Boy my blogging has been really lazy in the last months – it is so easy to lose the rhythm… Anyways make it one of my new year resolutions….
3 column blogger template optimized for adsense or other online earning programs. An update version from my previous Nyoba780 template
Download template .XML
Notes: You can use your own picture as header image. Image Size: Width: 870px, Height: 180px
News
Thursday, August 23, 2007
AOL offers new advertising network
Time Warner Inc. said Monday its AOL online unit will offer advertisers access to targeting and measurement tools through a new integrated product as part of the company's switch to an ad-driven business.
AOL, long known as a subscription Internet service, also plans to move its headquarters to New York from Dulles, Va., "locating it in the center of the media advertising marketplace," the company said. Time Warner Inc. is based in New York.
AOL, which abandoned the subscription model last year, said the new access tool is called Platform A, and will allow potential advertisers to buy space across all AOL sites and third-party sites that are part of the AOL network. The goal is to give advertisers access to as many potential viewers through a single sales point.
AOL also agreed with computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. to have an AOL toolbar installed on the HP personal computers. AOL will also be the default home page on the machines, expanding its ability to offer more page views to potential advertisers.
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Google Strives to Further Improve Search Functionality
Despite Google’s dominant position in the search industry, the internet giant’s decision makers insist that search is not a “solved problem,” and that there is still much room for improvement.
“Our position is that search is a very hard problem. We have still a lot of work to do,” commented internal engineer, Douglas Merrill, noting that 70% of Google’s efforts still go into improving search, as opposed to developing other services.
“It is not enough to have the information, the information should be right,” Merrill went on to say. “Sometimes the problem is figuring out what the users mean, not what the user said.”
At this point, some of Google’s main projects include improving mobile web search, personalized search, and language translation features, as well as finding new ways to combat SEO spam.
By keeping its focus on core search functionality, the internet giant is demonstrating its belief that no search algorithm can be “too good,” while recognizing the continual progress of competitors. This goes to show that even the mighty Google must work hard to maintain the upper hand against rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft.
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$5.75 Billion Spent on Search Advertising in 2005
Category: Search Engines, SEO News
A recent study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has found that advertisers in Canada and the United States spent $5.75 billion on search engine marketing campaigns over the past year. This marks a 44% increase over the 2004 figures.
“This report confirms our belief that search engine marketing has almost single-handedly revived a flagging online advertising marketplace after the stock market crashed in 2000. As consumers have become increasingly reliant on search engines to navigate the web, investors have shown a renewed interest in the digital technologies — and in search marketing in particular,” SEMPO chairman, Kevin Lee was quoted as saying.
One other interesting finding was that about 80% of internet markets user some kind of organic optimization, yet of the $5.75 billion spent, only 11% of it was spent on organic SEO. This just goes to show that, if done correctly, SEO can be an extremely affordable (or even free) alternative marketing technique, in the midst of a highly expensive advertising market.
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» Predictions 2008 – battle of the giants between Microsoft and Google | ||
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Predictions are always a dangerous game. As Kara Swisher would say, “could we have predicted a tiny start-up with negligible revenues but explosive growth could be valued at $15 billion? Could we have guessed that Apple stock would be up 135%? Could we have foreseen that a devastating writers’ strike in
The New York Times had a great story over the holidays: Google believes that 90% of all computing will ultimately reside in the cloud, as connection speeds become faster and internet software improves. The launch of Google Apps (e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets) is a great illustration of this trend: 2,000 companies are signing up for Google Apps every working day. The battle for universities is very telling too - when But the NYT article does a poor job in my mind highlighting Microsoft’s Windows Live efforts. As Mary Jo Foley indicates on her blog, Windows Live wave 2 has launched with a comprehensive suite of apps (Messenger, Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery and Family Safety, along with the online Skydrive service), connecting cloud based apps with
What do you think? |
Posted by gzleus 11:54 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Case Studies
How to Get Over 10000 Visits to a Webpage in a Day (Case Study)
In the night between December 4 and 5, 2006, in the twelve hours between 7 pm and 7 am, one article of the Science Fiction Observer blog received over ten thousand visits. The lessons of this success are useful to all interested in online marketing and promotion.
This blog was opened for the reasons of testing the new Blogger software, learning about social networking as promotion tool through practice, and--of course--to present news and opinions about science fiction and related subjects, by the blog members.
Blogs are good tool for web marketing and e-publishing experiments because the initial financial expenses are minimal, while the very nature of the medium enables quick linking among the sites, which are already optimized for search engines (if they use Latin alphabets). Large portion of their audience consists of other bloggers, who by default surf more than the usual internet users, so the results are obtained quicker, in comparison to the overall internet-space.
2. Present Relevant Information
During the previous weekend I came across a news item that I found fitting into the concept of the blog, and could be tied in to some previous posts. In the presented form it did not provide complete information. The topic was updating the legal framework on copyright in the U.S.A. in some special cases, enabling access to abandonware, including some old DOS games mentioned on the blog. Besides a link to the news, I also found the original text of the new regulation and posted a link to it, alongside with a quote of the most important article. By this I provided a complete information, enabling further research for the readers who would like to pursue it.
3. Invest in Promotion over the Internet
Few days before that I already promoted the basic website of the blog over the StumbleUpon, generating over 1000 visits. I decided to use Digg's Gaming News channel for this article, because its readers would be most interested. The platforms both social networking services, but Digg's advantage is that it's completely web-based, while StumbleUpon requires users to install toolbar. (StumbleUpon's advantage is the ability to initiate direct communication among users, which is somewhat complicated on Digg). Digg articles receiving enough votes appear on the extremely popular front page.
This happened with the article in question. After getting initial support by dozens of voters, the visits skyrocketed to a few hundred. It ended its stay on the front page with over 1440 diggs, leading to over 14.000 visits from all over the world in the next couple of days. Links on other websites and blogs continued to supplement the Digg effect. Most of the visitors came from locations where potential foreign investors reside (North America, Western Europe, East Asia, Australia).
During the evening, I stayed on the particular Digg page used for voting, responding to comments by other users. This also helped the promotion, because their friends can see if they are active and post comments to certain topics, and get curious about it. Also, I invited my friends who were online at the time to join the party via IM.
In this case, the financial investment was minimal, and most of the investment consisted in applying experience and knowledge of operation of systems used.
5. Analyze and Make Room for Further Development
According to the results by the blog aggregator Digimak, which uses the data from the public counters of around 88 Macedonian blogs, an average Macedonian blog has about 40 unique visits per day. The most popular Macedonian blogs seldom top 200 visits per day, with the exception of porn blogs, which remain a separate world anyway. Judging by the available public counters and some insider data, Macedonian business-oriented websites probably do not stray much from this pattern.
Source: Како до над 10.000 посети на ваша веб-страница во еден ден (студија на случај). Filip Stojanovski for Razvigor in Macedonian blog, Jan 15, 2007.
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Google AdSense Case Study
PVRBlog.com found a way to cover costs and make a profit with Google AdSense.
Case study : PVRBlog.com : www.pvrblog.com
PVRBlog
It's fair to say that Matt Haughey doesn't always start with a business plan. Based in San Francisco, Haughey has been a website developer, designer, and publisher for years, and is an active blogger as well. One of his blog sites, PVRBlog.com, is all about personal video recorders (PVRs), especially the TiVo® brand. Nearly a year ago Haughey began posting messages about this growing consumer electronics category, including notes on TiVo features, shortcuts, new models, reviews, hacks, and PVR industry news.
"I encourage people who can write and have active blogs dedicated to a single subject to support them through AdSense ads. It's definitely lucrative, and you can concentrate on your subject and your site."
Matt Haughey
Founder, PVRBlog.com
Challenge
Haughey didn't intend for PVRBlog to become a business. But its popularity grew - up to 5,000 people read it every day - and he wondered if there was a way to cover costs for hosting and storage. "If running ads could pay for the site, that would be fantastic," he recalls thinking. But as rule, Haughey and his blogging circle did not like the often irrelevant, obtrusive nature of most online advertising. "I didn't have a clue about how to find decent advertising for the site," he says. Haughey read about the Google AdSense™ program and decided to try it. "It's completely automated, and so it took 5 minutes to set up," he says. "I've hardly touched it since then."
