“Listen, we need to increase pagerank and to do that, we will need incoming links to our blog posts. If no one links to us, lets build a giant list of blogs who have commentluv plugin installed or who allow dofollow comments.

Once we have them bookmarked, lets post a blog post and start commenting on all the sites one by one.”

This is a crazy idea and there are reasons why you should avoid the “Do follow” comment system to “try” build up pagerank or allow do follow commenting on your own website, in order to make it “Sticky” in the sense.

When You Allow Do Follow Comments On Your own Site

Lets first think from the webmasters perspective and analyze what happens when you allow do follow comments on your own blog. Frankly, most bloggers who allow do follow comments think that doing so will encourage their site visitors to post more comments and spread the word, which hardly happens.

When you allow do follow comments, you are passing page rank from your pages to one or more of the external sites which may or may not have a relation to the context of your blog post, product, service etc.

So if one of your blog posts receive 20 comments and you are using the CommentLuv plugin or something similar, you are actually passing pagerank to these 20 external pages. Out of these 20 pages, chances are that only a handful might be related to the actual content of your article.

When the Googlebot crawls through those “do-follow” links, the Google Juice of your current page is diluted. In the worst case, the bots may have this reaction:

“Hey, this guy is linking to 20 different sites who don’t have any relation to the content of the page in question. Moreover, he has 350 blog posts and all these 350 posts link to typically irregular sites and blog posts which are not related at all. Examples: Cheap hotels, best student course and scuzzy links to MFA sites.

Why is this site suddenly linking to so many external sources, without any relevancy or value to the user ? What’s going on ?”

The human reaction is of course a bit different.

“Hey Mike, you might want to bookmark this site and call Joe to post 2-3 comments on every single page, whenever we have a new blog post up and running. You see, we get incoming links for free !

Just pay Joe some coffee money and ask him to comment in any case, whether or not he knows what he is saying, I don’t care. I just need those links.”

So typically, your blog post got 52 comments but only a few of them are legitimate.

You remove that do follow system and all the so called “popularity” will vanish in a flash. You’re living in a false impression that your site is getting the love from community. Wrong ! They are scavengers who can’t hunt, they only feed on the left outs.

I have seen some bloggers doing this and raising their collars “Whoa! I have 200 posts and 8000 comments. Surely, the do follow system worked for my site.”

Mr Do follow forced blogger-  That just doesn’t make any sense. You’re just inviting the link grabbers and screwing yourself in the bigger picture.

When You Comment On Do Follow Blogs Trying to “Win” PageRank

Now this is where you think that you are the sole gainer. You “Think”, that is.

You comment on Do follow blogs, get a few backlinks to your “linkbait” article and patiently wait to see whether your blog post gets more traffic because of increased rankings.

When I started two years back, I did the same. I bookmarked a whole bunch of sites who allow “Do follow” comments or have CommentLuv installed. Then I posted comments on some sites to see whether or not they have any impact on the rankings.

One month, two months, 4 months. Nothing happened.

Oh yeah, I used to get notifications in WordPress dashboard under “Incoming links” but this didnt had any effect on my site’s search traffic.

You’re Not the Only One Getting Linked From The Do Follow Site

You’re not the only one getting linked from the target site because of the “CommentlLuv” plugin. Chances are that the same page will receive more than 50 or so comments and your comment will lie somewhere in the middle.

So the same page is linking to 49 other sites and the overall pagerank that passes through each of these 50 external links is negligible. And with time, it will deteriorate  of course.

So the effective result is that only a negligible amount of link juice is passed to your site’s latest blog post.

Relevancy Is Almost Impossible To Achieve

So Mr Problogger posted about a topic and you rushed in to comment because his blog is a do follow one. His page is all about “iPhone news” while your latest post is about “soccer”.

Does getting a link from the target page matters ? Thing is, the Googlebot can determine whether this link is “Worth” or not.

Whats the  Certainty?

When the target site removes the “Do Follow” comments and all the “Comment Luv” links, you lose all those incoming links.

If someone is linking to you from the body of the article, he won’t remove it unless of course your site goes down after a few months. But with these Plugins, you never know.

The Position Of The Link Matters

A link placed under the body of an article carries much more weight than a link in the comments or in the blogroll. Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ has come up with a great study involving do follow links, Anchor texts, Alt  attributes  and how the different position of a link matter, when you’re talking page rank and Google Juice.

