Google Adds +1 To Blogger Pages and Speech Search!

Earlier today, Google announced the widespread availability of it's '+1' recommendation buttonfor blogs and websites.  In the announcement, the company said it would be available in other Google products such as Blogger.

Despite the fact that I have been off doing other things and haven't haven't the time to write as much as I'd like in recent months, I decided to mess with the +1 documentation and see how easy it would be to try it out right here.

I went to the notes .... and there was nothing about adding it to Blogger. 

Why?

They already did.

Alongside the Twitter, Facebook and other buttons at the bottom of each post (here), '+1' was added and turned on by default!

Sure, it can't hurt, and you are using Google's software for free (Blogger), but it still seems like a pretty bold move.  Shades of the early Buzz implementation within Gmail?

On another Google note, the company has been testing a search by voice 'microphone' on the main Google page almost all day.  I've been waiting for someone (anyone?) to write about this but apparently it's being overshadowed by the coverage of D9.

Curious? You won't see it in IE Explorer or Firefox.  You will see it at the right of the search bar (at least here in the States) using the Dev-M version of Google's browser Chrome.  I looks like this.  

Click it and it scan your hardware for a mic ... and tests it.

Pretty neat stuff.

Update: June 2 1:30 AM ET - Apparently you will only see the 'mic' currently on the Dev versionfor Windows according to a brief note I just received.

Update 2: Blogger Buzz has a video about +1 and using it in Blogger.  It appears that since I had the 'other' sharing buttons turned on, +1 now goes along for the ride.

Update 3: Don't rush to install the Dev version of Chrome to see this.  The test is apparently over.  The 'mic' is gone!

Increase Google Page Rank Blogger Blogspot

Today I continue my series of articles on search engine optimization SEO for a Blogger Blogspot blog. The focus of this article is on increasing the Google Page Ranking of your Blogger Blogspot blog. If your blog is like mine and relatively new you will find getting off the lowest rung of the Google Page Ranking a bit of a mission but it can be done particularly if you use solid SEO techniques.

To recap search engine optimization is the process of making your website search engine friendly. As major search engines like Google and Yahoo will drive most of the traffic to your blog the more search engine friendly your blog is the more traffic you are likely to receive.

There are a number of SEO - search engine optimization techniques you can employ on your blog to boost traffic such as adjusting titles tags, making use of meta tags, using keywords and keyword phrases, improving keyword density, submitting your blog sitemap to search engines. I have discussed these in detail in my article SEO Tips for Blogspot Blogger blog.

I have already written a number of other articles about SEO for Blogger Blogspot blogs too including the following articles so if you want help with basic search engine optimization try these:


Once you've started employing these SEO (search engine optimization) techniques and tips you are going to want to measure your blog's progress. Two important tools that measure the popularity of websites are Google Page Ranking and Alexa Ranking.

Improve the Google Page Ranking of Your Blogger Blogspot Blog
Google Page Ranking is a tool which ranks websites listed in the Google search engine. Websites are ranked on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being the lowest possible score for a site and 10 the highest. The higher the page ranking of your site, the greater the amount of traffic it receives in comparison to other sites. Check your Google Page Rank.

Google uses a complex formula to rank websites which I am not going to cover here. However there are some basic tips about Google Page Ranking that are useful for any Blogger webmaster to know. 

1. Make sure your posts are keyword rich.
   Google expects good usage of keywords so make sure your Blogger blog posts have a density of 3-5%. Keyword density is calculated by the number of keywords divided by the number of total words on a page. If your blog article is 500 words long and has 10 keywords it has a keyword density of 2%. A keyword density of anywhere between 2% and 7% is considered an acceptable range by Google. Anything percentage higher than 7% may well be regarded as keyword stuffing and your blog is likely to be penalized. You can check the keyword density using tools like
   
   
2. Post to your blog frequently
   Make sure you post frequently as Google prefers fresh pages and does not like out of date sites
   
   
3. Create internal links
   Link to previous articles you have written. If you have not cross linked as you posted it is probably worth going back and doing this even if it is a bit arduous.
   
   
4. Build external links to other sites on an ongoing basis
   Build links on a regular basis by commenting on other related blogs and in forums. Add social bookmarking buttons to your blog to encourage readers to bookmark and share your articles. Be aware though that many sites such as Reddit, Digg anddel.icio.us implement the link attribute rel="nofollow" which will not boost your ranking.
   
   Ensure your blog is properly indexed by major search engines. List your blog in blog directories. Watch out for blog directories though as some require you to put a link on your blog but do not reciprocate with a link. See my article ongetting listed in blog directories for further help.
   
