You'd be surprised to learn that, if you look into the source of the blogger pages for individual posts, you'd see that the headings are h3. I was investigating google search results where my blog was appearing on page 1 when I realized that! I'd think google would understand that and treat them as most important headings in the post for SEO purposes. But does it? And moreover, do other search engines understand that a h3 header is actually the main header of the post? I wonder where my blogger pages would be if all post titles were h1 instead of h3!
Ideally, you would want to change all post titles to h1 however in blogger, h1 is "reserved" for the blog title. We want to avoid more than one h1 item, based on several advice on the internet. But we don't want h3 either. So we go for h2.
If you don't want to play guessing games with search engines, you'll change this with me. Here's how.
Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates. Search for post.title and you'll find something like that:
<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
<h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
<b:if cond='data:post.link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:post.title/>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</h3>
</b:if>
Go ahead and replace h3 with h2:
<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
<h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
<b:if cond='data:post.link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:post.title/>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</h2>
</b:if>
Save your template and you're done! Just to make sure, you only changed 2 digits total! Simple as that!
Credit for the code change directions goes to: http://www.magznetwork.com/tutorials/complete-seo-guide-for-blogger-templates.html
[UPDATE] Well, it turns out this is not the end of the story. Turns out all the widgets in the sidebar have H2 headers also by default! Went ahead and changed all of those to H5! This will improve the SEO I am sure! It's quite a few more changes - two changes for each widget - but these changes are also simple changes. I recommend you do that too!
Following advice from Dan the Internet Man (http://dantheinternetman.com), I decided to install Smarter Related Posts for Blogger on this blog.
I suggest you consider installing it on your blogger as well. Dan suggests improving the internal link structure in your website or blog this way will reduce the need for external links by about 50%. Here's how it works:
Just grab the code from the source: http://www.moretechtips.net/2009/04/jquery-gdata-api-smarter-related-posts.html . I am using the code #2 to be inserted in the sidebar. The code is:
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://blogger-related-posts.googlecode.com/files/related-posts-widget-1.0.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
relatedPostsWidget({
'loadingText':'loading...'
});</script>
Just go Settings/Layout/Add new Widget and pick a HTML/Javascript. You can leave the title blank. The title comes out to be Related Posts automatically.
The example of how this works is in the sidebar of this blog.
I have found that with some posts, the Related Posts Widget only shows back the same post, or even no posts. For posts that have few or no related posts showing, just add more labels. Also, shorten your labels so more posts will share the same label. The widget is label based.
Check the Smarter Related Posts for Blogger Widget out for yourself and let me know if you have questions or problems running it. So far it worked for me wonderfully! Just leave me a comment below!
To maximize your Adsense revenue, you want to position the adsense ads into the place where a reader or commenter may see them. Like here:
I recommended in an earlier post to enable "ads between posts" under Settings/Layout/Page Elements/Edit in Blog Post Rectangle/Configure Inline Ads.
I also recommended your comment form placement setting to "embedded below post" which makes comments more viewable and adds more text to the posts as the comments build up. This is a setting under Settings/Comments/Comment Form Placement.
Unfortunately this combination of the Comment and Ads setting leaves a large gap between the end of the comment form and the adsense ads so the adsense ads become "low visibility" ads.
To fix this, I suggest to place your adsense "ads between posts" above the comment part of the page. You will have to modify the Template Html to achieve this.
Here are the directions on how to do this quickly:
Following Woork's idea to place ads below the title here's what you do to accomplish ads above the comment section: Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates/. Search for "includeAd", you will find this piece of code:
<b:if cond="'data:post.includeAd'">
<data:adend/>
<data:adcode/>
<data:adstart/>
</b:if>
and you will see it is placed below the comment code. Cut the above piece of code out and place it above the comment code and below the post code. The final arrangement should look like this:
<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
<b:if cond='data:post.includeAd'>
<b:if cond='data:post.isFirstPost'>
<data:defaultAdEnd/>
<b:else/>
<data:adEnd/>
</b:if>
<div class='inline-ad'>
<data:adCode/>
</div>
<data:adStart/>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:post.trackLatency'>
<data:post.latencyJs/>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "static_page"'>
<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
</b:if>
As you can see, the comment code is now below the includeAd code. Check out this very blog to see the final layout. The adsense ads become more visible instead of stuck to the end of the post, with a big gap after the comment section. Let me know in your comment how you like this new arrangement! I should be making more adsense $$$ right away ;)
You could find in a previous post about my top selections for top dofollow and high traffic social bookmarking sites. Many sites that looked good on surface proved not so valuable and were thrown out of the selection. I found some additional dofollow social bookmarking sites and I am presenting them here.