Results
"I can't believe how lucrative AdSense is," Haughey says. "On the very first day it was on, I made twice what it costs me for monthly hosting, storage, and bandwidth overage fees," adding that he's making money because the ads are relevant and readable. "The targeting is perfect for me," he says. Since PVRBlog is about a product, he gets a lot of traffic from searchers. "People are constantly looking for TiVo and PVR products and services. I'm lucky to have a blog that is product focused, because the ads all relate to PVR products and services."
Haughey says the custom color feature to differentiate the ads from the pages is "awesome. It's nice to add color so readers can see them in context on the page."
In his professional role as web creator, Haughey says he now sees the value of AdSense for similar endeavors. "I encourage people who can write and have active blogs dedicated to a single subject to support them through AdSense ads," he says. "It's definitely lucrative, and you can concentrate on your subject and your site." In particular, he feels the program is "really great for bloggers who worry about the wrong kind of commercialism creeping in, because AdSense ads really work in the context of blog pages."
Since launching AdSense on PVRBlog, Haughey has even opted to run AdSense ads on Metafilter, a much larger community blog site he began in 1999. Today, it features half a million posts on some 27,000 subjects. In short, Haughey has become an extreme fan of Google advertising, which he now says "changed everything by offering highly targeted ads that are actually useful."
About Google AdSense
Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. A broad universe of sites profit from AdSense, with service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management. Google's thousands of advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, including AOL, Ask.com, Lycos, and EarthLink. Visit www.google.com/adsense.
Posted by gzleus 6:00 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Advertise
Here goes the Advertise section and "Review me "
Posted by gzleus 5:58 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Setup a Blog
Blogware & CMS - where to create a blog?
There are dozen of way to publish a blog. This article covers some of the most popular service and software to create a blog.
It would be every blogger's dream to just start writing and never worrying about anything else. While that would certainly be wonderful, most of the time we have to manage everything in running a blog. Fortunately, there are blogging service & blogging software/scripts/blogware out there that take the most tedious and technical aspects out of running a blog. In fact, sometimes you might just be able to setup your blog with a few clicks and start writing (rest of the time is where blogcrowds comes in :D). Since blogging service/blogware can make your job incredibly easier, it is crucial to choose the one right for you.
Social Blogging
There are some distinction between different types of blogging; one of the being social blogging. If you are blogging about your personal life like your cat, your calendar etc with friends and family, social blogging is for you. As you can see, this is very close related to Social Networks and most major social networks have a blogging section. The largest social networks MySpace, Facebook dominate this side of blogging while MSN Space, Yahoo 360 also draw a crowd with their email, IM service etc. Signing up these services is very simple usually you just need an email address.
Online Blog Publishing Services
For those who does not need as much social element, you can sign up for blogging service such as Blogger, Live Journal.
Blogger
One of the first weblog publishing system on the internet, Blogger was initially launched in August 1999 by Pyra Labs. Unfortunately at that time it requires a subscription fee. As blogging become more and more popular, Google acquired Blogger in 2004 and made it possible for more people to use blogger by eliminating the premium!
Google subsequently improved Blogger by integrating its photo-sharing software Picasa and Hello. Another popular feature of Blogger is the FTP and SFTP for more advanced users to directly update their blogs. For less tech oriented users there is even a Microsoft Word add-on that allow users to use Word to edit their blogs on and offline.
Today, Blogger is characterized by a variety of clean cut validated CSS templates, ease to sign up and publish and one of the best blog publishing service on the web.
Live Journal
One of the earliest blog communities, LiveJournal was founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick. In early 2005 it was purchased by Six Apart which also owns Movable Type. LiveJournal is largely free with additional features for paid users or advertised sponsorship. Despite some social network features including user info, contact information, user avatars, LiveJournal is still heavily blogocentric. Users have a list of friends or flist who are allowed to comment on blog in message board style threads and view private entries effectively hidden from most search engines and viewers. In addition, LiveJournal provides group journals consisting of members who are allowed to post in the journal and moderate it. LiveJournal is written in PERL by volunteer programmers and therefore it is open-source. Because of this, many other sites also runs LiveJournal software including DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, Blurty and numerous other more shortlived communities.
Blog Publishing Software/Scripts
For even more control in blogging, you can host a blog on your own server with a blogging script/software. If Blogger is the most popular blogging services, than WordPress would be the most popular blogware. Other blogware includes Drupal, MovableType. While setuping WordPress can be a little more complicated than signing up for Blogger, it can still be done in a few minutes and the enhanced feature/control is certainly worth the extra clicks.
WordPress
WordPress is the free blog publishing system written in PHP & MySql. Many current stand alone blogs use WordPress. Along with the cost, WordPress attract bloggers with its multiple features:
- Manage multiple blogs on one server.
- Manage static html pages
- Manage users/groups
- Moderate comments
- Simple template system with excellent skins
- Integrated link management
- Extensible plugin support to take advantage of open-source communities.
- Subcategory, multiple category entry
- Ease of formatting and styling
Drupal
Drupal is the content management/blogging system written in PHP by Dries Buytaert. The name is Dutch for drop.
Drupal is initially written as a bulletin board system. Drupal supports pluggable extension for advance functions such as Amazon Item module, workflow, mailing list, photo galleries, CVS integration. Drupal also offers unique content classification system and tighten security. However, because of the additional features Drupal is in comparison more difficult to install. In addition, Drupal is known to have a less attractive appearance compared to other blogware, but its clean code allows advance users to add their own features to take Drupal from a blog to a full fledge community. Because of this, Drupal is used in company intranets, online classrooms, and other online projects. Special versions of Drupal includes, DrupalED, DrupalArt, vbDrupal.
This covers many flavors of blogging platforms to publish your blog, but by no means exhaustive. If you have any questions fell free to get in touch.
Happy Blogging!
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Domain Names - choose the right one for your blog!
An overview of domain and sub-doman names and which one is right for you!
After you choose a blogging platform, it time to decide your web address, URL or domain name of your blog. All three mean the same thing, the http triple w etc etc (referred to as domain name from now on).
Your domain name is what the world knows your blog/website as. How else would visitors remember or get to your blog? All sorts of important information is attached to your domain name. For instance, your PageRank, links to your blog, bookmarks and so on (all these hopefully I will eventually cover in this blog). If you are unsure of what they are right now, it is suffice to say it takes a lot of hard work to improve your Page Rank, build up links and bookmarks etc. You definitely don't want to spend hours upon hours promoting your blog only to switch to a new domain names after some success and start all over again. I see many blogger do this, which is one of the reason I emphasis bloggers to choose a domain name and stick with it.
Usually a blog would either have a domain name or sub-domain name.
Domain Name
As mentioned before a domain name is http://www...com. For example, the domain name of my blog forum would be http://www.blogcrowds.com/. You can register an unclaimed domain name with ICANN through many domain registrars. Some domain names with certain ending are free, but they are not very popular. For more widely used domain extensions, .com .org .net, the price to register is relatively inexpensive ranging from $2-10 USD for an unclaimed domain name. Sometimes you may find deals or host package that will include a free domain name.
Sub-Domain Name
Like the name suggest, a sub-domain is a web address that is a level lower than a domain name. As an example, the web address of this blog http://blogger.blogcrowds.com/. http://blogger.blogcrowds.com/ is a subdomain of http://www.blogcrowds.com/. Sub-domains are identify by a period(.) separating the web address with no www after http://. Sub-domains are often given by free webhosts, so it maybe something similar to http://something.awardspace.com/.
Domains vs Sub-Domain
For obvious reasons, you should try to use a domain name rather than a sub-domain. A domain name give you much more control - technically, the subdomain belongs to the domain owner. For this reason, you cannot apply for certain web services with a subdomain. For example, if you wish to run certain ads networks, you should not have a subdomain. And of course, a concise and memorable domain name is much better than a long sub-domain name.
Many bloggers, especially alternatively hosted BlogSpot or MovableType bloggers will use sub-domains. Of these bloggers, some write about their personal life and their cats for friends and family while others are more ambitious and try to turn blogging into a full time job. Most of the bloggers who seek blogging as a career path usually start out with a subdomain plans to move on to a domain after they have a steady number of visitors and traffic. The basis for this route is mainly financial - most bloggers want to earn enough money before seriously invest in blogging. Once they change their web address though, they will have to start all over promoting their blog and build traffic. However much these bloggers made before, be it $10 or $100 a day, is at risk. Redirecting traffic to the 'new' blog could be easy or hard depending on the content and reader loyalty. Nevertheless, easy or hard, when you have a steady readership, what you should do is write more quality content and not worrying about promoting the content yourself.