So you get the idea.

One good link from the body of the article is much more valuable than 100 do follow links from the comment form. At least the former one is legitimate while the latter is forced.

Matt Cutts On “Do Follow Comments”

I am sure many will disagree with my point but here is Google Engineer Matt Cutts’s explanation on Do follow comments and their overall effect.

I will keep this short and sweet. While answering a question on Quora (find me here), I came across something which I wasn’t aware of for a while. That something is Apache Roller. Roller is basically a full featured, multi blog and group blog based on Java.

However, it’s usage is not reported as highly as say WordPress, because most webhosts provide users with LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) installs. We internally use a LNMP install (Linux-Nginx-MySQL-PHP-CGI). However, for Apache Roller you will have to use a Java based server like Apache’s own Tomcat.

Though this project is not widely used, it is definitely recommended for people who are not blogging because they use Java based servers. At this point of time I am downloading this software and will review it. Being a Java guy myself, I am pretty much excited that a blogging solution exists for this purpose.

Aha, the hidden gems you get when you are on Quora. If you don’t know what Quora is, may I oblige you with this reading where I tried to explain What is Quora?

Have you ever heard of Apache Roller? Used It? Do give me some scoops on your thoughts about it then.

I have been using FeedBurner to handle the RSS subscriptions for my blogs for a long time, and I thought it was time to look for other available options. If you are a blogger, you most probably use FeedBurner as well, but do you know about the alternatives on the market?

Of course, I have many reasons to use FeedBurner. It gives me a nice overview of how many people subscribe to my blog and how many are reading my blog posts. It’s very easy for my readers to subscribe, and   it’s easy for bloggers to use since the installation wizard is nearly idiot proof. It only takes a couple of minutes and a few clicks to get started. Best of all, it’s free, and you can monetize your feed traffic with AdSense for feeds.

If you’re not a fan of Google products or FeedBurner, I have found some alternatives that you might consider using.

1- Feedcat

Feedcat is mainly dedicated to boosting feeds and also serves as a public catalogue of feeds (RSS and ATOM).

You can submit your feeds and use services for free!

2-Feedity

Feedity will take virtually any web page, and convert it into a fully formed RSS document. Feedity allows news subscribers & publishers, businesses, non-profit organizations and programmers to seamlessly interact with Web content. Feedity isn’t however fully free, it offers different plans for different needs, with a very basic free plan.

3-RapidFeeds

RapidFeeds is a web based service, which aims to provide complete RSS Feed management solutions to publishers and webmasters.RapidFeeds gives publishers the ability to create and publish their own RSS feeds from any computer with an Internet connection. It however also costs money.

4-FeedBlitz

FeedBlitz is a computer online service that provides services to users who publish content (“Content”) using XML syndication and HTML web pages. Feedblitz however also has a pricing model.

5- PostRank

PostRank is one of the largest aggregators of social engagement data in the industry. Their platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real-time.

I’m interested to know if you’re still using FeedBurner, or if you’re using something else. Please add a comment to let me know what other alternatives you can suggest.

Blogging requires lot of time and hard work. Almost every blogger would like to earn a decent amount from their blogs to compensate the efforts they put in. When it comes to earning some money from the blog, selling advertising slots is definitely one of the most effective ways to monetize a blog. Bloggers sometimes complain about how difficult it is to find a relevant and good paying advertiser for a blog. We’ve created a list of 12 things that can help bloggers find good advertisers for their blog and close deals with them.

Readership first We often see bloggers who start looking for advertisers from the first day of their blogging. Such bloggers spend most of their time searching for advertisers rather than focusing on building readership for their blog. You must realize that advertisers will come to your blog only if you have a decent readership. So focus on building a loyal readership first and then search for the potential advertisers.

Understanding your audience Advertisers will never like to promote their products amongst irrelevant target audience. Before advertising on your blog, they would ask you about your audience. They’ll want to know things such as, what kind of traffic you get (search engine/direct/referring sites), from which part of the world you get most of your visitors, how much of your traffic is from loyal readers, how much they earn, their age groups and so on. It’s always a good idea to understand your audience and collect as much information as possible before contacting any advertisers.

Creating the Advertise herepage Once you’ve built a decent readership for your blog and have information about your target audience, the next thing you should do is to create a advertise herepage on your blog. It should contain information about the traffic you get, advertising options available, pricing details, and contact information. Now, if an advertiser is interested, they can contact you easily.

