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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.

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.

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.

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.