weblogstart

Know what your blog looks like to a search engine spider

2009-10-21T01:45:00.001-07:00

Ever wondered what your weblog might look like to a search engine spider or bot? Try this tool and see the results! The results here will be similar to how Google, MSN and Yahoo spiders will read your weblogs!

Did you know that Adsense has its own weblog?

2009-10-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

Let me repeat the question, did you know that Adsense has its own weblog? It is hosted on blogger (naturally). Are you a serious blogger? Better bookmark the weblog of Adsense. It contains a lot of news and updates about, surprise! surprise! . . . Adsense. Their weblog contains topics about Adsense features, Google and about optimization. Who better to learn those stuffs from than of course Adsense itself!

Check out the latest with adsense! Check out their weblog: http://adsense.blogspot.com/

How does Google rank that weblog of yours?

2009-10-20T23:28:00.001-07:00

Google uses a complex system of algorithms to rank the billions of websites, weblogs included. In simple terms, Google uses a program that performs a lot of processes in order to organize all the websites and weblogs on the world wide web. Google uses over 100 criteria's to judge each weblog. Those criteria have different weights in determining your ranking, however the weights of certain criteria's can and will change over time as Google refines it’s algorithms (processes). It is always important to remember this when your weblogs start to go down in Google’s search ranking. That is why optimizing your weblogs is not only a one time task, search engine optimization should not only be observed at the start of your weblog, it should be a continuous process.

Although Google has over 100 criteria’s or factors that help them rank a certain weblog. There are however 2 major groups of factors that the algorithm can be broken into.

Keyword Factors – Involves how where and when keywords where used in your weblogs. Involves analyzing how well you have optimized your weblogs for your chosen keywords.

Link Factors – this involves the quantity and quality (how relevant the links are) that points to your weblogs. Link factors are mostly related to your Page Rank.

These two factors are what you must often think about when you are trying to get a higher rank in Google’s search results.

A short summary of how Google indexes your weblogs

2009-10-20T20:42:00.001-07:00

Google uses an automated software to go index the whole world wide web. These automated softwares are typically called a spider or crawler. Google indexes your weblogs through the use of these spiders, if you look at the image to the left, you will see a robot that looks like one of the robots you can see in a terminator movie, however a spider isn't really a physical robot, it is only a program or just a set of instructions performed by Google's web servers, A spider or crawler is sent to your weblogs and then reads and records your entire weblogs content. How often a spider crawls your weblogs depends on a lot of factors, one of which is the page rank of your weblogs, another is how often you have added content to your weblogs in the past.

When a Google crawler or spider first goes to your website, it reads and records your weblogs content like humans do, that is they start from the left to right, and top to bottom. These bots however are not capable of appreciating a beautiful picture, an amazingly dramatic video or a very fun and interactive flash application so keep those at a minimum in your weblogs content so that you will have more room for your text content. Spiders typically start on your homepage following each link as they encounter it. What actually happens is that when a spider encounters a link in your weblog it then sends another spider to follow that link to another page of your weblog or somebody else's weblog, it continues this process until it reaches the bottom of your weblogs homepage.

Google has been also known to not indexed weblogs until at least one other weblog or webpage has linked to it. So make it your primary focus to first gain some links from other weblogs before concerning yourself with onpage SEO (search engine optimization)

This is only a short summary of how Google indexes your weblogs, the full process of how Google indexes your weblogs contains some technical stuffs that I have omitted for the benefit of those that are new or just starting their weblogs. Have fun with your weblogs!

Four most important terms that webloggers commonly encounter

2009-10-20T19:12:00.001-07:00

These are the four most important terms to understand when starting a weblog

Rank, Ranking – That which represents a weblogs actual position on the free or unpaid listings sections of a search engines result page a certain search term or phrase.

Page rank – googles system for specifying a weblogs importance. Page rank can play a major role in determining a certain weblogs rank, but it is only one of those major factors.

Keywords – those words or phrases that mostly describe what your weblog is all about. I am not referring to the “keywords” META tag as those are different an are of no use anymore because Google and other major search engines have discontinued use of them.

