Nofollow & Dofollow Backlinks: A Guide To Blog Commenting

Link building is an important part of search engine optimization and some bloggers do this at all costs, even to the point of spamming on other blogs. Having quality, one-way backlinks pointing to your site does a lot in increasing your google page rank, thereby increasing the chance of your blog appearing in google search results. What most people fail to know is that only the quality of the backlinks matter, not necessarily the quantity. It's quite possible to have just a hundred backlinks and rank higher than sites with thousands of backlinks.

Now, don't get it twisted, a high google pagerank doesn't always equal to your traffic but it's still good to have it anyway. It's one of the algorithms google checks when sorting out search results. It's always been said that original contents matters a great deal and you must take this even more serious than link building but that is not the main topic here. There's a more comprehensive post I recently wrote on how to increase your google page rank and alexa traffic rank, you should try reading through it.


There are several ways to get quality backlinks pointing to your blog and one of the most effective is commenting on blogs relating to your niche. I've seen quite a lot of bloggers commenting here even to the point of spamming but most do not realize that google will never index or follow those links because there are ways to make blog commenting work to your advantage.

DoFollow And NoFollow Backlinks

What are dofollow and nofollow links? Did you know you can comment on 100 blogs without google recognizing any of those precious backlinks you worked hard to get? In a bid to reduce spamming for the sake of SEO, google devised the nofolow and dofollow tags. A link with nofollow tag added has no SEO benefit for the destination site and a link with dofollow or none of the tags will be indexed and counted as a backlink for the destination site


By default, all comments posted on blogs hosted on blogspot are nofollow links. Google doesn't index links on most blogger blogs, you probably would have noticed that in google webmaster tools and wondered why.

How To Differentiate Between Nofollow And Dofollow Links

Before you go about commenting on just any blog, you should know whether the blog you're commenting on has any SEO value for you. There's a firefox extension that highlight links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status.

There's an easier way to do this though, just highlight an existing comment using firefox, right click and select view selection source. Below is an example of a nofollow link as shown in page source:

<a class="comments-autor-name" href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/05279327145715289304" rel="nofollow">Don Caprio</a>
<a class="says">says:</a>

I'm not saying you should only comment on blogs with dofollow links, commenting on a few blogs with nofollow tag creates what looks like a natural profile in google's view.

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Quick Search Engine Optimization Results With Free Trial

There are so many factors affecting your search engine ranking and even if you try to get to google's first page all by yourself, there are still some opportunities you'll be missing without an expert analysis. Apart from using the right keywords and having as much backlinks as possible, there might still be some things or two you probably won't know about because the rules on which search engines operate keep changing and hence, the need to have professionals handle your search engine optimization worries.

QuickSEOResults is a reputed search engine optimization company that has a unique offer you can hardly find anywhere else, a free trial SEO you can enjoy for good thirty days without paying a dime. Yes, your site is optimized for thirty days all for free and you can decide to continue with their service after thirty days whether you're satisfied with the trial or not but I bet you will.

Maybe you own a new website in a very competitive niche or you already have an existing site that shows up on google once in a while when someone types a weird search query, you can still make it to the first page within a very reasonable time as the results is quite quick as the name suggests.

QuickSEOResults strictly uses white hat search engine optimization concepts which stands the test of time and approved by major search engines as opposed to most SEO companies using black hat methods which got slammed by google's last Panda update. All their link building services are built on PR 6-9 authority websites and pinged out to 30-40 services which enables quick indexation. In order to ensure effectiveness, your site is also submitted to about 50 social bookmarking sites and close to 100 RSS aggregators.

If you have an idea on what basic search engine optimization and link building is all about, you will understand the stategic method employed by QuickSEOResults and like I mentioned earlier, you don't need to pay a dime till you see what they can do within thirty days, so I suggest you go for the free trial SEO first.

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Adding Feedjit Traffic Feed To Blogger & Hiding It From Blog Visitors

Feedjit Live Traffic Feed is one of the best ways to effectively monitor your blog traffic and it's very easy to use. It clearly shows your visitors' geographical location, incoming search queries, exit pages, time of visit and other things that can make you deduce a quick analysis on your web traffic. It gives you an insight on what content your visitors are interested in the most.

Though it's incomparable to google analytics in terms of sophistication, feedjit live traffic feed widget can still do a lot in helping you know your most valuable keywords, traffic source and so on.


That's what the free traffic widget looks like. You like it, huh? :) Now let's add it to your blogspot blog!

How To Add Feedjit Live Traffic Feed To Blogger

-You need to first visit feedjit to generate the code. Click here to see the sign up page.

-Fill the registration form and and proceed to the next page where you'll need to configure the look and feel of the free traffic widget to easily blend with your blog's template

-After choosing the colors, size and every other thing, you can select your blogging platform with the drop down menu at the bottom and add it directly to your blog from there.