That, is the reason why, if you ever want to have your own domain, you should buy it in the very beginning. In any case, a domain is not that expensive. I hope everyone can get a domain name if they want to. If you can't purchase one, try to obtain one through webhosting packages, domain name give aways etc.
Choosing the right domain/subdomain
I won't dwell much on this topic, bloggers always do a good job on choosing domain names. Just choose something between 4-10 letters that is related to your blog and make it unique and memorable. There will be instances when the domain name you want is already taken by someone. Instead of paying an unreasonable whopping amount someone demand for it, just be creative. For example, del.cio.us or flickr.
One last thing when picking domain is the domain extension, the most popular being .com, .org, .net. There are many other domain extension such as .tv, .info, .tk etc. Selecting a domain extension is entirely a personal preference. Most people view the extensions .com, .org, .net equally and a category above all other extensions. Personally, there is no other domain extension other than .com with exception of 'location' extensions such as .co.uk (United Kingdom), .us (United States) or .ca (Canada).
To sum it all up, pick a good domain name you like that will create a desirable image for your blog/website and stick with it!
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Webhosting - find a reliable home for your blog.
Here we explain some basic concept of webhosting, some of the simple technicalities, and what to look out for in a webhost.
Now that you have chose a domain, its time to find a server to host your blog/website. Most alternatively hosted blogs such as BlogSpot or TypePad users won't have to worry about this. You are already hosting by Blogger or TypePad, but it is still good to know about webhosting.
Websites & Servers
First off, website are hosted on servers. A server is just a computer(s) which contains your website files that is always on and always connected to the web. This way, the server can send your webpages to people half way around the world even when you are sleeping. The reason why sometimes you receive an unable to connect error from your browser is because the specific server for the website is down or too busy for some reason.
Because of the nature and speed of the modern Internet infrastructure, the location of the web server does not really matter. You can even use a spare computer as a web server. However as your blog/website out grows the capacity of your computer and bandwidth offered by your internet provider, you will be looking for a webhost. Besides, its much easier to let someone else worry about the technical stuff while you write.
Disk Space & Bandwidth
When talking about webhosting and servers there are two technical details you have to understand, disk space and bandwidth. Many people often mix the two since they are similar and both measured in megabytes or gigabytes. The concepts are quite simple, let me illustrate with a MP3 file. Although most bloggers won't offer songs for download, I will use it as an example because everyone is familiar with MP3 files and how its 'exchanged' around the world.
So, say you have a 5 megabyte MP3 file on your server, then you would have used 5 megabyte of disk space. The disk space usage won't change until you add or delete something on the server. As for bandwidth, when someone request the MP3, your server will send the file using 5 megabyte of bandwidth. When someone download the MP3 file again, the server will use another 5 megabyte of bandwidth adding up to 10 megabyte of bandwidth for a total of two downloads of a 5 megabyte MP3 file. Your bandwidth accumulates over the month while disk space quota remains the same until files are added or deleted.
It is important to know these two concepts and understand you pay for webhosting in terms of both disk space and bandwidth.
Type Of Webhosting Packages
Webhosting services rent their servers in two ways. First, shared hosting, which means a number of websites/clients are hosted off one server sharing the space and resources. On the other hand with dedicated hosting you have control over an entire server and its up to you how many websites the server will host. In comparison, dedicated hosting naturally give you more control, disk space, bandwidth. Needless to say, dedicated hosting cost a lot more than shared hosting.
Most webhosts should several different hosting packages such starter, intermediate, pro for shared hosting and different server specs for dedicate hosting. Some webhost also has free hosting packages.
Choose the Right Webhost
There are literally thousands of webhosts out there, so how do you find the one right for you? Some people trust big hosts like HostGator or Dreamhost while others prefer their local webhosts so when they have a problem they can talk to someone in person instead of waiting for a phone call or email reply. To find reviews for webhosting, you can visit http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ where many people share their hosting experience.
When choosing webhosts, make sure you have enough disk space, bandwidth, specific features (eg. PHP & MySql for WordPress) and an option to upgrade later. Also check the reference and reliability of the webhost. You don't want visitor only accessing your site at one o'clock in the morning. In the beginning, the minimal shared hosting package provided by most webhost should be sufficient. Finally, there is one very important advice that should remember: you get what you paid for. Never signup for a host that only offers free hosting or free hosting that give you a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space.
Never Signup For A Host That Only Offers Free Hosting
Never signup for a host that only offers free hosting? Why? Well, these kind of hosting usually only have one administrator, and one server. In this scenario, some must have server features such programming language or database support may be missing. Additionally, without monthly charges there are really only two incentives for the administrator to offer free hosting.
First, the admin wish to build a large user base so he/she could sell the hosting service quickly. To build a huge user base, administrators offer free hosting and often oversells (covered shortly). After sufficient level of membership, the hosting service will exchange hands. Sometimes there will a lapse of service ranging from days to months as the new owner sets up. When the hosting does return, the new owner most likely will stop overselling and charge for webhosting. Those people who are attracted by free hosting and overselling will probably move on after these changes.
The other reason is just plain good will. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the good will of the admin. I have found many admins taking hours a day to help people with their webhost. What I am questioning is without monetary incentive, how motivated is the admin to restore the server after it had been hacked or the database crashed. How motivated is the admin to make sure these disasters never happen again? Unfortunately, usually with only one admin, these disaster are more than common.
Avoid Webhost That Oversells
You should also avoid free hosting that offers a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space. In other words as described earlier, overselling. The biggest problem with overselling is not that the offer may disappear soon, but the practice itself.
As mentioned before, most free host only have one server and limited resources, yet they advertise as much as 5gig disk space/10gig monthly bandwidth. It would all right if the hosts limit the number of users to how many 5gig accounts their server can take. Instead, these hosts assume that most users use less than the advertised 5gig/10gig. In a sense these hosts are selling more resource than they actually have, hence overselling. There will be serious problems when the host's demand exceed its resources. Stop signups won't solve problem, the users already signed up are expanding beyond their 'actual' limit but far from the 5gig/10gig offered by the webhost.
Overselling is the reason why some webhosts are often down or extremely slow.
Those are the reasons you should never signup for a host that only offers free hosting or free hosting that give you a whopping amount of bandwidth/disk space. People who uses these services usually have to switch hosts every few month. After reading that, you might think that totally against free hosting, but that's not the case. For free webhosting, I recommend signup for a reliable paid hosting service that also offers free hosting. One example is awardspace. It offers 200megabits of disk space. Honestly, in the beginning, that is more than enough. 50megabits for wordpress and a domain name, you are good to go with your blog. When you exceed the limit, you are doing very well and hopefully able to pay for webhosting.
Posted by gzleus 4:37 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Download templates
K2 Blogger XML
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Erudite Blogger XML (Two Column)
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Emire Blogger XML
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3 Column New Blogger Template: Bloggerized Adsense
New Blogger Template 3 Column : Nyoba 780
Note: You can use your own picture as header image. Image Size: Width: 780px, Height: 180px
New Blogger Template 3 Column : Nyoba
Note: You can use your own picture as header image, Image Size: Width: 300px, Height: 130px
How to Use this Old Blogger template in New Blogger
"hi! I love this template and would like to use it on my blog.
only problem is, this error occurs when i try to save changes...
Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: The element type "head" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "".
could you help me rectify it?
hope to hear from u soon!"
If you got the same problem, please read How to Use this Old Blogger template in New Blogger
- Login to New Blogger with your Google account.
- On your Dashboard choose blog you want to edit, Click on Layout, you'll go direct to Template tab where blog you want to Edit.
- Choose the Template tab of your blog then click on Edit HTML.
- Next scroll down to the end of your page and choose Revert to Classic Template.
- Copy all the code of the template you wish and paste it into your blog.
- Click on SAVE TEMPLATE and you are done!.
Free Blogger Templates, Another List
I set up a new free template list on my personal blog, no more .zip file, so you can copy the code without having to upload any images or files. It's the same list like templates you find here, but more to come. So subscribe to our feed and get the latest free blogger template news.
If you have any question or need help with designing your blog, just ask and leave a comment on my blog or here, what template do you want for your blog, we'll provide any template related to your blog.
