Blog improving

How to start your own blog

2010-02-20T04:14:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to this tutorial about startning your own blog. It's made mostly for people that are starting a blog, but the ones who have can also read it and find some unsefull content. So, here it is:
Step 1
First thing you have to do is visit blogger.com in your browser. There, click on a big orange button that says 'Crate your blog', cause that's what we want to do. The page will reload and you will see the first step of making your own blog - 'Create a Google account'. If you have a Google acocunt, you can skip the step by clicking 'Sign in first' (shown in the picture below).

After the page reloads, type your e-mail address and password and then logg in.

Step 2
It's time to choose your blog's name and domain. Your blog's name can be any, but the domain can't. Probably the first 5-10 domains you want for your blog are already taken, so it's not to easy to think of a good domain that can be used. You can feel real lucky if the domain you want is free to use. When you're done, click Continue.

Step 3
I'm sure you will have fun on the step 3 - now it's time to choose your template. Don't think "Oh my god, what if I choose a wrong template?!?", because you can change it later anyway. If you are looking to make a seriouse blog, it's not a good idea to choose one of those standard templates. You want to make your blog more unique, so choose better template please :). Click continue. You will get a confirmation that your blog has been made, and you can start blogging.

Step 4
Again I say that it depends on how serious do you want your blog to be, but I suggest you to make a logo and make a favicon . And choose a better template as I said in the third step. Next, write a few posts. Probably you want see any comments in a few days (never, actually), unless you start getting traffic, which isn't very easy unfortunately. But more about that next time.

How to make contact form

2010-02-17T05:38:00.003-08:00

Have you noticed that some web sites have contact form (like mine - click contact on this blog and you will see)? Well you don't have to be a programmer to do that. All you need is this tutorial :)

Step 1
Open this page in your web browser and make an account. You can choose many options, but if you don't wanna pay you can choose the free version (that's what i did).

Step 2
The second step depends on what you want to do, but I will tell you how I did my contact form. So, I started by clicking the Name button. That's how I added name field. Then I pressed Web Site button to add web site field. I did the same for E-mail and Paragraph text.

Step 3
When you're done with the second step, press 'Save Form' on the bottom of the page. A new window will open. Click 'Setup E-mail notifications for this form'.

Step 4
In the 'To mi Inbox' box fill the 'Your E-mail address' form by writing in your e.mail address. Click save, and then click 'Forms' button on the top of the page.

Step 5
There should be a box that contains some options for your contact form. Click 'Code'.

Step 6
On the left side, click 'Embed Form Code', and copy the iframe Version. Paste it on your blog wherever you want it to be and you're done!

If you have any problems you can post a comment (you can post a comment even if you don't have any problems:))

How to follow all recent comments

2010-02-17T05:37:00.003-08:00

Sometimes it's hard to track all the new posts on your blog, especially if you have many of them. It can take a lot of time to scroll down to each post and check number of comments. But there is a way to view the 25 newest posts on your blog, no matter if they are on the oldest or the newest blog post, and I'm gonna show you how to do it. It can't be more simple, just type the following url in you browser's adress-bar:

YourBlogName.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full

Of course, instead on 'YourBlogName' you have to type your blog's name, and that's it! So, in my case it would be:

blogimproving.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full

WOW, this is to short.... bla bla bla... this will make it longer. It's enough now. Comment and follow :)

How to add favicon to your blog

2010-02-17T05:37:00.001-08:00

Hello everyone! Today you will learn how to add a favicon to your blog. But what is favicon?It's that little icon that you can see when you open a new tab, bookmark a link, search browsing history.... If you don't make your own, a standard blogger icon will appear instead. You can see that I have a favicon - it makes your blog unique. So, do you want to have a favicon? Well, here's how to make one.

Step 1
First, we have to create it. You can do it in programs like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Picasa.... But there are also free favicon generators on the internet. Just google "favicon generator" and you will find them. Use 16*16 or 32*32 pixsels size.

Step 2
Save your icon as .gif. It's time to upload your favicon. You can do it using any web-page for uploading images. I can recommend you Tinypic. After you upload, copy your image's URL.

Step 3
Logg in to your blogger account. Go to Layout tab, then Edit HTML. Type this just before the end body tag:

<link href='*' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>

Replace * with image's URL. Save the tamplate.

Step 4
Visit your blog. You should notice that your favicon has changed. If you have any problems or question, please leave a comment.

How to change your blog's template

2010-02-17T05:36:00.002-08:00

Hello dear readers!

As your blog starts to grow it very important not to use one of the standard blog themes. It's gonna look nicer and it will ad some professionalism. So let's do it, I will tell you how step by step.

Step 1
First let's find adequate template for your blog on the internet. Just type 'Free blogger templates' in google and search some, you will soon find a nice theme. I can recommend you this site, it seems OK.