-I prefer the alternative: Manually adding it to your blog. Select Other blog or website and copy out the generated code.

-Go to your blog's dashboard and click on Design.

-Depending on where you want the live traffic feed widget to appear on your blog, click on Add a Gadget, select HTML/Javascript and paste the code you copied earlier into the box.

-Save your template and preview your blog

How To Hide Feedjit Live Traffic Feed From Your Visitors

Though this widget looks cool, you may want to have a hidden tracker for reasons best known to you. When your visitors see that they're being tracked, they might feel a bit insecure and being tightly watched. Nobody likes this, not even me. You may also want to have this traffic feed widget invisible but still working in the background because you feel it's too bogus and gives your blog some sort of unprofessional look?

Whatever the reason may be, you can turn it to some sort of invisible tracker for your blog and here's a little trick to hide this feedjit widget.

<div style="height:0;width:0;overflow:hidden;">

YOUR FEEDJIT CODE HERE

</div>

Replace YOUR FEEDJIT CODE HERE with the code you generated earlier. Alternatively, simply paste the code below to your blog:

<div style="height:0;width:0;overflow:hidden;">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feedjit.com/serve/?bc=FFFFFF&amp;tc=494949&amp;brd1=336699&amp;lnk=494949&amp;hc=336699&amp;ww=160"></script><noscript>
</div>

That's it and the widget remains hidden in the background. Are you wondering how to view the traffic feed widget when it's already hidden?

http://live.feedjit.com/live/your-url-here/0/

Just replace your-url-here with your blog address. You can bookmark the link on your browser for quicker access. Wanna see who's been visiting us? Follow the link below.

http://live.feedjit.com/live/doncaprio.com/0/

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How To Increase Your Blog's Google Page Rank And Alexa Global Rank

I was at home on Sunday, just relaxing and decided to check my inbox and saw this email from a fellow blogger:

"Please can you tell me the secret of your Google page rank and natural traffic. Thanks"

I've been asked countless times how my blog attained a Google page rank of 5/10 in less than a year (My web forum that is less than four months old also has a pagerank of 6/10). My former blog (www.capriofiles.com) was started in 2009 and this very one you're reading is just a year old. I could attain a page rank of 5/10 and alexa global traffic rank of about 150,000 in less than a year because of the little experience I had with my first blog. I had to delete that blog and focus solely on this because I realized I could do much better with just a blog. Anyway, I replied the email as follows:

"The major secret is original contents coupled with one way backlinks plus right use of keywords. When I started out, I registered in lots of forums (that allow URLs in profile) and commented on lots of blogs with higher page rank. That, combined with original and well researched contents improves page rank and search engine traffic and increases your alexa global traffic rank in the process. It might take months or even a year before you see a tangible effect, but just keep building your backlinks (one way backlinks) and be sure to emphasize on the keywords you think people would type in google search when writing your blog posts.

http://www.doncaprio.com/2011/03/link-building-traffic-and-seo.html

You can check out that post. Everything there practically works for me.

Assuming you're writing a post on "How to rob a bank," you must let that phrase or similar ones like "how to steal in a bank" appear in your article as many times as you can, perhaps five to ten times or so because that is just what anyone would type into google search box.

If only I had been writing my blog posts the way I do now right from the start, I would have had much more traffic and a higher alexa traffic rank. But remember, it's always original content, right choice of keywords and one-way backlinks that increases your google pagerank, search engine traffic and eventually, a better alexa trafic rank"

Yes, those are the three most important things to put in mind when thinking of increasing your blog's google page rank and alexa global traffic rank but for the purpose of clarification, I'll explain each of these one after the other.


1. Original, Quality and Well Researched Contents

I'm sure you might have heard this before but do you actually know what it means? I've seen a lot of new bloggers use articles on other blogs word for word, thinking its a cheap way to get traffic but hurting their very own pagerank in the process. Google has a way of differentiating between original content from copied one and you'll definitely sink lower in search engine result page if you're the type that relies on contents from other blogs. The last Google panda update 2.5 focused heavily on plagiarism, poor contents, black hat SEO and lots of big sites with high page rank sank.

A friend using autoblogging software disappeared from SERP and so many others got affected. There was some kind of general fluctuation in traffic but I've noticed an increase in traffic since. When google realizes your site content is copied from somewhere else, you lose relevance in search engine result page and start missing out on search engine traffic. So, the bottom line is writing original and well research content that gives you not only a higher page rank, but also gains you credibility with your readers.

I should also add this: you don't expect to come up in google search result with a blog post of just one hundred words. Your post must be long enough to be called a real article. Writing short contents won't increase your page rank or drive in any meaningful traffic form search engines.