Create a Media Kit Most bloggers never create a media kit for their blogs. If you are working with small businesses, there is usually no need for a media kit. However, if you want to partner with big and reputable companies for advertising, you must have a stylish and well written media kit containing all the important information about your blog and traffic. A well written media kit makes you look more credible in the eyes of big advertisers and increases the chance of closing the deal.

Contact your frequent readers- Go through your list of frequent commenters and see if any of them has a business site or a product that may be of interest to your target audience. This method works really well if you already have a relationship with the person.

Contact advertisers of competitors The next thing you should to find advertisers is to create a list of advertisers of other blogs in your niche and contact them with your traffic stats and blog details inviting them to advertise on your blog. Since, you already have the audience relevant to their products the chances of successes are really high.

Join popular ad networks It may take some time to develop relations and find some good advertisers. Till that time you can join ad networks like BuySellAds , TextLinkAds etc. These sites have lot of advertisers as their users who always keep on looking for new blogs to advertise their products.

Webmaster Forums Besides Ad networks you can also join popular webmaster forums like DigitalPoint, V7n, Warrior Forum etc. All forums have a buy/sell/trade section where you can sell your ads easily to other webmasters.

Look at Google ads for relevant advertisers – Search Google for keywords relevant to your niche and check the websites that are using Google Adwords to promote their products. Contact those businesses inviting them to advertise on your blog.

Endorse the products you use If you are using some products which you think could be of some use to your readers too then contact the product owners and see if you can strike a deal. Since you are already using these products and are satisfied with them, there will be no risk to you credibility if you endorse them on your blog.

Keep Prices Reasonable Initially, you should keep the advertising prices reasonable. Your top priority, at the beginning, should be developing relationships with as many advertisers as possible. You can increase the prices once you’ve developed your own network.

Work as a team An advertiser will stick to your blog only if he earns something from it. Do not think that your work is finished after placing the ad. Try to help your advertisers get sales from your readers. Some things you can do are sponsoring spotlight posts, sending email to your subscribers introducing your sponsor, and reviewing products from them.

Conclusion:

These are 12 things that can help you find advertisers for your blog. Do you have any tips? Share them with us in comments below.

Guest post by David Smith, who works for conversion rate optimization company Invesp and enjoys writing about SEO, landing pages , conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing.

We’re actually in a growing world of Google Gadgets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re building a Gadget while reading this. But, if you’re looking to make your Google Gadget and don’t know where and how to start? Just read through this tutorial, I’m sure it comes in handy!

Google Gadgets? What are they really? I hear of them a lot now a days. In simple terms, Google Gadgets are mini-web applications or widgets you can easily embed into Google products, like iGoogle, Google Desktop and Blogger.

A Google gadget can range from simple HTML to a complex app. It can be a Calendar, a Clock gadget, a Weather Globe, a Media Player, a Diagram Viewer or just about anything you’d like to have on your web page. There are so many Google Gadgets out there, but I’ve picked the best 10 which I thought are fun, interesting and useful to be working with. So here you go!

1) TwitterGadget

This is a functional gadget that can be added on your iGoogle page. TwitterGaget lets you update your status and also fetches the New Tweet Alerts, Trending Topics and Twitter Lists. It’s quite handy, since you can now manage your Twitter account from the iGoogle page.

2) Official YouTube Gadget

Embedding this gadget helps you browse, search and watch You Tube videos from your iGoogle, your blog or your website. With this gadget, you can link to You Tube videos and let your website visitors check them out.

3) Creately Diagram Viewer

Creately is an Easy Online Diagram and Collaboration application, which helps you draw flowcharts, UML, Mindmaps, Sitemaps, UI Mockups and more. Now, you can add an always-updated Creately diagram with zooming and panning to your page. Whenever anyone updates the diagram, the latest version will be shown inside the gadget. No more manual image uploads!

4) Digg

Add this gadget to your iGoogle or your website and discover the best news, images and videos as voted on by the Digg community. You can also now customize your Digg gadget by topic, Select the topic you are interested in and get the latest diggs relevant to that topic!

I don’t write for a living yet, but I still try to write like my life depends on it. If you’re a student, in business or a pro blogger, you may feel the same way. Your future life may depend on how well you write.

One of the most important things a writer can do to improve their writing, is to become a good editor. Writing well, is a result of what you take out of a post, as much as what you put into it. You’ll need to take out the spelling errors, grammar errors, and the clutter.

