10 Free Blogging Tools One Should Use

There are mass of interesting tools available for the serious and less serious blogger. Here are 10 free tools I use almost daily for my blog.

1. Picasa

 

Picasa, a free download from Google. Picasa lets you store all pictures on your hard drive in a library and perform basic editing like cropping, tone adjustment and watermarking. But I use it the most to compress pictures in size and quality before posting them on my blog so the download speed is reduced.
Picasa also allows you to synchronize all your pictures with your online library.

2. Flickr

 

I store all my picture on Flickr a free online service by Yahoo. They have a small tool which lets you right-click on any picture to add it to an upload batch. Pictures are organised in folders and refered to by an URL. Flickr provides basic online editing with Picnik. You can publish pictures for the whole Flickr community allowing comments, grouping,…

3. Google Analytics

 

There are many free web statistics tools available, but the most well-featured is probably Google Analytics. It provides deep analysis of your blog visitors, top content, referral sites, search keywords, etc.. All data can be displayed in a wide array of graphs and can be exported in a spreadsheet or PDF.

 

4. A menu bar generator

The drop down menu bar you see atop this blog, is made with the CSS Menu Generator by WonderWebWare. Through an interactive freeware, you customize your menu layout, style and its links, after which it generates the HTML/CSS code, which you can cut and paste into your template.

One tip: While the Menu Generator lets you save your menu for later changes, it does not store the styling of your menu, only the structure. I work around it, by saving the HTML in a text file, and when I do updates, I cut and paste the part of the structure only.

 

5. Feedburner

Feedburner is probably the most powerful and commonly used feed tool. It allows you to customize your feed, to keep track of your feed users, provides a wide range of tools allowing users to integrate your feed into their favourite reader, and has a ‘subscribe to this feed by email’ function.

 

6. Backlink searches and page ranking

Going into the “Nerds” category

As for any website, a blog gets a Google pagerank, a point of measure of the “importance” of your blog in the blogosphere and the Internet itself. Google uses pageranking to “prioritize” sites when a user searches for certain keywords. The pageranking algorythm is based, amongst others, on the number of people link to your blog.

I use prchecker to monitor the blog’s pagerank.

To monitor the backlinks, I use mainly three tools:
- Google backlink checker
- Google Blog Search

Some curiosities to measure your “penetration” in the blogosphere:
- Trifecta
- Website Grader

 

7. Manipulating RSS feeds

I wrote before on the use of Yahoo Pipes a tool I use to aggregate, customize and reformat RSS feeds.
On The Road, I use them for the comments feed, and the humanitarian news feed in the right column.
On The Other World News, Newsgator is used to generate a script searching all aidnews feeds and display the latest.
Yahoo Pipes you can see in action on my “meta” blogs: AidBlogs and AidNews… All together, about 100 different blogs and other websites are re-mixed, summarized and re-published for a reader to get an overview “what’s up”.

 

8. Gadgets and widgets

Google offers a wealth of gadgets you can use on your blog. From tickers counting down to a certain date, local weather forecasts, related YouTube videos, Quotes of the Day, jokes to games. I use Google Gadgets for the translation widget in the right column.

Another great resource is WidgetBox, featuring thousands of widgets. They also make it easy to make your own.

Keep in mind though, the more widgets you add to your blog, how slower your page will download. So keep the tips I published in this post in mind.

 

9. Google webmaster tools.

Google Webmaster Tools is an essential for webmasters. Both require you to register (no fees), and facilitate the overview of how crawl robots look at your site, check backlinks and outdated links on your site.

 

10. Buttons, icons and badges

Buttons, icons and badges are a great way to make a link to a service, a page or a function on your blog with a graphical interface. The two tools I use are Brilliant Maker and CoolText. Free and easy to use.

5 Things To Do After Creating A New Blog

OK, Know you did All sort Of hard work, you created a new blog! You post a few entries of Articles, Pages on which you sweat for days and Even Months, give it the best of your best go. But what’s next? 

Here are five basic steps I follow for every new blog I create:

1. Track your visitors.

Nothing is as encouraging for a blogger, as to see the amount of visitors going up, but also to explore where your traffic is coming from, which of your blog posts are the most popular,… So the first thing you need to do, is to monitor your traffic.
Activate Google Analytics on your blog. It is a free tool, and easy to use.
 

