Are you tired writing articles on your blog ? Can’t find topics to blog about? Losing out on the frequency of posts on your blog ?

Worry not. There are plugins to your rescue. Confused? Well, you should be. We’ve heard about numerous ways to help you write more articles on your blog.

Allow guest blogging, find more topics, ask questions to readers etc… Well, we have a brand new option now.

Allow visitors to submit posts/articles to you. Yes, allow all visitors (including all of them without any registration what so ever) to submit posts to you.

You know that your readers have a lot of contributions to make, but they don’t have a platform to express it. At the moment what they have is a contact form or email contact with you. If you are allowing guest blogging it again requires one to register first and then apply for a position etc. This filters down content and finally only a few make it.

But how about letting everyone contribute articles to you? Cool isn’t it?

This plugin does just that! It provides a submission page where in just like the ‘contact me’ page, users can submit articles to the admin of the blog.

The articles get saved as drafts in the dashboard where from the admin can publish the articles if found good. You can even allow special users to directly publish the posts. And you can also ban IPs from posting.

My only concern is about spam. Luckily, the submissions are saved as drafts only (except for the trusted users) so you can very well delete spam from the dashboard. but if there are too many of them (like how they normally are), then it may go into a waste-of-time exercise mode, deleting spam manually.

But this seems to a good plugin to increase the number of posts in your blog and as well as give privilege to users and gain their confidence by allowing them to participate in the blog. A must try for people running out of ideas to blog.

Download the plugin here
Test page here

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How many of us really give importance to the Meta tags description in our blogs?

How many of us bother to change the description in ever page of our blogs?

And how many of us really check how our meta tag description appear on Google?

Not many of us do. We either take the comfort of your default template settings or at the most go for a meta tag plugin for wordpress and set a universal description for all the pages in your blog. Right?

Raj Krishnan, of the Snippets Team from Google, has posted a new article at the official Google blog. This article seems to convey a whole new meaning to Meta description tags and it’s usage on sites and blogs. In his article he says that bloggers/webmasters should …

• Differentiate the descriptions for different pages.
• Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else.
• Include clearly tagged facts in the description.
• Use quality descriptions

He also suggests that one should not..

• Provide the same description for all the pages.
• Provide irrelevant data on the description.
• And provide lengthy descriptions which are likely to be truncated.

Raj further says - “A little extra work on your meta descriptions can go a long way towards showing a relevant snippet in search results. That’s likely to improve the quality and quantity of your user traffic.”

So pull up your socks and go ahead tweak your meta tag description for your blog and make it short, sweet and tempting - all the while being relevant to your site.

If you have 5 pages in your blog, give separate descriptions for each page according to the content in them.

If you are looking for a plugin to get this done, install the All in one SEO pack today to your wordpress blog. It will show you a meta tag description field and meta keywords field in the dashboard whenever you write a post, and you can give a separate meta description for each article/page. So you can increase the quality of your pages and it’s snippets on Google, not only for each page of your blog, but each post too.

Resources
What are Google snippets?
How to change your site’s title and description?
Improve snippets with meta description
Prevent snippets from being shown on Google

UPDATE - According to Google’s latest policies, meta tags are not so important as they used to be.

Hope you are aware that getting .edu and .gov incoming links to your blog can be the best thing that you can do in the SEO front, to upgrade your blog/site to the next level. Having said that, .edu and .gov links are hard to get as they are in most cases authority websites focussed on information or governmental policies and may not be likely to sell you links or donate one.

Now you have two ways left.

1. Write comments on these blogs.

There are blogs hosted on .edu domains, majority of them owned by students and alumnis of the respective school/university. In order to get incoming links from them simply go on commenting.
Wait, that’s easily said. There many not be topics of interest to you, and you may end up being a spammer. So find relevant topics that my interest you and write only genuine comments.
Some blogs may require you to register with the official email id (of the university) so you strike out chances of commenting on these blogs.

2. Get a .edu blog of yours.

Sounds crazy right? But true. Adison.edu is giving .edu blogs to anyone who will contribute US $35 per month to it on subscription.

So if you can spent US $35 you get a blog of your’s, which can be used to link to your blogs and site. And may be if you are a clever marketer, you can even go ahead selling links and make some money as well. If you manage to make US$ 35 per month, you break even on your investment !!

Forget creating..selecting a wordpress theme for your blog itself is a big deal. When you have too many options, it’s just a task tedious. And for non-technical people, tweaking the CSS code, or redesigning the header template is quite hard.
Always wondered if there is a theme builder software available for wordpress. And I had been asking many designers if they would recommend one for me. But in vain.
All of them used two or more softwares like dreamweaver and fireworks mixed with some self coding and CSS to generate their themes. Well, I could not afford to giving in so much time to design a theme for myself. Better said - I’m lazy.
All I needed was a WYSIWYG custom theme builder that will allow me to drag and drop my designs, select the colours of the fonts and background, select a two- column or three column template and just put in the content.
Well, after a good boring research only to find loads and loads of designers who promised to build me themes for very cheap rates, I found this cool tool.

It’s a custom Wordpress theme generator, that makes theme designing for wordpress as easy as playing tic-tac-toe.

All you need is to select the text and background colours…select a template, two or three column, select the text scheme,select the menu layout and presto you are done! (There are more options) It shows a live preview of your theme while selecting the options.

