Well if you do, don’t fret because the web has come along way and lucky for us combining colors is just as much a mathematical science as it is an artistic choice. There are numerous online sites that offer tools for the colorphobic. Most of these tools use fancy algorithms and color theory rules to come up with very convincing color pallets.

Check out the classic Color Schemer at www.colorschemer.com/online.html or the helpful new ColorToy at www.defencemechanism.com/color

Stick To A Common Theme

If you have over 200 pages about the same topic you will increase your SE ranking and the search engines will see you on an authority on your topic. I have many blogs and have an interest in many different topics, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to write about recording engineering on this blog. So, try to stick to some sort of niche.

Schedule Your Posts

If you want someone to bookmark your blog and become a loyal reader, you should try to post your articles at defined times. It’s probably not necessary to post at exactly 9am every day, but if you post every day, or every other day, you should stick to your schedule. After all, if the newspaper you subscribed to started to deliver on random days, you’d probably eventually cancel your subscription.

Be Yourself

Customers are savvy and today’s internet surfers are especially savvy when it comes to being sold. It’s important for a blogger let their personality flow. People can tell when you’re using a bunch of canned marketing jargon or NLP nonsense.

Creative writing will work for some bloggers, but for the most part, try to keep it real.

Keep The Search Engines in Mind

Creating a blog is not too difficult. What is difficult and important is boosting your rankings on the big search engines. One way to do this is to use one of the numerous website optimization software programs out there. First though, I would recommend doing a google search for SEO or start with our checkout our simple SEO tips.

You’ll surely never get more traffic to your site if you see the words Untitled Page in your title bar. I know this is basic knowledge, but you wouldn’t believe how many people ask me why they get no visitors to their site, and then I check their URL and find things link Untitled Page. So I decided to create this basic list to help beginning webmasters get on the Search Engine Optimization ball. The following mistakes will have a major negative impact on your web page rankings so avoid them at all costs:

Specifying no title for your page:

The title of your web page is crucial. Failing to specify a descriptive, keyword optimized title will do damage to your search engine ranking. It’s kind of like owning a brick and mortar shop and boarding up all the windows. Each page on your site should have a unique, content-specific title.

If you use WordPress I highly recommend you add the SEO Title Tag 1.0 plugin to your arsenal. This plugin will allow you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one defined through a custom field, in your WordPress admin.

Convinced yet? Then Download this FREE plugin!

Excessive use of Flash animation and images on a page:

If your web page has plenty of nice-looking graphics and eye-popping Flash animation and not a lot of textual content it may indeed look nice, but have you ever considered how the search engines will see it? Search engines thrive on textual content, indexing as much text as they can, but unfortunately they cannot understand images or Flash animations. They will find nothing of real value on your page. Try to balance your page so that the textual content is given priority and that any images or animations are used only when needed. Also us the ALT tag as much as possible. Search engines use this text when determining rank. ALT tags are simple to add and there’s no excuse for passing up another opportunity to rank your site. Go back right now and tag your images with content rich keywords.

Complicated JavaScript menu systems:

Search engines spiders that crawl through our pages are clunky robots. They find it very hard to navigate complicated JavaScript, Java applet menu systems. Don’t assume that because a human can navigate a menu that the search engine spiders will do the same. A menu system using simple textual links will be easier for a spider to read and it will then successfully navigate your site. Try using textual links or CSS when creating expandable or tricky menus.

If you simply must use a javascript or flash based menu or have recently implemented one and refuse to change it, you should consider making the following small change. Add contextual links to the bottom of your pages to ensure that the spiders will be able to find the pages on your site.

P.s. Try to avoid frames as well. They are usually completely pointless and robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately if leave them be.

This plugin will help with the long delay time that people experience when they using WordPress. As you know, if you have 10 or more ping services in your Options > Writing tab > Updated Services area, you will experience a long delay time, sometimes minutes. I know many people who get this delay with only one service in their list.

What this plugin does is adds pinging as a shutdown hook, so you don’t have to wait forever while WordPress pings away.

Info. from the old site:

No Ping Wait is a WordPress plugin designed to further eliminate the long wait after publishing a post in WordPress. While one of WordPress 2.0’s new features claimed faster posting time for users, and for a while it did, but Ping-o-Matic and other “generic pings” were not changed to be quicker. This plugin aims to correct the problem for WordPress version 2.0.x

Download:

No Ping Wait 2 - For WP 2.0+

Install

Drop the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder. Activate like normal.

Do you want to maintain your blog traffic or do you want to consistently build the traffic? Do you have an established blog or website and want to change the frequency of your updates? Is it possible to post to frequently? How long should my posts be? I’ll try to answer some of these very common questions.

If you want to build traffic to your blog I suggest posting one new article per day. Posting two to four articles a week will maintain your traffic. Anything less than that and you will see traffic fall and your blog will be a ghost town. Search engines such a Google like to index sites that are frequently updated with fresh, original content. Also, on blog search engines like Technorati the most recent articles will show up at the top of the search results, so it’s necessary to post frequently so your articles are indexed at the top.