3 Column Blogger Template: The Girl
Posted by gzleus 4:36 PM 0 comments Links to this post
SEO tips
Facts About Title Keyword Density
Page Optimization, Google, MSN
If you’ve done much SEO work for your website, I’m sure you’ve realized just how important it is to include the right text in the <> tag of each page.
As discussed in this article, it is a good idea to build each of your pages around its own primary keyphrase, and somehow incorporate that keyphrase into your <> tag. The question is, of course, what’s the best way to integrate it? The problem is that each search engine has its own unique answer.
MSN (aka Live.com) is generally thought to reward very high keyword density, and often grants top-five rankings to pages with 100% density in the title (that is, pages where the primary keyphrase is the only thing in the title bar).
Google, on the other hand, seems to make a point of devaluing pages on keywords that exactly match their <> tag. This measure was most likely introduced as a way to fight search engine spammers who over-optimize for a single phrase, by excessively placing it in their content, headings, and title.
Overall, you need to make an informed decision about which optimization route you want to take for each of your sites. As mentioned in the algorithm summaries, MSN is a good choice for driving short-term traffic and revenue, while Google has a lot more potential for long-term sustainable content websites.
If you want to optimize for Google, my advice would be to go for title keyword density of around 50%, and no greater than 75%. For example, if your primary keyphrase is three words long, you many wish to add another three-word phrase to your title, consisting of secondary keywords.
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Help Yourself: Link Back Home
Category: Page Optimization
This is pretty obvious from a design point of view, but it’s important to remember the SEO benefits as well.
When designing a website, you should try and have a text link back to your homepage on every page of the site. Flash and Java navigation is (usually) okay from a user point of view, but can’t be used by search engine spiders, meaning that you should always include a text link as well.
Where possible, use relevant anchor text in your home page links (dropping in a primary site-wide keyword or two), rather than just using a boring and non-descriptive “Home” link.
As the most important page in your site, there is no doubt that the home page deserves a good backlink from each and every page in your navigation structure. This is one of the easiest ways to create a good internal linking arrangement, and make it easier for search engines to index your site.
Keep in mind that this strategy isn’t just limited to your home page, but can also be applied to other important pages of your site. For example, if you have a blog and want to increase the ranking of a particular article, you could give it a side-wide link on all of your previous post pages.
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The Truth About Meta Tags and SEO
Page Optimization
The meta description and keywords tags are often seen as some of the most basic ways to optimize. But are they so basic as to be obsolete?
The short answer is that meta tags are no longer a requirement, and serve very little practical purpose in SEO. This is because they serve absolutely no role whatsoever in the ranking algorithms of Google or MSN, and play a very small part in the algorithm used by Yahoo.
This does not mean, however, that adding meta tags is completely useless. Even though it doesn’t count towards ranking, Google sometimes shows it to users on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Meta keywords are, if nothing else, a good organizational tool. I for one am a great believer in the value of sketching out lists of keywords and keyphrases that you want to optimize for, and keeping track of them on a page-by-page basis. So what better place to put them than on the page itself? This is an especially handy touch for plain HTML sites with no database, where you have to edit each page individually.
Despite the fact that meta tags are virtually obsolete for ranking, there is no doubt that they still have a few useful side benefits. Whether it is worth it to add these tags needs to be decided on a site-by-site basis, and largely depends on the amount of time involved.
As long as you use them in moderation, meta tags won’t damage your rankings. They won’t help them either, however, so if you are adding them to beef up your keyword density, you will almost certainly be disappointed.
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Google Search Algorithm
Generally thought of as the “smartest” (and strictest) search engine, Google invented the link popularity system that many other algorithms are based on today.
Despite plenty of competition, Google has always managed to stay ahead of the game, delivering what are widely accepted as the most accurate and reliable results.
How Google ranks a site still depends largely on its incoming links, but the system has evolved and shifted a number of times over the years. It now depends a lot less on raw quantity of incoming links (pagerank) and more on quality, that is how targeted and relevant each link is to the site’s content. The anchor text of incoming links is also given a high importance.
Google’s algorithm is also very good at differentiating high quality content from spam, meaning that a page with little or no value won’t have much chance of ranking well, regardless of its incoming links. The system is designed to pick up red flags, such as abnormally high keyword density in a page’s title or content, and penalize pages that exhibit too many “spammy” attributes.
Another apparent trait of Google’s algorithm is that it is very tough on new and unestablished sites. When the engine first locates a new site, it often puts it under a temporary penalty called the “Google sandbox,” which prevents it from ranking for anything for the first three to six months. This doesn’t affect all sites, but is very common, and seems to be triggered whenever Google detects any red flags on a new website.
One thing that is know to trigger the sandbox is a sudden significant increase in your quantity of incoming links. In general, you’re much better off to build links to your site slowly and steadily if you don’t want to “spook” Google and incur the sandbox or another penalty.
All in all, Google’s ranking algorithm is one of the hardest to impress. Your site will probably need a good amount of high quality content before you can rank well for anything competitive, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t get instant results.
Once you do earn some strong rankings in Google, you’ll probably find them quite stable and sustainable compared with other search engines. The trick is to write good content, get a few highly relevant links, and stick with your SEO strategy for the long term.
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Yahoo Search Algorithm
For years, Yahoo has striven to be more like its leading rival, Google, resulting in a ranking algorithm that looks very similar to that of the Mountain View giant.
Yahoo rankings are generally quite reliable and stable, and the SERPs don’t fluctuate nearly as much as those of MSN. Like Google, Yahoo places a lot of weight on inbound links, considering both quality and quantity of links, as well as anchor text.
Another way in which Yahoo and Google are very similar is the so called “sandbox” penalty, which often makes it difficult for new sites to get good rankings. In my experience, Yahoo’s penalty on new sites can last even longer than Google’s, and can affect even large and high quality sites for months after their launch.
One way in which Yahoo still trails Google is in its ability to differentiate between high quality content sites, and search engine spam. Yahoo is much more inclined to rank a low quality site simply because it has a high count of inbound links.
Overall, I find that Yahoo takes a quite a while to rank sites, but once attained, rankings aren’t hard to sustain, even for sites with a minimal amount of content. If you have the ability to point a lot of inbound links at your site, then wait patiently, you probably have a good chance at getting competitive Yahoo rankings.
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MSN Search Algorithm
In my experience, MSN is by far the easiest search engine to work with if you’re looking for quick rankings with minimal regard for content quality.
MSN’s ranking algorithm seems to put a lot of emphasis on sheer quantity of incoming links, and very little on link relevance and anchor text.
In terms of page optimization, it is important to remember that Microsoft’s search technology puts a huge emphasis on certain parts of each web page. The <> tag, for example, is crucial for getting a good ranking, while the heading tags (<>, <>, etc.) also play a major role.
One thing that MSN seems to pay almost no attention to is keyword density, meaning that placing a single keyword many times over (within reason) on the same page is probably more likely to help your ranking than hurt it. Keyword density of over 10%, which would mean almost certain death in Google, will often result in a pleasant boost for your MSN rankings.
Unlike Google’s ranking system, MSN’s algorithm doesn’t seem to a very high keyword density in the <> tag. In fact, putting a short and to-the-point primary keyphrase (100% density) as your title is an excellent way to achieve top-three rankings for moderately competitive keywords.
The other benefit of MSN is its lack of a penalty specifically affecting new sites. Old and well-established websites have virtually no advantage in Microsoft’s algorithm, meaning that a brand new site can rank well in a matter of days, without fear of the crippling “sandbox” penalties inflicted by Google and Yahoo.
MSN is also a fresh content junkie, meaning that frequently updated sites have a huge advantage. Sites that aren’t changed for a matter of several weeks or months will see their rankings decline noticeably between updates. Because of this, as well as the generally unpredictable and volatile nature of the algorithm, MSN rankings are much easier to obtain, yet harder to sustain, than rankings in Yahoo or Google.
All things considered, MSN is still an evolving entity, and isn’t anywhere near as popular as Google or even Yahoo. The Microsoft engine is a good bet if you’re looking to drum up some quick, cash-generating rankings, but for a long-term and sustainable stream of traffic, you’d be better off to focus your SEO efforts on Google and/or Yahoo.
