Category: Blogs

Check out this link to pick up cool new widgets, register your own, create your own customized widgets with news feeds and much more. Just click our blog post title to visit Widgetbox.com.

I think that there are some very cool ones there. Here is one that I am going to try out in a day or so http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/RandomFeed. It’s a random feed slide show widget that allows you to enter your own news feeds and then randomly displays them in a slide show format. Very neat. I don’t have time to try it out today, but I will be adding it to this blog or our Web-World Watch blog this week. I’ll point you there when I do.

Adding cool interactive gadgets to your web pages and blogs can really be fun. With a little research on the Web you can find all kind of very cool things to make your blog more interesting and fun for readers.

I also liked the liquid clock and will try that one out too!

If you are note sure if your blog posts are in the Google supplemental index, here’s a quick way to check. Go to www.Google.com and enter in site:www.yoursite.com *** –sjpked. Of course replace the your site.com with the correct URL.

One of the big reasons that blog posts routinely go to the supplemental index is that there are simply no links to them raising their page rank. Part of this is due to the way that blogs work with posts going onto a home page and then moving into the archive based on your settings.

One way to help keep your blog out of the supplemental index is to link to specific blog post pages from your website. If you point to a page specific URL for a post, not just the home page of your blog, and start to keep updated links to pertinent information, this may be one way to keep your posts live in the main Google index. Obviously another way is to write great content that others will want to back link on your blog, but if someone links to you and when, you can not control.

You may want to consider doing a special post archive on your website pointing to really hot property blog posts or ones that you particularly want to point out. What I do is to point to specific posts using Feed technology on my own website. I use a tool called FeedrollPro to allow syndication of my content and then I use FeedHoster to easily update my site feed online. This makes it super easy for me to show important headlines on my own personal website as well as to feed what I consider important content to others who are syndicating my content.

Staying out of the Google supplemental index is important so try some of these suggestions to see what may work for you too.

If you are using the new beta Blogger, well not beta anymore, then you know that you can add the widget that adds labels to your template with nearly one click. How very nice!

If you are using FTP and the Blogger platform, then you know just what a headache it is especially if you are using a custom designed template to add labels to your own blog template.

I tried over the weekend to do this dynamically on my blog Web-World Watch. I followed three different sets of instructions struggling to find a way that would work to dynamically create the label list. I tried adding the new mime type to the .htaccess file, adding a PHP include and several versions of scripts. At the end of several hours, I just had to simply give up. I added the “popular labels” using plain HTML manually to my template so that users can access my labels. I won’t be able to add more dynamically, but at least I have tried out several approaches that I have found on the Web.

If you find an easy work around to add labels to an FTP blog, let me know, I am all ears.

So you’ve got your blog going and are really working hard at creating great content, what’s next? Use your website to become your blog syndication tool.

We have several things that we have done to help syndicate our content and want to share them with you.

First make sure to install chicklets and easy subscribe buttons on your blog.

Second make sure to have a syndication page on your website pointing to your blog and your various news feeds. Here’s our page http://www.mccordweb.com/web-design/syndicate.php. We also list our clients blog feeds and allow easy one click subscription.

Third consider a script generator. Here’s ours http://www.mccordweb.com/web-design/feed-creator.php. We use FeedrollPro as our application. It is a subscription based tool, but allows for webmasters to style your feed to match their site and to syndicate your content. I do get site click-ins with this vehicle so I know that using this technique works to spread the word about your blog.

So get serious about your blog and then get busy promoting your blog through very easy syndication.