There’s always a flip side. What about too many posts? Don’t burn out your readers by posting too frequently. I realize most people don’t have this problem, but I wanted to point out the fact that it’s possible to post too often. I subscribe to many blogs and it seems lately that some of the bigger tech sites are posting as many as 40-50 new articles a day. I don’t know about you, but I can’t process that much information. I might even unsubscribe from an RSS feed if they have a machine gun posting style.

With this said, you are still asking, “How long should my articles be”? Obviously if you write shorter posts you can write more posts. But if your articles are thin or you are posting just to post, your readers will know. To give you an idea about the length of post; I would consider most of posts on monkey-box.com to be of medium length. Stay away from super long posts because you will burn out your readers. I try to avoid one paragraph posts, because if I don’t have more to say, I will wait another day or find something else to write about.

What is your blog about. If you have a tech blog and talk about the latest gadget you will have to update your blog more frequently. Maybe as many as 3-5 times a day. There are lots of new gadget coming out everyday, not to mention that your readers will be ferocious information junkies. On the other hand, if your running a celebrity gossip blog, for example, you could probably get away with one juicy scandal a day.

Finally, consider your readers. If you’ve been posting 5 blogs a week for months and suddenly triple your output, you may burn out your subscribers. Also, if your an inconsistent blogger or suddenly go from 10 posts a week down to 4 a week, you’ll lose readers. If you want your traffic to be consistent, you must be consistent. After you’ve been blogging for a few months, it’ll get easier to measure your traffic. When I first began blogging, I would actually check my AWStats for unique ips and compared the info. to the number of blog posts I made. After a few months of posting 1-3 post per day, I was able to see exactly how my posts were affecting traffic. Just like the stock market, you can’t always get a good idea of how things are going on a day to day basis, but if you look at a 90 day period and have detailed notes about your traffic and posts, you’ll get a better idea of what works best for your blog.

How often do you blog?

Affiliate Tools

Linkshare - Affiliate Program

Advertising

Google AdSense - ad program by Google
AdRotator - WordPress plugin for rotating ads
Blog Ads - blog advertising
Pheedo - RSS advertising
Text Link Ads - text link advertising system

Bookmarking

Del.icio.us - social bookmarking
Digg - social bookmarking site
DomainsBot - find a domain name

RSS

Feedburner - Must have RSS feed tools
Feedpass - RSS management and AdSense friendly
Google Reader - RSS reader

Jobs

Blogger Jobs - find a job as a blogger

Blog Search Engines

Technorati
Google Blog Search

Webmaster Forums

Webmaster Worlds - webmaster forums
Digital Point - very helpful webmaster forum

WordPress Plugins

Adsense-Deluxe+ - Place AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts
CG-InBetween - Easily insert code between posts
Feedburner Widget - Adds syndicated chicklets to your sidebar

Misc.

Copyscape - Theft & plagiarism tool
Pingomatic - Pinging Tool
Snap - Let’s your readers see where a link goes before they click it

CG-InBetween by David Chait is a must have plugin for you bloggers that want to sprinkle adds between your blogs. All you have to do is install this plugin and add one line of code to your WordPress theme. From the author,

With a one-line addition to your theme, CG-Inbetween can then make it easy to add things like Adsense between posts. Or anything else. You can echo HTML directly, call a PHP function (like QuickPHP), AND/OR include an html/php file. And you can do so for every post in the loop, the n’th post, the Last post of the loop, or only for Single posts (and pages). Admin panel makes it easy.

The best thing about this plugin is that you can use it to create sort of a sticky post. I wanted to create an area above my newest post that wasn’t editable or commentable, and didn’t have the date posted, etc. Similar to a post, but missing those elements.

First you’ll need to install CG-InBetween. I’ll assume you know how to add plugins to wordpress.

After installing the plugin, you’ll need to add one snippet of code to your theme’s index.php. **Don’t forget to backup backup, backup!!** When adding this code, add it before (make sure you aren’t using the last positioning feature!) the post header/content rather than after it. If you do this, you’ll need to add one when specifying your inbetweens because the numbering system will mean ‘before post #x’ rather than the default ‘after post #x’. You may have to play with it a couple times.

Now when you create a new Inbetween via your WordPress Admin, put the code snippet between 1,2 and it will show above your top post. Adding code between blog posts 8, 9 will show between posts 7, 8.

This may sound confusing but it’s very simple to execute. Comment here if you need help. Have fun!

- MB

You’ll see the following text on the WordPress Permalinks Admin page:

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. A number of tags are available, and here are some examples to get you started.

Click on the date and name based radio button. It will automatically add a custom string of script to the Custom structure box… see it, right below the column of radio buttons? Now click the Update Permalinks Structure button on the lower right. That’s it!

My clients ask me if this will negatively impact their website, search engine ranking, traffic stats, etc. No, do not worry about this. Your old ugly question mark and number links will still work and will lead to their correct pages. WordPress automatically associates your new date and naming scheme with your old pages.

Every WordPress page has an ID. For example, http://www.yourdomain.com/post?id=48. Permalinks simply associates your page ids with a new date and name scheme,… using your blog post titles for the page names, but you can change this anytime.

Benefits to using permalinks:

1. Organizes your pages so that they are more memorable and logical.
2. Search engines will index your titles more easily so you get higher search rankings.

Set-up your permalinks.

- MB