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5 Quick, easy and effective SEO tips for bloggers
This week I’ve been carry out some much needed SEO work on Blogstorm to make sure the site has everything in place to continue to rank well in 2008. Here are some of the tips you can follow to make your site rank higher this year.
Carry out a site audit
Visit Google and do a search for site:yoursite.com. The only pages that come up should be your post/article pages and any other high quality pages people might want to find. You shouldn’t have archives, search pages, category pages, tag pages or any other pages that are unlikely to rank highly on Google. Remove them from the index using the following meta tag:
Stop keyword cannibalisation
Many large blogs such as and Engadget link to their category pages such as http://www.engadget.com/tag/iphone/ from every iPhone related post. Notice how the tag page doesn’t rank when you search for “iPhone” but a real article ranks in 6th place? That’s because Google wants to rank stories highest and not category pages. If Engadget was to link all posts about the iPhone to a real page instead then they would rank second. If they did the same with all products the effect would be huge.
Carry out some keyword research and figure out what pages you want to rank highly and then make sure any other post referencing that topic is linked to the target post. For example if I wanted this page to rank for the query htaccess I would find every page on my blog mentioning the word “htaccess” and turn each word into a link to the target article.
Optimise your results
Look back at the keywords that have been sending you the most traffic and examine the search results for those keywords. If you aren’t number 1 then point a few more links at the page to improve your rankings.
Next look at the other results compared to yours. Is your title appealing to searchers? Does the snippet make people want to click? Are you even writing about the subject people are looking for?
Change your titles
A blog post title has to fulfil several roles. In the first week it has to attract as many readers and links as possible and maybe get traffic from social media. After that you should look to changing the title to target certain keywords. For example you might publish the “Top 10 Best Methods to Fix an iPhone” which would be good for getting traffic but not so good for ranking. As Graywolf said earlier this week you should look to changing your page title to “Fix an iPhone - Top 10 Methods” but keep the h1 tag as it was before.
Promote top pages
Check your logs to find the most popular pages on your site. Have they all been submitted to StumbleUpon and Digg? Try submitting them with social media friendly titles and see if you can make them even more popular.
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What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?
SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer." Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.
While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.
- Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
- Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.
Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.
- You should never have to link to an SEO.
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
- Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.
Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so. Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who have downloaded the required applications.
- Choose wisely.
While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
- Be sure to understand where the money goes.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
- Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they'd recommend the firm you're considering.
References are a good start, but they don't tell the whole story. You should ask how long a company has been in business and how many full time individuals it employs. If you feel pressured or uneasy, go with your gut feeling and play it safe: hold off until you find a firm that you can trust. Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines.
- Make sure you're protected legally.
Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied with your SEO's performance. Make sure you have a contract in writing that includes pricing. The contract should also require the SEO to stay within the guidelines recommended by each search engine for site inclusion.
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.
What are some other things to look out for?
There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
- owns shadow domains
- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
- offers to sell keywords in the address bar
- doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
- guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
- operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
- gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
- has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:
Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580
If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.
Posted by gzleus 4:35 PM 0 comments Links to this post
How to blog?
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SMO: What is Social Media Optimization?
How does business leverage the opportunity to connect with people using consumer generated media tools?
1. Get In.
Go where where your market is and investigate the Long Tail for related niches for your products and services. Get your brand is fair percentage of minds hare.
2. Fit In.
Create community around your brand for your percentage of minds hare to pay dividends. Go interactive and create conversations and networks around your brand. Participation is mandatory or someone else will start the conversation that you should have had to begin with. Meet your community where they are and find out what they want and deliver it. Fit in with the new expectations and habits of social networking.
3. Make Friends.
Do actually engage your market through community. Create interactive contests, polls, user feedback loops whatever allows your community to choose, create and contribute to the improvement of your brand. Allow them to submit home grown videos, photos, naming contests and any other unique and interesting experiences that will reinforce your brand and a great experience. This leads to trust. When you’ve been authenticated and validated by your community that can rightly influence the message of your market about your products and services. You'll find yourself in a cooperative position where consumer involvement becomes a vital contribution to your success and word-of-mouth marketing is lifting your business profile in a positive manner that helps you acquire new business.
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Distinction from traditional media
Social media has a number of characteristics that make it fundamentally different from traditional media such as newspapers, television, books, and radio. Social media does not have a finite limit: there are no set number of pages or hours. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments or even editing the stories themselves. Content in social media can take the form of text, graphics, audio or video. Different formats can be mixed. Social media is typically available via feeds, enabling users to subscribe via feed readers, and allowing other publishers to create mashups.[1]
Social Media is a term that is used for a broad spectrum of topics, and has several different connotations, however in the context of internet marketing, Social Media refers to a collective group of web properties that primarily driven by the users. For example, blogs, discussion boards, vlogs, video sharing sites and dating sites. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of trying to get one's content more widely distributed across multiple Social Media networks.
There are two sides to Social Media, the first side is known as SMO as stated above. This refers to on-page tactics that a webmaster can do to improve their website for the age of social media. Such optimisation includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily 'saved and submitted' to and for these services.
Social Media Marketing on the other hand is the off-page characteristics of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique and news-worthy. Marketing this content can be done by trying to get the content 'popular' on the services mentioned or even creating a video that is likely to be viral on the likes of Youtube and other video sites. Social Media is about being social so this off-page work can include getting involved in other similar blogs, forums and niche communities.
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How To Blog 101 - What is Blogging and Why Should I Blog?
In this article your will learn what blogging really is and why you should start blogging. Unless you've been comletely internet free for the past several months to a year, you have probably heard about these "blog" sites but you may not know what a blog is. Or perhaps you know what a blog is but you want to learn more about how blogs are being used and if blogging is something you could benefit from. In this article you will learn exactly what blogging is and what blogging is not and why you should or should not start blogging.
I will attempt to dymistify the definition of blogging if you absolutely aren't quite sure what a blog really is. A blog is generally defined as an online journal that is updated frequently and where your articles are listed in reverse chronological order when they are published. That means your articles are published with the most recent article listed first in date and time order.
What Is A Blog?
The term "blog" is derived from the term "Weblog" or web log. In the early days of blogging circa mid to late 1990's, web logs were used to track updates and references to other resources on the internet. Weblogs, as journals were also used as a stream of consciousness publishing tool where you could share and comment on anything and everything under the sun. As a results and to this day, there are lots of blogs that publish opinionated commentary as diverse in tone as there are a diversity of topics to talk about.
A blog is technically a content management system (CMS) albeit a more simplified version of one. A CMS allows you to easily publish to a website and manage content without having to deal with having to know how to program code. Blog publishing software provides you with a graphical user interface (GUI) for point and click publishing of your content. Your blog software will require you to perform intial easy-to-do setup and configuration so that it will know how to automically organize your published content in the future. After that, you can publish quickly and instantly using your blog software editor that is built into your blog publishing software.
Publishing A Blog Is Easy To Do!
You can also publish content to your blog by using blog publishing tools call bookmarklets or with blog editing and publishing software like WB Editor 2. Again, publishing with a blog can be done easily and instantly. You simply type something into a web-based texted editor and push a button and you published!
Some of these setup and configuration tasks include providing the name of your blog, providing archival intervals, providing the names for categories of content and provide names of other publishers. There are other settings also such as deciding to allow trackbacks, how to handle commenting in your blog, security settings, RSS syndication settings, site layout and more. Once these simple tasks are completed blogging becomes fun, fast and flexible and even profitable.
There Are Many Types of Blogs
Bloggers of all types whether for business or personal publishing, normally publish content around niche topics and subjects that they are passionate about. Examples of niche information topics would be politics, how to build pc's or pet care. Business oriented blogs will always be more niche oriented in their information content because they need to be tightly focused on their product or services and getting connected with the audiences they serve. Business blog content will cover a topics that promotes their subject matter expertise, educates consumers on their products or services, communicate announcements or provides customer support for example.
Personal blogs may cover a wider range of related or unrelated topics within the same blog because personal blogs lend themselves to more stream of consciousness publishing on a whim and according to mood. This style works well for personal blogs. There is an ever increase number of the "types" of blogs out there or rather the "way" in which blogs are being used to communicate. A few examples would be public relations blogs, affiliate marketing blogs, health care blogs, law blogs, car blogs and of course yet another blog about blogging...mine, the one reading right now! :)
Blogging is HOT! I strongly believe it is more than a trend as well. With that said lets talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not just a website. It is a type of website but your typical website content takes much longer to update, publish, share and distribute. A blog is no longer just a online journal. While "online journal" provides an easy to understand point of reference for how a blog is used and how it works, bloggerss have extended the use of blogs far beyond the personal pundit type of posting. As outlined above blogs lend themselves to many audiences for communication and publishing.