   It is worthwhile to link to other blogs you may own as well but doing this will not boost your page ranking particularly. Google is weighted to give a higher ranking to links from other high ranking blogs especially if they are relevant to the content of your blog. The higher the ranking of the site externally linking to yours the better. So essentially you can't just create a bunch of blogs and link to them with the expectation that your Google Page Rank will miraculously increase overnight. Far better to spend your time concentrating on creating a small group of links to quality sites with a high Google Page Rank than going all over the net creating links to low ranking sites.
   
5. Another aspect to consider when building quality external links is to ensure that your keywords and phrases appear in links which point to your site. Google analyzes these links so have the linking text contain your keywords to get the most out of them.

Check the Ranking of Your Blogger Blogspot Blog in Alexa
Alexa.com is a website that measures the traffic levels of websites. An Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users visiting your website with the Alexa toolbar installed and takes into account page views, number of users and three months of historical data. 

The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. This is kind of an odd way to measure traffic but that is how it works. However it is a well established measure of the value of your site against others so it is useful to see how highly your blog is rated in Alexa. Provided your blog has been around a month or two you can check out how your blog is ranked by visiting Alexa's site info page



Alexa supplies you with statistics and information about your blog's traffic and ranking in handy graphical format



If you want your Blogger Blogspot blog to improve its Google Page Ranking concentrate on building quality external links. Google likes it when your site is getting linked to by other sites. The more the content is related the better. In this article I have given you some pointers about how to boost the Google Page Ranking of your Blogger Blogspot blog. If you have time let me know how you get on. Particularly how quickly you got off the Google Page Rank of 1 and how you did it. I'm sure other readers would be interested too.

How to Add Internal Links Within Blogger Posts

In the Blogger tutorial I discuss how to add internal links within your Blogger posts (Blogspot posts) to point to either another section within the same post or to another post.

There are lots of times when you may want to direct a reader to a different part of your Blogger post depending on what their needs and interests are. Or you might want to alert the visitor to something significant in a related post. In this article I will show how to make use of internal links both within posts and in Blogger generally.

Why bother with internal linking you may be wondering? Well the answer is to improve SEO. Blogs with a good internal linking structure will fare better than blogs that don't link posts. Plus you will be creating an aid to navigation for your reader. On longer posts jumps links to different sections within your post or to other posts mean readers can quickly find the information they are looking for.

How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within the Same Blogger Posts

How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within Different Blogger Posts


How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within the Same Blogger Post

Consider the above links. Click on them. Each jump the reader to a different part of this article. This type of internal linking is common practice in website building and can be equally applied to blogs to assist with navigation.

How did I create these links? The answer is that I used simple html that anyone can learn in a few minutes. Here are the steps I used to create these links.

1. Log in to Blogger
   
2. Go to Posting > New Post or Edit Post and either create a new article or edit an existing one.
   
3. Within the article find a place where you want to add some jump links. This will be early on in the article as it will help the reader figure out what information is significant to them and how to get there quickly
   
4. Switch to the Edit HTML mode rather than compose mode so you can see the code you are inserting into your post
   
5. Create a couple of headings that will be your links to material further down in your Blogger article. Note you can also just jump to a word but for the purposes of this demonstration and clarity I am going to use headings. When creating this post I used the following headings:
   
   

   How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within the Same Blogger Post
   How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within Different Blogger Posts

6. Add links to your headings like so:
   
   

   <a href="#withinposts">How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within the Same Blogger Post</a>
   
   <a href="#withinblogger">How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within Different Blogger Posts</a>

   
   
   • The href attribute and closing </a> element is the same structure you use for other links in your blog
     
   • Each identifier is preceded by a hash mark (#). The #tells the visitor's browser to look for a section within your post
     
   • Each link identifier needs its own unique identifier and needs to be enclosed in inverted commas. Use a name that reflects the link you are creating if possible as it will make it easier to identify on a page with a lot of internal jump links. 
7. Now go to the first point in your post where you want to jump the reader to. This will be the start of some new idea, section or logical split in the information.
   
8. At this point create your anchor text by first adding your heading and then enclosing your heading with this anchor structure.
   
   

   <a name="identifier">a heading</a>

   
   
   • Note the use of the name attribute at the beginning and the </a> element at the end
     
   • Each link identifier needs to be enclosed in inverted commas. Make sure to match up the correct identifier with the one created in step 6
   
   
   Using this anchoring structure our first anchor becomes:
   
   

   <a name="withinposts">How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within the Same Blogger Post</a>

   
   Substitute your own link identifier and headings
   
9. Now move on to the next point you want to link to and create the second anchor. In this example we use the same structure but change the identifier
   
   

   <a name="withinblogger">How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within Different Blogger Posts</a>

   
   Again substitute your own link identifier and headings to suit your article
   
10. Save and Publish as normal and you will see your links are live and will jump the reader to different parts of the post

How to Create Internal Links To Sections Within Different Blogger Posts

Now you know how to create links to sections within Blogger posts let's look at how to create internal links within different Blogger posts.

