We have already seen how to tweak your wordpress title tags for search engine optimization.It was easy.
What we did in Wordpress is converted the default option in wordpress where - The Blog Title would be in front followed by the post title to - Post Title - Followed by Blog title.
Ex: - DailySEoblog - How to convert blogger title tag for SEO
to
How to convert blogger title tag for SEO - DailySEoblog

Why should you convert the default title structure?

In the default option - since the Blog title(Dailyseoblog in my case) appears first, the important information(which is the post title) is pushed to the end.There is a chance for the search engines to append this long a title. Also, it wouldn’t look appealing to searchers on google.

How do we change the title tag structure on Blogger so that it’s optimized for search engines?

The same law applies here. Put the main content(Post title) first followed by the Blog Title.
In Blogger, by default the Blog Title would come first.Let’s analyze the code.

Do you find something like this on your blog template?(Dashboard]Template)

[ItemPage][title][$BlogTitle$] - [Blogger][$BlogItemTitle$][/Blogger][/title][/ItemPage]

Change it to

[ItemPage][title][Blogger][$BlogItemTitle$][/Blogger]-[$BlogTitle$][/title][/ItemPage]

(Please replace square brackets with arrows>< )

Save and republish. Now, what we’ve done is brought the Item page title(which is the blog post title) to first place and pushed the Blog Title to the end.

The results should like like this.

BEFORE - YOURBLOGNAME-YOUR POST NAME
AFTER - YOUR POST NAME-YOURBLOGNAME

Now, that’s one more reason for your blog to gain edge over other bloggers and rank high on search engines.

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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.

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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!

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I’m writing this post using blogger in Draft an experimental feature of blogger, where you can access some cool new features that Google plans to implement on Blogger.

What’s new now?

• A video uploader that let’s you upload a video from your local machine to Google Videos.
• A blue logo

Probably, the team is adding more features to test soon, but as of now, this is it.

Here’s the official blog where you can get more updated details on Blogger Draft.

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Recently Ankesh Kothari developed a plugin which John Chow implemented to his blog and became an instant hit. (The man have promoted some cool ideas earlier too). It’s the “Buy me a beer” plugin I’m talking about. It helps visitors on your blog to donate money through paypal - to buy a beer for John Chow(or you).

This is an interesting plugin since it gives you a valid yet simple reason to donate money to the blog owner and i more persuading than a “Donate me money” button.See Ankesh’s thoughts on it here.

Unfortunately Ankesh developed this plugin for Wordpress users only. But blogger platform user’s like me would really want to use this plugin -but how?
Here’s what i found - a workaround to implement the same to your blogger platform.

Here’s how to

1- You should have a paypal account.
2 - Login to your paypal account
3 - Goto Merchant Tools
4 - Under “Key Features” click “Buy Now Buttons”
5 - Enter the details by filling in the forum
6 - As you enter please copy down the details to a notepad
7 - Copy down this link below

(https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=
youremailid@paypal&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amount=&return=&item_name=
Your+servicename+separatedby+plus+signs)

8 - In the above code, replace youremailid@paypal.com with your paypal login email id.
9 - Also, replace “Your+servicename+separatedby+plus+signs” with the service name you entered while filling in the form(the first detail you entered)

Make sure the service name is separated with plus signs. Ex:- If you entered “Buy me a beer”, then it should be “Buy+me+a+beer”

Implementing the link in blogger template.
Goto your template and paste this link wherever you want, i.e between posts or on the sidebar.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=
mani@dailydoseofinternet.com&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amount=
&return=&item_name=Buy+Me+a+drink+if+you+liked+this+post

That’s it - it should work if all everything is allright.

—————–UPDATE——————–
Thanks to Ankesh, there is a small correction in the above procedure.

In Step 4, instead of “Buy Now” click on “Donations” and in the details fill up form, Under “Security Settings” select the “No” button and this will generate you a HTML link which can be used to link link text. Select any text(that you want to prompt readers to donate you money) on your blog template and link them using the ahref command to this link.

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Not getting traffic even after writing good content on your blog?
It may be because you have not optimized your blog for google. If you didn’t know, optimizing a blog is different from optimizing a normal website.The best part is that it’s easier.

Before reading further, please refer these articles.

Here are a couple of sure-shot search engine optimization tips that will help you optimize your blog for Google and help you get traffic thereby. Implement these tips today and i can assure you that your statistics will improve in a few days.

1- Change your title urls/permalinks

Is your blog generating dynamic numbered template headings? Like “www.yourblog.com/entry.php?id=3″ ?

Big mistake - you should change this to “www.yourblog.com/your-post-title.htm”

If you are using wordpress you can simply change this from the publish settings.On blogger, you don’t have to worry much as by default the pages generated are titled based on your title usage. In this case you have to be careful with your title.How to write titles that attract traffic?

This is because search engines can understand what your content is based on your url/permalinks. So a url that is generated out of the title makes more sense than a randomly generated numbered page.

2- Change your layout

This may be a little complicated to understand for those who are not familiar with web-design. But let me put it the simple way. Make sure that you have a template that meet the following criteria.

- In your source code, make sure that there is less junk(CSS and HTML) and more of content.
- In your basic template structure, the links(categories or links to your best posts etc) are the first thing that bots will crawl.Example, in a three column template,if your links are included on the left hand side, wen can ensure that bots crawl them first and them move on to the body.Check out this post LINK where I’ve clearly stated on how to select a perfect SEO friendly template for your blog.

3 - Footer.

