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Recent Readers
Improve Site Ranking for Search Results
Generally, to ensure you are ranking well you must have unique and targeted content for your audience. Here are a few tips that you can start focusing on to help improve your search engine ranking:
How To Build a Reader Empire
Once you have made the decision to start a blog, you’ll need to determine a schedule and then continue with it. When considering this consistency try to take into consideration all aspects of your life and then make the decision on posting frequency. My recommendation would be to start out with one post per week and slowly work your way up from there. (read more on blogging consistency)
Is Blogging Consistency Important?
A lot of bloggers say that blogging consistency is key. What amount of content is just right? Should a new blog post daily? Would a successful blog only post every other day? How many times do you post and frequency?
When I first started out blogging I made a point to post everyday including weekends. Since then I have started a new blogging consistency of posting an article every three days.
How to Increase Your Page Rank
As a new webmaster of a new site (blog) there are several things you must do. First, and most importantly you must consistently update the site with fresh useful content.
Are you a page rank zero? Why? If you’re new I know you’ve asked me or other established sites how to increase your page rank.
Ten Simple Trust Building Techniques
Want to build trust with ten simple trust building techniques?
OK, that was a silly question. Of course you do.
Trust is generally an exercise in creating a site environment in which readers respond well to and are willing to pass along your site details to others. To present a case that visitor find beneficial and trustworthy you need to follow some simple common sense techniques..
Is Your Site Fast Enough?
So it’s been around ten days since the new theme and adding the new vanilla forum. Something that I’ve noticed about the site even before the re design was the slow load time. So what have I’ve done to help speed things up more?
Prosecuted and Balls Removed!
Some Tuesday humor: I went golfing a while back and came across this sign on the golf course. A very strict policy, removing golfer balls! Sorry for the pic quality taken on my phone cam.
Adding Some Vanilla to Ja Kel Daily
UPDATE: New Vanilla Forum Is Live, Signup and post your discussion! Just click sign in upper right in the header and then click Apply for membership. Once you’re approved you can start posting your discussions.
New Site Design and Blogger Intergration
Just yesterday I started the new site re design and blogger.com integration. To catch all readers up too date my wife and I started out blogging with a blogger.com account and around 1 year later I decided to start a blog tips slash personal blog with Wordpress.
At that time this is when the domain Ja Kel Daily became a reality – Ja Kel stands for Jason and Kelly abbreviated. Our blogger account still alive and well (http://fashionbyjakel.blogspot.com) but forwarded with a cname record to (http://www.jakeldaily.com).
For most it’s a hard decision to up and move to Wordpress and say good bye to all those back links and even PageRank. We on the other hand have decided to stick with blogger and attempt to integrate the two.
I’m not a website design guru by far but I have to admit I have impressed myself this time with the current process of the integration of the sites. So far I have not had any help, just the use of Google searches.
Site navigation tool bar I am sure that you have noticed a few new sections. The celebrity gossip section is in fact the Blogger account located under the celebrity + fashion link and all others are Wordpress blogs individual installed into separate folders representing what the content will be.
My personal blog that you are currently reading is under blog tips and starting tomorrow I will only be posting articles releted to blog tips and all personal posts will now be posted under the personal section.
Video podcast yep I’m not exactly sure when we will start our videos but it will be a weekly video posted every Sunday. Last but not least the forum this area I will actually have to hire someone unless I figure it out sometime soon because I want it integrated into the layout and not a separate look that it has now.
Almost forgot also working on a new logo!
View Commentators as Party Guests
A personal blog is your controlled equality, so you are truly free to prohibit whomever you like that rubs you the wrong way from commenting on your site.
The problem is that going all commando on a rogue commentator that may annoy you or disagree with you is its not exactly in the spirit of the freedom of speech on the internet.
Some of the best blogs out there allow a certain amount of controversy and if you are going to write and publish to the net then you should accept the fact that responses are not going to be 100% in view of what you say.
This is merely common sense and something that writers have known for years. However it does not mean you have to put up with foul mouth commentators on your site that may ruin the overall atmosphere you are trying to provide for your readers.
When taking action you have to give the benefit of doubt and view your commentators as party guests. Suggestion, if one of these rogue commentators is in fact making an uncomfortable blog environment for the other readers it’s time for a firm warning informing them that the next offense will result in a permanent ban from the site.
Setting guidelines as of what constitutes a ban from the site from the beginning is an excellent method and is completely your call. Just figure out what type of atmosphere you want to maintain on your site and then set your guidelines.
Returned Home Earlier Than Expected
I’ve returned home to Belgium from Romania much earlier than I expected. Anyway really happy to be back with my family and my one year old son no longer thinks I’m a computer screen (Skype & Messenger).
