Custom Redirects: How To Set A Custom Redirects In Blogger

Many bloggers ignore this functionality of custom redirection, this functionality if very helpful and it helps in preventing custom page not found in your blog, so using this functionality in blogger will give your blog users a pleasing experience while they surf your blog.

What does custom redirect in blogger mean?

Let’s assume wrote a blog post some time ago and the URL to that post was http://www.yourblog.com/my-test-url.html and the URL was already indexed by Google, but later on, due to one reason or the other, you wish to change from the former URL to http://www.yourblog.com/my-permanent-post-url.html, any of your blog users trying to aces the post using the old URL will get an error message that the page is not found, so it is this custom redirects funtionality in blogger that you will use in redirecting people using the old url to the new one.

How do I set up a custom redirects in blogger?

• Log in to your blogger blog dashboard
• Navigate to settings
• Click on Search Preferences
  
• Under Errors and redirections, you will see Custom Redirects click on the Edit that is inline with it. check out the image below for more explanation
  
• Once you click on the Edit a box similar to the image below will be displayed
• Now type in the old URL in the first box and the new one in the second box
• After typing the URLs, click on Save before clicking on Save changes underneath it and you are done.
• Now all the users coming via the old URL will automatically be redirected to the new URL.

Note: While typing the URL in the box, remember to exclude the domain name. E.g /my-test-url.html is the correct way of typing the URL in the box and not http://www.youblog.com/my-test-url.html.

That was all on how to set a custom redirect in blogger. I hope it helped? please feel free to drop your questions or contributions in the comment section.

Tecno Phone Official Website

If you will agree with me, tecno phone is is now dominating the android and the smartphone market, what do I really mean by tecno phone dominating the android and smartphone market? I mean that the use of tecno phones has now been incredibly viral, and about 80% of mobile phone users are using tecno phones.

Because of the wide use of this product people are inquiring to know more about it, that is why I’m coming up with this article to tell you tecno phone official website. Before you continue, I published some articles a while ago which I titled how to check if your tecno phone is original and list of tecno offices in Nigeria which I recommend you read them.


Now back to the business of the day:

What Is The Official Website Of Tecno?

The official tecno phone website is www.tecno-mobile.com, there you can check out the latest products released by tecno, apps download and so on, feel free to surf the website to check out more for yourself.

I hope you now know the Tecno Phone Official Website? I hope this article helped you? Please feel free to leave your reply in the comment section and share it on you favorite social network for your friends.

Basic Blogging Tips For Beginners

Today i want to give out the basic blogging tips for beginners which is the basics of blogging that any new or intending blogger must take not of before starting, to avoid silly mistakes. Personally when i started my blogging career, i made series of mistakes that i would not have made if i was privileged to an article like this before starting.

I will like you to learn from my own mistake, don't make the mistakes others made on the start. So i will give you a kind of starting kit for you to get started in your blogging ambition.
If you are a newbie-blogger or Pre-blogger looking for blogging tips to kick-start your blogging career smoothly, then this post is for you.

Due to lack of knowledge or misconception about blogging, lots of newbie bloggers end-up their career at the beginning itself! This is an attempt to provide few Basic Blogging Tips to avoid the common mistakes newbie bloggers usually make while starting their blogging career.

 Basic Blogging Tips For Beginners

Blogging Platform

Blogging platform plays a great role in blogging career. Choose it wisely.

Starting with a wrong platform and changing to a different one is not advisable at all. This is just like changing your home from one city to a completely unknown city. Making your newly changed blogging platform in-order and SEO friendly is a herculean task.

So, make yourself acquainted with different platforms available, and choose one with which you are more comfortable. These are few good blogging platforms you should try: Blogger.com, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, TypePad, Drupal and Joomla. Choosing the best blogging platform is one basic blogging tips I usually give to newbie bloggers.

Things you should look for while choosing a blogging platform.

