Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

How To Add “Read More” Posts Link in Blogger

With this trick, you can choose to display a select amount of text from the beginning of each post as a teaser instead of showing the entire post on the front page of your blog. Then when people want to read the rest of the post, they can click a “read more” link to see the full post. This is very handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page.
Step #1 - Update Your Template Code First you need to edit your existing code. Go to Layout >> Edit HTML. There you first click on "Expand Widget Templates" showing right above the HTML editor box. Now do a search (CTRL + F) within the HTML editor box for the following code <data:post.body/>. Now add the following code just above the <data:post.body/> tag.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <style>.fullpost{display:inline;}</style> <p><data:post.body/></p> <b:else/> <style>.fullpost{display:none;}</style>

The result should look something like this:

Now let’s add one more bit of code which will actually create the “read more” link in your post. This code will go below the <data:post.body/>tag so copy the following and paste it in. Feel free to change the “Read more…” text to whatever you want the link to look like. Be careful not to delete any other code during this process.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'><br /> <a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read more...</a> </b:if> </b:if>

Yes, there are supposed to be two </b:if> tags in the above code so don’t think it’ s a mistake. The result should look like this: new-code-block-2.png This code will be the same no matter what template you are using. Just make sure it goes below the <data:post.body/> as shown in the image above. Now let’s look at what the final result should be. Here’s the updated code block you just worked on all put together: new-code-block-3.png
Ok, now save it. If it get saved means you have done it well. So move to the next step: Step #2 - Add a Class Tag in Your Default Post Template For this step go to Settings >> Formattingand scroll all the way down to the bottom. It’s the last option called “Post Template”. You’re going to paste in the following code:
<span> </span>

You’ll want to keep the spaces in there which will make sense later. After you save this, it will look like this: post-template2.png
Step #3 - Create a New Post Ok, we’ve got everything all setup so it’s time to go and test it out. Hopefully you’ve got a new post in mind for your blog. If not, then we’ll just create a test post which you can later delete. When you click on the “Posting” tab, you’ll notice that the post text area is now pre-populated with the <span class=”fullpost”> and </span> tags. If not, then you didn’t save it properly so go back and re-read step #2.
So when writing your new post, anything you put above the <span class=”fullpost”> tag will be the teaser text. The main body of your post needs to go in between the <span class=”fullpost”> and </span> tags in order for the “read more…” link to work properly. See the screenshot below. Sometimes pictures illustrate better than words.
Now publish or preview your post to see the “read more” hack working on your blog. If it doesn’t show up for some reason, go back and run through the steps again. Most likely you pasted the code blocks in the wrong places. It’s difficult to troubleshoot these issues since each template can be unique so please make sure to double-check your template before asking for help in the comments section below.
Here’s the live post with the “read more…” link properly working based on the text I used above in the post text area.
post-results.png
Additional Info If you want to go back and update your old posts with this new “read more…” feature you can. Just go back and edit each post manually. Essentially you’ll need to paste in the <span class=”fullpost”> and </span> tags breaking apart the post into two parts.
For some posts, you might not want to use this feature at all. If that’s the case, just delete the <span class=”fullpost”> and </span> tags from within your new post text area. Then your new post will show up entirely just like it used to before you implemented this hack. Enjoy!

Thursday, 14 June 2012

How to do SEO in Blogger

What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.

Search Engine Optimization
We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.

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. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.

Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings
After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories 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. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.

Free SEO Tools
After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.

To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.

Just open Google in a new window and enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.

Suggested SEO Tools
Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-
a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.
b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.
c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.
d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.
e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.
f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.
g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.
h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.
i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.
j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.
k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.
l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.
m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.

Basic Tools
Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.

Yahoo!
To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.

1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages
The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!

2. Yahoo! Backlinks
Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.

Google
The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.

1. Google Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word "site:" to view the indexed pages in Google.

2. Google Backlinks
Enter URL after the word "link:" for details of the backlinks to your site.

MSN Live Search
Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.

1. MSN Indexed Pages
Enter URL after the word "site:" to view the indexed pages in MSN.

2. MSN Backlinks
Enter URL after the word "link:" for details of the backlinks to your site.

Page Rank Checker
This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.

Alexa Rankings
Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.