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How to Add Adsense ads inside Blogger blog posts or between blog posts

SEO Tool List - Firefox add ons

Static Versus Dynamic URLs

Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.

Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.

The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable, like http://mydomain.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-5.

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Visual Extras and SEO

As already mentioned, search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies, javascript. Instead, they rely on your to provide meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the metatag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.

1. Images

Images are an essential part of any Web page and from a designer point of view they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper anchor text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided.

With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be a most ugly site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: <img src=“one_month_Jim.jpg” alt=“A picture of Jim when he was a one-month puppy”>. Well, don't go to extremes like writing 20-word <alt> tags for 1 pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing.

2. Animation and Movies

The situation with animation and movies is similar to that with images – they are valuable from a designer's point of view but are not loved by search engines. For instance, it is still pretty common to have an impressive Flash introduction on the home page. You just cannot imagine what a disadvantage with search engines this is – it is a number one rankings killer! And it gets even worse, if you use Flash to tell a story that can be written in plain text, hence crawled and indexed by search engines. One workaround is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing (this is done in the robots.txt file but the explanation of this file is not a beginners topic and that is why it is excluded from this tutorial), otherwise you can be penalized for duplicate content.

There are rumors that Google is building a new search technology that will allow to search inside animation and movies and that the .swf format will contain new metadata that can be used by search engines, but until then, you'd better either refrain from using (too much) Flash, or at least provide a textual description of the movie (you can use an <alt> tag to describe the movie).

3. Frames

It is a good news that frames are slowly but surely disappearing from the Web. 5 or 10 years ago they were an absolute hit with designers but never with search engines. Search engines have difficulties indexing framed pages because the URL of the page is the same, no matter which of the separate frames is open. For search engines this was a shock because actually there were 3 or 4 pages and only one URL, while for search engines 1 URL is 1 page. Of course, search engines can follow the links to the pages in the frameset and index them but this is a hurdle for them.

If you still insist on using frames, make sure that you provide a meaningful description of the site in the <noframes> tag. The following example is not for beginners but even if you do not understand everything in it, just remember that the <noframes> tag is the place to provide an alternative version (or at least a short description) of your site for search engines and users whose browsers do not support frames. If you decide to use the <noframes> tag, maybe you'd like to read more about it before you start using it.

Example: <noframes> <p> This site is best viewed in a browser that supports frames. </p><p> Welcome to our site for prospective dog adopters! Adopting a homeless dog is a most noble deed that will help save the life of the poor creature. </p></noframes>

4. JavaScript

This is another hot potato. It is known by everybody that pure HTML is powerless to make complex sites with a lot of functionality (anyway, HTML was not intended to be a programming languages for building Web applications, so nobody expects that you can use HTML to handle writing to a database or even for storing session information) as required by today's Web users and that is why other programming languages (like JavaScript, or PHP) come to enhance HTML. For now search engines just ignore JavaScript they encounter on a page. As a result of this, first if you have links that are inside the JavaScript code, chances are that they will not be spidered. Second, if JavaScript is in the HTML file itself (rather than in an external .js file that is invoked when necessary) this clutters the html file itself and spiders might just skip it and move to the next site. Just for your information, there is a <noscript> tag that allows to provide alternative to running the script in the browser but because most of its applications are pretty complicated, it is hardly suitable to explain it here.

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Content Is King

If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact. Search engines (and your readers) love fresh content and providing them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You can't take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents regularly, this will certainly drop you to from the top of search results.

For company sites that are not focused on writing but on manufacturing constantly adding text can be a problem because generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines that update their content daily, weekly or monthly but even for company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS feeds but this will keep the ball rolling.

1. Topical Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site

If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad - there are ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the site.

One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make periodical promotions of particular products and product groups – you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical content.

Also, depending on what your business is about, you can include different kinds of self-updating information like lists of hot new products, featured products, discounted items, even online calculators or order trackers. Unlike promotional pages, this might neither bring you many new visitors, nor improve your ratings but is more than nothing.

One more potential traffic trigger for company sites are news sections. Here you can include news about past and coming events, post reports about various activities, announce new undertakings, etc. Some companies even go further – their CEO keeps a blog, where he or she writes in a more informal style about what is going in the company, in the industry as a whole, or in the world in general. These blogs do attract readers, especially if the information is true, rather than the official story.

An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic you can think of.