Step 2
Let's download the template. There should be an icon that says 'download' somewhere by the template.

Step 3
I will explain this step for the mozilla users, but I'm sure that other will understand what to do. Go to Tools - Downloads, and a new window should open (Note: Sometimes the new window opens automatically after you make a download), and there should be your new download. Right click - Open Containing Folder. Now new window should appear, containing the template. Right click on the theme folder - Extract here. Now you should get a new file, that is not Ziped.

Step 4
Logg in to blogger.com, then go to Layout - Edit HTML. Click browse, and find the theme folder (Important: Don't open the Zip folder, but the extracted one.) Inside there should be an .xml file. Chose that one, and click upload. Before it uploads it, blogger will probably warn you that it has to delete some widgets. You can't save them, so just continue.

And that's it, your theme should be in use! If you have any questions, probblems or comments, please feel free to comment!

How to make share this button

2010-02-17T05:36:00.001-08:00

Good day! Today I will teach you how to add Share This button under each of your posts. The button allows other people to share your posts on social websites like Facebook, Digg, Technoratti, MySpace, Twitter.... So it can get you some more traffic.

Step 1
Open this page in your browser. Customize your button how ever you want, but make sure that on 'Step 2: Chose your service' you chose 'Any website', even if you will use it for other 3 services.

Step 2
When you're done, click 'Get Share this code'. The page should reload and code should appear. Copy the code or save it somewhere.

Step 3
Go to Dashboard - Layout - Edit HTML. Check 'Expand Widgets'. Find the following line of code:

<data:post.body/></div>

Note: You might not have this line of code. In that case press Ctrl+F on your keyboard and type in 'Post'. In the HTML part of the code there should be a line of code that looks something like the upper one.

under the tag, paste the code you got before on Share This website.

Step 4
Now visit your blog. Under each post there should be a Share This icon. If something's wrong please leave a comment.

Note: If you want some more space between your post and Share This icon, between '<data:post.body/></div>' tag and button code type following line:

<br/>

If it's still not enough, keep adding '<br/>' line, until you think it's good.

How to make categories on blogger

2010-02-17T05:35:00.005-08:00

Maybe you already know that blogger, unlike tyepad, doesn't have categories widget. But my blog is an example that you can make it, you can see that I have it on the right side. So how did I do that? Well, here's a step-by-step tutorial.

Step 1
Before doing anything else, we need to know what categories do we want. So open a notepad and start typing them.

Step 2
Log in to your blogger account. Go to Posting - Edit posts. Now start editing every post you have, and in 'Labels for this post' text box type the categories name that you want that post to be in. Publish the post.

Step 3
Now go to Layout - Page elements. Click 'Add gadget' and add a labels gadget. It somewhere down. Position the gadget where you want it to be.

Step 4
Go to your blog. There should be the labels gadget that we now use as categories.

SEO optimization tutorial

2010-02-17T05:35:00.003-08:00

Hello dear readers!

Today I'm gonna teach you how to optimize SEO, and become the first in google results. If you wonder what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, there are plenty of different definitions, but I'd say its a process of getting your website ranked higher in the search engines for certain keywords pertaining to your business. Now why is SEO important? Well, millions and millions of people use Google, Yahoo, MSN and different search engines every day. So if your blog or web-site is the first result for certain keyword, imagine the traffic you get each day. It pretty much, don't you think? So here's how to make your site ranked higher in the search engines:

Web adress
It's important that your URL contains most important keyword. So, if your blog is about dogs, you won't call your site www.cats.com, but www.dogs.com. It's maybe a stupid example but you get the point....

Meta tags
Meta tags are HTML tags that help you control how some search engines may index your site, by using the keywords and descriptions you provide. So, it tells search engines what's your site about. I found this generator, and with it it's pretty simple to make meta tags. You can place them just under the 'html' tag.

Backlinks
Backlinks are links on another website that are directed towards your website. They are important for SEO because search engines, especially Google, more like websites that have many backlinks, so the sites are positioned higher in the results.

Text of your backlinks
It's important that text of your backlinks have you blog's keyword. So, if you have a dogs' website, the text would rather be 'Dogs' or 'Dog blog' than just 'Click here' or 'Check this out!'. By following this example your blog will again be positioned higher on the results list.

Keyword density
Try to keep this on optimum - not to high and not to low. If it's to high you will be, as they call it 'keyword spammer', and if it's to low... it's not gonna help you. I found this generator that checks the keyword density. I suggest you not to go over 9-10%.

Be grammatically correct
Google is like a language teacher - he likes when you write grammatically correct. Maybe it's not as important as upper suggestions but it still helps a little.

That's it for now, I hope it helped. Of course, nothing of this is gonna works unless you have submitted your page to search engines. You can do it here.