• UI (User Interface): User Interface is your everyday playground. Everyday you do lots of blogging activities via your User Interface or Admin Dashboard. You should be comfortable enough with your Admin Dashboard. And, your dashboard should be feature rich to help you to perform various important activities. Checkout the various UIs offered by various blogging platforms, and choose one with which you are most comfortable. I recommend WordPress.com or WordPress.org (Self Hosted), for its cutting edge technology and features. Beside that, WordPress is the most search engine friendly blogging platform, accepted by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team.

• Customizability: Checkout for customization option available with your blogging platform. You have to customize your theme to suits your niche or subject matter. A well customized blog stands out in the crowded blogosphere. You have to look unique. You have to look professional. So check for blogging platform which offers easy customization options. 

• Themes and Plugins: A theme gives your blog a look, and plugins add functionalities to perform various tasks.
  
  For every blogging platform, there are thousands of themes and plugins available, both free and premium. So, look for the blogging platform which offers the theme and plugins which suits your blogging needs. Finally, your blog theme should be SEO friendly, fast loading and well coded.
  
  A SEO friendly blog ranks higher in search engines with minimal SEO efforts.
  
  Your blog should loads in <3 sec time. The attention-span of web-surfers has reduced very much. If you blog takes more than 3 sec to load, they will simply click the Go-back button, or close the browser. And, due to bad user experience (Online memory) they will never come back again. Try this free tool to test your page-loading speed.
  
  Coding is another vital thing you should check in your theme. Your theme should be W3C compliant. Validate your theme by this free validation service.

Niche

Niche is the thing which can either make or break your blogging career.

Your niche should be your main hobby or passion. Because passion is the thing which inspires you to work hard and achieve your goal. After a log time of blogging, it becomes monotonous and frustration supervenes. There comes the passion. Again, you are already a pseudo expert about your choice subject or passion, and ready to teach people in a professional way. Your niche should be like this, if somebody ask you a question, you should be able to boast nonstop about the nitty-gritty, till the person droops.

Lots of newbie bloggers quit their blogging career only because they choose a wrong niche in the beginning. Instead of choosing their passion as niche, they look for the niche in demand currently (presently), and the subject which gives more money for AdSense clicks etc. Finally they quit blogging due to lack of knowledge, motivation and frustration.
So, take your time and choose your niche carefully for a long haul. This is one of the best blogging tips I usually offer to newbie bloggers.

Domain Name

Domain name is like more than naming your own baby. Choosing a domain name with a cute meaning is not sufficient. Your domain name should be short, catchy, meaningful, complements to your niche or subject matter, and finally partial keyword matching for your subject.

Few years back there was a hot trend for buying Exact Match Domain Name. Here they were looking for all the keywords in their domain name to rank higher in Google. And, Google was ranking them higher also. But the trend has changed now. Google is gradually ranking Exact Match Domain Name lower and lower in SERPs. The main problem with exact match domain name is, they (bloggers) also strive for exact match anchor text or backlinks from external sites for better rankings. And, ends-up with Google Penguin Penalty.

The current trend is registering a Nonsense domain name, which has no meaning, but catchy, short and easy to remember. To some extent it’s OK. But you shouldn’t follow the trend. Because trend has to end someday. Think about the keywords in your subject matter, have a great brainstorming session, take your time (days to weeks) and register your favorite domain. Don’t buy a domain in impulse.
I recommend buying your domain name from Godaddy.com.

Custom LOGO

Your logo is your brand identity. It represents your blog in the vast blogosphere.

Actually, a blog or website starts from the logo. The colors which you are going to use in your blog starts from your logo only. So choose your logo colors judiciously. A well designed logo speaks a lot. It should be ingrained in the mind and brain of your visitors at the first look only. That way they will recall it later and come back again to your site. Thinking about Love at first site? It’s something like that.

Always go for a professional logo, if you want to make a serious blog, or want to make blogging as your career.

DesignCrowd and 99Designs are the right places for making a professional logo.

Premium Theme

If you want to make your blog premium, your theme also should be premium. A premium theme standouts in the crowd.

Tell me one thing – Why you wear your best dress on your first date, or why you wear a designer suit on your wedding day? The answer is simple. To present yourself in the best possible way in front of everybody. You can’t pull crowd without having a premium theme.