Credit goes to the following sites:
A few months back I have presented a list of dofollow social bookmarking sites and high traffic social bookmarking sites. I have put them to the test and here are the results.
I have posted hundreds of bookmarks, probably thousands. I posted several of my websites and have tracked referrals from these bookmarks through Google Analytics.
There are two components to traffic accomplished by social bookmarking. Component one is the direct traffic to my sites. Componnt two is search traffic that is influenced by social bookmarking sites (no follow and especially dofollow) links to my sites. Direct traffic is measured in direct visits from the sites. I only have indirect measures of search traffic attributable to social bookmarking sites.
Here are the number of referrers (direct visits) from social bookmarking sites. I am also adding the number of posts on the social bookmarking site pointing toward my websites. This number of posts is an indirect measure of Google link juice flowing to my sites and is especially relevant in case of dofollow social bookmarking sites.
List: site, direct hits, pages linking toward my websites
Is your blogger gaining in popularity? Have your happy readers help you back!
Do you have comments thanking you for your help? Great time to let commenters know that they can bookmark the page with their favorite bookmarking services. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon are some of my favorites.
I have been using Onlywire bookmarking button on some of my blogs. This button is a bit overwhelmingly complicated so I decided to standardize on AddThis.com for my blogs. AddThis claim to be the one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing service on the net. I'm sure you must have seen their button in many places.
You will see the AddThis button on the bottom of this post. To see if this is something you want to add to your blog, try it out right now!
Locate the Bookmark button on the bottom of this post, hover over it, and select your favorite bookmarking service. Click! It is not as simple as bookmarking with your browser, is it!
However, it works and it will increase the visibility of your blog, both through referrals and through higher search engine rankings.
AddThis has made it very simple to include their bottom in various publishing media. Login or register at AddThis.com. For blogger, you will have two options.
First, include AddThis button as an element in your sidebar. That one is straightforward and highly automatized as you will see.
I recommend the second option. Here, add AddThis button on the bottom of each of your blog posts. To do so, you must add the button script as directed. To find the place they refer you to in your blogger template, go to Customize/Layout/Edit Html. You must select "Expand Widgets Templates". Use Ctrl-F or find to locate the <div class='post-footer'>
tag as directed by AddThis. Insert the code.
You're done!
From now on just gently remind your happy commenters to bookmark the page they found useful.
What do you say? What bookmarking service do you use on your blog? Have you seen increase in traffic since you have implemented it? Have you seen referrals from social bookmarking sites? Let me know, please comment below!
This is needed sometimes. Sometimes you just don't want people to be distracted by all the bells and whistles a blog offers. You just want people to follow a single line of thought, such as one toward a purchasing decision!
You can remove just about all bells and whistles from blogger using Settings/Layout. I'll collect here directions for couple of remaining things you can do through Layout/Edit Html.
First, remove blogger navbar. Credit goes to http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2005/01/remove-navbar.html
1. On your Dashboard, select Layout. This will take you to the Template tab. Click Edit HTML. Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog's HTML.Right after Blogger Template Style Comment include this code:
2. paste the CSS definition in the top of the template code:
#navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }
I was just telling you about signing up for Google Webmaster Central. The main purpose was to find out more about which links to your blog Google deems to be high quality. I was surprised to find a technorati.com backlink there. It was pointing to a specific post of my blog! A deep-linked, dofollow, possibly high Page Rank backling from a trusted Page Rank 9 site! Nice find!
