How to optimize your images in blogger to be search engine freindly

Images which we upload in our site or blog also need to be optimized because Google also has a feature of image search. Our blogspot blog offers an image uploading feature but that is not at all search engine friendly. All you need to do is alter a little code before you publish your blog post.

Steps for optimizing images in blogger.

1. All you need to do is just change the mode of the post from compose to HTML before you upload your image. This is because you have a chance to add few words in the code which can be visible only in the HTML mode. Your image code will look as follows.

2. Next just add alt="describe+your+image+with+relevant+words" just before the closing tag which would be like />. By adding this alt tag you will have the chances of making your images also to be searched by the search engines and you have the chances of increasing your traffic. Dont forget the equal to and apostrophes before and after the words which you have used to describe your image.

Few additional tips and tools to further help your optimization.

• You need to rename the file without any spaces by adding "+" instead of spaces for the image before you begin to upload. Blogger while uploading an image will take all the spaces as %2 which has no value.
• Before uploading the image you can also compress the image size further for some kilo bytes which will obviously lower your page size. If you want to know the benefits of lowering page size you can read in my previous articles. So in order to compress your image size you can do it by a third party tool provided by yahoo called smush.it 
 

 
Compressing your image using smush.it
• You can also add title for your image so that when you hover your mouse over the image the title appears as a description for the user. Procedure is similar to that of adding alt tags. you need to write title="describe the image" before the closing tag. Here you need not place + symbols as it not looks good for the user who hovers the mouse over the image.
• While writing the alt tag also place "+" symbols wherever you need to add space. This would help your code to avoid the %2 values.

Hope these tips would enhance your traffic a little bit during this famine situation. To do this process manually is a bit tedious but what all matters is little bit patience will surely brings you some extra traffic.

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How to check the frequency of Google crawling your blog

As soon as a person writes a beautiful article he wants it to be read by others. If the topic is a hot news then that article would be in a chance of getting good traffic. Results always fail to appear when the person types the same title of his article in the Google search as soon as he publishes it. This may be due to the newness of the blog, a lower page rank and lack of popularity. An article would be shown in the search engine when it has been indexed by a search engine. As soon as an article is indexed (crawled) then your article is having the chances of showing up in the search results. If it is unique then surely it would be on the first page if it is a copied one then it is sure to land up some where in the last and if your blog has a high page rank no matter the presence of articles in other blogs with same titles it would simple take you to top of the search engine.

So what really matters is to make your content quality rich so that search engines do make it to the top. If you notice few of the top sites they always remain top of the search results in spite of many blogs and low traffic sites this is because of their page rank, quality and popularity.

How to know when Google last visited your blog?

Then how can one know that Google has crawled our site and updated its index with the new content which has been updated. You dont need any tools to do however there are few tools, but a simple provision is made by Google itself. Just type your website or blog in the Google search and beneath your webpage result you would have an option called cached. Clicking on it opens a page which has be lastly indexed by Google. A small header portion just above your blog contains a statement at which date and time did Google last visited your site. Beneath that header you will find how your blog looked at that very moment of mentioned date and time. All the articles which were published till that date are in Google's index. 

Quicker the time Google visits back to your site quicker the articles would be indexed in the search results. If you observe any top blogs or websites and check their cached status it would be mind blowing to notice that it is updated on hourly basis. Google would be visiting frequently many times a day just because many people visit that site and almost content is made unique and posted more quicker than any other site. If that site fails to maintain the above said points it will be behind many sites eventually the blog or site which will give quicker quality updates would have an even faster crawl rate.

This is how your page looks after you clicked cached

Calculating your Google crawl rate:

Now the main part is to calculate the frequency of crawling rate. So if you have started a new blog then you need to calculate the crawling factor of Google for your blog. Simply open up a notepad and note down the information available by clicking the cached link. Daily repeat the process and note it down in your notepad. Don't do it hundred times a day but simply do it just once. Simply not down the dates and time in the note pad and calculate the time intervals. This clearly gives you an idea of when Google is visiting your site that would be your frequency of Google crawling your site.

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Is my blog under panda effect if then how?

Blogging isn't any easy these days because lot of advancements in the internet technology. Previously there used to be page rank, a factor used to determine the quality of a page and depending on that a search engine used to index the page. Pages having a higher page rank would be indexed first later the pages with lower page rank. Now recently a new trend emerged in Google Algorithm namely panda.

What is panda effect?

Google is trying to make searching more precise in terms of quality and it is moving quite rapidly. Few of the top sites are gaining more search engine rankings where as some are suffering. So a site which has lowered its traffic without any reason is due to panda effect.

Why did panda effect my site?