Secondly, if you buy a premium theme, they will give you all the support you need for customization and all. Premium themes are usually light weight and loads fast, SEO friendly and well coded.

Finally, choose a theme which compliments your niche in terms of looks and feel. You should start with TheThemeFoundry and StudioPress.

Social Media Promotion

You can’t be a successful blogger without proper marketing and promotion. As, blog marketing is a vast subject, I will be covering social media promotion part only. Social media promotion is the current hot trend, and it will go a long way for sure. You should promote your blog content insanely in social media sites for wider exposure.

It’s a proven fact that – The more Facebook likes, Re-tweets and Google+ your blog post gets, the more will be its search engine ranking in Google. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team has confirmed the addition of social signal in Google search engine algorithm.

Apart from better search engine ranking, you will get plenty of free traffic from the social media.

You should join at least Facebook, Google+, Twitter and StumbleUpon.

SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the secret of every successful blogs. The famous blogs you read everyday, even my blog MoneyCTL, couldn’t be successful without SEO. I’m not telling you to be a professional Search Engine Optimizer. Basic knowledge of SEO is what you need at the beginning. Gradually when you gain more knowledge, SEO will be more easy for you.

SEO will send you free organic traffic from search engines by placing your blog posts higher. And, the fun part is you don’t have to spend a penny for that, provided you are doing your SEO in-house. I strongly discourage PPC (Pay Per Click) for gaining traffic for newbie bloggers, unless you are selling some products.

Hard work and Patience

You can’t make blogging as your profession without hard work. Hard work and patience are cornerstones of every successful bloggers. Probably, the best and basic blogging tips for every newbie bloggers. Spend atleast few hours everyday to create good contents and promote your blog. I usually spend atleast 3 to 4 hours everyday on my blog (MoneyCTL) for different activities.

Even after doing hard work, sometimes success doesn’t come early. So, keep patience and things will fall automatically in places. Actually, there is no periodicity of blogging like one post/day or 5 posts /day. It depends on your comfort factor. And, always strive to produce great content.

Additional Basic Blogging Tips

Content is king: Produce awesome and unique content for your readers, not for search engines. Google loves to rank unique and fresh content higher.

Interact with your readers: Reply each and every comments on you blog post. Try to make a community around your blog. If you don’t respect their thoughts and address their query, they are never going to come again.

Email list: Build a long Email Subscriber list, capturing via Email subscription form. Send only important newsletters and blog posts to your subscribers. For God’s sake, don’t SPAM. Otherwise, you will loose their faith.

Read famous blogs a lot: You should read at least few blog posts of famous bloggers everyday. I recommend ProBlogger and CopyBlogger for you to learn the tricks of the trade.

Did you find these blogging tips useful? please use the comment to add any of the basics of blogging that you feel have been left out here. If you have any question to ask regarding this article use the comment section. For other inquiries please use the contact page.

Reference: Seohour

How To Add Multiple Authors In Blogger

Adding multiple authors in your blogger blog will help in boosting the frequency of your blog daily updates, if you have authors who are willing to contribute to your blog, knowing how to add them, to some new bloggers may seem so challenging, that is why I’m coming up with this brief tutorial on how to add multiple authors in your blogger blog.

 

How to have multiple authors on blogger

• Log in to blogger blog dashboard
• From your dashboard, navigate to Settings tab
  
• Now under permissions, you will see +Add authors, click on it, see image below
  
• Type in the email of the authors you wish to add to your blog and click on Invite authors
  
• A confirmation email will be sent to the emails you supplied in the box
• Once the invitee accepts the invitation by clicking on the confirmation link in the email, he or she automatically becomes a contributor (author) to your blog.

That was the brief tutorial on how to add multiple authors in blogger, if you have any question regarding this tutorial, please feel free to send them using the comment. But I will like to know, how many authors do you have in your blog?

Creating A Contact Form For Your Blog/Website Using Foxyform

A contact form is one of the most important pages you need to create for your blog/website, this will create a communal relationship between you and your blog/website users. In fact, if you have the intention of using Google Adsense to monetize your blog/website, this is one of the pages required to boost your chances of getting approved by the Google Adsense team. If any of your blog/website users wants to contact you via email, he/she may feel reluctant to log in to his/her email to contact, while a contact form will let them contact you directly from your blog/website without going anywhere from your blog/website.