Spelling:

The spelling errors are the easiest to remove. Spell checkers are built into most writing tools and are even embedded in the some web browsers. For anyone using a computer, there is no good excuse for misspelled words.

Proof-reading your text for grammar and readability is much harder. Fortunately there are many online resources for writers. Below are two online checkers that may help you improve by showing you weak points in your readability or grammar.

Readability:

If you’ve used Microsoft Word, you might be familiar with it’s readability statistics. It gives a quick test score called the Flesch-Kincaid (FK) Grade Level. The FK score tells you what U.S. grade school level is needed to fully understand your writing. Generally, a score close to 7 (7th grade) is recommended for general audiences.

I’ve found a great site that gives your text not only an FK level, but plenty of other information as well. It’s called ADDEDBYTES – Check Text Readability.

Here’s a screen-shot of the results from the first three paragraphs of this article. I think I did pretty well.

There are several scores shown here. Most of them don’t make much sense unless you study what they mean. There are links next to each score that lead to more information if you are interested.

I pay the most attention to the Average Grade Leveland the SMOG index.   The average grade is pretty understandable, since it’s simply the average of the scores shown. The SMOG index tells you how much gobbledygook you have included in your post. Gobbledygook is words that are used only in special cases, such as political speeches and scientific or technical papers. These are words that most people don’t understand. I try to keep the SMOG below 6 by using common words that everyone knows.

Recently, I told one of my fellow bloggers that their post was too lofty. New writers are always tempted to show off by using long sentences and lots of fancy words. I asked another blogger if they were writing poetry or writing a software review. A light punch in the belly will usually wake people up.

Good writers impress people with humor or great ideas, not fancy speech. Write to your readers like you are talking to a good friend.

Another site I found recently, checks your text for mistakes in grammar. I’ve never found a tool that catches most grammar mistakes, so don’t be disappointed when you discover the same thing.

Grammar:

Language Tool will catch the obvious grammar errors, but it will also generate plenty of false errors. Computers are still only as smart as an insect at this time, so I’m not surprised. Humans rule, and only an experienced editor will catch most grammar problems.

Here’s an example of the results from the Language Tool.

In this case, it found three errors, yet only one of them was a real error. Despite the false errors, if you need help finding grammar mistakes, the Language Tooloffers you a chance to find the most obvious problems.

Last Thoughts:

Hearing your written words read out loud is an easy way to catch errors of all kinds. Try to find a friend who can read your writing back to you. If you are on your own, read it out loud to yourself. My wife mentioned that it might be good to have a text-to-speech tool read your post to you.

Thanks for reading this long post. If it helps at least one person write better, I’ll be happy.

This is a Guest Post by Tanmay from Tech Tips Geek.

Starting a new blog is always challenging. If you are new to blogging, it is quite possible that you are not so much familiar of this profession. The success of your blog obviously depends on the niche, you have chosen. But only the niche can not promote you on the internet. Thousands of people are entering in the blogging world everyday. So you can not leave other people behind without organizing yourself.

Having said that, a good start always helps you to become first in the crowd. Here are some few advice to start your blog.

1. The first thing about your blog is your blog name. It is very worth to get a descriptive blog name. Choose it wisely so that people can understand about the niche of your blog.

2. If you can afford, then choose a top level domain(.com, .org, .net, .info). The Domain name should be the same as your blog name.

3. Host your domain in a good/well known hosting company. Though a bad neighbour does not affect your blog but having good environment is always better.

4. Select the theme for your blog so that it matches with the contents. As example, if you are starting a technology tips and tricks blog and choose a magazine theme, the readers may lose attention. Hence blog theme must be appropriate enough.

5. Design your theme uniquely. Be influenced by other blogs but do not be dominated by them. Make your theme easy to navigate, so that readers can easily reach to the article, they need. Remove the unnecessary links if you are using free WordPress theme. e.g the Blogroll links, Meta links etc. Restrict theme templates, admin pages from crawling by the search bots by robots.txt.

