13 June 2008

Blog Setup: 40 Practical Tips


From here

One of our readers, Max Pool, was kind enough to send a guest post with 40 practical tips to setup and optimize your blog. All the tips are actually links to previously published articles on Daily Blog Tips. Enjoy!

WordPress Setup

  1. Do your homework first and read about others’ mistakes
  2. Choose a reliable web host
  3. Choose a good domain name
  4. If you need inspiration, check this list
  5. Register and keep your domain name with a registrar
  6. Always install WordPress in the root directory
  7. Update your ping list

Themes & Design

  1. Choose a professional theme
  2. Remove unnecessary information from your theme
  3. Add a favicon
  4. Place an RSS icon at the end of single posts
  5. Create a functional footer for your blog
  6. Organize your categories
  7. Optimize the “About” page
  8. Speed up your site

Check & Validate

  1. Make sure your blog works in different browsers
  2. Check the load time of your site
  3. Test the SEO aspects
  4. Validate your website
  5. Keep a maintenance checklist

Plugins

  1. Install Akismet
  2. Install WordPress Database Backup
  3. Install Subscribe to Comments but leave it unchecked
  4. Install Chunk URLs
  5. Install Related Enteries and consider setting it to 3
  6. Install Custom Query String
  7. Install Jerome's Keywords
  8. Install sig2feed

SEO & Analytics

  1. Install Google Sitemap Generator
  2. Install Enforce www Preference
  3. Optimize your Meta Description Tag
  4. Setup an optimal URL structure
  5. Make category pages display excerpts
  6. Setup any needed 301 Redirects
  7. Create a robots.txt file (and here is a collection of different ones)
  8. Modify your title tag to be optimal
  9. Remove the hyperlink from the single post titles
  10. Offer email subscriptions
  11. Install the Feedburner Replacement plugin
  12. Add the Google Analytics plugin and track your stats


Max Pool is a software engineer by day - aspiring SEO expert by night. More ideas can be found at his blog codesqueeze.com.

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Blog Project: 30 Traffic Generation Tips


From here

First of all a big “thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well, I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).

Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:






1. Sridhar Katakam
Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.

2. Ian Delaney
Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.

3. Scott Townsend
Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)

4. Kyle
Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.

5. Grant Gerver
Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.

6. Daniel
A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.

7. Rory
Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.

8. Ramen Junkie
Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.

9. Eric Atkins
Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.

10. Megan Taylor
Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.

11. Guido
Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.

12. Brian Auer
You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.

13. Shankar Ganesh
Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.

14. Andrew Timberlake
A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.

15. Cory OBrien
Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).

16. Jester
Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.

17. Goerge Manty
Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.

18. Engtech
Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.

19. Chris
Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.

20. Splork
I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.

21. Jen Gordon
I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.

22. Kat
I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.

23. Inspirationbit
Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.

24. Mark Alves
Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.

25. Tillerman
Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.

26. Nick
Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.

27. Brandon Wood
A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.

28. Alan Thomas
Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.

29. KWiz
Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.

30. Dennis Coughlin
Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.

Customize the Feedburner Chicklet


From here

feedcount.pngThis tip is easy to implement but it can be very useful if you are trying to customize the text on your Feedburner Feed Count Chicklet. Just look into the HTML code that Feedburner provided you for the Chicklet and locate the address of the image:

src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/
blogname?bg=246cb0&fg=000000&anim=0"

Now you will need to add the follow attribute to that address:

&label=yourtext

Therefore the final line will look like this:

src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/
blogname?bg=246cb0&fg=000000&anim=0&label=yourtext"

You can use this feature to display something more catchy than “readers” like “fans” or “addicts”. Alternatively if you have two of more feeds on your blog (i.e. one for entries and one for comments or one for each language) you can also customize the text to differentiate them (an example can be seen on Andrea’s blog).

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How to add bookmarker widgets in Blogger


From here

This tutorial will explain simple way to add cool social bookmarker widgets to Blogger pages. In this case we'll use simple Blogger Plugin from BlogSocializer. This plugin allows us to add nine popular bookmarkers button on every pages of our blog. Including Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Yahoo! MyWeb, Google Fusion, Blink, Furl, Simpy, and Stumble upon. Here we go..

1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard. Than click manage layout of your desired blog.

Layout menu in blogger dashboard

2. You'll be in Template page at Page Element Tab. Now click [Add a Page Element]. Just choose where you'll place the widget is. In this case I set it at bottom of every post, so I'll place it below Posting Blog coloumn (See picture).

