A couple weeks ago, I dispensed my usual free blogging advice, this time on the topic of headers, including favicons. Well, later on in the post, I breezed over branding your headers.
If you need a little more help, or if your Blogger headers are giving you troubles, check out this post, “Control Your Title Tags in Blogger” by Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock (a really awesome mother of two/search engine marketer).
On an unrelated note, everybody get ready for the Mom Blog Group Writing Project next week! The topic and prizes will be announced on Monday, so stay tuned!
Ready to make your blog unique? This may look like intense coding, but it’s really not that hard.
Favicons
Favicons are the little pictures that show up next to your blog’s name on the address bar. Look where it says “http://www.mamablogga.com”—see the tiny picture of Hayden? So cute.
Here’s another example (the little pink 5, the MP, the Gmail logo):
Favicons also show up in bookmarks, which helps visitors remember your site better:
I know you want one now—and you’re not alone. In fact, some of my favorite blogs are without favicons. So I made some for them:
(To make your own, create a square image and reduce it down to 16 x 16. Michelle at scribbit mentions a site that will create a favicon for you. You may want to save it as favicon.ico; read on to find out why.)
Now what? Well, if you’re your own hosting, just look through your files and find ‘favicon.ico.’ (If you’re on Bluehost (aff), for example, it’s under the www folder.) Upload your own favicon.ico and overwrite the file.
If you’re not hosting your blog yourself (i.e. you’re on wordpress.com, typepad.com or blogspot.com), don’t despair! You can get rid of the W/speech bubble/B. Upload your picture to your blog (you can use an old post that you don’t mind sticking an image in, or you can simply use a draft—the post doesn’t have to be published). Copy the location of the image. (In Blogger, it’s something like http://bp2.blogger.com/<crazy strings of letters & numbers>/favicon.ico . Replace the example.com URL in the code below with the URL of your picture:
In Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. After the opening <head> tag, paste the above code (with your picture’s URL). Save and check it out! In WordPress & TypePad, if you can edit your <head> tags, do the same there.
Can’t find the right place? Here’s a screen shot to help. The first arrow shows the favicon code; the second shows the place for the next part.
Branded Headers
Add a tagline or phrase to describe your blog in your headers: mine is “mom’s search for meaning,” scribbit’s is “A Blog About Motherhood in Alaska” (Michelle mentioned this in January).
In WordPress, there’s a plugin to help with this, though even I had trouble getting it to work for a while (now it works great). When editing your headers in Blogger, WordPress or TypePad, leave what’s already there and add something right before the </title> tag. This phrase will appear on every page on your site (and some of your friends might start using it in their links back to your blog).
Not only can this have some effect on your search engine rankings, but (more importantly in my opinion) it also helps your visitors figure out what your site is about. I know I’m very used to looking at my site; I know exactly what it’s about and how it works and how to use the navigation. However, if a visitor comes to my site for the first time, I want him/her to be able to figure out what my site is all about very quickly.
Any questions/clarifications/cries for help? Leave them in the comments and you might win a prize!
RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.
Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:
Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).
Novice FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.
FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.
Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.
However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.
In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)
In WordPress, select Options > Reading.
Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”
Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:
<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>
Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):
<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>
Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)
Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).
Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!
UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!
However, after compiling the list of the most popular parent bloggers, I have to say that some of my opinions on the subject were challenged. As an Internet marketer, I would have told you all the live long day to get your own domain—but then nearly half of the most popular parent bloggers don’t have their own domain.
Guess what? ME.blogspot.com (or ME.typepad.com) is working just fine for them. Better than fine—great!
So I’m beginning to think that in the parent substratum of the blogopshere, it’s a lot less important to have your own domain than it would be in, say, the business world.
That being said, it’s not a bad idea—but if your blog is popular enough to make it onto the Popular Parent Bloggers list, it may not be the best idea to change.
Why not? Well, you may have a lot of Technorati clout (ie links) at your old domain (Technorati is a blog search engine, if you didn’t know. Oh, of course you knew, I meant him over there.). Michelle has taught us that Technorati links expire after six months, so you might be able to begin to outpace your old blog URL (and no, you can’t move it on Technorati) after six months, but do you want to e-mail every person that has you on their personal blogroll to get them to fix it? I wouldn’t and I’m only on a couple (thankyou, ladies!)
