Read further only if you are serious about SEO.
Have yo got a footer text on your blog? Most of you do.

What’s a footer text?
The small code of text you see below your blog template.
Well, it isn’t always small text. That was the old times. These days, we have wordpress templates that have large footers.

You thought this is just an “out of the box” thinking eh? Not really.
In SEO, footer text carries some importance.As much as the link density on that page.If you have read my earlier post on what’s a best SEO friendly layout, then you might have noticed what i said there.

- Make sure that the last and the first thing a crawler sees is the most important thing to you.

So the first thing a crawler see is your header image/links/about you url? Well, I’ve also talked about how to keep things in place and without re-arranging how to get crawlers crawl the best portion of your page.

So, let’s talk more about footers and how they will help you rank high?

Footers are of two types(as of now.)
1 - The traditional small text footers(like you see here) mostly with the copyright text and a few email links etc.
2 - The bigger,evident web2.0 style footer text with category links and content.

If you have the first type of footer - nothing wrong.In fact it’s easier to tweak to a crawler and get our stuff done.But if you have the second type of footer(web 2.0 style), then you have an advantage - you attract the crawlers as well as human visitors - the golden rule of SEO!

Be it first or second type, what you should be bothered about are the following things.
- Is your keyword present in your footer text?
- Is there a link with your keyword?
- Is there the right keyword density within your footer text?
- Is it clear and evident to your human visitors?
- Does it look spammy?

Now you’d have got an idea on what’s important in a footer and what’s not.
In the footer text - please avoid special characters and unwanted content.Like the copyright notice.Instead, please add more relevant content.A footer text is as imporant as your body text content.

So i would not recommend a footer text like this - “Yourdomain.com Copyright - 2007, Your Address, and your Signature damn it!”

Instead i would recommend this - “Yourdomain.com, Your keyword or your blog description with your keyword with a link to one of those most important pages in the blog.”

So you get the idea.If possible, keep the category links at the footer, this will help the crawler know what the stuff is on your page.This s because, crawlers give more or same importance to the footer text(or what they see last on the code) than the content on the page.

Now it explains why a web2.0 styled large footer is preferred to a traditional style copyright statement right? But if you have one panic not. Just change it to a well drafted statement embedding your targetted keywords and links or categories even.

So much for an evil tip on How to rank high on search engines.

I receive emails from readers(though not regularly) once in awhile, appreciating the content on this blog and how it helped them.

Most of the times it’s about how an article educated them on an SEO topic which sounded jargon prior to reading the post. I’m extremely happy to read these readers comments. Because, the purpose of this blog is to make aware the average blogger what SEO is and how simple it can be even without the technical knowledge.

So, I’ve decided to give an opportunity to all my readers to let me know what they think of the blog. If you have something to say, please shoot a mail to mani(a)dailydoseofinternet.com, in the form of a testimonial, and i shall feature it on the right hand panel with a link to your blog as well.

I’ve put together a testimonial by Ankesh Kothari(the guy who suggested the Buy me a Beer plugin for John Chow) today.If you can write a better one, let me know.

Youtube spooofs are just super cool! Spoofs have a special ability to make us laugh our ass out. I enjoy watching the spoofs than the originals most of the time.After all spoofs are supposed to be spoofs. They are worth collecting because you may want to show it off to your buddies as well. Okay enough babbering - here’s the stuff i collected.

(Image courtesy - NY Times)

The ultimate youtube spoof collection of all time (updated regularly!)

Political Spoofs
1. AlGore’s penguin army
2. Hillary Clinton Sopranos campaign
3. Hillary Clinton Sopranos part 2
4. George W Bush takes on USA
5. Political campaign commercial spoof
6. Election Day 2006 spoof
7. Tony Blair spoof
8. BBC Spoof
9. George W Bush spoof
10. James Adomian does a George Bush spoof
11. Osama bin Laden Interview
12. Bin Laden Suicide Kit
    Movie/Music Spoofs
13. Titanic sequel Spoof
    