2. Bold and Italic Text

When you have lots of text, the next question is how to make the important items stand out from the crowd – for both humans and search engines. While search engines (and their spiders – the programs that crawl the Web and index pages) cannot read text the way humans do, they do have ways of getting the meaning of a piece of text. Headings are one possibility, bold and italic are another way to emphasize a word or a couple of words that are important. Search engines read the <b> and <i> text and get the idea that what is in bold and/or italic is more important than the rest of the text. But do not use bold and italic too much – this will spoil the effect, rather than make the whole page a search engine favorite.

3. Duplicate Content

When you get new content, there is one important issue – is this content original? Because if it is not, i.e. it is stolen from another site, this will get you into trouble. But even if it is not illegal, i.e. you obtained it for free from an article feed, have in mind that you might not be only one on the Web, who has this particular stuff. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot be labeled “duplicate content” by search engines. If you don't manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen, scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be removed from search results!

Duplicate content became an issue when tricky webmasters started making multiple copies of the same page (under a different name) in order to fool search engines that they have more content than they actually do. As a result of this malpractice, search engines responded with a duplicate content filter that removes suspicious pages. Unfortunately, this filter sometimes removes quite legitimate pages, like product descriptions given from a manufacturer to all its resellers, which must be kept exactly the same.

You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. You can use http://copyscape.com. If you identify pages that are similar to yours (and it is not you who have illegitimately copied them), you could notify the webmaster of the respective site(s) to remove them. Also, you could change a little the text on your site, hoping that this way you will avoid the duplicate content penalty. Even with product descriptions, you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be a way out.

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Metatags

A couple of years ago <meta> tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between what you wrote there and your position in search results. However, algorithms got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day, especially with Google. But still some search engines show metadata (under the clickable link in search results), so users can read what you have written and if they think it is relevant, they might go to your site. Also, some of the specialized search engines still use the metatags when ranking your site.

The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. It does not hurt to include at least a brief description, so don't skip it. For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this: <Meta Name=“Description” Content=“Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a dog.”>

A potential use of the meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. For instance, if I were to write the meta keywords tag for the dog adoption site, I would do it like that: <Meta name=“Keywords” Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals”>. It is a small boost to search engine top ranking but why miss the chance?

The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.

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Backlinks – Another Important SEO Item

What are Backlinks?

In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Why Backlinks Are Important

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but also their quality. In order to determine the quality, a search engine considers the content of the sites. When backlinks to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these backlinks are considered more relevant to your site. If backlinks are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned dogs, and received a backlink from another website about dogs, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. Therefore, higher the relevance of the site linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to modify your webpages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important factor. Further, search engine's criteria for quality backlinks has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these backlinks by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Anchor Text

When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has. Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "orphaned dogs" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs". Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website. The 'Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool' is a tool which will assist you find your backlinks and the text which is being used to link to your website. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something which incorporates relevant keywords. This will also help boost your rankings.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome.

1 The Backlink Builder Tool

When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of relevent sites from where you might get some backlinks.

2 Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must, not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

3 Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

4 RSS Feeds

You can offer RSS feeds to interested sites for free, when the other site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

5 Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

6 News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for a small fee . A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the past few Google updates, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant backlinks were ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain, interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.

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Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO

Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your time and money. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best.

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For

It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal.

For instance, If you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult and often not worth the trouble, it's best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords.

The first thing you need to do is come up with keywords that describe the content of your website. Ideally, you know your users well and can correctly guess what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. You can also try the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below to come up with an initial list of keywords. Run your inital list of keywords by the Google keyword Suggestion tool, you'll get a related list of keywords, shortlist a couple of keywords that seem relevent and have a decent global search volume.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only the expected monthly number of searches but also the relevancy of these keywords to your website. Although narrow keywords get fewer searches they are a lot more valuable than generic keywords because the users would be more interested in your offerings. Lets say you have a section on your website where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. You might discover that the "adopt german shepherd" keyphrase gives you better results than a keyword like "german shepherd dogs". This page is not of interest to current german shepherd owners but to potential german shepherd owners only. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

2. Keyword Density

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

3. Keywords in Special Places

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more that if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names

The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.

When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much.
Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases tools like the Tool below can come very handy.

File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance http://mydomain.com/dog-adopt.html is not as good as http://dog-adopt.net/dog-adopt.html but is certainly better than http://mydomain.com/animal-care.html. The advantage of keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche, for example.

b. Keywords in Page Titles

The page title is another special place because the contents of the <title> tag usually gets displayed in most search engines, (including Google). While it is not mandatory per the HTML specification to write something in the <title> tag (i.e. you can leave it empty and the title bar of the browser will read “Untitled Document” or similar), for SEO purposes you may not want to leave the <title> tag empty; instead, you'd better write the the page title in it.