2. Submit your blog to search engines.

Search engines are one of the main sources of traffic, so submit your blog to Google and to the new kid on the block: Bing.
But there are more search engines than just these two giants. Use some of the free services, such as SubmitExpress to submit your blog to a dozen engines in one go.
And be patient. It will take a couple of days before they will start crawling your blog.

3. Sign up for some basic webmaster tools.

Google Webmasters allows you to tweak the Google crawler (the website indexer), to monitor how the crawler sees your site, who links back to your blog,…
And you can just as well submit your site to Bing Webmaster Center.

4. Submit your site to blog directories and social bookmarking sites.

Listing your site in directories will make it easier for others to find you precious blog, giving it the deserved attention. 

The most popular blog directories are Technorati and Alexa. Try also the DMOZ open directory, even though your blog will be queued for the approval by an editor, which can take ages. 

As an option, you can also submit your blog to a series of “blog catalogs”. Here is the list of free blog catalogs I use for my personal blog. 

Some catalogs will require you to ‘link back’, i.e. include a link to their website from your blog. 

Blogging is all about creating communities, and being active in these communities. Register, submit your most relevant blogposts and start looking for bloggers with similar interests on social bookmarking sites. 

The most popular ones are: Mister Wong, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Reddit and Diigo. 

If you have time, it also worth snooping around on blog forums. I like the friendly and helpful crowd on the Bloggeries forum.

5. Implement some the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics.

If you are really thorough, it is worth to tweak the Search Engine Optimization or SEO for your blog.

A well-tuned SEO will increase the probability people will find your blog through search engines, when searching for topics you blog about.

Wordpress has the superb All-in-One-SEO plug-in, but for Blogger, you will need to manually edit the template:
Insert the following in your template, just before the </head> tag:

<META CONTENT='keyword1, keyword2, keyword3' NAME='Keywords'/>
<META CONTENT='Describe here what your blog is about' NAME='Description'/>
<META CONTENT='Fill in your name here' NAME='Author'/>

…where ‘keyword1,…’ are the most important search keywords for your blog, e.g.: ‘Agriculture, development, poverty, agroresearch’.

And now… your blog is ready to go! 

Hpefully This Article On 5 Things To Do After Creating A New Blog Was Helpful......| Cheers.

How to Add Custom Robots.txt File in Blogger And Create SEO Friendly robots.txt

What actually is robots.txt file? How to create/make robots.txt file? Add SEO friendly custom robots.txt file in Blogger

Do you want to create your own robots.txt file for your Blogger Blog? If yes, this post will guide you in easy straight foeward steps. Here I will discuss about what robots.txt file is and how to add custom robots.txt file in Blogger. Recently Blogger has added an option called search preferences into Blogger dashboard that will allow you to add custom robots header tags and custom robots.txt file.

I will highly recommend you to know completely about robots.txt file before makes any changes into this file because robots.txt file is all about crawling and indexing of your entire blog so if anything goes wrong may harm your SEO. Now, first we will learn about robots.txt file.

What is robots.txt? 

 

Robots.txt file iassociates with all types of crawlers or spiders like Googlebot, which is Google search engine's spider. In simple words, search engines always want to index the fresh and new content on the web so they send their spider or crawler to crawl the new pages on the web. 

If the spiders find new pages they will likely to index those pages, now robots.txt file comes to the picture on sake of you, spiders or crawlers only index the pages you are allowing in your robots.txt file. 

Keep in your mind, the crawler or spider will first look at your robots.txt files to obey the rules you have instructed. If you have disallowed a page in your robots.txt file then spiders will follow the rule and they will not index that page into their search engine.

Where is robots.txt file Situated? 

 

Robots.txt file placed on the root directory of any websites or blogs. The spiders have no doubt to where to go for finding robots.txt file. If you don't have any robots.txt file into the root directory of your domain then crawlers by default crawl and index each pages of your blog.

In WordPress, you can easily create your robots.txt file and place it on the root directory by your control panel's file manager or by using any FTP client like filezilla.

In Blogger, You can not have any option to go into the root directory of your blogspot blog or custom Blogger domain. Now, thanks to Google who recently add search preferences option by which you can easily edit your meta header tags, robot tags, nofollow and dofollow tags for different page types. We will use this option to create custom robots.txt file. Before creating robots.txt file, you must know the rules because any improper use can harm your site SEO.