Most of you will be able to create a link to another post in Blogger using the posts editor. You just highlight the text you want and click on the figure eight icon and Blogger creates the link for you. Which is great most of the time. 

However what if we want to direct the visitor to a particular section of a different post? When you create an internal link it will take the viewer to the top of the page but what if you want them to see something near the end of the article? Well using an internal link similar to what we did to create internal links within the post we can.

Say I want to take my reader to a particular post in this case Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks. How would I go about it?

1. I create the link as usual by copying the article URL address from the browser address bar and using the post editor to add the link. The Blogger post editor uses this structure:
   
   

   <a href="URLaddress">linkname</a>

   
   So the Blogger editor would create the following link:
   
   

   <a href="http://admin-seo.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-add-internal-links-within.html">Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks</a>

   
   The link would appear like this in a browser:
   
   Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks
   
2. 
   
3. Now I want to direct my visitors to the section about creating breadcrumb navigation so I add a section name using the following structure:
   
   

   <a href="URLaddress#identifier">linkname</a>

   
   Thus my link would look like this in the Edit HTML section of my post editor
   
   

   <a href="http://admin-seo.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-add-internal-links-within.html">Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks</a>

   
   Note the link seen in a browser remains the same
   
4. If you want your link to open in a new browser window add the following to your link:
   
   

   <a href="http://admin-seo.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-add-internal-links-within.html"target="_blank">Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks</a>

5. Now I need to go to the post I am linking to and add the anchor. So in the post SEO Tips and Tricks I would use the following structure to link to the section about how to add breadcrumbs:
   
   

   <a name="identifier">a heading</a>

   
   So the section about breadcrumbs in the Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks article is now enclosed by the following:
   
   

   <a name="breadcrumb">Add Breadcrumb Navigation to your Blogger Blog</a>

   
   
   If you now click on the link below you will see that your browser open a new window and take you directly to the section about adding a breadcrumb to your blog.
   
   Blogger SEO Tips and Tricks
   
6. Save your changes and publish your article as normal

In this Blogger tutorial you have learned how to add internal links to a particular section of a post from both within the same Blogger post and within a different post. By adding internal links you will help your visitors to find their away your blog more easily and access information quickly. You will also be adding to your blog's SEO by linking related posts.

Google+ Widget | How To Add/Get Google Plus Widget To Blogs/Blogger

How To Get/Add Google Plus Widget To Blogger/Blogs | Google+ Widget

Google+
Google Plus widget finally live for your blogs and websites. By adding Google Plus Widget to your blogs you can easily increase the circles in which you are. Basically facebook, twitter have so many widgets for your blogs to increase the no. of your fans in your facebook pages and increase the no. of your twitter followers. facebook have all its official widgets for your blogs and twitter have some official widgets while you can use some 3rd party widgets for your twitter. Google Plus did not launch any widget for displaying your currently shared public posts on your Google Plus status and hope Google will launch it soon. A 3rd party widget which can show your currently shared public posts on your Google Plus profile and a button for adding you to your visitors Google Plus profile. You can see a live preview of Google Plus widget in the right sidebar of this blog. Firstly we must be know our Google Plus ID for using this widget, so lets find it:

You Should Also Read:
How To Add Facebook Tab in Google Plus/Show Facebook Stream in Google+
Did you want to update your facebook wall status from Google Plus profile? Did you want
to show your facebook stream in your Google Plus? Add Facebook Tab in .......
http://admin-seo.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-facebook-wall-statusshow.html

How To Add Twitter Tab in Facebook Fan Pages
Did you want to increase your twitter follower via your facebook fan pages, then add twitter tab to
your facebook fan pages and let know to your audience about your twitter......
http://admin-seo.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-add-twitter-tab-in-facebook-fan.html

How To Get/Find Google Plus ID | Google+ ID

1. Sign into your Google+ Profile.
2. Click on Get Google+ ID and see at the URL field of your browser.
3. Copy the numbers which is between http://plus.google.com/ and /posts. That is your Google+ ID.

Now,

How To Add/Get/Show Google Plus Widget for Blogger/Blogs

1. Click on Google+ Widget.
2. Write your Google+ ID under Basic Settings of Settings.
   
   
   
3. If you want to show your update stream of your Google+ Profile in your widget then tick oninclude update feed as shown above.Now as the above preview you can set your own options for your Google+ Widget under different tabs.
4. After changes all setting click on Get Code and copy the generated code, take a preview,
   
   
   
   
   and paste into your sidebar widget of your blogs.
You done!

You can also use another 3rd party Google Plus widget for your blogs just go to Google Plus Widgetand write your Google+ ID and set some values in the bottom area and click on Get Widget and copy the generated code and paste into your sidebar of your blog.