Unlike URLs, with page titles you can get wordy. If we go on with the dog example, the <title> tag of the home page for the http://dog-adopt.net can include something like this: <title>Adopt a Dog – Save a Life and Bring Joy to Your Home</title>, <title>Everything You Need to Know About Adopting a Dog</title> or even longer.

c. Keywords in Headings

Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics and from a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is extremely good to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have the keywords in them.

There are no technical length limits for the contents of the <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, ... <hn> tags but common sense says that too long headings are bad for page readability. So, like with URLs, you need to be wise with the length of headings. Another issue you need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. If it is Heading 1 (<h1>), generally this means larger font size and in this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which is not good and if you can avoid it – do it.

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How to do blog settings in blogger

The first important thing you should do to make your blog in blogger have the best performance is to do some Settings. As your inspirations on how to do blog settings in blogger, the following, Blogspot Tutorial writes how to setup blog in blogger:

* Please login to blogger with your ID

* Click Setting

* You will see the menu tabs containing things to setup:

Basic

Some settings in Basic menu:

Blog Tools: Import blog → this is the facility to import data from your computer (this is usually done when transferring blog). Don’t click it, let it be as it is. Export blog > this is the facility to export blog from blogger server to your computer. This facility is also called as Backup blog facility. You are suggested to create blog backup at least once a week. The backup data will be useful and helpful when sometime you want to transfer blogs in blogger, or you also can use it when you want to do a blog migration from blogger to another blog machine such as Wordpress, etc. Delete blog > this facility is to delete your blog. Don’t ever click it if you don’t want to delete your blog.
Title: Fill out with the title of your blog, e.g. My personal blog
Description: Fill out with your blog description, e.g. Notes of My Unique Life.
Add your blog to our listing?: You’re suggested to choose Yes option.
Let search engines find your blog?: Choose Yes, so your blog will be indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Show quick editing on your blog?: You may choose Yes or No.
Show email post links?: It will be an icon of email with which your visitors can easily email your posts to their friends. Choose Yes, if you want, or No if you don’t want this facility to appear on your blog.
Adult contents?: If your blog then will contain anything about adults including in the forms of writing, images, or videos of such as sexy girls, etc, you can choose Yes. However, if your blog then will contain anything to be accessed safely by kids and all ages, you should choose No. NB: If you choose Yes, there will be an adult content warning when your blog is accessed.
Select Post Editor: This is to select post editor in your blog. Updated Editor → This is the latest post editor that Blogger has with new features included such as the More button to cut off your articles, and more. Old Editor → This is the old post editor that Blogger has, but you can still use it if you feel more comfortable with this old editor, because there are some features at this old editor that are not included in the Updated Post Editor. Hide Compose Mode → This is an option for those who are familiar with HTML because this option will hide the compose mode in your post editor. Don’t use this option if you are not familiar with the HTML coding.
Enable transliteration?: Select Enable if you want your post editor allow you to translate to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, or Telugu. Select disable if you want your post editor not to allow you the transliteration.
End settings on Basic menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS.

Publishing

This is to change the domain name of your blog in blogger with your own domain name, e.g. http://yourblogname.blogspot.com into http://yourblogname.com.

For temporary, don’t do anything at this Publishing menu! Tutorial about custom domain in blogger can be read at How to use Custom Domain in Blogger.

Formatting

Some settings in the Formatting menu:

Show at most: type the number of posts you want to display on your blog homepage, e.g. 5. Next to number of posts option, there is dropdown menu allow you to choose Posts or Days. Just choose posts, which means your blog homepage will show 5 posts.
Date Header Format: Choose how the date format you would like to display above your posts.
Archive Index Date Format: Choose the date format for your archive index.
Timestamp Format: Choose the time format you would like to display. This is the time when a post is published on your blog.
Time Zone: Just choose the time zone where you are.
Language: Choose the language you want to use in your blog.
Convert line breaks: this is the facility of automated line breaks when you hit enter during typing an article in the post editor. This facility is used when you think you will not post or write the codes such as HTML codes, etc in the future. But if you think you will post about HTML codes and include the codes in your posts, you should choose No, for instance, if your blog talks about the tutorials about HTML, PHP, etc.
Show Title Field: You may choose Yes or No.
Show link fields: You may choose Yes or No.
Enable Float alignment: Choose Yes, so you can arrange the position of your post both images and texts. But if you think this option will disturb the display of your blog, just choose No.
Post Template: This is the facility to create any text or code to appear each time you write a new post. It is usually used to create blog signature that will always appear in every post you create without having to type manually each time you create a new post.
End the settings on Formatting menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS

Comments

Some settings in the Comments menu:

Comments: Choose Show if you want your posts commented by your visitors, or choose Hide if you don’t want your posts commented by your visitors.
Who can comment? : Anyone – includes anonymous users → choose this option if you want everyone can comment on your blog including the Anonymous users or those without identity. Registered users –includes OpenID → Only users that are registered who can comment on your blog, i.e. those who have accounts in Google, Live Journal, Wordpress, Type pad, AIM, and or OpenID. Users with Google accounts → Those who can comment on your blog are those who have Google accounts. Only members of this blog → Only members of your blog who can comment. A certain community usually chooses this option such as educational community, etc.
Comment form placement: Full page → the page of your blog will switch to the comment form page if you choose this option. Pop-up window → your comment box will appear as pop-up window, so your blog is still displayed. Embedded below post → your comment box will directly be displayed under post, so your visitors can comment directly without clicking a Post Comment link. Bloggers like most the comment box is embedded below post.
Comments Default for posts: Choose New posts Have Comments if you want your articles have the comment box, but you can disable this when you create a post. Choose New Posts Do not have comments if you want your posts don’t have comment box, but you can add it when you create a post.
Backlinks: Choose Show if you want to display links to the websites that link to your articles.
Backlinks Default for Posts: choose New posts have backlinks if you want your articles have backlinks, and choose new posts do not have backlinks if you want your articles do not have backlinks.
Comment Timestamp Format: choose the date format you want to display.
Comment Form Message: type your massages to be displayed above the comment box, e.g. please comment freely but keep it polite by not doing spam.
Comment Moderation: choose Always if you want to display any comment after moderation. Only on posts older than …days. Choose this option if you want to display any comment on your selected posts based on the age you have determined, e.g. 15 days, etc. Choose Never if you want to display any comment without a moderation. Don’t forget to type your email address in the available field to get notifications when someone of non-member comments on your posts. Or leave blank if you don’t need the notifications.
Show word verification for comments?: choose Yes if you want to display word verification that will require commentators to enter before publishing their comments. It is to avoid a spam comment such as the robot spam script that can comment on your automatically and frequently. Anyway, visitors usually don’t like the word verification for inconvenience reason. Choose No when you don’t want the word verification displayed, although this option allows spasm like robot spam scripts to place their comments.
Show profile images on comments?: Choose Yes if you want the profile images of commentators to be displayed, and choose No if otherwise.
Comment Notification Email: Enter the email addresses up to ten emails that you want to send comment notifications.
End settings on Comment menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS.

Archiving

Some settings on Archiving menu:

Archive frequency: choose how your blog archives will be displayed on your blog whether you want the archives arranged No Archive, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. You had better choose Monthly.
Enable Post Pages?: Choose Yes or No.
End settings on Archiving menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS.

Site Feed

Some settings on Site Feed menu:

Allow Blog Feeds: Choose either None, Short, or Full. You had better Full at this option.
Post Feed Redirect URL: If you have burned your post feed, you can type the URL of your feed here, for instance, you can burned post feed at Feedburner, etc. Leave it blank if you don’t have. We will specifically discuss about Feed burner at next post.
Post Feed Footer: You can fill any code here that will be displayed in the footer of your post feed such as advertisements, etc. Leave it blank if you don’t understand.
End settings on Site Feed menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS.

Email & Mobile

In order to be able to post an article on your blog, not only do you use the post editor, but you also have other ways, e.g. through email and mobile.

Some setting on Email & Mobile menu:

BlogSend Address: Type email addresses up to ten emails separated by comma (,) to which you want to send notification when posting an article.

Email Posting Address: Create a blogger email address (known as Mail2Blogger) from which you can post articles directly to your blog when you send an email to this blogger email address, e.g. if you have an email address at example@gmail.com, then you can create blogger email address at example.post@blogger.com or example.blog@blogger.com, or anything else you think very good, but you should remember that it’s a secret to avoid other people can post through it.

To activate this feature, you should choose Publish emails immediately, meaning that each time you send emails to your blogger email address, the content of your email will be posted as blog post on your blog. If you choose Save emails as draft posts, the emails will not be published automatically but will be stored in the draft posts.

However, if you don’t want to publish through email, choose Disable. For security reason, many choose this option.

End settings on Email & Mobile menu by clicking SAVE SETTINGS

OpenID

Nothing to do some settings here, but there is notification telling you that your blog address can be used as the address of OpenID. What is OpenID? Maybe we will discuss later.

Permissions

On this menu, you can add Authors by inviting them. Just write the email addresses you want them to be the authors of your blog.

