As a blogger, we need to know how Google search & understand our blog. Why Google?

This is because Google is the largest search engine in the world. A lot people in the world use Google as their primary search engine.

As such, as a blogger we need to know how our readers search and reach our blog. From this feedback we can improve our blog by writing relevant articles of what our readers are searching for and installing effective plugins that can increase traffic to our blog.

In this way  hopefully we can improve our blog  in the search engine ranking and bring in more traffic.

To know how Google search & rank our blog, we need to go to Google Webmaster Central.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The Google Webmaster Central is a one-stop center containing webmaster resources that will display information that have been gathered by Google. The information is keywords & crawling result from Googlebot. It also provides suggestions on how to improve your website.

Following is the screenshot.

Sign in using your Gmail account.

Click on +Add a Site. Key in your web / blog site name and click Continue.

It will generate a unique Meta tag for your web/ blog site. You are to copy & paste the code in your web/blog site as stated in the example below. Then click verify or verify later.

After Google has verified your website, you can go to the home page and click on your website name.

The dashboard will be displayed.

Basically it will keep track on the following information.

Search queries

Keywords

Links to your site

Sitemaps

Crawl Stats

It will display what keywords your visitors’ key in the Google search engine to reach your website & also Googlebot crawl information. This is helpful for your analysis.

See below for crawl stats

It will also display crawl errors, malware & provide suggestions on your website html.

Following is the video explanation.

I hope you like this article.

Cheers

Alwin Chuah

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In order to post the next post in a blog, a blogger needs to search the internet, browse for news, read other bloggers’ articles or write from experience. Difficult process, huh!

How about if I were to tell you there is an easier way to get information for your blog?
Instead of looking for information in the internet, you will get the information of your niche you are writing on right in your mail box!. Unbelievable?  Read on and find out.

Go to http://ezinearticles.com/subscribe/

Browse down and tick on the category(s) that meet your needs.
After you have tick what you needed, browse to the bottom and fill up your name & email address.

Related articles that fall under your selected category will then be email to you.
The email that you receive will look similar like this.

It will contain titles & a few starting lines of the articles.
The titles are live links. You just need to click on the titles and it will display the complete articles.
The articles are sent to you via email almost everyday.

My recommendation is do not copy the whole content of the article and paste it into your blog. I know it is the simplest & laziest way, but it will not raise your search engine (SEO) ranking in your blog.

If you want your blog to rank high in search engine, you need to write the article in your own words. You can use the points from the articles as your ideas.

Now you have ideas coming to you literally in the mailbox.

Cheers
Alwin Chuah

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That’s right.  Now you can upgrade your wordpress blog to version 3.0.

It has new features that I think will be beneficial to you.  Below is a video showing the features.

Cheers
Alwin Chuah

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Many people have heard that blogger can make money. But they have no specific idea how a blogger really make their money.

Here are the compilations:-
Online method
1)    Promote other people’s product on your blog and earn commission via banner display
2)    Promote other people’s product on your blog via blog post review.
3)    Displaying adsense banner
4)    Promote your own products via banner and post review
5)    Display clickbank banner
6)    Selling or renting out ads space on your blog to other people
7)    Conduct online training on blogging
8)    Get paid writing articles for other bloggers.
9)    Get paid writing articles for online newspaper, magazine
10)    Joint Venture in Internet business
11)   Create blog and sell it.  So anyone want to buy this blog?

Offline
Once your blog has high traffic, you can become a celebrity
1)    Get paid to write article for newspaper, magazine
2)    Get paid to attend functions( as you are a VIP now)
3)    Get paid to say nice thing about certain products( Like offline product review)
4)    Get paid for using you in advertisement
5)    Conduct blogging training
6)    Write books on blogging
7)    Become ambassador for certain companies ( especially internet companies)

As you can see by being a blogger, your income can be generated from unlimited sources.
It is not necessary that you can earn from your blog only. A lot of bloggers use it to open doors to offline and online income opportunities.

Cheers

Alwin Chuah

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Wonder Wheel is a free tool from Google. You can use it to boost your Search Engine  ranking

Where to find it?
First you need to go to http://www.google.com. Key in any keywords (eg Fish)

On the left hand side you will see Wonder Wheel stated there

Click on the Wonder Wheel .Voila! Other keywords related to your main keywords are displayed.

If you click on the secondary keywords, other related keywords will appear. In this example I click on Aquarium Fish.

How to use this Wonder Wheel?

The important part in Search Engine Optimization is content relevance. Let’s say you have a blog on fish. By writing blog content using the secondary keywords recommended by Google, there is a high chance your blog ranking will be boosted. This is because you are posting relevant articles related to your blog’s theme.

How to get articles?

You can do a google search based on your keywords. From there your can read through the articles that are already posted there.

Do not copy wholesale from other people’s blog. That is known as plagiarism.
What you can do is to jot down the key points from other blogs. Then you can write it using your own words. This is known as research. Also your blog will have high ranking as you are posting a unique article.

Do you like what you read? Post a comment. I love feedback!

Cheers
Alwin Chuah

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Many people will just create a post and just publish in their blog. Then they will hope that some people will read their articles.

In a typical blog, next to the posting is a column or columns displaying the various categories and archives of their previous articles.

However from my observation & feedback from my friends, not many readers will take the trouble to look through the categories & archives. In fact they will just look at the current publish article or on the article they have googled and they will move on.