14. MTV Spiderman 2002 Spoof
15. The Grudge
16. Paris Hilton - Stars R Blind spoof
17. Kung Fu Movie spoof
18. Scary Movie 1 - Different Ending
19. MTV Cribs - Michael Jackson
20. Mad TV on Michael Jackson
21. Michael Jackson v/s Justin Timberlake spoof
22. Britney Spears spoof
23. Britney Spears Part 2
24. Madonna v/s Britney Spears
25. The Matrix
26. Matrix Spoof 2
27. The Fake Trix(on Matrix)
28. The Matrix Alive part 1
29. Matrix Spoof- Agent Smith
30. Pirates of the Caribbean
31. Pirates 2 - End of jack Sparrow
32. Pirates - Cereal Commercial
33. Pirates of the Caribbean - Final Entry
34. David Blaine Spoof
35. Dan Michael - David Blaine
36. Chris Angels v/s David Blaine Spoof
37. Hulk Hogan Spoof
38. WWE Instructional Video
39. Michael Jackson in Bollywood
40. Harry Potter Funny Spoof
41. X-Men Spoof
42. Gasolina - Daddy Yankee Spoof
43. Eminem listens to Kim Mathers
44. South Park - Eminem Spoof
45. Real Slim Shady Crazy
    Technological Spoofs
    
46. Steve Jobs - Keynote Spoof
47. Bill Gates v/s Steve Jobs
48. Apple on Vista spoof
49. Mac Spoof
50. Microsoft surface spoof

Haloscan is a commenting tool available to make your commenting requirements easy. This tool is particularly helpful for blogger/blogspot users since the commenting feature on blogger is not that very manageable. Haloscan offers editing and deleting option for comments while blogger doesn’t. I’ve been using haloscan commenting on my blog for quite some time. But steve(bloggingtips.com) suggested that i would get more comments had i installed the comments form on the same page.But this is not possible with the haloscan tool. It will open the comments on a pop up window(as you might have already seen).

Now i researched on how to get haloscan comments to be embedded n the same page but in vain.Although i cam across these posts on how to implement haloscan on post page, but again there were glitches. Also, thanks for opinions from jackbook.
I’ve now deviced a workaround for implementing haloscan comments on the very same post page. The pop up window that shows the commenting form is now available on the post page.

Here’s how i did it.Use this code where you want the commenting form to appear.

(script src=”http://www.haloscan.com/load/youraccountname” type=”text/javascript”)(/script)
(span class=”post-comment-link”)
(script src=”http://www.haloscan.com/comments/youraccountname/<$BlogItemTitle$>/?m=1″ type=”text/javascript”)(/script)
(/span)

Now, replace the “youraccountname” with your account id on haloscan(your login id).And replace all the braces with arrow brackets(<>)

Let me know if this works.

Bad Neighborhood - in SEO means a bad site that you are linking to. If google finds that you are linking to a bad site(link farm,spam sites etc), then google can penalize you and drop your page rank. Many a times, this happens as one doesn’t analyze completely the sites he is linking to.As a result google drops the page rank and it comes as a shock!
Here’s a cool online tool that will enable you to check for any bad neighborhood links on your site.

It may show some annoying results though, like for instance it shows my blog as “blog spam” as there are too many out going links. But this is OK as it’s normal for forums and blogs.

It’s a good tool if you just need to analyze a huge number of links and decide what to keep and what not. Check it out!

I think i came across this tool very late. It was launched in 2006. But this post at Blogoscoped introduced me to this amazing online tool which is an almost online photoshop, image editing program.Yea, true it is - since its launch in Nov, 2006, the fauxto team has been introducing features like in the Adobe Photoshop like working with layers, brushes etc and the latest one zoom.You can upload images online from your local machine or give in an url.
This tool would come in handy when you are on a picnic and needs access to photoshop - goto fauxto.com and you have your own photoshop online.

Hmm yeah i know I’m talking too much about it. But hey - it’s really cool!

Today, let’s see more about sitemaps. Every webmaster must have a sitemap ready for his site and submit it to google in order to get all the pages listed on Google.Sitemaps are of two types, as you know the HTML sitemap you use to navigate a site and second the sitemap used to help crawlers crawl the pages more effectively.

Why are they necessary?

Sitemaps are not necessary.(Yep i said that) Even if you don’t have sitemaps the crawlers will crawl your pages and find the content. But, it is like letting them crawl in a dark room. What if you had a well lit room with all navigation and helpers around which will take them to each room? It will be more effective right? Sitemaps serve this purpose.

It has the site structure ready giving indication to the crawlers as to which are the folders/files that are important, which are not, which are the folders/files that are to be visited frequently, and which are the ones to be visited only once. This helps the crawlers to undersand your site more effectively.

Now, how to build a sitemap for blogger?

It’s very simple in Blogger. It only requires you to go to the Google Webmaster Central and ass your site feed and the sitemap is automatically created. You can get detail instruction on this here.Make sure that you submit your full feed and not partial one.

Which is the best sitemap generator program around?
There are lot of free online and downloadable sitemap generators.
Here’s a simplified listing of what is best.

