Entries for September, 2008

One of the issues that every blogger face - especially after a theme change or browser upgrade - is that his blog starts misbehaving with different browser applications and screen resolutions. The issues can range from minor painting issues to major alignment problems. Majority of the issues can be solved by making the theme code XHTML compliant and by avoiding making changes to the blog platform’s core codebase. Added third party (advertisements, tracking code, badges etc) scripts are other culprits that make a blog look ugly sometimes.

In this post, I would like to provide some tips and tools that will make your blog look great in every possible browser and device - provided the browser application itself is majorly bug free. Click Here to Continue Reading

Yet another Google page rank update is underway as it seems. My Google toolbar is showing a rank of 3 now for D$ which is not a bad news for a six months old blog. However, to be frank, I was expecting a PR4 (greed!) this time as my link building habit has been pretty much consistent.

Something seems to have gone wrong with my backlinks recently. A few others also have reported this problem. For the past week or so there has been a drop of up to 25-30% in my backlinks. Perhaps, Google was busy cleaning up some of them before the new PRs are publicized. Anyway, 3 is better than 2 and I wouldn’t mind taking it. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my regular readers by giving them some love. Click Here to Continue Reading

In the last post I promised to write about things that your guests, especially the search and referral visitors, hate to see in your blog. In fact, the opposite scenarios of those 10 good traits, that we talked about, themselves form the hate list. But I have more in my hate list here.

My hate list…

The following are those ten things that could create a very bad first impression (and hence the last impression as well, mostly) among your search visitors.

#1 CPU or bandwidth exceeded warnings: How often have you seen it? I get to see it a couple of times a week with one or the other blog. This happens mainly Click Here to Continue Reading

If you have a Search Engine optimized (SEO) blog then chances are high that 40-50% of your visitors are coming via web search. Though SEO takes care of luring the search users into your blog, it does not guarantee any positive action from them thereafter nor can it extend the stay of the visitor. Hence your blog, at the most, has 10 seconds to prove its worth and hospitality before the search visitor hits the back button or decide to stay on.

A couple of posts ago I talked about some tips to reduce the bounce rate of your blog. In this post I shall talk about 10 things that you could do in order get buy-in from the search visitor in as low as 10 seconds - In fact, you have less than ten seconds after discounting the page load time. Click Here to Continue Reading