Also the blog readers can read your blog from:-
•    Your blog site
•    Google reader or similar products
•    Email ( eg Feedburner)

We can attract the readers to read a few more articles that you have written instead of just reading one article. One of the ways is to put a few links of your previous posting at the bottom of the posting.

The Google Reader & Email readers will be able to read the articles only. This meant they will not see the side columns that you have on your blog. If they use this method to read your articles, they will not be able to see your banners, links and archives.
However if put banner at the bottom of your article, they will be able to see it.

Try not to put too many links or banners at your article. Otherwise people will not be keen to read your blog content anymore.

Following is the sample links & banner that I put at the bottom of my postings

Following is the view of Google Reader showing one my article. Note you will not see Header, Footer, Right or left columns from your blog. It just displays the article content only.

Cheers

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Do you like to know which countries are your blog readers from?

Also you can know which country provides you with the most readers.

At the same time you can display this information at your blog for everyone to see.

Well now you can satisfy the above by having a Flag Counter at your blog.

Unfortunately this is not a Wordpress Plugin. So you need to paste some HTML codes.

Here is a screenshot of the flags & the counter for each country readers that have visited your blog.

Where to get

You can get it at http://s05.flagcounter.com

Features

At the above website you can configure:-

• Number of flags to be shown.

• Column of Flags

• Background, Text & Border Color

You need to click on “Get Your Flag Counter”

The following will appear

Steps to install the above code at your Wordpress blog:-

Sign in to your blog using your Administrator’s ID.

Click on Appearance->Widget

You need to decide which sidebar you want to set this Flag counter.

At the Widget, drag the Text to the selected Sidebar

Copy the HTML code from the Flag Counter Website and paste to the Text box.

No need to fill up the Title. Click Save

That completes the installation steps.

Note:

Plan properly the settings for the flags. This is because once this flag counter is displayed at the blog, it will start counting. If you decide to change it later, you will need to go to this website and configure again. This will cause your counter to initialize again.

Now you can show off to the world where your readers are from.

Cheers

Alwin Chuah

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Do you know about half of the world population do not understand English at all?

This meant, if we write our blog in English, only half the world population can understand what we write. The other half will not understand at all.

Therefore in order to increase readers to our blog, we need to have a plugin that can translate English language to other languages. This way we can allow more people to enjoy what we have written, ahem.

I search in the Wordpress plugin and found the Global translator is the most popular plugin.

Following is the screenshot your blog reader will see and by clicking the selected flag, the blog information will be converted to that country’s language.

Key features of Global Translator plugin:-

•    It can translate 41 different languages

•    It support 4 different Translation Engines:

from Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt & FreeTranslations.com

•    Search Engine Optimized:

It uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost

•    Fully configurable layout:

You can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE, DIV or IMAGE MAP based layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors

Plugin Download

You can download the plugin here at http://www.nothing2hide.net/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/

Steps to install & configure

Download the Plugin into your PC.

Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.

Go to your blog’s plugin and activate it.

Click on Settings->Global Translator

The configuration screen appears. You may follow the guide on the screen and configure accordingly. If you not sure, use default settings.

I hope you like this article

Cheers

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If you have created many posts in your blog, you might want to highlight your most popular entries to your readers. The purpose is that hopefully your blog readers will read more of your blog content.

There is a plugin that can help you. It is known as Wordpress Popular Posts.

This plugin allows you to decide the term “popular” either by the most comments, total views or average daily views. You can set it at the setting screen which I will show you later.

Then you need to go to Widget and drag the Popular Posts widget and paste at the sidebar of your choice.

Installation
•    You need to download the plugin from wordpress-popular-posts plugin
•    Unzip the files in your PC
•    Upload the files intoyour blog’s plugin folder.
•    Then you need to go to your blog’s plugin and look for Wordpress Popular Posts.
•    Click on activate.

Configuration
Click on Settings->Wordpress Popular Posts.

The configuration screen appears. You may follow the guide on the screen and configure accordlingly or you may change it to your likings.  Then click on update settings

Widget
Select Appearance->Widgets
Select the sidebar where you want the Popular Posts to be displayed.
As for my blog, it has a sidebar_top( Note: This differs for different wordpress theme)
Drag the Popular Posts widget and place it there.
You are done!

You can see my Popular Posts Widget at my blog’s Right Column

Cheers

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Most of blogs that I visited have serious look. Very business like.

A typical blog will have words only. At a glance it looks boring.

Some try to enhance it by putting static pictures or images in their postings.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact I also capture images and included in my postings.

One of the ways to liven up your blog & to make it friendlier are to have active smileys that can move.

People tend to be attracted to things that move.

I have found a plugin that have active smileys known as Wp-Monalisa.

You can down it here at http://www.tuxlog.de/wordpress/2009/wp-monalisa/

Steps to download & install

Download the Plugin into your PC.

Unzip it and upload to your blog’s plugin folder.

Go to your blog’s plugin and look for Wp-Monalisa.

Click on activate.

.

When you go to Add New Post you will see the smileys at the right column.

Following are the samples of the smileys.

These smileys can be pasted, depending on your choice, in posts, pages or comments.

Hope this will help to inject a little bit of humor & remind your readers to smile a bit.

Hey! Life is meant to be enjoyed. Don’t take things too seriously!!!

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