the hotel reception. Such are times when you can fine-tune your scribbles and doodles. Don't just sit daydreaming or napping at those times.
4. Communication and Interviews (Keep Your Business Cards Ready)
It is in times of your travel that you get to meet and talk to a lot of people. Simply take a note of some of your old posts that you can add some juice to by interviewing any expert, in the topic, you meet. Don't forget to seek their permission before posting their names and other details. This is how you research for your posts.
You will also find people interested in the topic of your blog. Invite them to check out your blog and be regular readers. This is why I recommend that you print out and keep a few business cards all the time. Take them out and let anyone interested in your blog have one.
5. Look out for Topic Ideas
Since the main idea of travel is gathering information and inspiration, you can always seek new topic ideas from the people you meet. If they wish to read about any particular topic in your niche, you can note it down and let them know when you post about it.
6. Note Down and Visit Specific Locations
You may not be a travel blogger, but a medical blogger. Still, you have specific locations to visit to spice up your posts. You can visit any medical institution, meet up with important personalities with specialization and experience, and take pictures and videos. I believe every niche has its own specific places worth visiting.
You can depict these experiences in your blog posts, and may well draw a few hundred more visitors.
7. Make Good Use of Your Guide
If you have a guide on travel, be sure to make good use of him. Have him translate anything interesting to you. Tell your guide upfront about whatever things you are interested in, so that he can translate for you anything relevant he finds on the way. Sometimes, a wall poster, a local gossip, or an announcement can be valuable to you.
Conclusion
Those were the seven tips I have for you, traveling blogger. Keep yourself subscribed so you won't miss my future posts while on travel. Be sure to post your comments as well.
@LizS4ra: I'm not a professional blogger; so, I would say no. I'd be too scared of getting things wrong. [My reply: Liz, none of the guest-bloggers who blog in professional blogs are professional bloggers. And did you know that professional bloggers are always on the lookout of guests?]
FeedBurner (FB), now owned by Google, is indubitably the most popular feed syndication service out there. The tagline of FB is itself interesting: Get pro features gratis! Perhaps this is the only place where you can get professional services completely free. But are you really making use of all the features of FeedBurner? Here is a list of them that you really need to enable for your feeds.
In order to set your personal message in FB feeds and to choose the theme of the feed, go to Optimize->Browser Friendly from the FB dashboard.
2. What's in Store for Podcasters
From the Optimize tab, choose SmartCast. If you are syndicating a podcast rather than a normal feed, you will find various special features here. You can set podcast images and most importantly, podcast search keywords. Make sure that you also set the copyright message.
3. Make Your Feed Universally Accessible
Are you worried that you are syndicating RSS 1.0 and a great number of your audience are using Atom feed readers? Different feed formats always worry publishers. But no longer! In FB, you have a feature that makes your feeds universally accessible in all browsers and platforms in any feed reader application. This is SmartFeed. Activate it from the Optimize tab.
4. Enable Social Bookmarking in Feeds
Go to Optimize->FeedFlare. This service, once activated, you can place social bookmarking links to your feed. If a reader wants to bookmark your feed item, he can do it from the feed reader itself.
One great advantage is that if you have enabled this, you can also track the traffic statistics of your blog from the FB interface.
5. Include Your Logo in the Feed
Using the Feed Image Burner from the Optimize tab, you can add a custom image to the feed. Choose Specify custom image URL and choose the location of your logo. It will be automatically placed in the feed. This is a very helpful for brand building.
6. Make Your Feed Appear to Come From Any Email Address
This is a very interesting aspect of FB feeds. If you have email subscription enabled, you have a lot of options to configure. Go to Publicize tab and choose Email Subscriptions. From this, choose Communication Preferences. You can set the email from which your feeds appear to be sent. If you are receiving CW feed through your email, you will see that it comes from an email address: noreply@cutewriting.blogspot.com. This is a non-existent email address, which just appears on your emails.
In the confirmation email body, you can set a personal message, which will be displayed whenever someone subscribes to your feed.
Go to Email Branding to see more options on formatting the feed text and putting in a logo in the feed. Also, the Delivery Options page lets you set the time when you want the delivery of your feeds done; you should optimize the delivery of the feeds according to the time zone of your readerspace.
7. Keep Your Feeds Healthy
Go to Troubleshootize and choose FeedMedic. If you find any problems in your feed syndication, go back to Tips and Tools and do the appropriate troubleshooting step.
Make sure you don't miss any of these cool services. Also, be sure to read the former articles on feeds. Subscribe to CW feed now, not to miss any more content.