Add a page element

3. A popup window will appear. There you can choose what kind of page element you want to add. Now select [HTML/JavaScript] element. Than click [Add to Blog] button. A 'Configure HTML/JavaScript' page will appear, leave it first.

Choose page element

4. Go to BlogSocializer and get the code there. Click and copy the given code.

copy BlogSocializer code

5. Go to popup window again. Fill in title of element first than paste the code at 'Content' area (Right click and paste). Lastly, just click [Save Changes] button.

Paste the code

6. Now open your blog and test the widget. Below is example of working BlogSocializer in my blog. You can try how easy this widget in use by submitting this page to Digg, Technorati, and Delicious.

Demo screenshoot

Conclusion.
BlogSocializer is the easiest and simple way to add bookmarker widget in Blogger based page. This Blogger plugin is free to use. I know there are other bookmarker plugins such AddThis.com and Sharethis.com but I still suggest you to use BlogSocializer. Why? because with BlogSocializer we can display the true buttons of originally bookmarker sites. Not other flip button. So benefit of displaying those buttons is to make our blog looked like more cool. Just as Wordpress bookmarker plugin.

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Hexadecimal HTML Color Codes and Names


FROM HERE

Labels:
Changing background and border colors will add a special identity to your site.

Under the Template tab, you see “Fonts and Colors”. Clicking that, you will be able to change the colors, font types, and font size. However the available colors on the screen are limited. If you cannot find the color you want, you may want to copy the appropriate hex codes of the colors below, and paste them into the “color hex code” box and press Enter. Try out different combinations, and change them as and when you like.

Hexadecimal HTML Color Codes and Names

How to Highlight Author Comments


from here

Highlighting author comments using a different background color, border or different style of text helps readers understand when you have personally posted a response.

So far, "How to Highlight Author Comments" has been the most requested article in my Skribit widget, so in this post I'll explain how you can change comments which you have posted yourself to distinguish these from other comments on your posts.


The main obstacle I've faced in writing up this article so far is that different Blogger templates code the comments section differently.

While the easiest method for me to write would have been to say "Find this code and replace it with this", such a method would only be usable by bloggers whose template matches the code.

Instead, my explanation may be a little more complicated than usual, though I hope this explanation will ensure anyone using a Blogger template will understand how to implement the highlighted author comments hack!

Backup your Blogger Template!

Before even attempting to customize your Blogger template, the first thing you should do is back up your template. This ensures you can easily restore your original template if something goes wrong. Also, as most of us cannot see comments unless we are viewing a post page, it would be impossible to see if code changes have adversely affected the comments section.

To make a backup of your Blogger template, simply go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and click on the "Download Full Template" link. This will save your existing template as an XML file which you could use to restore your blog, just in case :)

Finding the Comments Block in your Blogger Template

The first thing we need to do in order to implement this hack is to locate the "comments block" within your Blogger template.

To find the comments section, you will need to tick the "expand widget templates" box as this code is contained within your main "Blog Posts" widget.

As I've already pointed out, the section of code used to display comments varies in different templates, so in order to find this section, you may need to search for some specific tags rather than complete sections of code.

To give you an idea of what you are searching for, here is the complete comments-block code from the Minima template:

<dl id='comments-block'>
<b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'>
<dt class='comment-author' expr:id='data:comment.anchorName'>
<a expr:name='data:comment.anchorName'/>
<b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'><data:comment.author/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:comment.author/>
</b:if>
<data:commentPostedByMsg/>
</dt>
<dd class='comment-body'>
<b:if cond='data:comment.isDeleted'>
<span class='deleted-comment'><data:comment.body/></span>
<b:else/>
<p><data:comment.body/></p>
</b:if>
</dd>
<dd class='comment-footer'>
<span class='comment-timestamp'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'>
<data:comment.timestamp/>
</a>
<b:include data='comment' name='commentDeleteIcon'/>
</span>
</dd>
</b:loop>
</dl>

If you are using Minima (or a similar template) you should be able to locate this section of code easily. However, some templates use <ul> and <li> instead of <dl> and <dd> tags, in which case the code you are looking for may look more like the section on this page instead, or could even be wrapped in simple

tags.