1- Python Scipt - This is the most difficult one to install. But if you are familiar with python, then this is the best one around.It’s automated and requires no additional support.I don’t recommend it for a beginner.Requires technical knowledge.

2 - Online sitemaps - This is best for small websites. It’s easy, simple and online.Just go to this site and submit your url.Fill in some basic details like time and priority settings for the files and click go!The whole sitemap will be generated online.You will get both ROR file and the Google sitemap XML file.If you are interested only in Google, use the XML sitemap.The format is according to Google sitemap protocol and is faultless.
Best choice for beginners and small websites of less than 500 pages.

3 - Gsite Crawler - This is a downloadable application. If your website is a bit large and you have time to tweak some settings and is serious about sitemap, then i would recommend this guy for you.
It requires you to give the website url, then select the types of files to be scanned from it, priority settings are automatically detected, and you can create bot Google sitemap and Yahoo url.
It has report generation as well that will give you an idea of how many urls were crawled and broken links etc.This is very useful while handling large sites.

How to make sitemap for large sites?

If you have really large websites for instance a one million page one, then it’s really going to be tough creating a sitemap. Practically this is possible with the Python script but if you are not okay with the technical stuff then you got to depend on sitemap generator programs.(If you don’t have a really large website the follwing piece of information may not help you.)

Step 1 - Download a free sitemap generator program like Gsite crawler.
Step 2 - Use it to crawl each folder of your website as separate projects.Make sure that you create a new database each time a new project is opened.
Step 3 - Now you have separate sitemaps for each folder.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder1 has a sitemap called folder1.xml and yourdomain.com/folder2 has a sitemap called folder2.xml
Step 4 - Download this simple index generator program.
Step 5 - Copy paste all the folders (containing the sitemaps) from thh projects folder of Gsite crawler(C:program files…) and put it into one single folder.
Step 6 - Run the index generator program against this parent folder.
Step 7 - Now a sitemap index would be created with links to all the child sitemaps but one problem, since in Gsite Crawlers projects folder(C:Program Files) each crawled folder will be named with underscore replacing the forward slash.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder will be named as yourdomain.com_folder
Therefore the sitemap index produced will have the links too this way.
Step 8 - Use notepad/wordpad to open the sitemap index file. Find and replace all the underscores with forward slash.
Step 9 - Upload the child sitemaps in the respective folders online.
Ex: - yourdomain.com/folder1..folder2 etc.
Step 10 - Upload the sitemap index file to the root folder and submit it to google.

Bingo! There you go you have now created a sitemap index and child sitemaps for a large website. Now submit it trough the webmaster central window and keep waiting!

Now the Safari 3.0 (with patch) is released and it’s been a week barely, I was wondering if the Safari has really made people switch or not?Firefox seems to be favorite of techno-savvy people like you and me but for an average user, IE still remains the best browser.Atleast, they can’t think of a reason why they should shift to another browser?To them,
Browser=That little blue “e”.

Are Safari’s “killer features” enough to convince an average user(who forms the major chunk of internet users) to switch from IE to Safari?

- Quickness
- Stretchable text areas
- Jumpback
- Security

To me they sound very lame reasons. Not convincing at all .BSN thinks the same.
Frankly, if you ask me why i downloaded Safari, is out of pure curiosity.And i had it cleared after the first use.I don’t use it anymore, but have not uninstalled from the system because I’d like to flash it in front of my colleagues!

I dunno about you guys,but this is my story.

There’s a new blogging software in town - It’s Blogonize!

If may want to try it, just PM this guy in this thread on DP forums and he’ll pass on the login details to you.

From my experience it’s a fresh new platform, and very promising. Though it says there are lot of additional features in it, i couldn’t find many. Many features were similar to the wordpress ones.
I liked the red cherry logo though.Very 2.0!

Well, try it if you want your hands on a fresh new software.

Optimizing your blog/site can be frustrating sometimes(most of the times), because you get the results very late. But i don’t think this is an excuse for you to jump to black hat seo and lame SEO “trials”.

It’s surprising to see that even many authoritative websites have not implemented the basic SEO factors in place. This may not be intentional, but you see as an SEO, it pains to see something like this.(screenshot).
Just randomly searching i found these websites with their title real estate misused with a very general terms “welcome to”.

I’d been happy if all of these sites were personal homepages of a teenager boy or some. But unfortunately many of these are high authority websites(which is why they are on the top results!).

I strongly disagree with using lame terms such as

“Welcome to my webapge/home page” or “{{{{{Welcome to the webpage}}}}}”

I have nothing against the terms but, realizing that the title tag is a real estate for rich and optimal(not spam please..) keyword usage, this is simply stupid!