[CW faces its first new year. Happy and Prosperous New Year to All Readers and Fans!!!]
Today, let's see some of the indispensable social services, in which every blogger that wants to be successful must have profile. If you haven't signed up on these places yet, go ahead and do it without fail.
1. Facebook
Facebook is the second largest social network in the world, with more than a hundred million users, most of who are from the US. Though MySpace is the largest social network, Facebook is so popular and so well-formed that you will make better, more useful connections through it. Connect with me in Facebook.
No other social network really makes a big difference than Facebook. However, Google's Orkut is more preferable if your business concentrates in Brazil or India.
2. Twitter
Twitter is the in thing and there is no shadow of doubt about it. Many professional bloggers and company officials have their own twitter profiles, and hence it is a great way to connect with all of them quickly.
Breaking news, new ideas, thoughts, posts, etc., all come to Twitter very quickly. It is a great marketing tool if you know how to use it well. Follow me on Twitter @vjlenin.
3. BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog
Blogging networks like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are indispensable for all bloggers. Simply because these networks allow you to connect with fellow bloggers for such activities as link/post exchange, promotion, readership exchange, and more.
BlogCatalog is independent, free, and very useful, while MyBlogLog (now owned by Yahoo!) requires you to have a paid membership to get all benefits. Make sure you make full use of its features of BlogCatalog like blog groups, broadcasts, member shouts, etc. Connect with me in MyBlogLog.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the largest and most productive professional network out there. It is more refined and free-of-spam than Facebook, MySpace, or Hi5. It was created originally as a job-hunting network for software professionals to show off their resumes to potential employers. Now, it is more than that. You can actually connect with professionals in various fields for a lot of business relationships. Hence, it is indispensable. Connect with me in LinkedIn.
5. Technorati
Having your blog recognized by the largest blog-only search engine, Technorati is extremely important. Technorati is still one of the biggest authorities in blogosphere. Claiming your blog on Technorati is no big deal. Also, use the Technorati ping tool when you publish new entries (though, claimed blogs automatically get picked by it).
6. Digg and Other Social Media Sites
If you are looking for promotion in the social media framework, Digg is the first consideration. Besides Digg, other popular social media sites like Mixx, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc., are indispensable. You need to also consider working on topic-specific social media sites, such as Bibsonomy for literature enthusiasts.
7. DP, Webmasterworld, and Other Major Forums
DigitalPoint Forums, Webmasterworld forums, etc., are the biggest and most important forums for all types of bloggers, though they concentrate primarily on blogging, web-mastering, and SEO.
Besides these two major forums, I advise you to find niche-specific forums for your own specific niche. That will help you get more famous in your niche.
Conclusion
Did I miss anything? I guess not. But if I did, please let me know by comments.
[Happy New Year once again to all! Keep promises, do good, and make investments to strengthen our economy in this fresh new penultimate year of this decade]
Buying a domain is pretty easy now. If you don't want to register a brand new domain, just go over to Sitepoint marketplace, and you will find hundreds of new and established domains for sale. This is a big marketplace for domain flipping. But this is also a dark hazy place of deception.
After purchasing a domain, you may see that it is not at all in the index of many search engines, which makes it virtually non-existent. Some very old domains may still be not indexed at all. Such purchases may prove to be worthless. Read further to know what to do before purchasing a domain.
1. Check in Google
Always check in Google if the domain is already in the indexes. Some sellers may tell you that the domain is already established. This is true only if at least the home page URL is indexed in the search engine and there is no blackhat technique that causes it to be blocked from the indexes. Use the site:URL operator to see how many pages are indexed from the domain.
2. Go and Check in the WayBack Machine
Get to the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) and actually see if your domain is there in the archives. This is important in case of old, established domains. The archive will tell you if the claim is true. What you should be most careful about is if the website has been doing any blackhat SEO tactics, such as hidden text, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, link sales, etc. Any website that is already engaging in such activities is not a good purchase.
3. Be Cautious About TLD, Trademark, and Misspellings
This is an important consideration. Make a list of domains that you find interesting and are matching to your business. Whichever niche you are in, having the targeted keywords on the domain name itself is very important.
Research the domain name to see if it can be the misspelling of any popular company or domain name; be careful to avoid legal troubles due to trademark violations. Also, check if your domain name has any negative meaning. For these, simply Google "your domain name". If Google gives you any spelling suggestion, it is a bad indication. For instance, search for "Fearcebook.com" and you will see a spelling suggestion.
Make sure you have searched for TLD (Top Level Domain) variants of your domain (domain.com, domain.net, domain.org, etc.)
