Button Effect for Text Links

I just implement this technique on my blog, maybe some of you already have noticed that when you click a link in this blog it will give you an effect like you press it, just like pressing a real button or a "bump down". Actually I read this in Chris Coyier blog CSS-Tricks, and after reading I said why not implement this one?. I loved the effect maybe my blog readers will also loved this one and hopefully it can encourage more clicks ;-).

Adding prettySociable - Professional Blogger Tutorial (Part 2)

I was impressed when I first saw this jQuery plugin run in Mashable.com (but now I think Mashable is not using this anymore) and I never thought that I can implement this on my blogger a.k.a. blogspot blog until I read Divya Sai post on BloggerStop.net. prettySociable make sharing a lot more fun, by dragging and dropping objects. You can see this working in one of my blogs, click here. Try dragging some of the post images and you'll see icons where you can share the post. I'm sure this plugin can attract your readers to share your blog posts.

How to Increase Blog Loading Speed

Well since the issue of Page Speed becoming a PR factor started, I have been keeping an eye on my blog's loading speed. I think my blog's just load on a average speed, not so slow and not so fast, so I'm still doing some stuff to try to make it load more faster. PR is still a PR that is very important in the Blogosphere, so doing this might benefit your blog's Page Ranking in the near future and most importantly it will benefit your visitors and readers.

How to Submit URL to Baidu.com

Finally, I submitted my blog's URL to Baidu.com with the help of Google Translate. By the way Baidu.com is the leading Chinese search engine for websites, audio files, and images with a Page Rank of 9 and Alexa Rank 8. Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Since we all know that China has a massive amount of population, It's definitely a good idea to submit your blog's URL to Baidu.com. Although we all know that most of the Chinese are not good in English.

Adding Blog Language Translator

Before proceeding to the tutorial make sure you know the benefit of blog language translator.

I've known Google Translate for a long time, I used it when I took up my Nihongo and Spanish class back in my college days. I find it very helpful specially for my projects. The translation is pretty accurate but it's not perfect, it still has some glitch. What I liked about Google Translate is that it supports all languages and you can translate sentence by sentence not words by words which useful for students.

Adding Marquee tag

Marquee tag "<marquee>" is used to make a moving text, image, links and etc. Usually you can see this in the news section of other websites. In my this blog I used this in my featured articles as you can see. The use of marquee tag "<marquee>" can be either good or bad to blog and your design, so I suggest use this tag properly.

Why do I use marquee tag?

Since marquee tag can make something move, it is easier for your readers to notice it and with a proper design it can surely add spice to your blog.

SEO for Blogger - Part 5: Use Proper Link Name

When creating links try using proper link names because it is very SEO friendly. Instead of using generic links like "Read more", "Click Here" and "View Demo" try to put some relevant text information to your links "Read more about Blogging", "Click Here to see blog design" and "View blog design demo". This simple things can make a better SEO to your blog.

For your blog posts this is very easy task to do you can simply modify the text in your editor but notice when you insert jump break to your posts it will automatically put "Read More >>" link under your posts when you start to published it. To deal with this we can add the title of your post after, "Read More >> + Your_Post_Title" or we can totally change the "Read More >>" to "Your_desired_text + Your_Post_Title". It's always better to include your post title for jump breaks and that is what I'm going to show you.

Adding Sidebar Tabs - Professional Blogger Tutorial (Part 1)

Recently, I realized that my sidebar is so populated. I have so many useful widget in my sidebar that cause it to extend so long. One solution to this is to add tabs in my sidebar that has at least 3 sections. Good thing that one of the blogs that I followed which is Soh Tanaka's blog did make a tutorial on how to make a simple tabs with CSS and jQuery. View Tabs demo. This is easy to put on blogger a.k.a. blogspot because you have full access on the blog's code. You can see the tabs on my sidebar after editing some CSS codes to suite my blog's design. Since all the codes are provided in Soh Tanaka's Blog, I will teach you how to put it in your blogger a.k.a. blogspot blog. The good thing about this tutorial is you don't have to use external file storage. All the codes are directly inputted on your blogger's HTML code.

