Jump In Google Pages | 10 Seo Tips For Newbies

1. New Domain? Old Domain?
Do not purchase a brand new domain unless you absolutely have to. Google now has an “aging delay for all domains” check. New domains will be considered unreliable and need to “age” before it gains importance in the google index. If you had to use a brand new domain, expect to see 9-12 month delay before you are able to achieve top 20 position in any keyword. The trick is buy an old or expired domain.
2. Don’t go for the popular keywords.
Do not try to tackle the popular keywords such as “travel” “computer”, instead add a word before or after the keyword such as “travel tips” or “computer news”. Many top 20 positions in less popular keywords is a thousand times better than a top 200 position in a extremely popular keyword.
3. Design your site to be “spider-friendly”.
Remember spiders can not fill out forms or click on flash menus. Always have an alternative HTML link that spiders can travel through to crawl your entire site. The best way to go about this is have a sitemap that contains links to every page of your site. Google has a special place for web masters to submit their sitemaps. Use it! https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemaps

4. Only link out to non-spammer, non-linkfarm and quality sites.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter who links to you, you can have a thousand spammer and link farms that have links to your site, and it won’t affect your rank with google. But if your site contains links to spammer and link farm sites, your site will also be marked as spammer or link farm. So the trick is, watch who you link to.

5. Put your most important keyword in your url and title tag.
Search engines such as google see your url as one of the most important factor for determining relevancy. For example, the top 20 positions for the keyword “wallpaper” are occupied by sites that contain the word “wallpaper” in their url. So if you want to achieve top 20 position in any keyword, the fastest way would be having that keyword in your url. Title tags are also very important for search engines, especially the first few words, put your most important keyword in the front of your site title.
6. Use keywords for folder names and file names.
This trick has became very well known recently. Use your relevant keywords for your sub-folder names and file names. For example if you have a web page called “contact_us.html” and your website is about selling “teddy bears”. Then use “contact_us_for_teddy_bears.html” as your file name. Do the same thing for your folders and you will have a keyword rich url.

7. Make sure your site loads fast and rarely go down.
This may sound silly, but whenever a google bot or any other search engine spider visit your site. They will test your page load speed. If your site loads very slowly, your page rank will suffer as your site is now considered unfit for browsing. Also if your site is frequently down, your page rank will go down real fast.

8. Never rename your webpage unless your site is new
For established and popular websites, renaming your webpages will kill your rank in the search engines, you are essentially starting from scratch in terms of SEO. So if you are redesigning your site, remember keep the old file names.

9. Never implement ANY cloaking methods on your site
Site cloaking was popular a couple years ago. It means show one version of content to your visitors and show a different version of content to the search engine spiders. There are of course legitimate reasons for doing this. But due to popular usage by spammer sites, it is now considered instant ban if you cloak your site this way. Do not think the search engines will not find out. Google now frequently send out unknown bots from unknown ips for the sole purpose of detecting cloaked sites.

10. Do not over-optimize
Remember the most important asset for your site is not your search engine ranking, but your users. Never SEO your site to the extent of hurting user experience. Over-optimization for search engines may help you in the short-terms but you will wake up one day and find out that your site only have “visitors” but not “users”.

Post Footer – Customize Template | Blogger Tips and Tricks

In this tutorial, we discuss the various ways you can customize the Post Footer and change the Blogger template. The steps will cover how to change the “Posted by author”, “Comments”, “Labels” links in the Post Footer, replacing them with other names or pictures.

This is how a typical Post Footer looks like. It includes the author's name, time of the post, number of comments, number of backlinks, icon for readers to email the post, icon for you to edit your post, as well as Labels.

Update:

If you are looking to change the text, alter some settings or re-arrange the positions of the Post Footer elements,you can go to Template -> Page Elements and click the “Edit” link on the Blog Posts widget. You will see a screen like this:-

You can read our Arrange and Customize Blog Posts Elements article to learn a little about these options. Even though this is a simple way to make minor adjustments, you will not be able to insert pictures, signatures, change the author's name, etc. To do these other things to the Post Footer, you may want to read the rest of our guides here and customize your Footer.

Before we proceed to alter the template, remember to backup the existing template. Go to Template -> Edit HTML. Check the “Expand Widget Templates” box. Backup your template by copying the template and saving it in an MS Notepad text file. You can also click the “Download Full Template” link that appears right after the words “Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it.”

Posted by author

1. Change author's name

The name of the author is the name shown in your Blogger Profile. Should you want to keep this name, but assign a pen name or nickname to your postings, go to Template -> Edit HTML and click the “Expand Widget Templates” box.