If you are having trouble locating the comments section in your blog's HTML code, do a CTRL+F (or CMD+F for Mac users) search within your template code for the following template tags:

* <b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'>
* <data:comment.author/>
* <data:comment.body/>

The comments section of your blog's HTML code should contain all three of these template tags. Simply locate these tags and the surrounding code in your template, then work out where this section begins and ends using your discretion.

Generally speaking, this section will usually begin with

or
    or
    and end with a matching closing tag.Changing the comments code to add author highlighting

    Once you have located your comments section in your blog's HTML code, you will need to highlight this entire section of code and replace it with the following section of code instead:



    <ul class='commentlist' style='margin: 0; padding: 0;'>
    <b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'>
    <b:if cond='data:comment.author == data:post.author'>

    <li class='author-comments' style='margin: 0 0 10px 0;'>
    <b:if cond='data:post.dateHeader'>
    <div class='commentcount'/>
    </b:if>
    <cite>
    <b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
    <a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'><data:comment.author/></a>
    <b:else/>
    <data:comment.author/>
    </b:if>
    </cite>
    <br/>
    <div style='clear: both;'/>
    <b:include data='comment' name='commentDeleteIcon'/>
    <p><data:comment.body/></p>
    <div class='commentlink-date'><a class='commentlink' expr:href='"#comment-" + data:comment.id' title='comment permalink'>
    <data:comment.timestamp/>
    </a></div>

    <div class='clear'/>

    </li>


    <b:else/>

    <li class='general-comments' style='margin: 0 0 10px 0;'>
    <b:if cond='data:post.dateHeader'>
    <div class='commentcount'/>
    </b:if>
    <cite>
    <b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
    <a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'><data:comment.author/></a>
    <b:else/>
    <data:comment.author/>
    </b:if>
    </cite>
    <br/>
    <div style='clear: both;'/>
    <b:include data='comment' name='commentDeleteIcon'/>
    <p><data:comment.body/></p>
    <div class='commentlink-date'><a class='commentlink' expr:href='"#comment-" + data:comment.id' title='comment permalink'>

    <data:comment.timestamp/>
    </a></div>
    <div class='clear'/>
    </li>

    </b:if>
    </b:loop>
    </ul>

    The simplest way to change your comment code is to follow these steps:

    1. Copy the code above to your clipboard
    2. Highlight the entire section of your comment code in your Blogger template
    3. Paste the code from your clipboard in place of the existing code by keying CTRL+V (or CMD+V).

    One quick method to check if you have made code errors is to preview your template. If you have accidentally omitted some code, you will receive an error message. In this case, you should press the "clear edits" button and begin again.

    If you don't get an error message, you can then proceed to save your template.

    Adding style for author comments

    At this stage, your own comments will still appear in the same style as other comments. To highlight author comments, we need to add some style code to your blog template.

    This step is much easier than locating and changing the comment section. Simply locate the closing tag in your Blogger template, and immedietly before this, paste the following section of code:

    .author-comments {
    background: #cccccc;
    border: 1px solid #333333;
    padding: 5px;
    }

    If you prefer, you can change the hex colors (#cccccc and #333333) to match the color scheme of your own template (discover the color codes for your preferred schemes using the web color calculator).

    Then save your template.

    Now when you make a comment on your blog while signed in to your Blogger account, your comments will have a different border and background color to comments posted by your readers.

Adding a RSS subscribtion message under posts


from here

Labels:


A friend of mine wanted to know how to add RSS subscription messages under the posts like mine , i saw this messages on BlogOhBlog.com and i wanted to do the same , here how to do it.

If you want a rss subscription message same as mine, go to edit html , expand your widgets and , copy and paste the codes below after this line

<p><data:post.body/></p>



<br/>
<br/>
<div style='padding:5px; border:1px solid #999999; background-color:#efc954; margin-top:1px;'><img align='left' src='http://sdf789zzxx.googlepages.com/rss_tekil.png'/>If
you enjoyed this post,<a href='YOUR-FEED-URL-GOES-HERE'><b>
make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! </b></a
></div>


Tips
  1. You had better host this image on your googlepages,photobucket or imageshack account to prevent bandwith from exceeding.
  2. You can change border color and background color also the message and image align , thats why i coloured changable lines.
  3. Before saving template , preview it , if you like it then save it . This trick will not cause any problem in your blogger template.
  4. This can be used in blogger classic templates and blogger xml templates.
  5. Do not hesisate to ask question :)
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