Another week has gone by (fast) and since I have restarted to post my weekly echoes, I have been more active online and hopefully will continue to do so. This week I found many great articles worth sharing with you and this is the objective of the echoes, if you still do not know what it is about. As usual, without further ado, here are my suggestions for this week and in no particular order:
Protect Your Content and Reputation: A guest post from Kristi of Kikolani.com. She runs over some of the advantages and pitfalls of guest blogging and provides some valuable tips to consider when you are submitting your article to be published on any site.
How to Secure Your Social Media Brand & Personal Identity: Branding or Brand Marketing? Creating an online presence using Social Media is becoming more and more popular, which means that it is becoming increasingly more important to maintain a consistent brand and personal identity across all platforms. Why should you not ignore taking action today on protecting or securing your brand?
29 Premium-Like Free But Extremely Tremendous Portfolio Wordpress Themes: If you like WordPress, here some freemium templates for you to check out. 29 of them, all free.
Affiliate Marketing: Choosing The Best Model For You: Whether you are a publisher or an advertiser, this chart will help you choose the model that suits your needs and maximize your earnings. Awesome!
Top 10 Traits for Finding Your League of Extraordinary Bloggers – Saturday Morning Surfing: WIAW discusses the potential of creating an alliance of bloggers. People you can look out for, support, and lean on. If you don’t already have a blogging alliance, you need to build one.
How Google Handles Duplicate Content: Everybody has heard about "duplicate content" for sure. Thing is, it will always happen. What should you do to ensure that your content is considered to be the original source and not just a copy? Must read.
5 Strategies to Maintain and Improve Your #1 Rankings in Google – After You’ve Reached the Top: OK. You've done your SEO and you are now the proud owner of that #1 spot on Google or any other search engine. Now, what shoudl you do to keep it that way? Here are some excellent tips to help you maintain that position.
How to Recycle Your Existing Content?: I love this one. Sometimes I get stuck on what or how to write my next article. Here are some great ways to recycle some of your old articles and make them shine once again:) Plus, it helps beat that "block".
43 Blogger Tips – What you should do after installing WordPress: Are you thinking of moving to WordPress (I am, soon)? Well if you are or just moved, here's an awesome checklist of what you should do after making the move. You can also use it as a guide to remind you of things that you might have overlooked.
20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank: Ah! Alexa. Everybody wants better ranking on it. Why? Not so sure, but if you are monetizing your website, this is something that unfortunately you should be working on. Follow these tips and see how you can improve your Alexa Rankings.
ExtremeJohn's Sunday Smash: Extreme John's Sunday Smash is always a great source for more blogging tips and he does it well by doing his own roundup every Sunday:) Check it out.
That's a wrap. Hope you enjoy reading these articles. Let me know what you think about them. Have a great week ahead.
Google's Blogger Template Designer
Posted by DiTesco Labels: Beginner , Blogger.com , Blogging , Template Designer
How To Design Your Template On Blogger?
What's Interesting about the blogger template designer?
For one, it's the ease of use. The only tool you need is virtually just a mouse and the rest is up to you. You can customize your layout, colors, width, backgrounds, number of gadgets and just about anything else. With this new tool, there is no need for any knowledge in coding as you can easily design your own template and be unique. How cool is that? Newbies and blogger.com enthusiast will certainly welcome this addition.Watch this quick video that the blogger team prepared:
And some of it's great features:
* 15 new, highly-customizable templates from our design team, split into four families: Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc, and Watermark
* One-, two-, and three-column layouts for each template, with complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns
* Hundreds of background images and patterns from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
With the various combination that are now at your disposal, figure the math and see how many different templates you can create. Be creative, tailor your background in accordance to your topic or simply your taste. Or you can really design some good templates and have it available for the world. The blogger template designer allows you to include the attribution gadget (added to the footer by all new templates) which is there to give credit not just to the designer and artist of the background image, but to you as well. great way to get backlinks, don't you think? Just edit its settings by clicking “Edit” on Layout > Page Elements to add your own authorship or copyright information. This is all now more reason to consider using blogger.com as your free hosting platform of choice. You can read the official release on The Blogger Template Designer.
