What is SEO?

Do you know John Chow, Darren Rowse or the 13-year-old blogger Carl Ocab? Anyway, if you’re going to ready their blogs, they keep on talking about SEO, traffic or page rank. What are they talking about anyway?

When you started creating your own blog, there are general purposes in doing so. Perhaps, you just wanna vent out whatever is in your mind or you wanted to kill the boring time you have and blogging is the answer for all of those moments. Or, you really wanted to earn lots of money, with simple ideas and internet. This is really sounds fun! But this is easier said than done. I’m not discouraging each and every one of you. Making money online needs a lot of patience, creativity and SEO.

SEO or the Search Engine Optimization is a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results. There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. Now, I’m going to introduce them all.

With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. Example, if you google “Make Money Online”, the first site that will appear is Make Money Online with GatherSuccess. That’s what the SEO will going to do for our own blog.

Search Engine and Blog Directories

Do you remember the Yellow Pages? Well, I think nowadays, we don’t use these anymore because of Internet. Here’s in Singapore, it launched the Internet Yellow Pages (Singapore). But, in the Internet world, or in the Blogging world I should say, Web Directories, Blog Directoris and Search Engines are the Internet Yellow Pages.Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information.

Here are the sites wherein you can submit your Blogger Sitemap:
1. Yahoo!
2. MSN and Ask.com
3. Google Webmaster
4. Blog Directories
5. Search Engines
6. RSS Feeds and Pings
7. Blog Traffic Exchange

On my next posts, I will discuss on how to submit your Sitemap to the aforementioned Search Engines.

Digg Your Blogger Now

We usually see the Digg image/icon (on the left corner of this post) at beginning or at the end of every post. We often see numbers on it and we just let it be and didn’t ask what this is for.

Digg is a social news website made for bloggers like us, to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet world. How it works? If you have a good story, the readers will simply submit links and stories, or vote or comment on the articles. This will definitely help your site to be noticed, to be famous and definitely earn a lot of cash, eventually.


First Things First

1) Your Blogger account or site should be set to save Post Pages. These are archived blog posts published to their own web page, which mean that each post have unique URL. This is a common requirement by Digg for reader’s posts to be submitted.

How? Dashboard -->Settings -->Archiving -->Enable Post Pages -->Yes

2) The code reads the URL of each blog page and this will be the URL used for submission of the story to Digg.

How? Before you inserted anything on your Template, please copy or Download Template that you’re currently using. This is one of the necessary steps to do whenever you want to change the template. With a backup, you can easily restore the template to the prior state if needed.

Let’s Get Started

Click the box next to “Expand Widget Templates”. Scroll about two-thirds down the template to look for the code that reads:

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

If you want the button to show at the top right corner of your post, replace the above code with this.

<div style="'float:right;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><script type="'text/javascript'"><br /><br /><br /><br />digg_url="<data:post.url/>";<br /><br /><br /><br /></script><br /><br /><br /><br /><script src="'http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js'" type="'text/javascript'/"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><p><data:post.body/></p>textarea></p><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>

This is how it looks like:

If you would like the button to appear at the end of your post, replace with this following code instead.

<p><data:post.body/></p><br /><br /><br /><div style="'float:right;"><br /><br /><br /><script type="'text/javascript'"><br /><br /><br />digg_url="<data:post.url/>";<br /><br /><br /></script><br /><br /><br /><script src="'http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js'" type="'text/javascript'/"><br /><br /><br /></div>textarea></p><br /><br /><br /></div>

And here it goes like this:

This might not be effective to use. Else, place Digg at the upper left corner of the post, similar to what I did.

<div style="'float:left;"><br /><br /><br /><script type="'text/javascript'"><br /><br /><br />digg_url="<data:post.url/>";<br /><br /><br /></script><br /><br /><br /><script src="'http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js'" type="'text/javascript'/"><br /><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><p><data:post.body/></p>textarea></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>

The outcome is like this:

Blend your Digg on your Post

You can also change the background color of the button to blend with your site. For example, a code like this:

<div style="'float:right;"><br /><br /><br /><script type="'text/javascript'"><br /><br /><br />digg_url="<data:post.url/>";<br /><br /><br />digg_bgcolor="#FFFFFF";<br /><br /><br />digg_skin="compact";<br /><br /><br /></script><br /><br /><br /><script src="'http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js'" type="'text/javascript'/"><br /><br /><br /></div><br /><br /><br /><p><data:post.body/></p>textarea></p><br /><br /><br /></div>

Here's how it looks like:

You can insert the color code of your choice into the letters (FFFFFF). For the example above, I used the white background with a color code of #FFFFFF.

Hope this helps. If you would like to Digg this article, click the Digg button.

Be the Judge on the iPhone 3G Ad

You might be in depth thinking on what is the difference between the old iPhone launched last 2007 and the iPhone 3G, that I currently possess Aside from the fact that 3G that supports faster internet browsing and Assisted GPS, comes with a 16 GB memory and lighter by 1 oz, I can’t think of any difference here. So, I search on Youtube, if there’s a visual representation that will convince me that buying an iPhone 3G is better than anything else.

So, I came across this Ad about an invisible shield. All along, I thought this was a main difference. Crap. I’m not watching carefully. Luckily, I didn’t try on my phone then.

But the big question is, is this for real? If you want, you can try it first.