Page title – the title of a weblog and is contained between the <title> </title> tag. It is located near the top most part of an HTML file and is displayed in the top bar of a browser window.
These are the most common terms or words that a weblogger hears and these are also as the most commonly misunderstood terms when you are starting a weblog. It is very important to remember these terms and understand them better because they are most often encountered in search engine optimization. So start your weblog with a good understanding of these terms.

How to increase average CPC (cost per click) of your blogs advertisements

2009-10-19T01:48:00.001-07:00

In the world of weblogs, Increasing traffic to your blog is one way of making sure you earn from it. However, increasing the average CPC or cost per click of your weblogs advertisement is one way of greatly increasing your earnings. The question is, how do we do it? Most bloggers know about CPC, but a lot of us don’t know what determines your average cost per click. I have only one word for you, “keywords.” By spreading certain keywords around your blog you can have a certain degree of control over the average CPC of your advertisements in your weblogs.

The advantage of optimizing your sites content to increase your weblog advertisements average CPC is very obvious, increase earnings! I used to have an average earning of $0.05 to $0.24 per click from my ads, but after I learned about CPC i was able to increase it to $0.40 to $1.00. Now I am sure the question which you’re dying to know the answer to is “how do i know which keywords can give me a higher average CPC?”
Well, that’s what I am going to try and discuss here. First, think of the keywords whose average CPC you want to know.
For example I will use “weblog hosting,” Once you are set, go to Google's keyword tool page or click here
Look for a particular are of the page similar to image below

Once you have found it enter the keyword or phrase whose average CPC you want to know and press “get keyword ideas”. Once the results are displayed you will see a similar page to this one

Once the results are displayed, click on the “Choose columns to display”and choose Show Estimated Avg. CPC. After choosing it, the results below will add another column showing you the average CPC of the keywords you have entered.

The average CPC column will appear after the “keywords” column, the currency used for the average CPC will be determined by which country you are in. But you can recalculate it to any currency by changing the desired currency in the upper left hand corner of the results and clicking the recalculate button.
Once you have known the average CPC for the keywords you searched for and you are satisfied with it. The next and last step will be to use them throughout your weblogs, and even your articles. This will ensure that the advertisements displayed by adsense on your weblogs will have the average CPC for the keywords you are optimizing for. Good luck!

Submit a sitemap for your blogger hosted weblogs

2009-10-18T02:58:00.001-07:00

A site map (or sitemap) as the name implies is a map to your site, or in my case, my weblog. Sitemaps show the structure of your site, its sections, links between pages. etc.
A Sitemaps is also useful in communicating with search engines. With a sitemap you can tell a search engine crawler where to go and what to index on your weblogs. The most common ways of submitting a sitemap to Google is through their webmaster tools page.
I assume that you have already added your weblogs URL to Google’s webmaster tools. I also assume that you are already familiar on how to navigate through the webmaster page.

Start by logging in to your webmaster account, access your weblogs page. then click Site configuration > sitemaps Once you have clicked sitemaps, click on the submit sitemap button. A box will then appear with the following text.yourblogsname.blogspot.com/____________
paste this in box feeds/posts/full You can’t currently use an xml sitemap for your blogger account, because blogger doesn’t allow you to upload files.

How to set-up a visitor friendly weblog

2009-10-17T23:26:00.001-07:00

As we all know a weblog is sort of like an electronic magazine. Just like in real magazines, weblogs have readers. These readers visit your weblogs, so it is obviously very important to make their visit fun and enjoyable.
Most webloggers care to much for their rankings and statistics that they forget the whole purpose of making blogs. I believe blogs are made to disseminate information about something you are passionate about, and which you want to share to whole world. I also believe that weblogs in some way can tell you a lot about its author. But enough with the sentimental stuffs, let’s discuss the main topic for today, “Visitor friendly weblogs.” Visitor friendly weblogs should have three distinct qualities to them, so before starting a weblog always remember these.