How did that link end up on Technorati? Simple. As a member of Technorati, my blog is regularly scanned by Technorati. Whenever I link to another blog that is also a member, that blogs ?reactions page gets updated with a direct, dofollow, possibly high PR (up to 6) backlink to my page. Technorati also extracts the text from my post around the reference. The reactions page looks like this:
http://technorati.com/blogs/echoesofwisdom.blogspot.com?reactions
Here's what Technorati says about Blog Reactions. The blurb also explains what Technorati Authority is:
What Are Blog Reactions?
Technorati defines Blog Reactions as the number of links to the blog's home page or its posts from other blogs in the Technorati index. A subset of blog reactions, Technorati Authority is the number of unique blogs linking to this blog over the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has. To see reactions to specific posts, you can find them listed on Technorati post pages.
The numbers are in. I wrote about how to double my blogger blog adsense revenue before. Now I doubled my adsense revenue again. Simply by adding a nice background image to the blog.
That was with exactly the SAME amount of traffic to the blog as before. All I needed was a digital camera and an image manipulation program. I used a free gimp for windows. I used gimp just to change the contrast, brightness, and to crop the image appropriately to the screen. That was it!
When you have an image ready, just go to Customize, then Layout, then click Edit in your Header rectangle. You'l have a choice to upload your image from the computer. If needed, play with the resizing and that is it.
Pick a nice header background like this or like this and you'll about double your adsense income vs. just a plain blogger default single color template.
The numbers are in.
P.S.: Please do not copy the background image from the internet. You may get in trouble with licensing. Just take a nice picture of a sunset, skyline, flowers from the nearest gas station island, or anything that makes sense for your blog.
The main reason why you want to sign up with Google Webmaster Central is to find out what backlinks are pointing to your blog. Especially which are the backlinks to your blog that Google values.
You will get the most comprehensive list of backlinks to your site through Yahoo by using Yahoo Search link:yoursite.blogspot.com feature which takes you to Yahoo site explorer like this: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdofollowcool.blogspot.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr=moz35&fr2=seo-rd-se .You can see the comprehensive list of backlinks there. However, most of the search traffic comes from Google and you do want to know which of these links are valued by Google. Dofollow is only one of the qualities of a link Google is looking for.
When you try the same link: search at google.com, you will see that Google hides most of the backlinks jealously. You will find many more links through yahoo search.
So to get a bit closer to understanding what backlinks Google appreciates, sign up with Google Webmaster Central. Choose the META TAG authentication for your blog as the file upload version will not work with your blogspot blog. Then check up on your backlinks. Here are the current stats for a site that shows you how your parking ticket pays for itself:
Yahoo Siteexplorer: Pages: 38, Inlinks:174
Google Search Link: 5 sites linking in
Google Webmaster Central: 88 links to your site.
You see, not all links are created equal in Google's mind. Google is a jealous god. Backlinks play an important role with Google. However, you will need to work just a little bit harder to find out which backlinks really count for Google. Sign up for Google Webmaster Central. There is other very useful information there. I'll let you discover it on your own. In my next post I'll tell you my discovery.
I wrote recently about a social bookmarking strategy I use and recommend. As a first step I suggested using Onlywire.com bookmarking syndication. In this post I will show you how Onlywire.com works and how you can use this post to verify your submission to Onlywire.com!
Onlywire.com is a great bookmark syndication tool. It will help you get your bookmarks syndicated into some of the largest news and social bookmarking sites quickly. Mostly they are not dofollow. However, you will receive substantial referral traffic from these social bookmarking sites. That's just because of the size of their audience. If you are able to make your title and description attractive, and if you are bookmarking great content, you may end up on the front published page of these services, such as digg or stumbleupon. This way you will get additional referral traffic, way beyond the norm. In addition, most of the sites represented in Onlywire.com have good reputation with google and other search engines. This will quickly bring you search engine traffic, sometimes within hours of publishing the bookmark.
And just how quick is it to publish with onlywire.com? Well the setup phase can take a while because you need to manually register with the participating bookmarking sites. The bookmarking of a single page takes me about 10 minutes. It takes 5 minutes for initial submit, and then 5 more minutes to "finalize" the submission with a few sites.
You do not need to sign up with all bookmarking sites represented on Onlywire.com. Here are the ones I found easy to use, user friendly, and without overzealous censoring. Your mileage may vary; use the comment form below if you found sites in Onlywire that I am not mentioning. Then let me know and I will include them here.
