I was pleasantly suprised when I found Skinpress.com website. On this web site you’ll find 61 quality Wordpress themes. I like their themes very much, so I decided to download one of their themes and change look of my blog. They offer themes with predefined space for banners, and that is what I was looking for. Tag cloud is also cool feature, it helps users to find what they need in your blog, and also helps in better positioning in search engine results.
Contact page is very important, but you shouldn’t put your email address on your contact page. Spammers use software that crawls the web searching for e-mail addresses. When they find e-mail address, they put it in their database and your inbox will be flooded with spam messages. Some people write email like “myname at myprovider.com”. Email crawlers wouldn’t recognize it as e-mail, and can’t use it, but it looks quite unprofessional. It is much better and more professional to have contact form on your blog.
Fortunately, there is an excellent Wordpress plugin called cforms that will help you to easely install contact form on a contact page.
You can see this plugin in action on contact page.
When you install plugin, you’ll get detailed instructions how to make it work on your blog. It can be done in five minutes.
This plugin also supports some advanced features:
- Customizable fields with optional checkboxes, radio buttons, and select boxes you can use to collect data.
- Several different “styles” available right out of the box. Change the look of your form with a single click.
- Create multiple contact forms and display them on however many pages you want.
- Tell-a-friend form support.
- Backup and restore custom forms to other sites.
- Set certain fields as required and validate e-mail addresses.
- Visitor verification questions, along with CAPTCHA support
Blogs are now an extremely popular and important part of the internet. Millions of people blog every day. As blogs have evolved over the years, so has the commenting system. Now anyone can make comments on a particular blog posting. As blog commenting has grown more popular, so has spam commenting. In this newsletter, we’ll go over why comments are a great form of feedback for your blog, how they help the credibility of your content, what spam comments are and how to prevent them from happening. Read the rest of this entry »
August 06 2008
Power Blogging - 3 Awesome Blogging Tips That Will Skyrocket Your Blog Business
Tagged Under : blogging basics
This article is not intended to give you the newbies course about hosting, installing a blog on your domain and etc. It will give you some serious advice on your blog business
Bad blogging habits are easy to get into, and one of the worst is to leave your ‘About’ page unchanged. You know the page: it is provided by Wordpress as standard and a whole host of bloggers leave it unchanged. Why they do this is known only to them, because this is the first page that a large number of first-time visitors to a blog check out, and the reason why many of them leave without looking further.
All you have to do is to say a little about yourself, who you are, and what your blog is about, why you feel qualified to write a blog about this topic and how you can be contacted. If your blog covers a particular niche, rather than being simply a log of personal comments, then your potential readers will want to know why they should believe what you say by reading your credentials on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »
In previous article I wrote about paid links. For Google buying links in order to get better Page Rank is “illegal activity” and you can be penalized by lowering PR and position of your web pages in search results. So, how to buy links?
If website contains information that you can buy links without NOFOLLOW attribute, avoid that website. Someone could report that site to Google, and you as a link buyer will be penalized too. If you clearly see that some website is full of sponsored links without NOFOLLOW, avoid that site. Paid links should be presented in a “natural” way, as an integral part of the content.
Recently, I found LinkXl, ad broker that offers “safe” link building. As an advertiser, you buy certain keywords and keyphrases. You can browse pages containing those keywords and phrases, and you can buy link on page that contains desired word or a phrase. That word or phrase will become “natural” link to your website or blog. You can’t buy link on home page, because content of blog’s home page is frequently changing. Read the rest of this entry »
As I mentioned in article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″ the best way for your website to climb up in search results is getting a lot of quality links. “A lot” means as much as you can (refer to article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″ to see what term “quality links” actually means). So how to get quality links? Here’s how search engines like Google imagine link building:
- your website has quality content
- other people like content of your site and they put link to your website on their websites
- those websites are related to yours and anchor text of inbound links is related to content of your website (term “anchor text” is also explained in article “Google Webmaster Tools Part 2″)
It is so called “natural” link building. Every link is “vote” for your site. In Google, the importance of every web page is measured by Page Rank. The value of Page Rank can be from 0 to 10. Page rank depends on number of inbound links and Page Ranks of web pages containing links to your website (I think that PR and quality of websites linking to your website is more important then number of inbound links). For example if someone puts link to your site on web page that has PR 5, that will positively affect PR of your website (actually, every page on web site has it’s own PR, usually the page with highest PR is home page because home page receives most links). Read the rest of this entry »
July 22 2008
How to make a blog tutorial - part 1 - register domain name and find web hosting provider
Tagged Under : how to make a blog
How to make a blog first step: register domain name and find good web hosting provider
The first steps in making a blog are registering domain name and finding good web hosting provider. I already wrote about it in posts named “Do I Need To Register Domain for My Blog” and “Finding Good Web Hosting Provider for Your Blog”. If you read these posts you know why is so important to have your own domain name and good, but not too expensive, hosting provider.
July 21 2008
Google Webmaster Tools - part 2
Tagged Under : external links, inbound links, webmaster tools
In this post I’ll write more about interesting features of Google Webmaster Tools.
Diagnostics
When you login to your Google Webmaster Tools account you’ll notice link on the left navigation panel called “Diagnostics”. Click on this link, and then click on “Content analysis”.
Google will analise pages in your website to see if there are any mistakes that can have negative effects on site’s position in search results. Common mistakes are: pages without title tag, duplicate title tags, title tags that are too long or too short, duplicate meta description tag, meta description that is too long or too short. Google will warn you if there are any issues with title tags and meta description, so you can change bad titles and meta descriptions.
July 20 2008
Blog stats
If you own a blog then I’m sure you want to know how many people visited your blog, what posts are the most visited, which websites are sending you visitors, what keywords are people using to find your blog on search engines.
There is an interesting Wordpress plugin called Wordpress.com Stats which intergates into Wordrpess and shows important statistical data about your blog. In one of the previous posts I wrote about Blog Metrics plugin which shows data that is specific for blogs. This plugin shows data common to all websites, after all blog is just another web site.
You can find this plugin here as well as installation instructions, faqs and screenhosts. In order to use this plugin you need Wordpress api code. You’ll get this code if you create account on wordpress.com website.
May 01 2008
Post About Writing Blog Posts
Yes, I know I broke one of the most important bloggers rules - to publish a post at least once a week. I decided that publishing post once a week is enough frequent for me. But, as you can see I published last post two weeks ago! I can try to find some excuse: Eastern holidays (Orthodox church celebrates Eastern on april 25th this year), I had some other important work to do. But the point is that it is very easy to get lazy. Successful bloggers write often, some of them write new post every day. There are two reasons why is that so important: Read the rest of this entry »