Also important, you may have a lot of search engine clout (ie links) at your old domain as well. On the plus side, it’s possible to channel that clout to a new domain if you use something like Blogger’s Custom Domain kind of thing. You have to make sure that your URL structure doesn’t change (like mine did… gonna have to learn Apache to fix that. You can avoid this fate by consulting my guide, but I went and made things complicated on myself by changing my URL structure and now I definitely don’t want to go back).
One possible solution for someone with a lot of clout at their .blogspot or .typepad domain: if the appropriate URL is available, buy it (I’ve had good experiences with www.GoDaddy.com ) and redirect it to your .blogspot or .typepad blog instead of the other way around. (if given an option, use a 301 redirect). You can also select the option of “masking” the domain so that even though someone is redirected to ME.blogspot.com, their address bar still reads “www.ME.com.” (With GoDaddy, both of these functions are accessible under Domain Forwarding.)
Of course, Technorati doesn’t understand redirects at all, so it may see www.ME.com as a second blog with the same content as your first one (which it actually does to me… it’s really annoying). But you know what? Technorati isn’t the be-all and end-all of your blog.
Disclosure: the GoDaddy link is an affiliate link.
As I did my research for the Popular Parent Bloggers list, I was surprised at a few of the trends I found. As an Internet marketer, I could see a few things that definitely needed attention repeated over and over again. So, here’s some general, technical advice to all mom bloggers (and please don’t feel targeted if you’re on the PPB list; I think you’re already awesome).
Although every blogger and his/her dog will tell you that if you’re serious, you should be on your own domain, I don’t think that it really hurts your blog’s popularity if you’re a momblogger. Sacrilege, I know. However, nearly 50% of the original Popular Parent Bloggers list are hosted on BlogSpot (12) or Typepad (2), including 3 of the top 10. However, you may still want to have your own domain, if it’s available. That topic deserves its own post, maybe next week.
If you have your blog on your own domain, and you have control over your hosting, implement a 301 redirect to create a canonical URL inmediatamente (immediately).UPDATE (27 June 2007): If you run your blog on WordPress, UrbanGiraffe has a handy plugin that will do all this for you, Redirection. (This particular trick is found under Manage>Redirection>Options.)
If you don’t have WordPress, don’t worry, I’ll tell you how. Probably the most general way I can tell you to do this is to get into whatever kind of file manager your hosting service offers and find a file named .htaccess . Edit it, adding this:
(For some reason, mine only worked if I put it after the WordPress stuff already in my .htaccess file, without the first two lines above.) Of course, if your site isn’t .com, change it to the correct extension.
What does that do? That makes it so when someone types in or links to “yourdomain.com,” it’s automatically redirected to “www.yourdomain.com.”
Don’t want the www? Use this code to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com:
Why does that really make any difference? Your traffic, links and search engine ranking are divided between the www and non-www versions of the site until you implement a 301 (permanent) redirect like this.
After a week here in WordPress and my own domain, I have to admit that there are some things I miss about Blogger. I don’t regret switching to WordPress, but there were a couple things that I liked or even preferred about Blogger.
And a big #1: Label posts without opening them. Labeling posts is roughly equivalent to putting them in categories or tagging them. In Blogger, you just check a box next to the post title on your post editing page and label them (like you might in GMail). Yeah.
I felt cool using Greasemonkey to ‘pimp’ my Blogger. It was actually the initial reason I downloaded Greasemonkey for Firefox. Sure, WordPress has ‘plugins,’ but I feel like so much less of a haX0r.
Set up another blog in like no minutes. Yeah, this is probably why there are so many splogs on blogspot, but it’s fun. I set up five different blogs, with different topics, on one account.
It’s easier to tweak your template. I’m really scared of ruining my perfect php files on WordPress. With Blogger, I was relatively confident in tweaking the CSS and HTML. Sometimes I ruined things; then I hit ‘clear changes.’
It’s easy in general. Everything is simpler in Blogger. It’s a simpler platform. WordPress is a ‘professional’ platform.
It’s totally free. Okay, so WordPress itself is free, and if I were hosted on WordPress.com, that would be just as free. But hosting my own site is not free. I’m okay with that, though, since I have a job now.
So, after seven days, there are a few things I miss about Blogger, but I’m definitely not done customizing my WordPress yet with some more cool plugins.