Why Should You Blog?
So why should you blog? Well, you shouldn't blog before you understand how a blog can best support your online communications. You will have the most success with your blog if you understand before you start what outcome you desire. At the end of the day your blog should be fun or profitable to you or both!
If you aren't blogging that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be blogging. If you are in business and especially if you do business on the internet then you absolutely must determine if blogging works for your business model. Without going into a very long article on this topic I will say that if you are doing business online there is a good chance your competitors are blogging or preparing to blog. Blogs are expaning on what are called "market conversations" and your markets are talking to each other about your products and services in your industry and niche and they want to talk to authorative sources in those niches.
Those businesses bold enough to open up an honest dialogue will capture more audience which can result in prospects becoming customers. Right now blogs have taken center stage as the premier communications and publishing tool for businesses to communicate authoratively and demonstrate subject matter expertise in their market niches. If you aren't talking to your market your competition is and your markets are definitely talking back. That alone is powerful motivation to at least investigate how a business blog can enchance and drive new business for you online.
A Business Blog Is Especially Worth Considering
The last point I'll make on the the case for a business blog is the SEO advantage. Search Engine Optimization is a big benefit to blogging. If you have a website promoting any product or service and any type of content that you use to drive any level of business and commerce then you require a blog. Blogs are very light weight and text-based compared to traditional website content. This cuts down on the crawl time by search engine spiders and allows them to take back more of your pages to the search directories much quicker. Blogs are dynamic in that they are frequently updated. This makes blogs relevant and popular and causes the searches engines to crawl blogs more often. The result is that your blog will have more pages going back to the search engines much quicker and more frequently than your competitor who is using a static and standard website.
This is not good however if YOU are the competitor with the static website. :)
If your blog content is targeted and link density for your keywords is healthy you will burn your competition in the content war if he doesn't switch to a blog. Ultimately a blog alone isn't the holy grail for publishing content online for top search engine rankings. You will need to to other other things like write good and relevant high-value content for your audience. You will need to target the keywords that target your markets and you'll need to build link partnerships to help with your Google popularity.
Personal Blogs Are Fun, Interesting and Exciting
For personal publishing you could blog as a means to keep family and friends updated about your life and times. There is lots of fun to be had with personal blogs. You can share many interests online with other people. You can share and publish photos online from your your mobile phone or digital camera with a service like TextAmerica. You could share humor. You could share gossip. You could collaborate on homework and research projects.
You can setup a personal blog about anything you are passionate about. A business would create a blog around their industry and niche and a personal blog could do the same thing from a customer point of view. Blog about your favorite products and services if it lends itself to that kind of passion and fanfare. You could do a resume blog that highlights your skills and experience and you can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise as well and network by writing about what you know which would be of interest to potential employers. The sky is really the limit here. What's your passion? What do you want to say about your passion? Do you want to network your passion and teach the world something new? Do you want to finally show the kwow-it-alls how smart you really are?
Blogs are really easy to use content management systems or websites that allow you to publish instantly and in real-time. Blogs can open up new opportunities to connect and communicate with others both personally and professionally.
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Make Blogging and RSS Pay Off by Driving Traffic and Sales Through Optimized Blogs and Feeds
In the intensive session I led during the ACCM in Boston on May 21, the overriding theme was that search engines judge a site’s worth on its inbound links. Translation: No links = no rankings.
Blogs, meanwhile, are great at attracting links from the blogosphere, because bloggers are rather cliquish and mostly tend to link to each other. So you’ll earn links as a blog that you wouldn’t normally earn otherwise.
Nonetheless, intentionally work to boost your link popularity; don’t just expect links to your blog to come on their own. One of the best ways to do this is by building relationships with bloggers by posting thoughtful comments on their blogs, by networking with them at real-world conferences like the Blog Business Summit and BlogHer, and by blogging about them. They’ll be more likely then to follow your blog and give you “hat tips” when they piggy-back on something interesting you’ve found online, and hopefully even include you on their “blogroll” (a link list of favorite blogs they read).
Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure
You pass all that hard-earned link popularity (PageRank) down through your blog’s archives through the blog’s internal hierarchical linking structure. Internal linking is one of your secret weapons, so make the most of it. Create a Top 10 list of your best posts and link to those posts from your blog’s home page. All your posts should include “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links, as well as a linked list of related posts. When writing blog posts, get in the habit of referring to any relevant old posts sitting in your archives.
Don’t use “click here” or “permalink” or “read more” in the anchor text of your internal links, because the search engines associate that underlined anchor text with the page to which you are linking. The engines will start to think all your pages are about such bizarre things as “click” or “here.” Given that, you’ll want to include important keywords in your internal links. The post’s title makes for a great anchor text, so make sure your post titles are clickable links.
Use the Neat-o tool to review the anchor text on your inbound links. Then ask your blogger friends who link to you with throwaway phrases like “click here” to change their wording.
A very powerful, somewhat advanced tactic is to provide visitors and spiders with a “tag cloud” full of keyword-rich text links that point to “tag pages” hosted on your blog. These are created automatically using a tagging plug-in like Ultimate Tag Warrior.
Importance of Title Tags
Title tags are the most important piece of text on a Web page. They’re given the most weight by search engines. So take the time to craft keyword-rich title tags for each post, category page, and of course, home page. If you must include your blog name in the title tag (not recommended), put it at the end of the title rather than at the beginning. Override the automatically generated title tags that are based on the post titles and replace them with custom-written title tags, using a blog plug-in.
URLs are very important to your blog’s rankings, too. Use “URL rewriting,” which is supported on most blog platforms, to create keyword-rich URLs that have no “stop characters” (question marks, ampersands or equals signs). Separate keywords with hyphens, not underscores, as Google doesn’t treat underscores as word separators.
Set up permanent (301 style) redirects from pages at yourblog.com to corresponding pages at www.yourblog.com, or you’ll end up with a duplicate site in the search engines. If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, maintain the old URLs through permanent redirects to preserve those valuable inbound links that point deep into your archives.
Heading tags (like H1, H2 etc.) get extra weight as opposed to regular body copy by the engines, so mark up post titles with H1 tags. Don’t mark up dates with heading tags (a fairly common mistake). On category pages, wrap the category name within an H1 tag. And on your tag pages, wrap the tag name within an H1.
Get ‘Sticky’
“Sticky” posts, which are posts that always appear at the top of the page regardless of the date, offer a clever way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. The Adhesive plug-in will provide this “sticky” functionality to any WordPress-powered blog.
Optimize your RSS feeds too. Go with full-text feeds, not summary feeds. Provide at least 20 items in the feed, not just the default 10. Offer a range of feeds (not just one) by category, latest comments, comments by post and by tag. Have a keyword-rich title for each item, because that oftentimes will become anchor text.
For the same reason, put your most important keyword in the site’s title. Write a compelling site description because that gets displayed in various important places, such as in the “Related Blogs” results in Google Blog Search. Resist the temptation of appending a tracking code like source=rss to the URL, because it reduces the linked item’s link popularity potential. Include podcasts in your RSS feed as enclosures, as that can gain you additional visibility in podcast directories and search engines.
Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. Reach him at sspencer@netconcepts.com .
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Posted by gzleus 4:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post
What is a blog?
A simple overview of blogging and its place in the internet.
Blogging first started in the late 90s and recently blogs have been springing up everywhere. Its like every other website is a blog or includes a blog. With so many blogs out there, what is a blog or blogging?
Like the term 'web2.0',the exact definition of blogging is arguable, but generally it goes...
Wikipedia.org:
Blog is a type of website that is updated periodically with content display in chronological order; the newest content at the top, the oldest at the bottom.
You could also add that most blogs are updated from several times a day to once or twice a week. A blog usually focus on one area of interest from ultra technical to personal ramblings in forms text, picture, and/or videos. There are special blogs where the content is entirely pictures (photoblog) or videos (vblog).