Easily navigable
Lightweight but not to plain
Allow easy feedback or comments

Let me start by explaining what I mean by “Easily navigable” Visitor friendly blogs should start by providing their visitors an easy way to navigate through their pages. Allowing visitors easy access to your pages will also benefit you because chances are that your visitors will be willing to explore your blog. However, please don’t try and trick your visitors into viewing your ads. Some people are smarter than that and will be offended by your attempt, therefore destroying your chances of making your visitor come back for more of your content. This is a perfect example of what I am talking about,

This blog has a navigation tab with a label “Submit blog free” but once you go to that page, all that you will see are ads. Ads that are automatically generated by Google adsense which displays related ads to your blog. Let me clarify though that this is not cheating, It’s just gets to your nerves sometimes.

“Lightweight but visually appealing” A blog should always be lightweight, because your visitors can sometimes have old computers therefore making it hard for them to access your blog. Flash content, especially those graphics exhaustive ones should be avoided. Flash files are not good for SEO anyways, so avoid using them if necessary. Also, don’t make your blog to simple. A little bit of graphics, mostly images can do wonders to your blogs appearance if used properly. Visual appeal should be taken into consideration when starting your blog, but never overdo it.

“Allow easy feedback or comments” I have seen a lot of blogs that have never been commented on, and most of the reasons I assume is because they have a lot of anti-spam tests before you could make a simple comment. Not only is it a waste of time, It’s also a bit irritating. I know that we all don’t like spams. But we don’t need to have multiple securities to prevent it, especially in your blogs. A simple image verification such as captcha should suffice. You shouldn’t worry about getting spams on your blogs comment. You should worry if you don’t get even just a single spam because that’s a good indication your blog is not worth noticing.
Please always remember those three qualities of a visitor friendly blog. Start your blog the right way and you’re guaranteed success.

Start a blog correctly using basic SEO techniques

2009-10-17T03:03:00.001-07:00

Starting a blog is easy, you just sign up for a certain blog platform and start typing your content and you could call it a blog already, but chances are that your blog will never appear within the top 1000 results of a search engine ranking. However, there are a few simple and basic SEO techniques you should apply when starting a blog, these SEO techniques would greatly increase your chances of getting a higher rank on search engines. You should never start a blog without making use of these techniques.
I am going to discuss to you most of the basic techniques in SEO that are usually before starting your blog.

The first thing you should always remember is to choose the right keywords to build your weblog and posts on, this is the most basic SEO technique. Choosing a keyword however requires some researching and for this article we are going to use Google’s keyword tool to research about what and how to find suitable keywords or search phrase to use on your blog. click here

Google’s keyword tool can be used to research about keywords especially if you are planning to put up a new blog or make a new article. For example, your blog is about “movie reviews”

Enter the phrase “movie reviews” and click Get keyword ideas. Wait for the query to finish. Once it is finished it will display a similar result to the image below

I will explain the four most important columns, the first column is the “Keywords” column, It displays a number of keywords you could use, the keywords displayed are the ones related to your “movie reviews” term that people often search for. The second column is very important it is the “advertiser competition” column. This column shows the estimated number of advertiser which means you should stay away from keywords with full green bars. The next two columns are the number of local search volumes and the global monthly search volumes, these are simply the number of times this term is searched monthly. In analyzing the given keywords you should follow the given guideline below.

The keyword for your blog should have the least advertiser competition and has an adequate amount of local and global monthly searches.

The next SEO technique you must do before starting of your blog is to make sure that your domain name include the keywords you have chosen.
An example would be if you choose “critic movie reviews” as the keyword you are going to market your blog in and if you named your site ilovemovies.com and there is a competitor named criticmoviereviews.com, then chances are his blog or website is going to rank higher than yours in that search term.

Your pages should also contain the keywords you have chosen or at least keywords that are related to you niche.

ex. www.criticmoviereviews.com/i_love_to_critic_movies.html

The title tag is also very important, do not underestimate the influence it can make on the search results. Take not also that the nearer you place your keywords to the closing title tag the more effective it will become.
An example would be, “Giving the world the most awesome movie reviews by a critic.” That would be a fairly good example of putting your chosen keywords near the closing title tag.