4. Check the IP Address of the Domain
This is very important. There are quite a few IP blacklist databases where you need to check if the IP address of the domain is listed. This can negatively affect the domain's trust and search engine positions. Check the IP address here: http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticpages/index.php/is-my-ip-address-blacklisted
Having listed in several databases is not good for a domain. Sharing IP address with a blacklisted domain is also not a good indication.
5. Check Incoming and Outgoing Links
See which domains give link to the domain in question. Bad neighborhood links, such as links from porn sites or illegal sites, are not good. Also, when checking in the Wayback Machine, see if the site or any page links to bad neighborhoods.
Conclusion
Understand that purchasing a domain requires the hardest exercise of your discretion. The theory that "If it's too good to be true, it probably is" applies here well. If you find a really dramatic offer, be wary.
Many bloggers do not care for their blog's design. It is important that you have a very professional theme for the blog, as well as a fast-loading design. Here are some things you need to care for.
1. Keep Your Stylesheet Outside
It is always better to let your CSS Stylesheet be cached in the browser. It will enable the loading of subsequent pages on the blog a lot faster. If you check my blog's source, you will see that all my Stylesheets are kept externally in my own Googlepages server. This will enable the browser to cache these files and use it when a new page is accessed, without downloading the Stylesheet again.
2. Do Not Enable Too Many Widgets
Always see if you can save space by removing unwanted widgets. They will not only take up a lot of space, but also will run out your bandwidth. A blog check at least once in a few months is very necessary.
Also, you may want to consider adding more than one facility through a single JavaScript widget. This is possible in Blogger. For instance, if you want two HTML/JS widget on the sidebar, one on the top of another, then create only one widget and place both the codes in it. This will help you track your design easily.
3. Don't Put Excessive Text on Template
Putting in a lot of text on your template causes it to appear in all of your pages. If this text is keyword-targeted, it may be deemed as content duplication by search engines. This can actually affect your blog's rankings negatively.
If you really need the text, use image or some multimedia content, such as Flash instead.
4. Coloration
Follow light colors throughout the blog. Don't put too excessive coloration in your design. Links should be colored blue, and the content, light black. Visited links should be made brown or dark purple.
Don't put up a design in which email subscription option is on the top of right sidebar and RSS subscription on the middle of the left sidebar. Group your widgets together and keep them in the most expected places. Here are some guidelines:
The search box, by standards, should be placed on the top right-hand corner in case of blogs and content sites and centralized in case of search engines. The logo should be placed on the top left-hand corner. Navigation may be on the right sidebar, below the search bar. Copyright notice should be placed at the very bottom either centralized or left-justified in smaller, lighter font. It is also advisable to have the same menu on the top and the bottom and it can be reproduced on the top of the left sidebar as well.
6. The Design Should Work in Different Browsers and Resolutions
I found many bloggers using widgets from BlogCatalog, FaceBook, and MyBlogLog together on the blog. This is unnecessary. You need to keep one of the widgets only. Now, you have the option to place Google Friend Connect on the blog. You may just put links to your profiles to various social networks on the sidebar.
Conclusion
Make your design better following these guidelines, and always understand the importance of uniqueness.
For the last few days, I was very unhappy to see one of my posts receiving a lot of comment spam. One of the most spammed posts was the one about drug addiction. The others, thankfully, were only moderately spammed. Thinking of a better way of controlling comments got me into this little idea.
1. Disable Comments on Your Blog Posts
I went ahead to the post that was receiving comment spam and disabled the comment form there. In Blogger, you can just go to the post editor and click Post Options. You may find the options to disable the comments and decide whether to show the current ones or not. Choose "Don't Allow, and Show Existing".
2. Put a Message in the Posts
You can set a message that all commenters can see, by going to the blog's Settings->Comments->Comment Form Message. This will be displayed above the comment form. In this message, clearly put the comment guidelines.
You can check my message at the bottom of this post. You will see that if the comments are disabled, you have to follow me in Twitter in order to still comment. This has helped me and will definitely help you too in increasing Twitter followers.
3. Enable the Message in Comment Disabled Posts
You will see that the message we set is not displayed in posts where we disabled the comments. In order to reverse this, follow this template tweak:
Go to Layout->Edit HTML->Expand Widget Templates
Look for the code, <h4 id='comment-post-message'><data:postCommentMsg/></h4> <p><data:blogCommentMessage/></p>
Cut it from its original place and search for the following block of code,
You are done! Now, if you really have posts that people want to comment at any cost, you will find an increase in the Twitter count. If you want to promote something else, then put it there.
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