Sunday, December 20

Why Change Your Headings From H3 to H2?




You'd be surprised to learn that, if you look into the source of the blogger pages for individual posts, you'd see that the headings are h3. I was investigating google search results where my blog was appearing on page 1 when I realized that! I'd think google would understand that and treat them as most important headings in the post for SEO purposes. But does it? And moreover, do other search engines understand that a h3 header is actually the main header of the post? I wonder where my blogger pages would be if all post titles were h1 instead of h3!

Ideally, you would want to change all post titles to h1 however in blogger, h1 is "reserved" for the blog title. We want to avoid more than one h1 item, based on several advice on the internet. But we don't want h3 either. So we go for h2.
If you don't want to play guessing games with search engines, you'll change this with me. Here's how.

Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates. Search for post.title and you'll find something like that:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h3>
    </b:if>


Go ahead and replace h3 with h2:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h2>
    </b:if>


Save your template and you're done! Just to make sure, you only changed 2 digits total! Simple as that!

Credit for the code change directions goes to: http://www.magznetwork.com/tutorials/complete-seo-guide-for-blogger-templates.html

[UPDATE] Well, it turns out this is not the end of the story. Turns out all the widgets in the sidebar have H2 headers also by default! Went ahead and changed all of those to H5! This will improve the SEO I am sure! It's quite a few more changes - two changes for each widget - but these changes are also simple changes. I recommend you do that too!

Tuesday, December 15

Install Smarter Related Posts for Blogger




Following advice from Dan the Internet Man (http://dantheinternetman.com), I decided to install Smarter Related Posts for Blogger on this blog.

I suggest you consider installing it on your blogger as well. Dan suggests improving the internal link structure in your website or blog this way will reduce the need for external links by about 50%. Here's how it works:

Just grab the code from the source: http://www.moretechtips.net/2009/04/jquery-gdata-api-smarter-related-posts.html . I am using the code #2 to be inserted in the sidebar. The code is:


<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://blogger-related-posts.googlecode.com/files/related-posts-widget-1.0.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
relatedPostsWidget({
   'loadingText':'loading...'
});</script>


Just go Settings/Layout/Add new Widget and pick a HTML/Javascript. You can leave the title blank. The title comes out to be Related Posts automatically.

The example of how this works is in the sidebar of this blog.

I have found that with some posts, the Related Posts Widget only shows back the same post, or even no posts. For posts that have few or no related posts showing, just add more labels. Also, shorten your labels so more posts will share the same label. The widget is label based.

Check the Smarter Related Posts for Blogger Widget out for yourself and let me know if you have questions or problems running it. So far it worked for me wonderfully! Just leave me a comment below!

How to Improve Visibility of Adsense Ads in Blogger




To maximize your Adsense revenue, you want to position the adsense ads into the place where a reader or commenter may see them. Like here:

I recommended in an earlier post to enable "ads between posts" under Settings/Layout/Page Elements/Edit in Blog Post Rectangle/Configure Inline Ads.

I also recommended your comment form placement setting to "embedded below post" which makes comments more viewable and adds more text to the posts as the comments build up. This is a setting under Settings/Comments/Comment Form Placement.

Unfortunately this combination of the Comment and Ads setting leaves a large gap between the end of the comment form and the adsense ads so the adsense ads become "low visibility" ads.

To fix this, I suggest to place your adsense "ads between posts" above the comment part of the page. You will have to modify the Template Html to achieve this.

Here are the directions on how to do this quickly:

Following Woork's idea to place ads below the title here's what you do to accomplish ads above the comment section: Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates/. Search for "includeAd", you will find this piece of code:


<b:if cond="'data:post.includeAd'">
<data:adend/>
<data:adcode/>
<data:adstart/>
</b:if>


and you will see it is placed below the comment code. Cut the above piece of code out and place it above the comment code and below the post code. The final arrangement should look like this:


<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
      <b:if cond='data:post.includeAd'>
        <b:if cond='data:post.isFirstPost'>
          <data:defaultAdEnd/>
        <b:else/>
          <data:adEnd/>
        </b:if>
        <div class='inline-ad'>
          <data:adCode/>
        </div>
        <data:adStart/>
      </b:if>
      <b:if cond='data:post.trackLatency'>
        <data:post.latencyJs/>
      </b:if>
      <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "static_page"'>
        <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
      </b:if>
      <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
        <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
      </b:if>


As you can see, the comment code is now below the includeAd code. Check out this very blog to see the final layout. The adsense ads become more visible instead of stuck to the end of the post, with a big gap after the comment section. Let me know in your comment how you like this new arrangement! I should be making more adsense $$$ right away ;)

Sunday, December 6

More Great Dofollow Social Bookmarking Sites




You could find in a previous post about my top selections for top dofollow and high traffic social bookmarking sites. Many sites that looked good on surface proved not so valuable and were thrown out of the selection. I found some additional dofollow social bookmarking sites and I am presenting them here.

Credit goes to the following sites:
There is probably over 100 bookmarking sites mentioned in total. I have done some serious filtering here.

Some of the "recommended" social bookmarking sites that are supposed to "work" I don't find useful. Reasons are: they are not dofollow, they do not really offer direct links to my sites, or they do not offer a separate page with exclusively my bookmark. Some sites are out of business. I have excluded those and am putting the rest to the test. These are:
More later..