Another way to looks at blogs in to compare it with regular websites. Both has new contents periodically and they can be display more or less in the same way. What is different between the two is probably the content and how its presented. When covering the same topic, as an example news or reviews, a website will be mostly informative giving you all the facts. On the other hand, the news/reviews on the blog will be or should be unique with a personal touch or expressing a particular point of view rather than just giving you the facts. In other words, if you think of a newspaper, a website would be similar to an article whereas a blog is closer to an editorials.
So, why blog? Well, different people blog for different reason. Some use blogging to keep in touch with friends and families, others write about their interest, opinions etc. Lately blogs has also been involved in personal branding and a source of income.
If blogging intrigues you or you have a particular area of interest, why not give blogging a try?
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What Is A Blog?
The term "blog" is derived from the term "Weblog" or web log. In the early days of blogging circa mid to late 1990's, web logs were used to track updates and references to other resources on the internet. Weblogs, as journals were also used as a stream of consciousness publishing tool where you could share and comment on anything and everything under the sun. As a results and to this day, there are lots of blogs that publish opinionated commentary as diverse in tone as there are a diversity of topics to talk about.
A blog is technically a content management system (CMS) albeit a more simplified version of one. A CMS allows you to easily publish to a website and manage content without having to deal with having to know how to program code. Blog publishing software provides you with a graphical user interface (GUI) for point and click publishing of your content. Your blog software will require you to perform intial easy-to-do setup and configuration so that it will know how to automically organize your published content in the future. After that, you can publish quickly and instantly using your blog software editor that is built into your blog publishing software.
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Blog Definitions: Common Terms of the Blogosphere
Before getting into blogging definitions and why they are used we first need to understand what a blog is, what the purpose is of the blog and what it really is used for in the advertising market today. There are many people who do not know or understand what it means to blog.
The word blog itself is short for web log. When blogging first began it was as a sort of journal for internet users and enthusiasts that was used to write down their daily activities, thoughts and opinions on varying subject matters for public consumption. Livejournal and MySpace are famous sites for blogging.
In general they represent the personality of the author or the purpose, as it is used more readily now, of the web site that hosts the blog.
Advertising companies have discovered the popularity of blogging and have taken it upon themselves to create ad-specific blogs to hopefully gain hits to sites earning more ad revenue. Software companies have seen the trend as well and have produced programs to aid one in mass blogging.
Why should I take the time to blog?
Blogging today is used to increase web site traffic. In order to generate ad revenue and sales of banner space we need to have our web site at the top of the big search engines such as Google, Ask, Yahoo and any other lesser known search engines. In order to achieve the top spots blog articles now contain what other web sites have used for ages: keywords. Keywords are found by search engine spiders in order to generate the relevance by which sites get ranks per the users search criteria.
In 90% of cases the person doing the searching will click on the top five results that a search engine gives them. Out of millions and millions of people searching on a topic at any given time this translates to hundreds of thousands of clicks. The search engines then recognize your traffic statistics placing you higher in rankings.
Blogging is definitely a phenomenon unto itself, but unlike Beanie Babies there is no sign of it slowing down. Besides the advertiser, who else utilizes blogging? Simply put: everyone. If you spend time posting messages on MySpace or Livejournal or Yahoo 360 than you are a blogger. There are professional bloggers out there getting paid for doing what others do as a hobby.
A blogger is a CEO, a student, a techie or a teacher. A blogger is your mom, dad, grandpa and ma. Imagine a recent conference in Cambridge, Harvard Law to be exact. Just for blogging and bloggers. You get the idea. These things aren't meant for the weak of heart. Many discussions about the blogosphere, global communication and one voice are all bantered about making the face to face seem less fun than staying home and chatting it up online.
There are many definitions used within blogging, a virtual dictionary of catchphrases and acronyms that are used within the blog world to identify the nuances of the subculture. People outside of the bloguverse would not understand all of the terminology that is used.
BLOGGING - THE WHAT
These are probably the simplest terms to understand. To garner a full grasp of the terms you should start at the beginning.
Bloggeries: The term used to refer to the posts within a blog. You write bloggeries and post them on your blog. Also commonly called posts or entries.
Blogosphere: The blogging community at large. It is the internets version of a biosphere. (No we are not referring to that movie with Paulie Shore�)
Weblog: A journal or sorts or a diary. Dated and filled with stories, events, opinions and other such things.
Blogging: The act thereof.
Blog: Literally a shorter version of a web log. A teaser.
Blogger: A blogger is the term used to describe the person who is actually writing the blog.
BLOGGING - THE HOW
How we blog is as varied by who blogs and what purpose it. There are blogs that include basic writing, audio files or videos and photography.
Photoblogging: Pretty straight forward. These are blogs that utilize photos and images to convey a story or intent.
Podcasting: Blogging's audio cousin; very similar to a blog but in audio format.
Mobblogging: Mobile phone blogging.
Vlogging: The use of video instead of text to blog.
Audioblogging: Think of vlogging but with MP3's.
Autocasting: This goes hand in hand with podcasting making the task automated.
Blogcasting: The combining of the blog and pod cast into a single web site.
Blogging can be fun but it can also be very daunting. There are software programs and sites which make this a less annoying and aggravating task.
Blogger: Google has created this free platform to simplify blogging activity.
Blogspot: A web host that specifically hosts blogs. Typical addresses would be blog.blogspot.com and the like.
Livejournal: Livejournal, like MySpace, is a free site where people meet to talk and write blogs.
Movable Type: Paid tool.
Typepad: Another paid tool.
Wordpress.org: You can upload to this site easily. Customizing and upgrading your blogs are easy.
Wordpress.com: Another free host site.
Radio Userland: Publishing software for bloggers.
BLOGGING - THE GUTS
The innards of a blog are important. What are the things that the majority of blogs consist of? This is where it starts getting technical. Some of these terms will seem familiar to you as some are common place within the confines of the internet or computers in general.
Header: Also the title. Found at the top most portion of the website. A lot of keywords get hidden here as a lot of search engines go from top to bottom and they don't see as we do so any text that is placed at the top of the site that is the same color as the background will be read and used to generate positioning.
Footer: Typically the very last thing on the web page and will typically list the same things as the header.
Index: The first page we see of any site is the index.
Navbar: Also sometimes called a sidebar. These can be positioned left or right of the main pages contents. This is where the categories and subjects are listed.
Post(s): Also known as entry. These are the individual entries of a blog or the bloggeries.
Comments: Reader�s are able to post comments to a blog, adding onto the popularity and keyword base.
Ping: A standard net term short for Packet Internet Grouper that is used to track IP addresses as well as to notify automatic services of updates.
Trackback: A ping is sent to another blog thru a trackback system to alert a blogger to the mentioning of their blog. This is also sometimes known as a pingback.
Tags: Placing of keywords as a way to collect similar posts.
Tag Cloud: The display of keywords.
Captcha: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captcha�s are small image boxes containing letters, number or words that you have to re-type in order to verify you are a human.
Link: An access point to specific articles.
Blogroll: Links to other blogs and the nav or sidebar.
Sideblog: A mini blog or blurb on the sidebar.
Template: A generic web site where you just have to fill in the information and post.
Blogthis: An added function that allows a blogger to add to an entry.
Plugins: Mini files you download to your computer that works with your browser to give you added features.
Dashboard: Like that of a car it is where your controls are. Editing and moving files etc.
Archives: Like those found in your library but for the internet. It�s a collection of all tings blogiful and placed in reverse order by date.
Post Summaries: An expandable teaser of a larger blog.
Continue: Also referred to as a jump this is a link to continue on to another section of a blog in order to save space and load times.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol. It is also a type of program. All used to upload content.
BLOGGING - THE FEEDING
In order get your information out to the general public you need to make it so that it can be seen by them. This is called feeding or web feeds. This is how a blog is seen by a user.
Web Feed: Subscriptions. Typically you join a site to read a blog.
RSS: A series of web feeds for syndication purposes.
XML: A sort of HTML but meaning Extensible Markup Language making it a more advanced form of what we know to be HTML. It is usually used to help syndicate a site.
Photofeed: A feed like the others but using images.
OPML: This is an XML format specifically used for outlines. You can easily import multiple subscriptions.
ATOM: Very blog specific feed and most blogs are of this type.
BLOGGER - WHO
There are as many kinds of blogs as there are bloggers. Bloggers usually fit into one subset of the culture as a whole.
Problogger: Someone who spends hours a day just posting blogs. They�re paid and usually work for ad companies.