2. Choice of Keywords and Moderate Use

Apart from writing original contents, it's also important to know the right keywords to use that's going to drive in traffic from search engines. Like I said earlier, if you're going to write a blog post on how to rob a bank, you must be sure to include that phrase in your article and similar ones such as 'how to steal in a bank' and so on. You should let this appear in your article as many times as possible but it seems google now has a way of punishing excessive use of keywords. You must be moderate about it but you also must be sure you pick the right keywords to use in each article.

A few weeks back, I wrote a post that went viral and drove in lots of traffic, with almost 600 facebook likes in just a couple of weeks, and I took time to study how I wrote that blog post and realized what made it go viral was the proper use of keywords that drove in mad search engine traffic which will definitely have a huge impact on my alexa global ranking in about a month or so. The phrases used in that blog post was exactly what people were searching for on google.

Using Google analytics will give you a better insight on keywords and I suggest you start using this if you haven't.

3. Building Quality Backlinks

I won't talk much about this because I have an article that already covers it. Building quality backlinks is an efficient search engine optimization method that's definitely fool proof. It's an important way to increase your page rank and one of the algorithms google considers in SERP. For more info on this, please read this post.

One important this you must know in order to increase your traffic, google page rank and alexa traffic rank is that although these things are different from one another, they are still interrelated one way or the other. Focus on improving your blog by writing quality and original content with good choice of keywords and you'll realize your google page rank drives more search engine traffic which in turn increases your alexa traffic rank. Happy blogging!

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Buy Facebook Fans And Twitter Followers

Starting a facebook fan page is easy but getting people to like the page might be a hard task to accomplish. There are several ways to promote your facebook fan page on your website or blog and these include using the like box or like button I recently wrote a blog about. Another way is by suggesting the page to your facebook friends but this definitely won't get you thousands of likes. You might get a couple of hundreds which isn't that much when it comes to real facebook marketing.



With buyrealfacebookfans.com, you buy facebook fans at an affordable price. Having a huge facebook fans can be a big boost to your online marketing as you get more exposure and come in contact with potential customers. Apart from buying facebook fans from these company, you can also

1. buy twitter followers
2. buy youtube views
3. buy google +1
4. buy tumblr followers
5. buy vimeo views
6. buy web traffic

Facebook is the largest marketing platform today and this is the major reason why you should seriously consider buying some. Buying targeted fans can be a major boost to your revenue if well utilized. Buyrealfacebookfans actually send your real facebook fans who are going to interact with your product unlike some other companies that build up your fan base with fake facebook profiles. They have different packages ranging from 1000 likes to 10000 likes and you can choose any one that suits your need. I guess you should check them out.

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Using Google Analytics On Your Blog

There are several free counters you can use to monitor traffic coming to your blog but only a few can equal google analytics in terms of detailed reporting. Google analytics is a free service provided by google to keep a track of your site or blog's visitors. Using google analytics is quite helpful as it gives you an idea of what your visitors find interesting on your blog and areas you should make improvements. With google Analytics, you get to see almost real-time data about your site's visitors. It's even possible to track how much you're earning from each of your blogs if you have more than one.

Google Analytics can provide you information about top search keywords relating to your site, referring websites and so on.

Installing google analytics on blogger is quite easy but you first have to sign up for the service with your google account.

1. Log in to google analytics and create a new account for your blog.



2. Hit the sign up button on the next page and proceed to the next stage where you're supposed to enter your website's URL and account name.



3. Enter your contact information and proceed



4. Copy out the code generated on the next page





5. Log in to your blogger account and click on Design > Edit HTML

6. By pressi9ng CTRL + F on your keyboard, search for </head>

7. Just above this, paste the code you copied earlier in step 4 and save your template.

You just successfully installed google analytics code on your site and should start seeing tracking reports in your google analytics dashboard in about 24 hours.

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Using Unique Meta Tags For Different Blog Posts (For Blogger)

Using meta tags on your blog can increase your search engine ranking and and it gets even better by adding different meta tags for different blog posts. The last post I made on how to add meta tags to blogger explains the basics of meta tags and what they are all about. Simply put, meta tags are special html codes that gives search engines like google some needed information about your website such as description, relevant keywords, title, etc. You can however define different meta tags for different pages. This is very useful if you blog on a wide number of topics or you operate your blog on a very diverse niche. Adding different meta tags to individual blog posts makes it easier for bots to crawl and properly index your blog content and there's the chance of a better search engine ranking and an increase in traffic.



Though major search engines like google and yahoo do not put meta keywords into consideration that much like before, including them might still be of help to other search engines that still use them. Meta description is still important as this is the snippet that will be shown in search engine result pages.

Adding different meta tags to blog posts is a white hat on-site search engine optimization technique which isn't hard to implement on blogspot sites though it still has to be done manually unlike wordpress with a ready made plug in for this same purpose.