First Group: Sites I use, no finalization needed:
Ask.com
Bibsonomy.com
BookmarkSync.com
Delicious.com
Facebook.com
Faves.com
Google.com/bookmarks
Jumptags.com *
Mister-Wong.com *
Multiply.com
MySpace.com
Propeller.com
Second Group: Sites that I use, finalization needed:
Digg.com *
Mixx.com *
Reddit.com
Third Group: Sites that currently fail consistently, at least for me:
Bebo.com
Blinklist.com
Connotea.com
Diigo.com
Newsvine.com
Plaxo.com
Stumbleupon.com *
As the sites that require finalization are quite large, it should be worth your time to go ahead and do manual finalization with the second group. If you have extra time on your hands, go ahead and bookmark your page with the third group manually, directly on the websites.
The great thing about this post is that you can verify if your submission was successful. Wait perhaps a few hours or a day after submission with Onlywire. Then just come back to this post and do search on this page. It is a Google Custom Search for the sites mentioned above. Use keywords from the title of your bookmark, and, optionally, your site name to narrow down search results. You will see just how quickly your site is indexed by Google.
Here is the Google Custom Search:
Leaving a comment on someone's blog the other day I read another commenter write "I need to get back to my blogs now". I was taken aback a bit. A stay at home mom running multiple blogs? Hmmm.
If you are serious about making money with your business blog you need to run multiple business blogs.
There are opposing opinions out in the blogosphere about starting multiple business blogs. Some bloggers cautiously encourage starting several blogs and spreading the start dates out in time.
I'd say, forget cautiously. Forget spreading them out in time. Start a new business blog when you feel inspired. Don't let anyone tell you you'd spread yourself thin. When you start multiple business blogs you will find that, depending on the topic you were inspired to pick, each blog will have a completely different audience. You will be in for surprises. You'll find it easy to drive scores of new targeted visitor to one blog from day one through straight referrals from forums and blog comments. The other blog will do better with search engines, and build up audience over time. You will find that the best marketing approach will depend on the blog.
This is what I found with two of my new blogs. Another big difference was in monetization. Take google adsense's eCPM. eCPM stands for effective cost per thousand impressions. What represents cost to Google represents revenue for your blog. I found eCPM differed by more than a factor of 10, ranging from $0.5 on the low end to $11.00 on the high end. Big difference in eCPM. Big surprise.
You'll learn a lot running multiple blogs.
True, there is more management involved with starting a new blog. You need to tweak with the blog to make it user friendly, navigable. You need to market it to drive targeted traffic. You need to make it dofollow, of course. You need to encourage and reward commenting. These tweaks take some time.
However, learning how to do a certain tweak with one blog will help you do the same tweak for the next blog in half the time. Bringing in startup traffic for blog #2 will take much less time than for blog #1.
Depending on whether you blog one hour a day or 10 hours a day, you won't be able to keep up with all the blogs all the time. You won't be able to keep in touch with your audience for a while.
Don't worry, your blog audience, commentators, subscribers, even new visitors would rather not hear from you than get an uninspired piece of information from you. Writing inspired blog posts beats posting frequently. Plus, neglecting a single blog for a while has unintended advantages. You will see what the long-term residual influx of new visitors from forums, blog posts, and search engines. More on that in a future post on keeping track of your visitors with google analytics or similar services. When you leave a blog alone for a while, make sure you continue collecting the visitor information!
It turns out many successful bloggers run several blogs simultaneously. I'll write sometime about techniques to make operating several blogs more time effective such as Firefox Profiles, separate email accounts and the like.
Do you run multiple blogs? If you do, what were the surprising differences you found in running them? Comment ahead!
If you can not find your favorite forum in the list of dofollow forums, you can add it here. Your link to the forum will appear in this growing list of the dofollow forums.
Feel free to also include your own website URL.
<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Sorry your browser does not support this page. Please try another browser like Firefox. Or submit your forum in the comment below.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
The new forum that you suggest (Forum URL) and your own website URL (Your website URL) will get a dofollow link from the page of all Dofollow Forums and some extra traffic from this blog, as a thank-you for helping build the list of dofollow forums.