Mostly blogs or sites which are suffering from this effect are being thoroughly scrutinized for all the available links in their site. If panda feels that most of the titles or matter is present almost in some of the blogs of higher page rank then it would label your site as content farm and you will start to be under its effect. Instead of sending traffic to your site it redirects to some blogs of higher page rank which will eventually effect your traffic and ranking. some sites which practice give always to help a stable traffic also being labeled as content farm.

How to avoid panda effect?

1. Avoid copy pasting articles from other blogs especially titles of your articles if it finds a match with the same words in any of the higher page ranked blogs your blog has to suffer. So simply eliminate all the titles which were copied or else per-existing. Just while naming a title search once if it is unique then go with the title else keep modifying until it is unique.
2. Regarding content of the articles never ever do a mistake of copying entire paragraphs from Wikipedia or any top site which have an Alexa rank below thousand. it would have an adverse effect on your site or blog. So mostly avoid copying try writing in your own words.
3. Avoid auto blogging, a software which does auto posting this would nearly make your site zero panda is made as a specialist for such software's.
4. Avoid all the bad means t gain traffic like repeating keywords several times or hiding words for this moves you into a negative realm.
5. Try to delete all the articles which have a lower traffic rate if more of such pages exist in a blog panda will feel your blog as a low quality blog and will leave you miles in the search engine results.
6. Avoid high linking because if your site has many broken links then you are a victim to panda.
7. Always aim at quality articles not copy paste articles.
8. Starting a blog and writing all unique articles is difficult but we are not to have some others style we need to develop our own style.
9. Always keep your content organized and never go beyond your blogging niche in search of traffic. If you are a writer who writes based on trends always do so regularly for if you stop you wont generate the same amount of traffic.
10. Have a quick loading, user friendly and eye catchy template. Develop traffic slowly rather than at a pace never go after quick means.

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How to remove whitespace after removing the navbar in blogger

All the blogspot blogs have a long bar at the top of the blog which is usually called as navigation bar in short navbar. Most of the designed templates or third party templates will not have such bar but if you want to remove that with the default templates provided by blogger you can do it by simple techniques which are already available in many articles published around. But most of the time people are facing a problem with the empty space which appears after the disappearance of navbar. That white space is a bit annoying and it just requires a css tweak which I will explain now.

I have divided the blogger templates into two generations. So coming to the first generation templates which were before 2010 which are almost used by many designers for tweaking because of the ease of customization. In them minima is the most widely used so what ever it may be almost all those templates had a navbar and after removing them you would get a whit space in that place so simply follow the below steps.

1.Removing navbar and white space for classic blogger templates:
Use the following code just above the closing head tags which would be like this </head> from your edit blogger template menu.

body {margin-top:0px;position: relative;top: -45px; }
#navbar-iframe {visibility:hidden;}

The above mention code will do the work. if you are still having white space just modify the number 45 in the above code with 50 and so on till you are satisfied with your header. still if you are facing any problem with the above said method simply copy paste the below code instead of the above said code. 

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none;}
body {margin-top:0px;position: relative;top: -45px; } 

2.Removing navbar and white space for new blogger templates which support template designer:

In order to remove the white space in the new blogger interface you need to firstclick edit HTML and then in the code you need to find ]]></b:skin>

Just above ]]></b:skin> add the following code

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}
body {margin-top:-30px;}

If you want to adjust the white space just keep experimenting by changing the number 30 in the above code. You can also use the below code instead of the above one it will also work for you or else use the above code only.

#navbar-iframe {visibility:hidden;}
body {margin-top:-30px;}

NOTE: If you paste the code in the template designer in the Add CSS menu it wont work, it only works if we do it manually in the code itself so hope this article will help you to remove the white space in both the template generation. Please keep an eye on the minus(-) symbol before the numbers in the code provided removing it will revert the problem.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Blogger has come out with a new kind of templates namely dynamic views, we can say it as the advanced versions of the second generation templates. They are free from navbar as blogger has noticed that many people are not liking to have a navbar. Actually they should have been keeping an remove option for navbar as they did for powered by blogger. Even they have come up recently with a option to change the favicon. But because of the launch of these new dynamic view templates they may or may not come up with the feature to remove navbar in the older templates.

Effects of removing Navbar:

-Removing navbar is not a new topic any more it has been into existence from 2006 onwards and many people have successfully been blogging without navbar for many years. There is no mention of the removal of navbar as violating blogger terms of service so it is not against blogger's TOS. Only an article about navbar in blogger help mentioned that "The Navbar appears on all freely-hosted Blog*Spot blogs, but can be disabled for users publishing via FTP". They dint really insist free users to keep the navbar or else dint mention any note that it would be against the TOS to remove navbar. They simply said navbar can be disabled in blogs hosted via FTP. They don't recommend or support the removal but also there is nothing to do with the TOS.

-Many will also feel removal of navbar would make their site to be crawled fast but it is a myth their is no truth in it because we are just hiding the navbar not removing it. This only gives a professional look nothing more than that. So hope this article would help you to remove the blank space which appeared after you have removed your navbar.