Sample of a general meta tag and how to use it on blogger can be found on this blog post as the one shown below is for specifying unique meta tags for different posts.


<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "BLOG-POST-URL-HERE"'>
<meta content='DESCRIPTION' name='description'/>
<meta content='KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>


For this particular blog post, my unique meta tags for it should look just as shown below:


<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://www.doncaprio.com/2011/09/meta-tags-different-unique-posts-blog.html"'>
<meta content='How to add different meta tags for different blog posts. This post explains how to use unique meta tags for blog post on blogger.' name='description'/>
<meta content='meta tag, blog, different, unique, search engine ranking, google' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>


Follow this steps to add the meta tags to the head section of your template:

- Login to your blog and click on design

- Click on Edit HTML

- Press CTRL + F and search for </head>

- Just below this, paste all the meta tags.

- Save your template.

Note that you can create different sets of meta tags for all your blog post but this almost impossible if you have a great deal of blog entries. Doing the trick for a couple of your most important blog post isn't a bad idea.

To know if your meta tags are working properly, you should check out this meta tag analyzer which is a free online tool.

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How To Create A Facebook Fan Page And Adding Like Box To Blogger

Facebook isn't just a social site that helps you connect and share with the people in your life, it can be a great way to connect with your business clients or blog readers. I have written some posts on facebook integration with blogger like adding facebook comment box, adding facebook like button and large social bookmarking button but having a facebook fan page can not be overlooked. Creating a facebook fan page is an effective way to ensure you keep in touch with your blog visitors on the world's favorite social network. Though there are millions of Facebook fan pages, there are still some people who find it hard to create a fan page because they're probably new to facebook. This blog post explains the basics on how to create a facebook fan page, a like box and how to integrate the widget to your blogger hosted blog.

To create a fan page with a like box, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your facebook account and click here to create a fan page

2. Select a page category depending on what you're creating a fan page for. You should select Brand or Product if it's a blog.

3. Select Website as sub-category

4. Enter Your site name in the next available space e.g Doncaprio.com or The 9ja Geek's Journal

5. Agree to the terms and continue.



6. The next page takes you to where you're asked to upload the page's profile picture. You can use your blog's logo

7. You can invite your facebook friends to like your fan page or import email contacts to notify about your new fan page

8. Enter the basic info about your blog or website on the next page.


Creating A Facebook Like Box

- Click here to get started.

- Enter your fan page URL and other parameters as shown below


- The sample shown above can be different from yours depending on your choice.

- Click on Get Code when done with the configuration


How To Add Facebook like Box To Blogger

- Clicking on Get Code presents two different sets of codes

- Copy the first one (ifame)

- Log in to your blogger account

- Click on Design

- Select Add Widget on the location you wish the facebook like box to appear

- Paste the code you copied earlier and save

- View your blog and the Widget should appear at the very spot.


How To Get Facebook Fan Page Custom Username

A default facebook fan page URL can be quite long and hard to remember. My facebook fan page looks like http://facebook.com/capriotips which is so short and simple. You must have at least 25 likes before getting a custom facebook username.

On your browser, launch http://facebook.com/username and select your desired username for your fan page.

Automatically Updating Your Facebook Fan Page

Instead of sharing every blog post all by yourself, you can synchronize your blog's RSS Feed with your facebook fan page and every blog post will be pushed to your fan page as well as your personal profile to see. I wrote a post earlier how you can automatically publish your blog's RSS feed to your facebook profile and fan page and you can as well check it out.

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How To Add Large Share Buttons To Your Blog Posts

Social networking now plays a major role in getting traffic to a blog and it all becomes better when your readers can easily share or bookmark your blog posts on their favourite social network.
This post explains how to add large share buttons to your blog posts. This includes facebook, twitter, digg, delicious and the whole rest of them.

1. Log in to your blogger account, click on design, then edit html.

2. Always remember to back up your template so you can restore it in case something goes wrong.

3. Click on Expand widget template

4. Press CTRL + F and search for this code:

<data:post.body/>

If you're using a magazine style template or have more than one of this code in your template, locate the one that actually contains the post body on blog post pages. If you're confused about the right one to use, search for this code instead:

<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'/>

5. Just below that, paste this code:


<div style='border: 1px #3b5998; background-color: #eff3fa;'><div align='center'><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'><strong>&#9829; CONSIDER SHARING THIS POST WITH YOUR FRIENDS IF YOU LIKE IT &#9829;</strong> <br/> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Share this post Facebook'><img alt='Facebook' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQUzYjOFqpUibvsR_qoM5qzC9WqsMT1E6waXg_ml9wsePHGinn60pD0sg06REnYt2vR0xB4Frbwy3ds5ZznSvEo-SzZGvY-ZCqGo_W3C3x5exaMQlY63L9EIsua8mtp3KCAOJiondNcg/s1600/facebook_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://twitter.com/home?status=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Tweet About This Post'><img alt='Twitter' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO_mnAq1K7Fu8ZPuHBtP_914gePHAXVpyY8O7XYTA-D0akUnFVzrTM5_Sc87C8bJ87wc0OqzGynHKaenUcWm80JYyh7QCwdw50pgSnba7MO9QcGr29CpY_tGDRWM-cV8JF-XqXDQ0onQ/s1600/twitter_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='StumbleUpon This Post'><img alt='StumbleUpon' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSTXkl4G1maIpv49I0t4XZ2RgnvAiR4-_vSCJbcTZxMP-yQ756LvotP-DwDBj6iRXlZuUhOylDYFGOuTEBnU_ZqzYeoloPlleJidyOkrFdg0egwDdCh-6fy6CbSqpUK-fFeIF-FfsBsw/s1600/stumbleupon_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://digg.com/submit?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Digg This Post'><img alt='Digg' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULm1t2MzWzAX-Ghh6m_UsQJvtyyeL334CovK8Szzw9piZnPMZL6IiEkCHpyULk4QkOXnMZoFK4XaOiSJyfmIv5Ae95N_MZ9LLyEG6FLiR6THU3PCl-1jwwXfbi8KjWHBo5_tyYncrZA/s1600/digg_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://del.icio.us/post?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Add to Delicious'><img alt='Delicious' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipSXtqddTzhhIOfoSDsT2lJg4lZbxW3TYPNjAOmXOHhZ3riq5aEMXHRf3701UJI4CPeAntZ6zhl35Tl_ZLdooTreCVgi3nmqRFxbb8gPRh2OEud7P_updHBrLOg_7y1ou_wtHHQA1aWA/s1600/delicious_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://reddit.com/submit?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Reddit this post'><img alt='Reddit' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwe3JDqT6NRB-hyHnuowoPOQuoYLjkINz0E0Uek_l_KXXneTJqxRteUwDj-0jeRD9a0GWuHzjvS1BUGc2kbqwuyD1H8Ogj2g7xtn5fD1mUqUQCvn5Erf4iEzMqPm8vD8kRwyWrUOnEZA/s1600/reddit_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://www.technorati.com/faves?add=&quot; + data:post.url' target='_blank' title='Add this to Technorati Favs'><img alt='Technorati' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8QilHUS0p8Y5OwRfQrKHD-0IocqzLI0tOx8icReLaD3jax77qzdigj8jUuvJYWF2LwkHtZFREvb5p6NNxW3B1ANkdLLCH6bCZ5PEu7lN3x72QMkfkhpi_HndDp-buKryT7byrWiFBrg/s1600/technorati_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Mixx it'><img alt='Mixx' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyJryWLgFP8dkgqSN_1hVViUF-0gs5a80xSONfdapnEm2nL9FLrNxOzye3Z3NHFwc7pNHnj30cpa5Z60SENCyNSw3VxGGT1AtBRG22ZvkZoVU0CC_yoUvlwBJwD6Y6rtGOrI9cp_P0rg/s1600/mixx_icn.png'/></a> <a class='opacity' expr:href='&quot;http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Share on Linkedin'><img alt='Linkedin' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUbJwL_idNLg1TjyMvULizTGbSUjwxRFm0Itqr-oRGxOWofhcXc_XFKplBNhxfIOJX_JeH7SVz0KxtbJ6Wq60QAeJhBZCNpvlWqES7dD3nrXkN4iJ_nM9_6wt7X7Nj8wx0slVG2fW4ug/s1600/linkedin_icn.png'/></a><br/><small>[<a href='http://www.doncaprio.com/2011/04/add-facebook-large-share-button.html'>Get this Widget</a>]</small></b:if></div></div>


6. Save your template.

Now check any of your blog template and you can now see the large share buttons with facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit, technorati, linkedin, mixx and stumbleupon.



You can as well style the icons with css.

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Google Pulls Down .co.cc Subdomains

About a couple of weeks ago, google decided to remove all .co.cc sub-domains from it's index. The main reason behind this is the excessive use of this free sub-domain by malware sites. It was a big blow to blogs, forums and other sites using this free sub-domain as they will no longer appear in search results.

You could run a google search before, bump into a .co.cc site and get your computer infected with malicious programs without your knowledge. It was reported that millions of sites were removed from google's index: the bad eggs and sadly, the good ones as well. This of course has a negative impact on respectable sites using this particular sub-domain, but it's like what had to be done was done at last.

It's always wise to go for a top level domain if you intend to run a successful blog. Using a free sub-domain never helps as it makes your site look very unprofessional. The very sound of a top level domain gives your visitors a sense of security, even if the design isn't that great.