At Who can view this blog?, you can choose who can view your blog. If you choose Anybody, your blog can be viewed by public or anybody. If you choose Only people I choose, only invited people who can view your blog that they should login first to view. If you choose Only blog authors, only your blog authors who can view your blog. If you think your blog is not worth publishing as you conduct maintenance, for instance, you can use this option, so only you that can view the blog.

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Introduction – What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

1. How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

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Blogging -Tutorial in creating blog in Blogspot

1. What is Blog?

Blog is short for "Web log", which is a a web application containing note or writing that are usually called "post" and displaying on the web pages. The posts are often displayed orderly based on the age or based on the time when the writing is written and published, so when you view a blog, you will first find the latest posts, top to bottom of the web page and the first to the last page, if the blog has had more than one web page.

For the first time, blog was created as the online private notes, but along with its development and popularity, blog has various types of contents or writings such as tutorial (e.g. this blog), sharing, business, etc. In general, blogs seem not to have the difference with the sites on the Internet.

The blog platform or used to be called blog machine has been created in such a way by blog designers or developers in order to be user friendly, so the knowledge of HTML, PHP, CSS, etc that was a must to create a web application, now with blog, everything is so easy as 1, 2, 3.

2. How to create blog in blogspot

One of the free blog providers that is quite popular today is blogspot or blogger, where you have to register through blogger.com and you get the domain name as sub domain of blogspot, e.g. yourname.blogspot.com.

Why should you create blog in blogger.com, not in other free blog providers? Actually, there is no “should”, but blogger.com has more advantages than other providers do. One of the advantages is the easiness in operating so that blogger.com is good for the beginners. Other advantages are the freedom in editing and replacing the templates to make the best display, custom domain which means that you can replace the domain with your own but with the blogspot hosting, e.g. yourname.blogspot.com can be changed into yourname.com, but still in the same hosting, i.e. the free blogspot hosting.

It should be emphasized from the beginning that the Internet is highly dynamic, so it is very possible that this practical guide to create blog in blogspot will not be relevant anymore as changes occurring, whether to the platform, coding, or anything else that you see right now in blogger.com

To reduce something unneeded to write, below is how to create blog in blogger.com.

Creating Email

One of the conditions required in creating blog is to have an active email address. If you do not have an email, please register at gmail. Since Blogger is one of Google services, when you want to register at Blogger, you had better use Google Email or gmail. If you need a simple guide to create an email, please use Google search engine to search for the best guide.

Sign up for a blog at blogger

Please visit http://www.blogger.com
After registration page open, go to the right bottom of the page where you can change the language to your own to make you easier to understand the instructions, but in this tutorial, I use English for more global targeting. Please login by using your username and password of your gmail (your email account is allowed to use for login to blogger).
Click "CREATE A BLOG" button
Enter your Blog Title in the field next to "Blog Title", and your expected blog address in the field next to “Blog address (URL). Need to remember that when you enter your expected blog address, you have to be sure of it as you cannot replace it in the future, except you use Custom Domain facility. Check for the availability. If your expected blog address is not available, replace with your new one and so on until you get it. Then type the character you see next to "Word verification", below blog address point and click CONTINUE for the next steps.
Choose a starter template, meaning that you can replace this template in the future and then click CONTINUE.
You will see "Your Blog has been created!" meaning that now you have a blog and you are ready to start Blogging, by clicking "START BLOGGING".
You will soon be in the post editor, where you can write anything as you may have thought about before. (it is recommended to directly write for your first post to avoid "Blogger Anti-Spam Robot" that can result in your blog locked. For instance, you can write a very short entry if you have not prepared an entry: "Hello World!", and anything else you want. Click "PREVIEW" button to view how your post will be displayed, then click "PUBLISH POST" if you want your entry to be published.
Click "View Post" to see your blog. Below is the example of the blog display created
Done

For the first phase, your blog is ready and accessible for public. For next discussions about blogging in blogger are to come.

Pages

1. Images

2. Animation and Movies

3. Frames

4. JavaScript

1. Topical Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site

2. Bold and Italic Text

3. Duplicate Content

What are Backlinks?

Why Backlinks Are Important

Anchor Text

Ways to Build Backlinks

1 The Backlink Builder Tool

2 Getting Listed in Directories

3 Forums and Article Directories

4 RSS Feeds

5 Affiliate programs

6 News Announcements and Press Releases

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For

2. Keyword Density

3. Keywords in Special Places

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names

b. Keywords in Page Titles

c. Keywords in Headings

Basic

Publishing

Formatting

Comments

Archiving

Site Feed

Email & Mobile

OpenID

Permissions

1. How Search Engines Work

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines

1. What is Blog?

2. How to create blog in blogspot

Creating Email

Sign up for a blog at blogger

Followers

Archives

Categories