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Right time to add meta tags in your blog and how?

Meta tags are the words which we do hear with the people who do the SEO stuff. It plays a major role in the search engine rankings. And improper placement of these or misusing of these tags will also make you to go down in your ranks. So here is a article which gives a basic knowledge on Meta Tags and how to place them in your blogger based blogs.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are simple words placed below the head tags of our web page which gives the complete description of the content of the web page or your blog. So a search engine need not crawl the entire content of the web page of what it contains just the information supplied at the meta tags would be enough for it to index your page. So adding meta tags is a search engine optimization technique mostly used by many SEO gurus to make the site top of the search results.

What is the right time to add meta tags?

You cant take few words and  place them in the meta tags, instead you need to build a proper organized content in your webpage or your blog. For example you are building a blog on search engine optimization then you need to supply the key words which fit that category and if I do it with only one post it wont be helpful. So after few posts regarding the topic would help my blog or web page to hit the bulls eye in the search engine rankings. So never make a mistake of placing key words without proper relevant content in your blog.

What is the code for meta tags and where to place them?

The code generally has many segments out of which title, description and keywords play a major role remaining are just optional but will help in giving extra information. So a simple structure of your meta tags will be as follows.

<meta name="title" content="Mention the title of  your blog" />
<meta name="description" content="Just describe your blog in more than 100 words" />
<meta name="keywords" content="write, few, key, words, which, best, suits, your, blog, separated, by, comas" />

See that you dont place irrelevant key words and description, if not you have to suffer a lot with search engines especially Google.You can place up to 20 relevant keywords.After clicking edit HTML in your blogger dashboard you need to place the above code just below your head tag which will be like this <head>  and save your template.

Few of the other optional meta tags are regarding author, copyright and robots.txt dont worry you dont need to provide these information. Regarding robot.txt you need not worry if you are blogspot user other than that you need to place them along with your other meta tags.

How to check if I had properly inserted the code?

Its simple just go to Google and type meta tag analyzer you would get few sites which would help you analyze your meta tags. If there are any errors it will suggest it also gives you the relevancy of your meta tags to the content of your page. You can also get an idea on how your site looks in the search engine.

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Social bookmarking will quench your identity

Many think that social bookmarking will help to boost their sites traffic. But what you shouldn't do is to depend on social bookmarking sites in the initial stages of your blogging. As soon as you write a beautiful article you look for people who love to read it but people aren't interested to read some one who has just wrote his first or second blog post instead they like to read from some top notch blogs.

Mashable is one of the worlds top most blogs and if you submit an article in Digg for instance it would receive 50 plus Diggs within 15 min of its posting though the article is informative or not. But if you have written an article taking lot of struggle and posting it in Digg even for days your article will not get a Digg. This is not your fault this is how the audience respond to new sites. But as soon as you link an article from some top blog instantly you will see people voting.

As your blog came into existence recently it would not be indexed by the search engines not even one search engine would crawl you. So posting in some social bookmarking may help with one or two visitors but when ever people search for something which is in your blog they dont get your blog but they'll get the social bookmarking site first than your blog. This means you are being dominated over by a social bookmarking site. Your blog will not have its own identity but rather a social bookmarking site does.

So you might be thinking then what is the use of publishing an article in social bookmarking. For a newbie blogger he should build his blog with care not to depend on some other sites for its growth. But as your blog grows big and get noticed by search engines you need not publish your article in directories people themselves do and at that time you dont need to worry about the votes and traffic it gradually increases. Even your article does gets its search ranking above the social bookmarking site. So forget social bookmarking for traffic and start building your blog. Quality does pay you but it takes time never do a mistake in letting your blog go down all by yourself.

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How to find the size of your blog page

Finding the size of your blog page helps you in better understanding its loading times.  Concept is simple lower the size of your page faster is the loading time. So you can draw a relationship that size of your blog page is inversely proportional to its loading time.

Size of blog  α  1 / loading time of that page

Smaller the size faster the loading time
Larger the size slower the loading time.

What matters the most is, speed of internet will not be same in all the places of the world and for people accessing from such slower connections would face some difficulties with larger page size. So if your blog is having smaller size it would load fast and helps you to make that visitor to stand long in your site.

Even the search engine finishes its crawling fast if your page is of lower size compared to a larger page. So as soon as your blog gets crawled soon your result will be shown in the search page and those whose pages are still being crawled appear in the later stage.

I would show you some blogs which have a very small page size.
First one in my observation is one of my favorite blogger Amit Agarwals page Labnol. Labnol has got no rich graphics or any good colors but still it could stand as one of the top technology blog of India with an Alexa ranking always below 1500. And when I saw the page size it was just 28.29 KB and its loading time is less than a second.