6. Keep your best articles in home of your blog. This will ensure that the search engine will crawl them regularly.

7. Submit your blog URLto giant search engines:

• Submit blog URL to Google
• Submit blog URL to Yahoo
• Submit blog URL to Bing
• Submit blog URL to Baidu

8. Sign up for Webmaster account and submit your blog to get verified. Here is the list:

• Google Webmaster
• Yahoo Webmaster
• Bing Webmaster

9. Reduce blog page load time so that search engines can easily crawl your site. Some plugin can really help you. Here is the list:

i) WP Super Cache

ii) PHP Speedy

Also adding an Expires header to the static resources like JavaScript, images, CSS files significantly improve the page load time. You can do it by adding the following lines in the .htaccess file from your server.

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg AA2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg AA2592000

10. Try to get back links from some older sites with higher page rank. There are some ways to win back links.

i) Write a guest post for a well known site. It will help you to increase your page rank and also a fair amount of visitors.

ii) Another tricks can help you to increase your page rank – Some websites use do follow meta tag in their comment section. Find out such sites relevant to your niche and leave a comment.

11. Use SEO for better search engine ranking. This may take some time as your blog is so new in the web. To get some instant traffic you can follow a simple trick. Some sites publish the trackbacks. So find out that type of site ranking top in the search engine that matches with your article and give a credit to that site from your post.

Over of all you must be original and honest with your articles.

This is a guest post by Tanmay from Tech Tips Geek, where you can find the latest tips and tricks. Want to guest post for us? Read our Guest Post guidelines to find out how you can submit guest posts to us.

WordPress has a feature to add pages to blogs, the pages are basically static HTML content which does not need to change very often and serves certain purpose for the site. For example, we have an About page, a Contact us and an Advertise Page. WordPress has always had this feature, however, today the Blogger platform has introduced Pages for Blogspot blogs too.

Blogspot users can now start adding static pages to their own blogs just like WordPress blogs. To add or edit a page on your Blogspot blog, go to Posting and click on the Edit pages tab. However, unlike WordPress, Blogger has a limit of 10 pages. Blogger has also provided users with a template to display all the pages on your blog. Users can customize the widget to select which pages appear on the widget, along with the option to automatically add future pages to the widget.

So it looks like Blogger is finally looking at adding some much wanted feature to their platform as they lag way behind on features with WordPress. Do you have a Blogspot blog? Do you find this feature useful? Let us know through your comments.

Recently, someone posted a comment at my website, telling me about two useful and   free Windows Live Writer Plugins from Kobi Pinhasov. The first plugin that I tried out was called Import and Export Settings Wizard. (also see Windows Live Writer Backup)

Kobi mentioned how that he’d always hated trying to sync up his WLW between different PCs. He decided to write a plugin to solve that problem. According to his blog post, this plugin will import and export the Configuration Settings, Auto links glossary, Preferences, Blog Accounts and the Installed Plug-ins. While exporting, you can save the backups in a local folder, network folder or FTP. He also plans to add the ability to export to SkyDrive and other cloud backup sites soon.

Here are some screen-shots as I tried out the Import Export Wizard plugin.

Screen-shots

1. As you can see, you will access the wizard via your Insertmenu in WLW.

2. You are first offered a choice as to what you’d like to do. I chose to Export my settings.

3. Next you can pick and choose which settings to back up.

4. As you can see below, I chose to export settings to My Dropbox account so that I could access them from anywhere on the web.

5. After a few seconds, the wizard reported that it was done.

Once I finished exporting, I checked the output folder that I’d selected and found the files that the wizard had created.

I have not checked out the Import setting on this plugin yet, but I do know at least one person who’s been using it, besides the author, that is.

Download this plugin at: Import and Export Wizard for Windows Live Writer

Techie Buzz Verdict

Using this plugin, you may save yourself a good number of headaches and save time. I like the way it works and I may give it a better rating once the author adds access to other web file hosting services.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5

Be sure to add a comment below or email me. I’d love to hear from you.

There are several plugins/widgets that let you display updates from your Twitter or Facebook account on your blog. However, there are very few that cater to all the social media platforms. BloggyBits is one of them.

BloggyBits is a social widget for your blog that lets you display updates from various social media including Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr and Delicious. It also lets you display updates from a custom RSS feed and your URL from the social media service.

Simply head over to www.BloggyBits.com, select the services you want to use and configure your widget. Once done, you will be provided with an HTML code that you can paste on your blog/website to embed the widget. You also have the option to edit your widget later through a unique edit sent to your email address.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

BloggyBits is a great way to display social media updates on your blog. It eliminates the need for having separate plugins for each social media service.

Ratings: 3/5 (Very Good)