So, what do you think of this new addition to blogger? For those interested, I have written a post that provides some tips on how to become a better blogger.com user. Happy blogging!
Last year, Matt Cutts has dropped a bomb on the sphere when he hinted that site speed could be considered as a ranking factor for the SERPs (search engine result pages). While it is not clear whether this is in fact being used or will be, by Google, it is always prudent to see how your website is performing. Relevance is still king when it comes to rankings and a combination of both relevance and page speed will definitely give you the ingredients to get to the top.
So, Is Site Speed Important For SEO?
Say there are two websites that are equally relevant for a user. Which do you think will be preferred by the user, the website that loads faster or the one that takes forever to fully load? I am betting that the answer is obvious and this is the reason why I think you should regularly check for your sites loading time whenever possible and perform some changes whenever necessary. It may or may not be an official ranking factor but I am almost sure that it will come into play when Google decides which website should come first, all for the good of enhancing the users experience. According to some research I have performed, the ideal site loading time will be somewhere under 10 seconds.How do you measure your site speed loading time?
As always, I like using the KISS principle when recommending some tools for you to use. I have been using two free online SEO tools and one of them is even recommended by Google. Here they are:Numion's StopWatch (very simple and recommended by Google): The stopwatch is a small Javascript that runs on your computer (not the Numion server). It measures the time between the moment your browser starts to load the URL and when the browser signals that it has finished ("Done" in the status bar). The measurement therefore includes fetching and interpreting all HTML (including frames), images, and Javascripts. It does not include content that is handled by plugins. If the page is in the cache then the stopwatch will measure the faster loading time. The accuracy is the accuracy of the Javascript timer, on most systems 10 milliseconds. Not bad. Just be make to test for your site speed also by clearing up your cache. This will give you an idea of what a new user will have to wait for your site to load.
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| iBlogzone Test Site Speed |
Web Page Analyzer (simple but advanced): The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.
If you are interested is seeing how your site is performing, give these tools a go and get your website optimized for speed. Remember though that it is not something you should panic about, but better safe than sorry.
Hi everyone. After a taking a long break on my online activities, I have finally resumed to write my weekly echoes which as you know is my form of sharing posts that I have enjoyed reading over the past week. Whether it is a great advice, an inspirational message, a humorous post, or a breaking news, I am of the opinion that it is also a great initiative and an excellent form to build your network.
As usual they are of no specific topic and are in no particular order.
So, for the weekly roundups:
Consistency – A 7th Characteristic of Trust Building (Everyone can do this): How do you know if your readers trust you? Find out how.
16 Facebook Applications to Boost Popularity of Facebook Fan Page: Don't really have to elaborate too much here. Just head over Ching Ya's blog and be informed of some of the best Facebook apps available to boost your popularity. Must read.
The BEST Way to Generate Lots of Comments on Your Next Blog Post: An extremely simple written article and yet very informative. If you are struggling to get those comments pumping in, apply these techniques and you should see some movement going on.
7 Shoestring Marketing Secrets: The secrets of internet marketing finally revealed? Check this awesome guest post written by Jessica Swanson.
Blog Food Series: 4 Tips for whipping up fresh content
: An excellent 4 part series that provides tips on how to create fresh and original content. This is the fourth. You will have to read all parts:)
In Defence Of A Bloggers Right To Review A Product: A perfect example of how the community of bloggers work.
Dramatically improve your blog in one night: These works and it is easy to implement. Read on...
Top 7 Celebrity Plugins, How to turn Wordpress into a Hollywood Blog: If you are on WordPress, here are some must have plugins that will help you reach that status of celebrity quicker, lol
What You Should And Shouldn’t Have On Your Blog’s Sidebar: These are tips and suggestions, and I highly recommend you to read it, just in case.
Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & a Viral Video: Kikolani's weekly roundup. More great posts over here.
That's it for this "I'm Back" weekly echo. Next week (hopfully) there's more. Have a great week ahead.