Blognoscenti: Or blog snob. Someone who is incredibly knowledgeable about blogs and their inner workings.
Blogebrity: Someone who everyone else knows. Could be a real celebrity who blogs or someone who�s a pro who everyone knows to blog.
Blogerati: The paparazzi of blogging.
Commentariat: This is someone who leaves comments to blogs on a regular basis.Dooced: Getting dooced or to dooce. This is someone who was fired for blogging excessively during work hours.
Blogther: Someone else who blogs.
A-List: Another type of Blogebrity.
Blogstar: Popular blogger.
BLOGGING - THE HABIT
Bloggers have their own idiosyncrasies while blogging. The method in which an individual blogs helps set them apart.
Metablogging: Blogs and articles about blogging.
Blogstipation: Blog block.
Blogathy: The act of loathing blogging and thusly taking a break from it.
Blogopotamus: A rambling blog that continues, seemingly without end.
Blogorrhea: Someone who posts often and usually has been dooced.
Bleg: A self pandering blog to beg.
Hitnosis: The act of repeatedly refreshing your blog to see if anything has changed.
Blogroach: Someone who enjoys flaming a blogger.
Blogaholic: A person who can�t enough writing or reading blogs.
Blogorific: A word used to describe a blog as terrific.
Blogvert: The act of advertising within a blog.
Blogger Bash: A party where bloggers get together online and comment back and forth in real time.
Blogathon: Blogging every thirty minutes for an entire day.
Blogsnob: Someone who refuses to comment to someone who is not a friend.
Blogostorm: Controversy drives revenue. This can also be known as a Blog Swarm.
Doppelblog: Copying some other bloggers work and reposting as your own.
BLOGGING - TYPES
For every type of blogger and blog there is a certain niche of where that particular item will fit. Professional bloggers wouldn�t do dark posts, for example as they want to be seen.
The types of blogs you post define, sometimes, who you are in the blogosphere. And that determines your strengths and weaknesses.
Celebriblog: A blog that is run by a celebrity.
Kittyblogger: This is someone who spends time writing about their cats.
Celeblog: The act of blogging about celebrities.
Group Blog: Multiple contributions to multiple blogs.
Event Blog: Blogs used to talk about one event on one date.
Clog Blog: The Dutch do a tremendous amount of blogging and this term is used to set them apart from others.
Movlogs: Video blogs on the mobile.
Metablog: The act of writing blogs about blogging.
CEOBlog: A blog that is run by a corporate executive.
Splog: Spreading spam through blogs.
Tech Blog: Blogs about technical items.
Anonoblog: These are blogs where the poster remains anonymous.
Plog: A blog about a project.
Milblog: Blogging by our men and women in the military.
Blawg: Usually written by lawyers these blogs cover topics of law.
Edublog: Educating the masses using blogs.
Shockblog: The Stern version of blogging.
Progblog: Something that is written in a progressive manner.
Dark Blog: A blog that is private.
Photocast: Photoblogging that updates as soon as you add new photos to it.
As many definitions and translations as listed here there are many, many more but these are enough to keep you from guessing and to make your forward into blogging all that much better.
Did we Miss Something?
If you send us a term that we should add; include your blog's address. If we use the term and like your blog we will give you a free permanent regular listing.
Copyright Bloggeries 2005-2007. All rights reserved.
Posted by gzleus 2:29 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Make Money
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Make Money opportunities
The following is a list of all the ad networks and affiliate programs I use to make money online. They were chosen from this exhaustive list of 130 ad networks. I have used all the following networks at one time or another and can highly recommend them. They have proven to provide good service/support and most importantly, on time payments.
Kontera ContentLink
Kontera ContentLink allows you to make money from advertising without giving up any current advertising spots. Their technology reads your post and turns certain words into an ad. The highlighted words are double underline and an ad pops up when you hover over it. Normally Kontera requires a site have a minimum 500,000 page views per month before being accepted into the program. However, I have a partnership with Kontera that will allow smaller blogs to use their ContentLink service.
Fill out the application and enter “John Chow Kontera partnership” into the Comments field. The application is sent to my personal account representative. He will approve you based on your blog content and not your traffic level. This is a great way to use a service that is normally only available to high traffic sites.
Sign up for Kontera
Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads is one of my favorite ad netw. They help me make money online by selling those text links you see under “Featured Sites.” The links offer advertisers traffic and search engine benefits and readers don’t seem to mind them at all because they are not intrusive. Your link price is set by Text Link Ads and is based on Alexa, Google PageRank, number of RSS subscribers, and other factors.
Sign up for Text Link Ads
Google AdSense
If you don’t know what Google AdSense is then you’ve been living under a rock. This is pretty much a must have if you want to make money from a blog. Google display simple text and image ads on your blog that are targeted to what you’re writing about. Google has been a consistent money maker for this blog.
Sign up for AdSense.Sign up for AdSense.
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser, a CPC ad network that competes with Google AdSense. It main advantage over AdSense is its low $10 payout. You only need to make $10 in order to be paid. Big publishers wouldn’t care about this but for many small blogs that are still waiting to hit that magic $100 Google payout level, getting pay at a lower level is quite attractive.
Sign up for Bidvertiser
AzoogleAds
AzoogleAds is one of the largest performance-based online advertising networks in the world. They offers some of the best and highest paying affiliate deals in the industry. No matter what topic your blog covers, you can find a deal that matches your site. The payout range from $1 to over $100 per action. Affiliate marketing is one of this blog’s biggest moneymaker and AzoogleAds is the affiliate network that offers us the best payouts.
Sign up for AzoogleAds
AuctionAds
AuctionAds is one big eBay affiliate. What AuctionAds does is put all their publishers into one big “collective” to go after the higher revenue share. Publishers can leverage AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and AuctionAds’ ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own eBay affiliate relationship. Right now, affiliates will get 100% of any money they make from the system. As the collective moves up the eBay revenue share tiers, AuctionAds will start to take a cut of revenues. The goal is for you to make more with AuctionAds than directly with eBay’s affiliate program, which will be the case as the network increases its volume.
Sign up for AuctionAds
ReviewMe
ReviewMe is this blog’s biggest money maker, accounting for $2,400 of the $8,545.25 March income. ReviewMe allows advertisers to buy sponsored reviews on your blog. Review prices are based on your blog’s Alexa, Technorati and estimated RSS numbers. Publishers can set their own pricing if they don’t like the price ReviewMe set. Reviews can be positive or negative. The only requirement is the post must be at least 200 words long.
Sign up for ReviewMe
TTZ Media
This is my own ad network. It’s ideal for technology and shopping related sites. TTZ Media Network offers a comparison shopping search engine for its affiliated sites. Right now, we’re working on a completely new ad engine that will allow me to accept sites with traffic that is lower than the current 250,000 page views requirement. I’ll make an update on this blog when the network comes out of beta.
FeedBurner Ad Network
FeedBurner provides CPM ads for both site and RSS feeds. The CPM rate can be get as high as $10 and publishers get 70% of the money. However, the fill rate is pretty low. If you’re looking to monetize your RSS feed, then FeedBurner is probably the best of the RSS ad networks. To join the FeedBurner Ad Network, you must first have FeedBurner power your RSS feed.
Sign up for Feedburner
AGLOCO
AGLOCO offers a toolbar that display advertising. If you run the toolbar, they will give you a share of the ad money. They also pay you if you refer other people to use the toolbar. The more people you refer, the more you can potentially make. Currently, my network has over 13,000 people in it and it’s increasing by over 100 per day. AGLOCO is a startup and unproven. However, since the cost of entry is zero, you can’t lose anything for signing up. AGLOCO is also the only network here that doesn’t require you to have a site.
Sign up for AGLOCO
DealDotCom
DealDotCom offers a two-tier affiliate program. When you refer others to DealDotCom and they get a free account, they are marked in the system as having been referred by you. Anything that they buy will nets you a 35% commission. Unlike other affiliate programs that place a time limit your your commission (like AuctionAds’ 5% for 6 months), the DealDotCom commission is forever. That’s right, forever. It doesn’t matter if they buy something tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now - you’re going to get paid. What’s more, anyone that they refer to DealDotCom goes on your second tier. Anything people on your second tier buy nets you a 15% commission, forever.
Posted by gzleus 4:50 PM 0 comments Links to this post
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