SEO for Blogger - Part 4: Getting Rid of Spam Comments

Spam comments are usually ignored by some bloggers not knowing the harmful effect of it. Before, I have no idea what spam comment was but as I explore the blogosphere and the search engine world I have now a better understanding of it. After knowing what spam comments are I realize that I've done it so many times and sooner or later it will hunt me back. You might done the same thing, When you post a comment on someone's blog posts you also leave a link to your blog.

SEO for Blogger - Part 3: Interlink Blog Posts

Interlinking your blog posts is one of the best way to keep your visitor in your blog because it provide more opportunities for visitors to find content of interest. Again this is a great SEO tactic. Interlinking your blog is a very easy thing to do. You just need to put anchor tag "<a>" within the word/s or phrases that will go to other page when visitor clicks it. <a href="Your_URL"> Your_Word/s </a>

Example: <a href="http://www.google.com"> Go to Google </a>

SEO for Blogger - Part 2: Optimize Page Titles

Part of SEO is to optimize your website title or your page title, part of optimizing page title includes to have your keywords in it and make it dynamic. Most blogger forget to optimize these things specially when they rely on blogging tools like blogger a.k.a (blogspot). Having a dynamic or changing page title is a must for blogs and website because it eliminates the search engines impression that you have a redundant content. Although blogger a.k.a (blogspot) provides dynamic page titles to all your posts the problem is that it always inserts the blog title first before your post title in your page title. To understand more see example.

Example: The blog's title here is "Facebook Vampire Wars - Walkthrough, Tips, Cheats and Guides" and the post title is "Add Me"

SEO for Blogger - Part 1: Adding Meta Tags

Meta tags plays a very important role when it comes to SEO or Search Engine Optimization because by putting meta tags It helps the search engine understand the contents of a site. Meta tags are placed inside the head tag <head>Meta_Tags_Here</head> and when you talk about SEO the most important meta tags are "meta description tag" and "meta keywords tag". Everytime you submit a query in a search engine, you will at least see 3 parts of the result. 

For example let's search for "Facebook" in google.

Styling your blogspot blog (Part5) - Make Round Borders Review

Last week I've done major blog enhancement to make it more functional and user-friendly. Now that I'm 90% done I want to get back to my writing and share a very nice tip on how to make your borders round.

Having a round borders somehow add style to your blog and when used properly it can take your blog design to the next level. Round borders are most likely applied to links to give more impression that it is a button.

Styling your blogspot blog (Part4) - Making Blog Wider Review

Making blog wider is very simple if your using blogger as your blogging tool. It only takes a very simple CSS to use. Most of the blogger I know only rely in the free templates blogspot has, so what if your template doesn't fulfill your blog's need or maybe you just want to maximize the space of your blog. Now I'll be teaching you how to make your blog wider but before I start I want you as always to make a back-up of your template which I discuss in the previous post I had styling your blogspot blog part 1. So if anythings goes wrong you can always restore it back to your original template.

Styling your blogspot blog (Part 3) - Navigation Bar Review

To make blog more professional looking, bloggers should only put things that the blog needs. Blogspot always put navigation bar automatically when you create a blog,



So what if you don't need it? or the design of the navigation bar contradict your blog's design?

Styling your blogspot blog (Part 2) - LinkWithin Review

LinkWithin is blog widget that make 3-5 links to your related posts from your blog. It puts a thumbnail picture under your posts or just plain text links. So by putting LinkWithin in your blog, you force your reader to see some of your blog posts which is by the way a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactic because you interlink your posts. I personally like this blog widget because of the following:

1. It's Free.
2. No Sign-up required.
3. No Advertisement Included.
4. Fast to install (less than 5 minutes)
   
5. Good SEO tactic.
6. Simple and Elegant Design.

Styling your blogspot blog (Part 1) - Floating Review

Today I will start sharing what I know to modify and create your own blogger theme. There are a lot of free blogger theme out there but as a web designer I don't use them, I want to create my own design for my own blog. Before anything else I want you to backup your existing template, just click on "Layout" and go to "Edit HTML" tab and click the "Download Full Template" link and then save to your desire location. Or you can simply copy all the code you see in the code frame and paste it to your word processing application, make sure you check the "Expand Widget Template" before doing copy and paste.