You can access your robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the root directory of your blog or website. If your website domain URL is "www.yourdomain.com" then you have to access your robots.txt file by "www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt" URL.

If you have a blogspot domain then you can access it by "yourdomain.blogspot.com/robots.txt" URL. You may also check my robots.txt file.

How to Create Robots.txt file 

 

Creating robots.txt file is really simple just you have to know some rules as I am going to discuss in the following ways.

"If you have a WordPress blog, you can create a text document on your desktop and rename it to robots.txt. You are ready to go with an empty robots.txt file. You can upload it to the root directory of your domain. You may create rules as per your need by writing some text into this file"

"If you have a Blogger blog, now it is more easy than WordPress to create your robots.txt file. I will discuss it later but before I want to discuss about the rules and what kind of commands you can write in this file"

First thing, if your domain doesn't have any robots.txt file, it means you are allowing to crawl and index all of your blog pages to each spiders or crawlers.

Second, let you have a robots.txt file which is blank, it also means you are allowing to crawlers to index all the pages of your website.

Third, let you have a robtos.txt file and write the following two lines in it.

Here "User-agent" means all kind of crawlers or spiders, it may be Google's crawler such as Googlebot for search engine or Mediapartner-Google for Google adsense. In the above robots.txt file, I have used "*" as a value in User-agent. It means we are creating the rules for global crawlers or spiders or robots.

In the second line, we are allowing everything to crawled and index by crawlers. Don't be confused! ("Disallow:  "is same as "Allow: /" and it is not same as "Disallow: /"). If you don't have any value in "Disallow: " it means you are allowing everything to crawl and index while if you have "/" value into disallow as "Disallow: /" you are disallowing everything to crawl and index by the spiders.

Now, a quick cheat sheet is as following to understand the rules.

Block all content from all web crawlers 

Allow all content to all web crawlers

Block a specific web spider from a specific page

In this example, I have disallowed that specific page to Google's crawler so Google search engine would not index this page into their search result. However, the same post can be crawl by other web crawlers.

Block a directory from all web crawlers 

In this example, all things inside "search" directory and sub-directory would be blocked to all web crawlers. If you have a Blogger blog and you have created the same rule, it would disallow your category pages, called label pages in Blogger because label pages contained in the "search" directory (/search/label). It will surely disallowed search pages in Blogger.

In the third line, all things inside "p" directory and sub-directory would be blocked to all web crawlers. If you have a Blogger blog and you have created the same rule in your robots.txt file it means you are disallowing all your static pages to be crawl by any spiders. 

Allow an item to a blocked directory from Googlebot

In this example, you have disallowed all the static pages in Blogger except a page called about us.

I think, you have learned that how to deal with robots.txt file. You should use robots.txt file to disallow the pages that create duplicate content issue such as monthly or weekly archive pages have the same contents. One more thing, do you really want your blog get top ranking when someone search for the privacy policy or disclaimer policy. If no, then these pages should not be index in search engines, and search engines can not index such types of page if you had disallowed them.

Since robots.txt file indicates what to crawl and index from your website, and all the web crawlers visit on your robots.txt file before visiting on your website so there should be an option to include your sitemap into your robots.txt file. Yes, it is so that the spiders can do easily calculate and reach to every page into your website.

Showing sitemap in robots.txt file

This is a XML sitemap for Blogger.

SEO friendly robots.txt file in Blogger

 

You may disallow the pages you don't want to be index by search engines like contact us, privacy policy and disclaimer policy pages.

Now, copy all the text in the above code. we will upload this into our robots.txt file in Blogger.
Go to Blogger Dashboard -> Select your blog -> Settings -> Search preferences

Under "Crawlers and indexing", enable custom robots.txt content by clicking on "Yes" now paste the copied content here as mention in the preview. Now, finally click on Save changes. You have successfully created your custom robots.txt file for your Blogger.

You can now check robots.txt file of your blog by the desired URL as mention earlier in this post. If you have disallowed some specific pages via your robots.txt file, you may check it via Google webmaster tool under robots.txt tester by choosing your site URL.

Conclusion: robots.txt file is beneficial for those who don't want to share specific things to search engines or other robots. You may resolve duplicate content issue by using it.