BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

With the neon-text-generation widget, you can generate neon text for your blog or web site, if the style is appropriate for your design and contents.

And you can get this widget and put it on a blog about, say, graphics, for the use of site visitors. Putting a text generator on your site may bring visitors back for repeat visits.

At WidgetBox.com you can generate the widget for a wide variety of platforms (including WordPress, Blogger, HTML, and lots more). And you have the choice of javascript or flash.

To get the neon-text-generation widget, just click on the tab at the bottom of the widget in the sidebar on the right on this page. (You may need to scroll down or up to find the widget.)

I love neon! I hope you do, too.

Most bloggers who host their own domains use cheap web hosting, especially when we first start out. As we learn more, those who want to make money from blogging start to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). 

You can optimize your blog, and you can write and place articles, post on forums (with your blog address in your signature), send out press releases, get links from blog directories, and so on.

But one often overlooked way to make your blog more appealing to search engines is to have a dedicated IP address, especially if you hope to improve your Google page rank by linking from one of your blog or web sites to another.

Read the rest of this entry →

The best blog design in the world is nothing without lots of good content. We know that we need to post often, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We let things slide.

So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.

You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.

All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric's posts. Your dates don't have to match up exactly.]

By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)

Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?

You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.

If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.

I just discovered this site where you can make a widget of your own blog posts. They call it a “blidget.”

This widget, or blidget, automatically picks up and displays your last few blog posts. It is your very own private BlogRush-type widget, featuring only your own blog!

Others can then get your blidget and put it on their blogs if they want to keep up with your posts (sort of like putting the Digg widget on your blog). Or you can put your blidget on other blogs and/or websites that you own.

Not only that, but when you create a blidget, you can then easily add it to your Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or other site by clicking a button. It’s all very automated and easy.

Here is an example that I made for this blog:

You can customize your widget, and others who get your widget to put on their blog can customize it to suit their site.

Register, and you can store your widgets and have them listed in a blog directory for others to see (and maybe post on their blogs).

Also, by registering your blog, you get a free link back to your site from what is sure to be a highly Google-ranked site as it catches on. (That’s great for getting traffic and helping raise your blog’s ranking).

This is really fun stuff! Go see for yourself at Widgetbox.com.

When you start a blog, you always hope that people will read it. But how will they know it’s there? How will they find your ultra-cool, well-designed blog?

If you are lucky or have done everything right, they will find your blog near the top of search engine results for your topic.

How do you get that to happen? How do you get your blog to rank well in search engine results?

Jon Leger has made quite a name for himself as an expert on raising the search engine ranking (in the search results) of blogs and other sites by various clever means. Now he’s about to release a report that he says debunks many popular myths about what makes your blog or website rank well in Google searches.

He is offering one chapter of the report for free. I suggest that you download a copy and read it. It’s only a few pages. If you do, please let me know what you think.

Personally I don’t think what he says accounts for my Art Fun Cheap blog achieving a PageRank 4 only 7 weeks after I started it. I didn’t advertise it. I did not buy or trade links. I did not put articles linking back to it in article directories. I didn’t do much of anything to promote it except register it with BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, and Technorati.

Almost all my traffic comes from Google searches. Lately I’m getting some from Yahoo, too. That tells me I found a topic people are interested in, that has little competition, and got the keywords right. Because there are still not very many links to the site. Yet people from all over the world have found it through search engines.

So as much as I respect Jon (a lot!), I can’t totally buy into his explanation for why sometimes lower PageRank sites outrank higher-PageRanked sites in search results. He says PageRank comes strictly from links. I say that may be mostly true, but my example shows that it can’t be the whole story.

It appears to me that if you build a site on a topic that people are actually searching for in search engines, and there is very little competition (sites with quality information), Google will consider your site an authority site by default—and give it PageRank.

For the same reason, therefore, Google will also rank it highly in search results. So, if your site had a low PageRank but great information that matched the search string, wouldn’t you rank highly in the search results? That seems to be my experience. My site was being found in Google searches from the start—when it had a PageRank of 0.

Think about it. Imagine, for example, that suddenly the world gets interested in a remote tropical island called Isla Coqui (maybe Johnny Depp buys it and the Dalai Lama goes to visit?).

If you had a 12-page, original-content site called IslaCoqui.com (and hardly any other site even mentioned Isla Coqui), don’t you think that Google would consider IslaCoqui.com an authority site? Apparently Google would.

Even if the number of visitors interested in that topic was small, your site would be an authority and could acquire PageRank and also rank well in Google searches.

Anyway, that’s the way it looks to me. What do you think? Read the free report pages and post a comment here, OK?