Transportation wasn’t so bad a four hour flight on a private six passenger plane.
What Makes a Great Site?
Build it and they will come, yeah right! I‘m not sure exactly who came up with this quote but it could not be further from the truth when it comes to websites and blogs.
When reading this blog what is it you are looking for? Is it content, graphics, the story, content style, entertainment or combination of things? I’ve listed 20 tips below that potentially make up a great blog site.
20 Tips What Makes a Great Site?
- Original, credible, valuable, timeless content
- Share what you learn
- Let visitors no who you are
- Custom site design
- Be responsive / interaction
- Optimize graphics
- Optimize HTML
- Easy to read format
- Well organized
- Fast loading
- Try and stay focused
- Collect email addresses
- Simple navigation
- Consistency
- Right use of colors
- Choose background wisely
- Good headlines
- Creative links and linking
- Ad optimization and strategy
- Fresh consistent content
The 20 tips above just plain common sense and more than likely listed on over million or more sites out there for you to read. Overall my impression of the net is sites either got what it takes or they don’t.
Which leads me back to my question what exactly does it take to make a great site? Not simple or easy – something (original) viral global that spreads by word of mouth like crazy. What makes a site viral?
Unfortunately I’m still looking for the viral answer.
Wordpress Rotating Header Images no Plugins
The first time that I saw rotating header images was on Chris Pearson’s personal blog Pearsonfied.com and I really liked the feature a lot. If you do not already know Chris is the man responsible for the well designed Cutline Wordpress Theme that actually comes with an implementing tutorial for adding the rotating image headers including the images. This may be the answer you’ve been looking for if you do not mind changing your entire theme just to get image rotations up top.
Anyway since I do not want to change my entire theme and with a little from my friend Google I was able to locate quite a few methods in which to accomplish the fabulous image rotation. As always I will only be explaining the route that I choose for my site. If you are interested in some possible plugin solutions you can find a few at Lorelle’s site.
Unfortunately for the novice I did not decide on a Wordpress plugin this go around and instead I with some good old code manipulation. Given the fact I am not an expert by far in the department of; php and css it took a little time to figure out how to make this work with my theme.
Rotating Header Images Step 1:
- Copy the php code here (below rotator apart header)
- Save it to notepad
- Save the file as rotator.php
- Open your FTP program
- Make a new folder (random)
- Upload the rotator.php to the random folder
- Find images now that meet header height & width
- Upload those images to the random folder
Rotating Header Images Step 2:
The coding if your using the Misty theme your in luck because that is what I use and I have already figured out the coding to make this all work.
Go to your style.css file in your dashboard and you have to find out what attribute your theme uses to place your header image and you have to place the URL to the random folder which has the images and the rotater.php file. Once again if you are using the Misty them then just find #headerimage and copy the code below.
#headerimage {
clear: both;
background: #fff url(http://jakeldaily.com/random/rotater.php) no-repeat 0 0;
margin: 0px;
color: #fff;
height: 175px;
}
Congratulations to those of you that have finished this task and successfully made it work for your theme. I must admit immediately after I got it to work with my test images I went directly to Flickr and starting stealing images to put into my new rotation.
Then thirty minutes into my image stealing frenzy I realized something! This is my personal blog and why am I putting other people’s pictures into the image header focal point of the site.
A light blub went off at this moment and that is when I decided to start looking through my personal travel pictures and use them (travel date & place right hand corner) in my rotating image header. My intentions are to have ten images in total in the next few days and at the moment I have six to include; Ferrari Vegas, Venice Italy, Attre Belgium, Bognor Regis UK, Maldives, and Alicante Spain.
Turn Reader Questions into Content
A great way to connect with readers and get more ideas for your next post is to open the site floor for questions. Since I’ve only addressed a limited number of questions that readers my have today I’d like to encourage you to comment and ask questions.
In the beginning stages of starting my personal blog to present I’ve received emails and comments from readers asking questions on; general, opinionated, technical and many other topics for which I’d written about or had not.
Turning reader questions into content is simple and straight forward.
- What are your questions post?
- Answer questions in comments
- Turn the question into a post
- Create a questions folder for inspiration
Ok, time for some Q & A. Questions must stay general in nature relevant for everyone to blogging and not personalized to suit your site. Note – I will not be able to answer every question received but will do my best to answer all questions that I feel I can honestly give good advice on. Readers are also welcome to answer commented questions.
The above cartoon by Peter Steiner has been reproduced from page 61 of July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. I had to crop it for the post and cut off the quote at the bottom. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The same goes for questions “On the internet, nobody knows you’re puzzled” unless you ask.