Friday, December 25, 2009

Announcement : Custom Domain Transition

The purpose of this post is to let all the subscribed readers know that The Blogger Guide will switch to a custom domain starting next week. The new URL is www.bloggerguide.lk and I hope to complete the transition during the course of the next week.

Hopefully the transition will be smooth, but there can be some unexpected hiccups, especially with my feeds. Once all the configurations are complete, I will do another post on the week starting Jan 4th, 2010. If you come across any problems in receiving feeds after the transition, please drop me a mail on bloggerguide@gmail.com.

Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience that you might come across.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Add Pages in Blogger

"How can I add pages to my Blogger blog?"; this is a frequent question on Blogger Help forums, which I think comes from bloggers who have used other blogging platforms such as Wordpress.

The simple answer is that you cannot add pages to Blogger blogs. But, of course, there are workarounds.

Most people who ask about pages have a requirement to direct the readers to some key pages in their blogs such as an About page or a Contact page.

There are some simple workarounds to achieve the desired effect. In all cases, you would need to write normal posts with the content that you want in your pages. Once you publish those posts, one way to get the pages effect is to add a simple navigation bar at the top and link to your relevant posts from there. (for example, see the navigation bar for this blog)

Another alternative is to use a Link List widget or an HTML/Javascript widget in your sidebar and linking to the required posts from that widget. Placing such a widget at the top of your sidebar with a suitable caption can catch enough attention from your readers.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Grow Traffic with Page Title Tweak

This post is about a pretty simple modification to your template to tweak the appearance of the page titles of your blog, which will result in a traffic growth of 10% (or perhaps more). The steps for this customization was referred to me by Mark, who is a frequent visitor to my blog.

The default Page Title in Blogger blogs appear in the order of [Blog Title] : [Post Title]. What this modification does is simply to reverse this order such that it becomes [Post Title] : [Blog Title]. With the Post Title in front, your blog's posts get a higher relevance score to keyword searches than when it is at the back.

I applied this tip at the beginning of last October and I can confirm that I saw an overall traffic increase of approximately 10% in the past two months (see figure below from my actual SiteMeter stats). My posting frequency remained almost the same, and I didn't to any other optimization during this period. So I can safely attribute this traffic growth to this neat tip introduced by Mark.

I recommend this modification for your Blogger blogs as well. For the details of the conversion please go here.