Bots remember the first and last things they see on your site to a certain level of importance. Like for instance,the footer. Suppose you have a footer that says - copyright - yourblog.com. Change it to “copyright - yourblog.com - SEO tips and Tutorials”, this way bots will remember the SEO tips and tutorials keyowrd they read on your blog.Make sure you don’t spam your footer though - with more number of keywords.

4 - Image ALT tags.

In free blogging patforms like blogger or wordpress, unfortunately image ALT tags are not used by default. Make sure that in every image you upload(on every article or even the bullet images on the template), you use the keywords as ALT tags make sure you don’t spam it again, but optimum usage is recommended.

5 - Interlinking your posts.

Extremely important point.This is a pain taking process honestly. Because you got to dig out your old posts, get their urls, remember them ah! Pain in the arse! But let me tell you, it’s a good habit to maintain a spreadsheet with all your old and present urls to posts updated, so that you can hand pick them any time.Using this, post links to your old posts within posts. This will ensure that none of your pages are brushed beneath the carpet but are equally given importance and the Google juice will equally fill them.

These 5 tweaks will ensure you that none of the articles, that you wrote with much pain, is left un-noticed but helps you get more traffic on the engines.

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Blogdesk is a utility that allows you to create/mofiy/edit and compose your blogs posts offline(For Wordpress and other CMS systems).You may save your posts as drafts for later publication or publish it instantly.

It has a very simple and easy composing window where the post can be edited just like in MS Word. You can also add images by dragging them in to the window.Later, on publication, the images also will be uploaded to the site.

All the standard components in a blog post are included in the editor window.

This application is now not compatible with Blogger but works amazingly well with wordpress,Movable type,Expression Engine,Drupal,Serendipity,Blojsom and a few ther CMS’s as well.

However, One drawback is that, in order to publish posts directly from this tool, you go to give your username and password to it. This may not be seen as a good option by many since it may prove foolish.

On all other matters, this is a really flexible ad simple offline blogging unitility, especially if you want to organize your posts and do most of them offline.

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Alright …. So?

Do we have a export function that will help us migrate to wordpress? - NO

Do we have categories? NO

Are we making more sense with lables? NO

Can we switch back to olg blogger?(Yikes..!) NO

Blogger is anyway, out of beta. And the developers are pretty much excited about it.

We have a better dashboard now - Hmm…well, dont ask me what, but that’s what they say.
Yes, have you guys noted the help-resource box on the bottom right at the dashboard, in case you haven’t cheked it - the blogger status thing wont just work.It shows a 404 Forbidden error to me.

We have instant publishing now - no more illusionists circle!

We have a full feed option now - which is great! We could have individual feeds for all the comments on the blogs and posts.The RSS 2.0 formats also have been incorporated.Wicked!!

Protecting your blog - keep it within your family. Yep if you just don’t want to show your blog to others or you are a private deective, or just want to share your monthly expenses living in the US to family in India, use this feature!

Customized design - been there with the beta, just re enforcing the idea.

It would’ve been more interesting if the questions at the top were answered, but hey there’s the next version coming up sometime later - I’ll wait.

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10 things to keep in mind before selecting a theme

- Decide on the category/mood of your blog.
See what type of blog you’ve got already. And select a theme from the appropriate category(many template stores have this).
You would see an appealing theme in the theme selector but you wouldn’t want to apply a heavy artistic theme to a technology blog.

- See if you have a theme that will feature/support all the blocks your existing blog has.
i.e - Blogrolls, Technorati, Links etc.
If they don’t have these blocks, then see if there is space in the template so that you can incorporate it manually.

- See if the theme designer has a copyright license and has specified in the instructions on his site that the links to his blog(mostly in the footer) be maintained. If so, carefully study them. If you don’t want to link back to him, then better select another designer who is okay not linking to him.

- See if the designer has put in unwanted codes into the template, like affiliate links, redirection pages or even Google AdSense ads! They will not benefit you or even may harm you - so better stay away from them. You can find this out by comparing the source code with that of your existing blog.

- Test the skin on different screen sizes(800×600, 1-24×768….1280×1024 etc) and see how it looks, it’s better if you can strike a balance between all the sizes, and not stick to a theme because it works well on 1024×768, it may look ugly on another one.

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Okay, so you’ve shifted to blogger beta from the old blogger > then there’s bad news for you.
If you are planning to move to a new domain with a wordpress installation then, things are going to be even more troublesome.
Wordpress has a Import feature already that helps you import all your posts from blogger to wordpress in a matter of click. But it still is waiting for an upgrade that allows you to move from blogger beta. As of now, if you try the import feature on wordpress, it does not login to the blogger beta account.
There are a few suggestions made on the web that will help you do it - some stupid some partly working and some grunchy.

The simplest one is here.
- Goto your blogger beta blog, take the RSS feed(no body has explained how) and save it as an XML document. Now goto to wordpress import function, then select the “Import from RSS” option and browse select the XML file - Upload!
Although it may show that import successfull - It didn’t work for me the 12th time even.

Now the hard one (as on webbleyou.com)
This one is a bit tricky and tests your patience - i would give you an award for the “Most patient blogger” if you successfully did this.

The sad thing is that google doesn’t allow you to switch back to old blogger from blogger beta, so if you’ve been blogging since the last few years,bad luck!

So i warn all the professional bloggers around - If you are planning to move to a new domain with a professional wordpress installation, the keep away from the blogger beta - It’s a TRAP by Google and most likely you may disagree to Darren Rowse!

Cheers!

——————-

UPDATE

After a few days from this post i found the real working script that imports your blogger beta posts,comments with url and images to wordpress.

Check it here

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