Then it allows you to download the theme in zip format and the files separately. All you need is to upload the theme files to the template folder.

So if you want to design a wordpress theme just at the snap of your finger..try this wordpress theme generator tool.

Well, that’s what they say. Windows Live search has undergone it’s biggest ever update since it’s launch in 2005. According to the official blog, Live has become more relevant, quick and easy to use. MSN had proved earlier that their Image search is far more better than Google image search with it’s update recently.

So keeping that standards, this one sure looks promising. This update should mean more relevant searches, and more precise answers. Any testers? I wish they bring back the link finder and site index operators back..
See the press release here.

Following discussions on the web about reducing duplicate content on wordpress blogs, found out a few interesting things. These are things that you may not notice and may assume is normal on a blog. You may even see probloggers practicing such mistakes on their blogs. Well they are unaware of it..but they sure are mistakes

An example is - categorizing an article/post in more than one category. This practice is bad for your blog as it increases the chances of duplicate content on your blog. So Google recommends (Matt Cutts does) that you categorize articlces/posts only in one category at a time. But I’ve seen Darren Rowse tag posts in more than one category on his blog. See his latest post on page rank today. Here he tags the post into two categories. Video Posts and Search Engine Optimization.

Although I believe that it’s good to tag the posts in your blog to one category, seeing top bloggers practice it the other way makes me think… where’s the line to be drawn?

Everyones carrying a digital camera these days. And everyone’s clicking lot of pics too. Where do you store these files?
If you prefer your PC that means you are going to run out of space sooner or later. You would be using flickr or picasa otherwise..but there’s storage limit for free users at these services too. Have you tried making good use of these photos other than storing it online and sharing it with your friends? May be printing your friends picture on to a tea cup and sending him on his birthday? Cool isn’t it?

Picsquare is an online portal that helps you to do just that. And if you are in India it’s damn cheap too (I wouldn’t be promoting it otherwise). To print your photo on a tea-cup, it costs only Rs 299 and to print on a T-shirt it costs only Rs 399/-. That’s cheaper than you thought I bet!

Picsquare accepts credit cards, but I’ve had a few glitches the first time i tried to order a coffee-cup. But they were quick to sort it on intimating about it on email. I think this is a very good application and an excellent idea for Indian startup , when there are a lot of NRIs who would want to gift personalized gifts to their folks in India.

The site is neatly designed, even though from the SEO perspective, like all Indian startups, it does not perform well. There is unwanted clutter of script on the landing page and keywords(if at all any) are not highlighted.

But a cool service, you must try.

There are a lot of blogging talents around, that we often over look just because we are so used to think about our own blog only. Nirmal TV is an active blogger in the blogosphere here in India. His blog Life Rocks 2.0 features articles on technology, tips and tricks, blogging, tutorials and the internet ! I’ve been very impressed with his socializing skills in the Indian Arena of blogs. His blog receives on an average 20 comments on every article. Pretty cool that is!
I’m still unsure how he’s able to make others comment on his articles. However one thing that I noticed is that Nirmal himself makes it a point on other blogs too. And most of the commenters on his blog are reciprocal commenters. Which is not bad at all.

When a first time visitor comes to his blog, they’ll see a lot of comments and gets a good impression about him. And he’s likely to grab his feed. This is a great lesson to learn from Nirmal.

Nirmal is up-to-date on technology within his reach, and often strikes a point blogging about it prior to anybody else. Clever! Something to be noted about Nirmal’s articles is that he churns out lot of “Numbered lists”. Like Top 10 themes, Top 10 plugins and the like which gets dugged and stumbled upon by his readers which in turn gives him lot of traffic. Interestingly, Nirmal prefers lists with odd numbers like 7 and 9 rather than 5 and 10, which are very common on the internet.

Apart from all these stunts, Nirmal is out to grab more organic traffic online by harnessing the power of SEO. He’s approached me for a quote too. Too clever!

Spotted this strange ad on my AdSense ads today. It has a - “Show more” link as well as an “Ad-links unit” combined with it beneath 468×60 banners. Show more ads were seen tested on many websites earlier and is reported here on SEO round table and here on Mashable. Even Ad-link units were seen on may sites reported on SEO round table.

But this combination of Show more links and Ad-Links units together are first time. Any clues on how it would function?

Honestly, this is the most effective and useful Wordpress plugin I’ve seen in a long time. Shylock Adsense plugin has gotten better with it’s new updated version where, it allows you to,

• Insert AdSense ads in between posts
  It calculates the number of lines and paragraphs in an article and judges the middle of the post and inserts the selected AdSense codes appropriately.
• Insert AdSense ads at the top, bottom, top right and bottom right of posts or articles on your blog.
• Random positions
  This is very effective as the plugin randomly inserts the AdSense codes at the above said positions for each page load. Excellent to increase the ROI on AdSense ads.
• Show the AdSense ads on posts that are X number of days old.

This plugin was developed by Alexandru from Shylock Blogging and I truly think this man should get an award for this baby.

Inserting AdSense ads on blog posts have never been so easy. It’s just a matter of selecting the right AdSense code, selecting the position and inserting it on the right post. Very simple and effective !

Download the plugin here | Report bugs here | Instructions to install

A special thank you to Kevin, for nudging about the update.