I was reading this SEO guy's blog http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/2009/08/link-building-are-you-doing-it-right.html yesterday. He is talking about combining several online strategies to increase targeted traffic to your blog. He mentioned forums as a great source of targeted traffic.
Coincidentally two weeks ago I started another blog. That blog has now about 100 visitors a day just from my posting messages in various relevant forums. My forum posts are helping people in the forum with their annoyances. Search engines have not even found my blog yet. The entire traffic of 100 new visitors a day to my blog is from the forum posts! So I realized this guy's message is absolutely confirmed, forum posting can be a great way to promote a blog.
Sure enough, forums have been around for a while and each has grown into their own style. You do want to familiarize yourself with the forum first before you register and start posting. You do want to make sure that the theme of the forum is compatible with your blog.
Please don't spam. Many forums have built in spam filters, so you are just wasting your time posting irrelevant links. Instead, respond to posts where you can add in some way to the discussion. Your blog has a lot of great content, right? Cool, so you will be able to find forum posts and threads that would benefit from your knowledge. Send forum visitors to a relevant page in your blog. Place your blog URL in your profile in each forum you contribute to.
A word of caution. If you post several posts in a forum and all of them are essentially doing nothing but sending people to your blog, you may be violating terms of service with some forums and may be banned from the forum. Look around on the forum. Contribute a few posts here and there where you are answering questions or asking questions and not posting your links.
With the forum posting strategy you may or may not get 100 visitors a day right away. Just keep returning to the forum and keep interacting with the forum members. Your reputation and traffic to your blog will increase over time.
Your blog is dofollow, right? A number of forums have recognized the value of dofollow links. I found a solid list of blogs that feature dofollow signatures on this site: http://www.peiprofit.com/traffic-secrets/list-of-dofollow-forums.
Here is the list of dofollow forums, that is forums that allow a dofollow signature link, thanks to peiprofit.com:
You've done a couple of things with your blogger blog so far: you've set your blog to dofollow, encouraged and rewarded commenters for quality coments, implemented keyword exchange for comments, monetized your blog, doubled its pull and your adsense income, and enabled others to easily navigate the site. Now it 's time to get the word out. And I mean get the word out in a big way. Your content is precious. Right?!? You want people to know about it.
One of the quickest ways to get the word out is post a social bookmark. Social bookmarking is a great way to get links back to your blog. Links that are well categorized. Social bookmarking will bring you targeted traffic. Social bookmarking, when done right, will increase your blog's popularity with search engines. You can find more about social bookmark basics by simply signing up for delicious.com, one of the original social bookmarking sites. Roam around and you will find how the system works. Yahoo has recently bought delicious.com and seems to be putting some efforts together to integrate delicious more tightly with Yahoo search and other offerings. There are hundreds of other social bookmarking sites out there and new ones are mushrooming daily.
How to make sense of all this? Should you go and sign up for all the sites and bookmark your blogger pages? That could take forever! Well you are in the right place to see about bookmarking selectively and speeding up the social bookmarking process.
I recommend using two tools:
A few days ago I discussed internal linking and improving your blogger navigation and SEO. The point is to make it easy for your visitors to navigate your blog and help the web searchers find your blog entries through search engines as well.
The Archive feature in blogger that we discussed has been around for a while. Recently, blogger introduced the "Labels" gadget. This is just what the doctor ordered! In this blog, I decided to name the gadget "For More Information on Dofollow and Blogger Marketing Visit:" and place it at the bottom of the blog. The style chosen is "Cloud". Visit the Dofollow Cool blog and scroll to the bottom of the page to see it. In the Echoes of Wisdom blog it is called "Labels|Tags|Categories". There, it is placed in the sidebar with as a list style.
Inspect the Labels gadget visually. You may realize that you'll have to modify a few labels that you have used when you wrote your posts, maybe trim their length. Maybe consolidate similar labels into one lable. Maybe you will need to add labels in the first place. Go ahead, do that - it will help you clarify your posts and your purpose with your blog.
Add a Labels gadget to your blogger. Help people find you through Labels/Tags and enable your visitors get more information they are looking for quickly.