If you happen to be one of those affected by this step google took, you should switch to a top level domain as continuing to use a .co.cc domain definitely means no search engine traffic.

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How To Advertise on Facebook

Facebook is a becoming a part of day-to-day life for some people, people keep registering every single minute just to socialize and get in touch. There's more to facebook than just socializing though, you can turn facebook to a major source of traffic for your site. You must have seen facebook ads displayed on the right sidebar each time you log in and probably followed a couple of them before, right? Did you know you can actually have your site advertised on that sidebar? You definitely can and you there's absolutely nothing complicated about advertising on facebook.

You might be wondering how much it costs to advertise on facebook. Well, it's cheap, I mean dead cheap and you can advertise for as low as $1 and pay as low as $0.01 for a click. This simply means you can get one hundred visits to your site for just one dollar! You don't need to have a paypal account to advertise on facebook, you can pay with a credit or debit card. I recommend Guarantee Trust Bank mastercard for online purchases if you're a Nigerian, it works just fine if you've activated it for online transactions (contact the nearest GTB branch for details about this).

How Do I start Advertising?

Login to your facebook account and scroll down to the bottom of the page, click on the "Advertising" link at the footer. You'll be asked what you intend to advertise, your target audience and a couple of other things. You should also have an image ready before following the link. I recommend a 120x120 image or less in size but it must be square or else it might look cropped and distorted.

How To Choose Maximimum Pay Per Click

The amount you choose to pay per click determines how often you ads will appear. Facebook suggested I pay abou $0.32 per click but that looked way too much and I chose to pay 0.05 per click instead. This is flexible, you may even choose to pay as low as $0.01 per lick. The choice is yours but it is important to know that there are many people bidding for those advertising spaces and your advert might not appear if you select a bid too low.

After placing the order, your campaign should be reviewed and approved withing twenty four hours. You might even see your own very ads running while surfing around the site if you happen to be one of the target audience you selected while creating the advert.

You can get thousands of people trooping into you blog with this in just a matter of days. I tried and and it definitely works.

Does this post sound helpful? Leave a comment if you have a question and share us if it's helpful.

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How To Use Meta Tags on Blogger And Other Sites

Meta tags are special html tags placed in the head section of a web page to control how search engines list and index the site. Meta tags are generally used to give search engines detailed information about your site whenever they come crawling your contents. Many information can be contained in meta tags and this make can go a long way in boosting your pagerank if properly implemented.

Different meta tags perform different functions. There are meta tags to tell search engines about your site main language, general description, relevant keywords, whether to index web pages or not, etc.

An example of Meta tag is given below:

<TITLE>The Unknown Site</TITLE>

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This site is sbout unknown stuffs you probably didn\'t know before reading this stuff.">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="unknown things,stuffs,abc,xyz,blah blah blah">

<META NAME="robot" CONTENT="index,follow">

<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="Copyright © 2011 Unknown Inc. All Rights Reserved.">

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Unknown Author">

<META NAME="language" CONTENT="English">

Having proper information in your meta tags is an on-site search engine optimization step. It must be detailed and the information contained therein must be accurate or you might get penalized by including wrong information such as inexistent keywords. Also, you must be sure the content of each meta tag content does not exceed 100 characters. It should actually be much less according to SEO experts. It's not the quantity that matters, but the quality.

Almost all the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL Search, AltaVista, AllTheWeb (FAST), HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek (Go), Excite, and WebCrawler support Meta tags and it is important to have well made meta tags because they can help increase your Search Engine Position.



You can edit the one I posted above or use this Online Meta Tag Generator.

How To Implement the Meta Tags on Your Blogspot/Blogger Site

1. Login to your blog and click on design

2. Click on Edit HTML

3. Search for </head>

4. Just above this, paste all the meta tags.

3. Save your template.

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How To Redirect A Blog To Another Blog or Address

I had to make this post because I realized what would have happened if there was absolutely no way to redirect a blog to another. I initially intended to make http://fbt.doncaprio.com a different blog under a sub domain but changed my mind due to certain reasons. I was quite worried about all the traffic I was going to lose and decided to go online just to make a little research. I came up with a little trick which I'm gonna share here, who knows, someone else might just need it down the line.

To redirect one blogspot blog to another needs no techie stuff, simply copy and pasted the code below in the HEAD section of your template by folowing these steps:

* Login to your blogger account and click on Design > Edit HTML

* Now Press CTRL = F and serch for </head>

* Paste the following code just above this

<meta HTTP-EQUIV='REFRESH' content='0; url=http://my-new-blog-adress'/>

<meta content='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW' name='ROBOTS'/>

Please change my-new-blog-adress to your own new address.





