There’s a great article over at Spice Up Your Blog on this topic, and it provides a video for how to do it. Just click on the link below to view that very informative post.

How to Buy a Custom Domain Directly from Blogger
and Connect It to Your Blog

Custom domains are a great way to help maintain your business brand, and a way to just streamline the route to your blog, whether it’s for business or personal use.

Favicons are the small “favorite icons” (= favicons) icons that appear in the browser’s address bar. If you look up at the URL for my blog, you’ll see my favicon that looks like a little OBJ.

It’s a great little way to help with branding your blog, and your business. So if you’d like an easy way to now add one to your Blogger blog, please visit the Blogger in Draft blog link below for a tutorial on how to do just that.

Customize Your Favicon Tutorial

Wish they’d done this years ago…but better late than never!

In my last post called Link Party Anyone? I talked about joining link parties to help generate some traffic to your blog. I thought it was important that I now talk about Link Parties and SEO, and what link parties can’t do for your own blog or website’s SEO. And additionally, I’ll talk about comments and links as well.

When you join a link party, the link that you leave to your own blog or website does NOT get noticed by the search engines. Many people do not realize this; even I didn’t realize this for a long time, to be honest. Nor do most people realize that when you leave a comment on a blog along with a link to your blog or website, in most cases, that comment link also does NOT get noticed by the search engines.

In the case of link parties, widgets and java scripts generate the link party forms on a blog from the link party host (like InLinkz or LinkyTools, the two most popular link party hosts). That means that the links that are left by participants in the link party are all stored at the link party host. And those links are set to NoFollow by default, which prevents Google and other search engines from following those links. If this weren’t the case, not only could spam become a big problem, but websites could get a seriously inflated and false page rank, just by joining lots of link parties. And Google doesn’t want that.

Likewise, most blog platforms, like Blogger and the free hosted Word Press, have comments set to NoFollow by default in the template, preventing any search engines from following links left with comments. And they do this for the same reasons noted above. If you want search engines to follow the links left with comments on your own blog, you have to modify the NoFollow rule to become a DoFollow. How you do that depends upon which blog platform you use. You can also consider switching to another commenting system, one which creates DoFollow links, like CommentLuv or IntenseDebate.

Link parties and blog comment links are still a good way to get some human traffic to your business or personal blog or website, regardless of the NoFollow/DoFollow status of the blog in question. But I wanted you to be aware of the SEO aspect of link parties and comment links, so that you will understand exactly what to expect when you leave your website link in those places.

First I found Blog2Print.

I found that link somewhere in my Blogger dashboard as I was posting the other day. That site offers a service that allows you to print your blog into a 20-page softcover book for only $14.95. Now if you use your blog for business, then could be something that might interest you as a marketing feature. But even if you just have a personal blog, there are lots of possibilities.

On the Blog2Print site, they also had a link to another site, Everything2Print.

On that site, you can print your blog, but you can also print your Facebook photos, your tweets at Twitter, your Picasa albums, and also Word and PDF documents…again, for just $14.95. You can even get a plain PDF of your book for just $7.95. This service would be great if you want to offer something to your customers/clients via a download on your website, especially if you can’t make PDF’s on your own.

So I thought these two finds were definitely worth sharing with you.

Have Happy New Year from Online Business Junction.

Intense Debate has a widget you can add to Blogger in order to utilize their program. And they have great features for your blog comments:

• Threaded Comments
• Customizable Moderation and Blacklisting
• Reply-by-Email
• Email Notifications of Comments and Replies
• Email Subscriptions to Comments
• Commenter Profiles
• Optional Reputation Points & Comment Voting
• Comment Posting via OpenID, Twitter, Facebook or as a Guest
• HTML Formatting
• Gravatar Support

And if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, they have a plugin that you can use as well.

If you’d like to see IntenseDebate in action, hop on over to the Blogger blog that I’ve added this feature to.

Tattered Sisters Primitives

Once there, just click on one of the post titles to view the post, and scroll down to the comments area. You’ll be able to see just how it looks.

Take care, and have a safe and Happy New Year.

If you are interested in selling from your blog, please check out my article in the latest issue of Creative Times Magazine. I offer information and advice on how to do just that within the article. Click the link below to be taken to the magazine’s download page.

Selling From Your Blog Article at Creative Times Magazine

No matter what your business-related reason for blogging, good SEO is essential for your blog, just as it is for any other website. And one thing you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO is to add meta tags to the Template. If you aren’t sure how to do that, here are some simple directions for doing so.

NOTE: The content editor in this WordPress site tends to alter things in HTML code and they don’t display correctly on the page. This generally affects apostrophes and quotation marks. When you copy the code below, please retype the apostrophes and quotation marks yourself, before pasting the code in your Blogger template. Otherwise, it may not work. And be sure to work in a plain text document, rather than a word processor like Word or Works, etc. Those programs also tend to reformat HTML code.

1. Login to your account at Blogger.
2. Click on Layout, and then click on Edit HTML.
3. Search for the following bit of code, which will likely be near the top of the template.

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

4.  Directly underneath that bit of code, paste the following code:

<meta content=’PUT DESCRIPTION HERE’ name=”description”/>
<meta content=’PUT KEYWORDS HERE’ name=”keywords”/>
<meta content=’PUT AUTHOR NAME HERE’ name=”author”/>

Be sure to replace the content for your Description, Keywords, and Author Name, where indicated. And don’t forget to save  your changes.

]]> http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2010/02/add-meta-tags-to-your-blogger-blog/feed/ 10 http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2008/08/reader-question-on-seo-and-blogger-vs-wordpress/ http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2008/08/reader-question-on-seo-and-blogger-vs-wordpress/#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:42:00 +0000 admin http://www.onlinebusinessjunction.com/2008/08/18/reader-question-on-seo-and-blogger-vs-wordpress/ Cathy of Cathy’s Creations wrote to ask me two questions. She wanted to know how a person who is not a “techie” goes about doing SEO on their site. She also wanted to know if Blogger or WordPress is the better blog host, and if one gets crawled by the SE’s better? Here are my responses to her.

The best thing you can if you’re trying to do SEO yourself and you aren’t very “techie” is to read and learn as much as you can about it. If you’re trying to build and grow your website, this is just a must to help you reach your goals of success. I have lots of information about SEO on Primitive Business Junction. And I have posted many links there to other sites that offer even more info, for all skill levels, to help people understand SEO. You really owe it to yourself and your website to learn as much as you can, so that’s really the best advice I can give on this topic.

As for WordPress vs. Blogger, I’d say that’s really a matter of personal choice. If you’re comfortable with Blogger, there is no need to switch. I use Blogger for 3 of my blogs. But I am building a new online marketplace on a WordPress integrated site, and I must say that Blogger is much more user-friendly. I like WordPress and its features, but I don’t think I’ll be switching my Blogger blogs over any time soon. But with regard to the indexing of blog pages by the search engines (Blogger vs. WordPress), I don’t think there’s an easy way to compare crawl rates on one vs. the other. All of the SE’s are going to crawl sites most efficiently that have been appropriately optimized, that are updated frequently, regularly pinged (in the case of blogs), that have a good internal link structure, sitemaps and robots.txt files, and that have good server speeds. Any website or blog that meets these criteria has the best chance of getting crawled and indexed in the most timely and efficient manner.