It is great to post links to your sources of information. It is great to post links to bloggers who have been writing for a long time and have success and good reputation. Successful bloggers monitor who is linking to them and will come to your site. Maybe even link to your blog. In fact successful bloggers are generous when it comes to link love. Links from successful blogs count a great deal.
On the other hand, you do not want your visitors to leave your blog when they follow an external link. Here's how you can have them go and stay at the same time: open the external link in a new window. Here's a quote from blogging4good.blogspot.com:
http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2009/01/do-not-let-visitors-leave-your-blog.html
Create a Hyperlink That Opens a New Window
The basic structure of a hyperlink looks like this:
<a href="http://internettradingbeginners.blogspot.com/">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>
If you use this code, the clicking on the link will lead the visitor to the new location and they will leave your blog. Opening a new window on every click requires html code modification. Just add one more property to the ’a’ tag:
target="_blank"
Just like the href property/value pair (href="some value"), you need simply to include the target="_blank" to the ’a’ tag of your hyperlink. Here is what the finished hyperlink will look like:
<a href="http://internettradingbeginners.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>
Some desktop software HTML authoring utilities are able to provide this functionality as an option for you when you create a hyperlink. For example, Post2Blog, I use can do that easily. But if you use online Blog editor, like Blogger, you do not have ready to go option for the hyperlinks properties modification. You need to review the HTML source, find the ’a’ tag you want to modify and then add the target="_blank" value pair to the hyperlink definition.
That's all folks. Happy external linking.
Imagine a first time visitor arriving to your blog. Let's say they find your post interesting and they read every word of it. They arrived to the end of the post. They want more. Why not make it easy on them and offer them a link to another post of yours with similar content?
If blogger had categories, this post would be under Internal Traffic category. Internal traffic is about helping visitor navigate your blog and keep them on your blog. This post would also fit in the SEO category. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is about helping your visitors find you through search engines.
Blogger does not have categories, however. I wanted to talk to you about something related today. I read a very well written post by Courtney Tuttle at http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/08/14/increase-search-traffic-with-effective-link-structure-20/ recommending the following components to your blog structure:
The main idea of the dofollow blog keyword exchange is simple. You started a blog because you want to start a conversation about a topic that is important to you. Or you want to make money.
You want to have readers. You want to have commentators. Turning your blog dofollow is a way to attract commentators. But will they read your posts?
Some people will just come to your blog to get an anchor text backlink to their site. That is fine.
In exchange, you accept the link as long as they contribute to the discussion. And they will need to read your post to contribute. So you gain a reader in exchange for giving away "link juice".
This blog is an implementation of the "keyword exchange" idea. The implementation with dofollow "keyword exchange" both attracts readers and entices them to contribute to the blog by reading the post and using "my keywords" in their comments. "My keywords are typically in the title of the post. They will want to use "their keywords" in the "Name" field of the comment.I feel the best place to suggest blog comment keyword exchange is in the "Post a comment" section, plain in sight to the commentator just before they are ready to type their comment in the box.
Originally, the GolfTipsBeginners blogger suggested keyword exchange. He was placing his Dofollow Blog rule in the sidebar. You can implement in the sidebar too, this would be the simplest way:
http://golftipsbeginners.blogspot.com/2009/08/bump-and-run-chip-shot-in-golf.html#comment-form
Here are the technical details of implementing keyword exchange in my blogger template. I'm using the inline comment blogger, and you should go inline as well as discussed previously.
In blogger, you can just go to Customize/Settings/Comments and under "Comment Form Message" put this text or similar to give the commenter the idea what moderation they can expect:
This is a DoFollow blog. Comments that contribute nothing will be deleted. Keyword exchange: If you are placing your keywords in the Name field I request that you read the post and place my keywords from the post title or text in your comment.So good luck! Be smart, turn your blogger dofollow, establish strict moderation of comments, and tell commentators what you expect of them! Then watch the readership grow!