Explanatory Note

content='0 as shown in the code determines how long (in seconds) your visitors will stay on the old blog before being redirected. I set it to Zero but you might change it depending on your choice.

Also <meta content='NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW' name='ROBOTS'/> tells search engines to stop indexing posts on your old blog. This prevents your new blog from being penalize by google for duplicate content as pages indexed on the old blog will be removed in due time.

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Link Building, Traffic and SEO

If you are new in this blogging business, you probably won't know what link building is all about and what it means to a site. You will probably be too concerned about your google adsense earnings and neglect the most effective way to increase it. Apart from being a source of traffic, quality links from sites with high pagerank pointing to your blog always go a long way in boosting your ranking in search engine results.

Aside from writing quality contents, building quality links pointing to your blog should be your target especially if you desire a huge traffic from google search results. Have you ever wondered how google sorts out search results, placing some sites before others? Are you worried because your site or blog never comes up even when you search for a phrase or keywords specific to your site?



Like they always say, content is king but having quality backlinks is the most effective way to make google notice your content. When search results are displayed, google takes a lot into consideration before ranking some sites high above another. Google uses a mathematical formula called an Algorithm to display search results in order of preference and this involves up to 200 components. Some of these include

1. Use of keywords
2. Pagerank (which is directly proportional to your baclinks)
3. Quality content
4. Traffic
5. How old the domain is

Pagerank is one of the most important. Having sites relating to your blog category linking to your site is a major way to boost your pagerank. This does not imply that you must find links to your site even from sites with low reputation. Backlinks from sites with very low reputation or sites with no relevance to keywords appearing on your site will only hurt your google pagerank and thereby making your site have a lower pagerank.
Goole remains the largest source of trafic for your blog and appearing on the first ten results is the only way beecause nobody will go through millions of search results just to find your blog!

How to Get Quality Backlinks

Now there are two types of backlinks:
1. One way backlink - this kind of backlink is considered the most important as only the site points to your blog without any link to the site appearing on your site.

2. Two way backlink - this too is has it's own importance but not as effective as the first. This is the case with most directory listing and partnership, you have to link back to sites that link yo you.

i. commenting on blog posts across the internet
ii. partnership (a mutual agreement between site owners to link to eachother)
iii. directory listing
111. paid SEO (paying someone to do all the dirty job)
iv. Encouraging your readers to link your contents
v. posting in forums
vi. guest blogging

These are only some of the various ways to get those precious baclinks, not all. Improving your ranking in search results depend largely on your backlinks, so get as many as you can BUT DO NOT SPAM.

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How To Publish Your Blog Feedburner Feed To Twitter Automatically

If you're a twitter freak with thousands of followers, you will surely like to tweet every blog post immediately they appear on your blog. Feedburner does this for you at no cost and I assume you already have a google account as this is what you're going to need to login to Feeburner.
I also believe you have your blog RSS feed. This is how to get your blogspot RSS feed address if you do not know it already:

Your post RSS feed should look like -
http://my-blog-address/feeds/posts/default

Your comment RSS feed should be like -
http://my blog-address/feeds/comments/default

Replace my-blog-address with your blog's address, ok?

Now back to business, login to feedburner.com and burn a feed. Use your post RSS and do the necessary configuration.

When your feed is ready, follow the following steps:

1. Click on "Publicize"



2. Select "socialize" from the links on the left



3. Add your twitter account with your username and password




4. Grant Feedburner the required access to your twitter account.

5. "Save" and the service is active.

Once this is done, every blog post you make will appear to your twitter followers as a new tweet. You can get a lot of traffic from social networks if you know the right way to utilize them.

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How to Automatically Publish Blog Rss/Atom Feed To Facebook or Twitter

Feedburner RSS feeds can be automatically published to your tweeter profile. Many Feedburner users have patiently waited for Feedburner to add RSS synchronization to facebook profiles and fan pages but it seems that is not in their agenda.

Publishing your RSS feed to your profile or facebook fan page is quite an efficient way to keep your readers updated, it's a sure way to inform them as soon as you publish a new blog post.
I, however, found two facebook applications that does this for you, publishing your RSS feed to your fan page or profile even when you're offline

1. Networked Blogs




This Facebook application automatically posts your blog posts to your profile of fan page using the RSS feed you configured it with. Using it is quite easy as you only need to register your blog, verify ownership, grant the application the required permission and you have your blog posts on your facebook or twitter profile and fan pages minutes after they are published.

The only thing I dislike about it is that it encrypts your address and places a toolbar on top of your blog posts but this can be turned off in the syndication menu.



2. RSS Graffiti



RSS Graffiti also does the same job as Networked Blogs and I've already tested it with my feedburner feeds. It gives a direct link to your blog post on your facebook profile or fan page by reading the RSS feed you configured it with.