Second blog in my observation is Quick online tips a a blog which gives some online tips is also having a low page size of 26.54 KB and it too loads within a second. This blog too stands good with an Alexa ranking below 4500.

Sizes of webpage of some top Blogs

These two blogs were having low page size and also faster loading times so this could be the reason for their good amount of traffic. These blogs have a very normal look without any huge images and widgets but only simple matter but still took top positions in ranking.


Tool used to find the size of a page:
Now coming to the main part there are many tools to find the size of a page whether it is yours or else some one else’s page. I used a simple online tool called getPageSize which is one among hundred tools by searchenginegenie. Simply use it and find the size of your blog or or webpage and act accordingly.

What should be the optimum size for a webpage:
SEO experts usually suggest anything below 150 KB would do the job but from my above analysis below 50 would work like a magic. What do you say? Want to get good traffic then find a light weight template.

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Choosing a search engine optimized template

After starting a blog next thing you need to do is select a nice template which is light weight and helps search engines to crawl fast. So strictly speaking about blogger many people dont know the exact influence of selecting older templates. I agree blogger has updated many of its features and one of its main milestone is implementing some advanced templates along with a template designer. But selecting an old template is worth while for getting good search engine rankings.

What I observed among search engines is they usually crawl in the order of page ranks especially Google. And a blog which is 2 months old cant cope up with those rankings. Even if your content is fresh and good you wont make it first but as soon as the same content is copied and pasted by a blog which has a good page rank will be indexed soon. So to sustain such competition is difficult in starting stages and if your blog is too heavy also makes it to be behind many pages in search.

So selecting a light template may slightly make your blog to push little bit forward in search engine rankings.  Only Google always tweaks its algorithms but many search engines like Bing Yahoo still have an old fashioned searches where light weight blogs do have some favor. Of course Google will be the first one to index new blogs. 

So selecting a new template from blogger would make only a slight difference over choosing an old template. But why to give a chance some blogs which are using some older templates of 2006 of blogger are still having a good crawl ability and also ranking good. Some of the blogs like labnol an old blogger based blog's  appearance is awesome in search engines even after 5 years with some of its blogspot posts. Now it is migrated into WordPress as it offers more flexibility and good search engine friendly features.

Still labnol theme is a very light weight this tells us the advantage of light weigh template over a heavy weight one. One more blog which reminds me of such light weight interface is QOT Quick online tips this blog also is a light weight which initially used to be a blogger blog.

How to select older blogger template: 

Thanks to blogger it still gives users to choose from the older templates.

1. You need to click on the design tab.

2. Next you need to click on the edit html tab.

3. As you scroll below you will find an option to select older template.

 

Option+to+choose+old+blogger +template;

In new blogger interface Follow these steps

1. Click on template option present in the right side of your blogger dashboard.

2. Scroll to bottom you will find revert to classic template Click on it and you can use the old templates.

 

In new blogger interface 

Which template might be best:

Personally I felt minima is the best template which you can choose because it is plain and you can design it your way. Before the introduction of new template many template designers used to alter their blog templates throught this template only. My blog template is also a modification of minima template. I have copied the style from labnol blog which is a top technology blog of India written by Amit Agarwal. I observed his blogspot template and thought he would have made it from minima I tried and was successful to an extent of course I have altered the color schemes.  So if you want to build a nice search engine optimized blog template my suggestion is use minima.

This blog post is only for people who are serious about traffic but those who love nice latest templates can use it but that would not be a good choice for increasing traffic.

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Taking blogging to a next level

Blog isn't a new term anymore their are many bloggers around but only few of them are successful. I have also gone through some people who were successfully holding their positions as a great bloggers. Blogging has come up entirely with new directions. A new subject has come into existence and is not limited but growing. From the day blog was introduced no one would have thought that this would play a major role in present day browsing. Many bloggers have emerged and had also established a unique identity on this globe. Search engine optimization, templates, platforms, tips and tricks to tweak blogs have been increasing day by day and is still growing.

Recently their was no craze for blogging but now many have left their main stream career and have taken blogging as their profession. Days have changed a lot, for us to stand apart among some millions of blogs is very difficult but yet challenging. Search engines have also tweaked their algorithms based on the quality and quantity of a blog and hence a struggle for newbies is becoming a must. Less knowledge on blogging make you to be behind many of the bloggers.

So you need to tweak yourself and gain as much knowledge on blogging and thus you can take your blogging profession to a next level. Have a good attitude and always encourage new bloggers. Their are many terms like back linking, commenting, widgets, jQuery, CSS, meta tags, site maps etc which you will come across in your blogging journey. You can also take some short cuts but that wont last long as search engines are also becoming intelligent beings. So this blog lets you know some blogging tips and tricks which may help in taking your blog from basic to professional level.

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