I got a great "Keyword Exchange" idea from one of my commenters: as a Dofollow blog I will get instant readership that I would otherwise not have (good for all). However, some of the commenters will be here just to place comments with their keywords in the name field (good for them) and not read or contribute to the post (not good for me or the dofollow movement). So I kept the "Post a Comment" line and placed the following wording in place of the generic warning:
Post a Comment
This is a DoFollow blog. Comments that contribute nothing will be deleted. Keyword exchange: If you are placing your keywords in the Name field I request that you read the post and place my keywords from the post title or text in your comment.
I will write about the procedure to make this change in my blogger in my next post.
Hopefully the "Great post mate" comments will turn into more thoughtful comments. Or at least longer and more keyword rich comments ;)
Your comments on the keyword exchange idea? Do you feel it is easy for you as a commenter to follow? Do you like it? Is it a fair exchange? Will it help increase the dofollow movement? Post your opinion in a comment and let me know!
[Update 9/2/2009 I found two additional modifications to increase the blending of the ads into the page that you can add to the four modifications below. First, see if it makes sense for your blog to match the text size of your posts to text size of the adsense ads. Second, see if you can match the text color of the post with the color of the ad text. I'm testing this as we speak.]
Seriously, this is a gold mine for your blog. The -how to make money blogging- post. Read every word.
By now, you've accomplished a few major things:
-You've turned your blogger to dofollow to encourage blog comments
-You've monetized your blog with adsense ads in a few clicks
A couple of things you want to do to double your google adsense blog revenue in the next 30 minutes is
-Change your sidebar adsense to large square
-Change your adsense backgound color to blog background color
-Change your adsense border color to background
-Change your adsense title color to blue
(check this blog's adsense and see if I'm following these rules)
Tried and tested. Doubled MY blog revenue. Just do it. Double your blog income in 30 minutes. Thank me later.
I did not invent this. I found it in an ebook by a nice guy by the name of Joel Comm. You may be able to still get his Adsense Secrets ebook for $9.95 at http://adsense-secrets.com, pages 1-61. You'll find the reasons why you're doing these steps and more tips in this ebook.
Your blogger is dofollow, right? Comments are the liveliness of your blog, right? So reward the commenters by publishing their comment excerpts on the side. Go Customize/Layout/Add a Gadget/Featured/Recent Comments. Hit the plus button. Position the gadget where you want it. Done.
If you don't have any comments yet, make some up. Ask your friends to comment, or comment yourself.
The new commenters will love to see their names on top/side of the blog.
As of today, monetizing blogger blog is a matter of a few clicks if you already have adsense set up. Just click on Settings then Monetize then you'll be given a few layout choices. Stick with the default for maximum exposure of ads. Google will select your adsense layout to match the colors of your blog style. There is not much else to do!
I've noticed some bloggers out there calling for no advertising on blogs. I disagree. The main point is: Most people are ad-blind anyways, and subconsciously filter out the ads and go for the content anyways. However, if they're looking for something already, they hit your blog, they will see an ad that matches what they're looking for. My theory anyways. As google has implemented Double-Click advertising and viewer-centric advertising in addition to content-centric advertising, chances are even higher your reader will find something they are looking for in your ads.
So go ahead monetize your blog now!
Give it a couple of days/weeks depending on how much traffic you get. Check back with Monetize Tab and you will see your earnings right there.
Here's a neat trick to get your Craigslist Ads to Follow!
Craigslist allows you to use links with anchor text in the posts. Normally, these links will be nofollow.
When you edit the post, however, you can delete the "no" from "nofollow" in your links, repost, and the links will stay follow!
Craigslist gone Dofollow!
According to
http://reviewofweb.com/blogging/dynamic-meta-title-tags-blogspot/
you want to add a post-specific META description tag to your blog posts. Just put a meta tag
inside the head of posts. Go Layout/Edit Html then insert between <head> and </head> tags this line:
<META NAME='description' expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle + ",Put in your common description tags here "'/>
where you replace your own common description tags.
What happens is expr:content= ‘data:blog.pageTitle’ gets replaced by the title of your current page. So when combined with the common description tags, the description tag becomes unique for each page.
This will enable more searchers to find your post.
P.S.: I am not mentioning the second trick about putting title of the blog into the title of the page as recommended on the website above. Blogger already has that feature built in as of today.