10 Quick Tips for Smarter Blogging.

Here are some tips and tricks I have amassed during my blogging forays. Many of them are too small to make a single post by themselves so I have put them all together in this post. I will also be adding to them as I discover new ones so make sure to bookmark this page. Also do not be surprised if you get this post repeatedly in your feed as Blogger sends out a new feed every time a post is updated......

OPTIMIZE POST TITLES

The URL/PERMALINK of your posts contains the first four or five words of your post title. So make sure that you include the main keywords of your post in the first four or five words of the title so that when the search engines crawl your blog they are included in the index. The Permalink is the link of your post by which it can be accessed in a browser. It is different from your blog link.

CORRECT HEADER IMAGE SIZE

Blogger now has a facility to upload image in the header directly. However your image after uploading may appear off-center. To center your image in the header resize the width of the image to fit the size of the header.

You have to resize the image in a image editor on your PC and then reupload it to your blog header. Use a free program like Irfanview for this. Google for it to download and install it.

To find the width of the header go to Template------>Edit Html and scroll down to the header or header-wrapper code and look for the width parameter. If not there look for outer-wrapper and see it's width. It is denoted in pixels (px). It will look something like this :

#outer-wrapper {
width: 965px;
}

REVERSE ARCHIVE ORDER

Your Archives widget in the sidebar shows the latest posts first. If you want to show the oldest posts first click Edit link in Blog Archive widget in page element subtab of Template tab and deselect (uncheck) the option to show oldest posts first.

SHOW POST TITLES IN ARCHIVES

To show your post titles in your Archives click Edit link in Blog Archive widget in page element subtab of Template tab and select (check) the Hierarchy option. The post titles are not shown in the other two options. The latest month post titles are shown and the other months titles are available on clicking the expand arrow next to the month.

ONE KEYWORD - ONE POST

When you started the blog you selected your keywords. Do not make a post containing all these keywords. Instead put one keyword in one post and use associated (sub)keywords in it. This will help you to make your posts detailed and focussed on one subject.

PREVENT IMAGE COPYING

There is no way you can prevent copying on the Internet. Even if you disable right-click people copy from the source code of the page or by pressing the Print Screen key on the keyboard and then pasting into Paint program. To prevent copying DO NOT PUT PERSONAL OR CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION on the Internet. Use thumbnail images instead of full sized images. Put a watermark on your images using Irfanview - a free image editor.

ADDING WIDGETS OR PAGE ELEMENTS

There is no limit to the number of widgets you can add in your blog. However most Blogger templates have a built in limit. To get around this limit go to Edit Html subtab ofTemplate tab and scroll down in Tenplate box till you see the widget code line with the maxwidgets=x parameter. There is one such line in each section : Header, Sidebars, Main column and Footer of your blog. It looks like this :

<b:section class='main' id='main' maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'>

Change the number of maxwidgets to whatever you want and save template. You can now switch to Page Elements tab and click the 'Add Page Element'ink to add more widgets in that section.

ADD WIDGETS IN HEADER OR FOOTER

Most Blogger templates do not have the ability to add widgets or page elements in the header or the footer. This is because they do not have the "'showaddelement='yes'" line in their section. To do this go to Edit Html subtab of Template tab and add this line in that section like this :

<b:section class='footer' id='footer' maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'>

Save Template and switchto Page Elements tab. You will now see an 'Add Page Element' link in the footer. You can click that link to add more widgets to the footer.

REMOVE BLOG HEADER

Some bloggers would like to do away with the blog header altogether to make their blog stand out. Blogger templates make it difficult to do so because if you click Edit link in the header section of The Page Elements subtab of Template tab there is no 'Remove' link in the popup window. To restore that link go to Edit Html subtab of Template tab and scroll down to the header code :

<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='MY BLOG. (Header)' type='Header'/>

Change locked='true' to locked='false' in the above code and save template. Then switch to Page Elements tab and click Edit link in Header. You will now see a 'Remove' link in the popup window. Clicking that will enable you to remove the title widget altogether.

ADD STATIC PAGES IN BLOGGER

As we have seen before Blogger does not give you the ability to add a static page like the Profile page. Wordpress has this advantage. There is a workaround for this. Go to Settings----->Archiving------>Enable Post Pages----->Yes------->Save Settings. This gives each post you make it's own separate page. So now to create a new page just create a new post by clicking on +New Post on the Dashboard.


This is not a very elegant solution. So another solution is to create your own account in Googlepages. It is free and you can have free space also for hosting your files (upto 500MB). Create a page there and put the link of that page in the sidebar of your blog.