In today’s tutorial I will be sharing with you how you can create a contact for your blog/website at foxyform for free.

How to create a contact form for your blog/website on foxyform

• Go to foxyform.com
• On getting to the website, choose the options you want on your contact form, check on the options you want as a required field
• Customize your for with your desired color such that it matches with the theme of your blog/website
• Now supply the email that you want all the messages from the contact form to be forwarded
•  Now you are done with the customization, remember to fill the anti-spam protection and click on Create Formular
• You will now be provided with an HTML code which you will add to your blog page.
  

How to install the contact form on your blog/website

• If you are using blogger head straight to pages > create a new page
• Switch to HTML mode, paste the code there and publish the page.
  
• If you are using WordPress, you can use contact form7.
• If you are using any HTML base website, you can use the contact form html code generated from the foxyform website to embed the contact form any way you like on your website.

I recently published a tutorial on how to create static pages in blogger, if you have difficulty in this form installation on blogger, I recommend you read it.

Meanwhile, that is all for now on creating a contact form for your blog/website, if you have any question regarding this article, please feel free to use the comment section to relay them.

Avoid Google Panda Effect By Adding Nofollow Tags To Your Blog Label Links

It is the desire of all the bloggers to have a successful blog, but do you know that following your blog label links can cause a great harm to your blog? That is why it's good to share ideas, and that is the main essence of blogging, sharing your ideas with people.

Google Panda effect is the name most of you might heard. It is a strict Google new algorithm that looks for content farms and link farms and completely stops indexing the publisher. If your blog contains too many irrelevant content or duplicate content or your post quantity is less than 300 words and you have too many tags/category labels on your blog that makes no sense then you can be the next target of Google panda update. Your traffic will drop significantly.

If you are receiving 2-3K visitors per day, you will end up with just 400-500 visitors. It really shocked me personally when I surveyed official and un-official blogger templates and amazingly found that all category tags or label tags are dofollow. It is really sad on blogger part but I found the same problem on WordPress blogs as well. Even the tags in wordPress are dofollow but since now many expert SEOs have advised to nofollow the label tags therefore we must not delay any further else the consequences could be huge.

How to add nofollow tag to your blog label links

To get started:

• Go To Blogger > Design > Edit HTML
• Backup your template
• Check the "Expand widget templates" box
• Search for this,

<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'>

Replace the code above with the one below

<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag,nofollow'>

Now your blog label links are successfully protected against google panda effect.

How to add nofollow tag to label cloud links (The one on your blog sidebar)

Note: This step is optional as it is added in your blog side bar, not the main blog, where the crawling takes place.

•  Search for the code below

<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url'><data:label.name/></a>

• Now replace the code above with the one below

<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url' rel='nofollow'><data:label.name/></a>

To check if you've correctly carried out the steps. Install Nodofollow in your Firefox browser to check it.

That has been all about adding nofollow tags to blog label links to avoid Google panda effect, feel free to drop your questions and contributions in the comment section.

References

Blogger Campaigns: Blogger Introduces New Feature To Promote Your Blog

A few days ago, blogger introduced a feature called campaigns which you can use in promoting your blog. For bloggers having low traffic, this is a great opportunity for you to boost your blog traffic with this new feature that is added to blogger.

Now to take advantage of this amazing feature, you will need to create an account with Google Adword, that you can do right in your blogger blog dashboard. Log in to your dashboard, click on the campaigns tab and you will be redirected to google adword webpage, there you can create and account and get started.

Also Read: Using social media to promote your blog

What you need to know about blogger campaigns

• I know most of us like free things, but I’m sorry to tell you that this one is not free, compared to creating a blog on blogger for free. The good news is that you only pay when someone click on any ads from your adword campaigns.
• If you are a Nigerian, you must have a debit card, so as to be able to pay for your campaigns, for now, that is the only payment option provided by google.

That was just a brief post to tell you about the new blogger campaigns.

What do you think about this new feature that is added to blogger?