That conludes this article “Start a blog correctly using basic SEO techniques.” Hope you have enjoyed reading and have learned a lot. Remember, the SEO techniques mentioned here are the most basic and fundamental of all SEO techniques, they are merely guides on how chose a proper blog or website name. There are however more techniques which involves optimizing the articles on your blogs, which I will be discussing in the near future. SEO is not continous process and I admit I am prone to mistakes also, please leave comments when you find some points I discuseed that you disagree or would like to correct. I would appreciate it

Start using Windows Live Writer – Offline blog editor software

2009-10-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Windows live writer is WYSIWYG offline weblog editor software, This is a great blog tool to start your weblog with. To explain it more clearly, this weblog software allows you to create your blog posts from your computer (offline). Not only that, it also allows you to edit your previous blog posts as long as it was posted using Windows Live Writer. I am using this software for my blogger blogs so this review will mostly be applicable to blogger platform users only.
When you start Windows Live Writer and it begins setting up your account it will do the following actions.

Analyze your homepage URL and contents
Detect blog settings, categories, icons and editing theme.
Will mimic your theme settings

It does those actions because it will try to copy your blogs theme and set it as the default page where you will create and edit your blog posts. Let us look at the examples below.

This is my blog’s template

This is Windows Live Writers interface after it has detected my blogs settings and themes

Do you see the resemblance between the windows live writer interface and my blog theme? As most of you blogger platform users know, bloggers online editor doesn’t exactly allow you to see how your posts or articles will appear while your creating or editing it. Windows Live Writer however displays your theme or the part of your theme where your blog posts will appear and allows you to create your posts or articles in that area, this will of course result in you having more control over how your blog posts will look like while editing it. Having said that, this blog editor has more to offer, Windows Live Writer also has a “preview” mode that has the capability to display your blog in its entirety within the program itself. To better understand what I am saying, take a look at the image below.

As you can see from the picture you can immediately tell that this blog is really new and this is my first post. I am using Windows Live Writer to write and edit my blog posts. The image above shows Windows Live Writer in its “preview” mode showing how your blog will look like if you publish an article you are writing or creating at the moment. The beauty behind it is that you will not need to connect to the internet to do this. However Windows Live Writer does not allow you to navigate your blogs links, doing so will result in opening a new browser window which will go to the link that you have clicked. Windows Live Writer also allows you to see the source code of your blog posts allowing you to edit it in its HTML form.
This blog editor also supports labels, although it refers to “labels” as “categories.” It allows you to add categories or labels however it does not allow you to delete one. It also has the “set publish date” which provides a mini calendar so you could choose the date instead of typing it, which is a handy feature. I really hate having to remember the format of the date. MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY, It is just so darn confusing. The image below will show where you can set both the categories and publish date.

Windows Live Writer also supports tags which I don’t think is applicable to blogger accounts for now, however wordpress users might find this feature useful, although I’m not sure yet. I’ll update this post once I get some more info.
Windows Live Writer also allows you to create Photo Albums which you can use for your blog. This could also be used by blogger platform users because the photo album is hosted on a windows live account, which means you have to sign up at windows live before you could this to use this. This photo album however is displayed on a blogger blog as one image. In order for someone to view the pictures they would have to follow the link given. An example of this is the image seen below

View Full Album

It also has a map service where you can get a screenshot of any place in the world (aerial view of course) which you can use on your blog. This image is a screenshot of the country I am living in. Can you guess where this is? The map service from bing however isn’t as detailed as google maps, however it is still very handy.

Windows Live Writer also allows you to add videos, you have the option to get the video from your computer, a web URL or a Video Hosting service such as YouTube.
Having reviewed most of the useful features of windows live, I can say that this is really a great blog editor for blogger, I even prefer this blog editor more than bloggers online editor. There are a lot more features in Windows Live Writer that you won’t find in bloggers online editor, such as the capability to add “tables” visually and more which I will leave for you to discover, for now, the information I have given will be sufficient enough for you to use this tool to start your weblog. It also has a plug-in page where you can find and add more features to Windows Live Writer that will allow you to do more with your blogs. I highly recommend this blog editor software for blogger platform users, It is simply a great and a better alternative to bloggers online editor.

To download this software click here
For the plug-in page, click here

Link partners

2009-10-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

not yet implemented

Contact

2009-10-14T03:17:00.000-07:00

Not yet implemented

About

2009-10-14T03:15:00.000-07:00

Not yet implemented