Scroll to where you see these lines. For most browsers, you can press Control-F to search for this phrase “data:post.author”

<div class='post-footer'>
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author'>
<b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
<data:top.authorLabel/&gt; <data:post.author/&gt;
</b:if>
</span>

Replace the part of the code (shown in red) with whatever name you want to call yourself. This is what you will see in your Post Footer:-

2. Remove “Posted by”

What if you do not even want the words “Posted by”? Well, you will have to delete both the codes (shown in blue and in red). Replace them with the words you want to display. The result is this:-

3. “Posted by” below Post title

Some blogs have the “Posted by author” just beneath the Post Title. If you want to do that, cut the entire code in the template and paste it below this line:-

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

<span class='post-author'>
<b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
<data:top.authorLabel/> <data:post.author/>
</b:if>
</span>

This is what you will get:-

You can also place an image instead of having a name. However, this image should be small. Crop or resize the image using photo editing tools. There are free ones like Google's Picasa which you can use. Upload the image onto free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files. Take note of the Image URL.

In the above codes, instead of replacing the blue and/or red parts with a name, insert this code instead:-

<a href="URL of your Blog"><img src="Image URL" /></a>

Remember to key in the URL of your Blog as well as the Image URL. This gives you an image link so that when people click the picture, they will be brought to your Blog's main page. If you do not want a link, you only need to insert this code:-

<img src="Image URL" />

The final code will look like this:-

<div class='post-footer'>
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author'>
<b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
<a href="URL of your Blog"><img src="Image URL" /></a>
</b:if>
</span>

5. Image AND Name

Let us now combine the above to have BOTH your image and name in the Footer. For example, you may want to have something like this:-

The code will be changed to this. Change the text. The image code can be either before or after the text.

<div class='post-footer'>
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>
<span class='post-author'>
<b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
Author<img src="Image URL"/>
</b:if>
</span>

Timestamp

If you do not want the time stamp at all, scroll down the template and delete these lines:

<span class='post-timestamp'>
<b:if cond='data:top.showTimestamp'>
<data:top.timestampLabel/>
<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<a class='timestamp-link' expr:href='data:post.url' title='permanent link'><data:post.timestamp/></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span>

Now we continue with customization of the “Comments”, “Labels” and other icons shown in the Blogger Post Footer.

Comments

1. Settings

If you simply want to enable or disable Comments, login into your Dashboard and under Settings -> Comments, you will see the options for “Comments”. You can either “Show” or “Hide”. You can choose “Hide” so as not to show the Comment link, without deleting existing comments.

2. Change the word “Comments”

Should you want to retain the Comment link but change the word “Comments” to something else, scroll to this part of the template:-

<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>
<a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 <data:top.commentLabel/&gt; <b:else/><data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/&gt; </b:if></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span>

In my spiderman example, I wanted to use the phrase “Friendly Neighbors”. Where the blue code is, I replaced it with the phrase “Friendly Neighbor”, the singular form when there is only 1 comment. At the red part of the code, I replaced it with the plural form “Friendly Neighbors” when there are 2 comments or more. The resulting code is:-

<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'>
<a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 Friendly Neighbor<b:else/><data:post.numComments/> Friendly Neighbors</b:if></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span>

And this is what you will see:-

Links to Post

If you do not want this in your Post Footer, go to Dashboard, under Settings -> Comments, you can choose to “Show” or “Hide” the “Backlinks”. If you select “Hide”, the backlinks to your Post and the words “Links to this Post” will not be displayed.

Email Post icon

In your Dashboard, under Settings -> Basic, you can see a query “Show Email Post links?” If you choose “Yes”, you will see the little envelope image for viewers to click to email the Post to other people. Should you choose “No”, that image will not be displayed.

Labels

1. Change “Labels” name

To suit the theme of your Blog, you may want to change the word “Labels” to something else, like “Subjects”, “Topics”, “Categories”, “Genre”, etc. Scroll to this part of the template:-

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
<b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
<data:postLabelsLabel/>
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond='data:label.isLast != "true"'>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</span>
</p>

Substitute the part of the code (shown in red) with the word that you want to use. The result is this:-

2. Image instead of name

In Part I of this article, we went into details on how you can use an image to replace the author's name. If you want to have a picture to replace the word “Labels”, the procedure is the same. Instead of the name to replace the part of the above code (shown in red), insert the image code. The resulting code would appear like this:-

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
<span class='post-labels'>
<b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
<a href="URL of your Blog"><img src="Image URL" /></a>
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond='data:label.isLast != "true"'>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</span>
</p>