It is quite easy to use and has flexible settings. Instead of publishing your posts as a link, you may decide to publish it as just a status update. You might as well add a twitter account.

It needs to be granted the required access to function properly. I stopped using it few days ago because the new beta version stopped publishing to my profile.

It's quite okay has has some edges over NetworkedBlogs like usinq a http://bit.ly link and so on.

You may as well try out the two to see which one suites your need though they both actually do the main thing: Automatically pushing your blog's atom or rss feed to your facebook or tweeter profile and facebook fan pages.

I prefer the first one though as it has some kind of blog network as the name suggests. You can follow blogs and your blog can be followed thereby also acting as a source of traffic. The only thing I dislike about it is the fact that RSS Graffiti updates a lot more quicker than NetworkedBlogs.

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Submit Your Blog's Sitemap To Google

If you intend to be listed in google search results, then I guess you must tell google about every single page on your site. Submitting your sitemap to google goes a long way in SEO (search engine optimization).Google Webmaster Tools shows you

-search results in which your site appear
-how your site ranks in all search queries
-click through rate (what percentage of people actually visited via that search result)
-all sites linking to your blog
-keywords that drive visitors to your site
-certain errors you might not be aware of.

After signing in to Google Webmaster Tools with your google account, you must add your blog and verify ownership. Follow these steps:

1. Add your site



2. You're asked to verify domain ownership on the next page. Select "ADD META TAG TO MY SITE'S HOMEPAGE" then copy the code given.



3. Login to your blogger Dashboard, click on Design, then Edit HTML


4. Search for this code:

<head>

5. Now, just after this code, paste the code you copied earlier and save your template.

6. Go back to your Google Webmaster Tools and click on verify.

7. The next step now is submitting your sitemap. Select Site Configuration from the links on the left sidebar and click submit sitemap.



8. Now paste this in the space provided after your blog's address

/atom.xml?redirect=false&amp:start-index=1&amp:max-results=500

That's all. Google now has your sitemap for easy crawling.

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How To Add Email Subscription To Your Blog

You might have seen email subscriptions on many blogs and wonder how it's done if you're a new blogger.

The one I use is delivered by feedburner. Wondering what's the use? Well, your subscribers get an email each time you make a new post and it's a great way to keep them coming back again and again.
Now let's get down to business. You should be familiar with feedburner by now if you ahve read my previous posts on how to add recent comments and recent posts via your feeds.

1. Login to feedburner with your google account

2. Click on "my feeds" right at the top of the page and click the feed you've burned earlier



3. Next, click on "publicize" tab



4. Now select "E-mail SUbscription from the links on the left



5. Now click the activate button and you're just a few steps to go



6. Now you should see some links under the "E-mail subcription" link by the sidebar



Select subscription management to get the code to use on your blog.



Sign in to your blogger dashboard > click on layout > add a page element > html/javascript



and paste the code and SAVE THE CHANGES.



7. You might as well check out the other links for customizing the email.

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How To Get Traffic To Your Blog

It's quite easy to build a blog but most blog owners are faced with the challenge of driving meaningful traffic to their site. The primary objective of building a blog is for people to read your stuffs, right? But how then can you make this happen? How can you make your site appear in first pages of web search results? How can you keep visitors coming back every now and then? People often ask me this questions and I'll try to do the little i can to answer them in this post based on my little experience.
1. Write long, informative, original posts.
2. Do not rely on copied materials from other sites.
3 . Submit your site to popular search engines.
4. Using Google webmaster's tools is very good for knowing your most valuable keywords and top search queries.
5. Submit your blog to blog directories like blogcatalog and technorati.
6. Promote your blog on social networks like facebook and twitter.
7. Write and submit articles to article directories with your site link included.
8. Make sure your readers can subscribe via email or rss. Use feedburner
9. Encourage your readers to comment and respond to comments as new comments invites spiders.
10. Always update your blog with new posts at regular intervals.



11. Always write in simple and easy to understand English. Having too many grammatical errors is unforgivable.
12. Develop a sense of humour in your blog posts.
13. Don't be boring.
14. Contact blog owners for link exchange. Some will turn you down definitely but having your links appears in several places on the internet makes you gain favour with search engines.
15. Use a nice looking template good for SEO.
16. Using too many graphics, javascript and flash that increase page load time is not advisable.
17. Link your blog posts.
18. Link to other blogs or sites relating to your subject matter. It goes a long way in helping.
19. Encorage your readers to share your posts on their favourite social network.
20. Make an effort to comment on other blogs with your link included.
21. Never take your readers for granted.
22. Use pictures in your blog posts. Sometimes pictures communicate more than words.
23. Use pingomatic or some other services to ping your blog each time you make a new post.
24. Track your visitors to monitor their behaviour. This helps to know where to improve on.
25. Endeavour to be the very best in your category!

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