This is not only Brad The BlogBoy’s one year aniversary this is the first day of our relaunch and I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed with comments and ideas over the last year.  I really wanted to take the time to tell you about what to expect over the next year.

1. I will promote one new theme a week here.  With any luck, I will be able to create one new theme a week to also hand out.
2. I want to do some in depth plugin analysis as well.  With any luck I will be able to get a few of the popular plugin authors, especially those I use a great deal to pimp their own wares to you.
3. Last but not least you are going to see a lot more of me here and over at Blogging For Noobs.

Brad The BlogBoy will relaunch on March 9, April 1, 2009.  Until that time we are posting a variety of SEO and Blogging Articles we think you will enjoy and be worth your time to read.  If you are interested in becoming a contributing author to this blog or a guest poster please contact us.  We would love to hear from you.

What you can expect in the relaunch:

• Regular Wordpress Plugin Reviews
• The latest Wordpress SEO techniques
• Blogging Secrets
• Guest Posting from bloggers getting it done for themselves

Until then enjoy the Articles,

BlogBoy

By Leonardo Wood

When someone searches for a keyword or set of keywords on Google they are presented with a series of results. Each of these results are used as the free listing and are taken from the webpage they are on. They are made and from three separate parts; the Headline, the Description and the URL or domain name.

By ensuring that you include your keywords within these three sections you are making your page extremely relevant for those keywords and, as Google loves relevancy, you will then be climbing in the Google rankings until you get to that sought after first page position.

First of all include your keywords in the headline of the web page. This is the Page Title (also know as Title Tag) of your page which is the white wording in the blue bar at the top of your page.

Also use your keywords in the meta data or description of your web page. This is normally within the back end of a website, but if you do not have a page description already built in, Google will get the description straight off your page so making sure your page contains your keywords will make sure your keywords are included in your description.

If you can get your keywords into your URL or domain name as well this also helps with the relevancy of your page.

If you put all these together it will make your page very powerful for your chosen keywords and will give your SEO a serious boost.

Want to know more about how you can get your website listed on the 1st page of Google check out my Free Report: SEO Secrets

Leonardo Wood specializes in teaching website owners how to do their own SEO.

For Instant SEO Tips to Help You Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google click: SEO Tips

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leonardo_Wood
http://EzineArticles.com/?SEO-Tip—Where-to-Put-Your-Keywords-on-Your-Page&id=1986190

Starting a new site is no small task if you want to do it right. Even some of us who have been doing it for a long time still make mistakes, However most of us who are successful in this business don’t keep making the same ones. The site I am following is Meme Connection. I started the site five days ago with a stock theme from Revolution Two. I am quite pleased they have gone to open source licensing so I can give you the theme with all of my upgrades in the SEO department, because frankly it needed them.

Now five days on in the blog I have linked it to a couple of my other blogs, registered with Technorati, made a few posts, and promoted it off an on in my social network. For the first time today I am seeing an Alexa score which we will call my base score of 7,169,215. This isn’t bad since I know bloggers who have been around for years and don’t have scores that good. My target is to have that down to a 1,000,000 by the first of the year. I also have a goal of hitting PR 1 with the next Google PR update do out either at the end of December or first part of January. I won’t be to disheartened if I don’t make that goal since this is a very new blog. If it doesn’t happen my goal is no less than PR 2 in the March/April update with an Alexa score of 250k or lower.

What is next for the blog? In the coming days I expect to submit new memes from all of my existing blogs, and maybe from a few more new domains. Backlinks are the key to search engine success. Now that we are live I am going to work on putting the link directory and forums up on the site and start to build the community. You can follow Meme Connections on the Memes for Blogs site or subscribe to our primary feed. You can follow this continuing story and keep updated on how well the Alexa ranking is doing at least twice a week on How To Blog. You can also get twitter updates of both of these blogs and all of my others by following me, BradHart.

If you followed this post over from Blogging For Noobs, then you know this mornings story.  The summation is I found a potential spamback link in my comments at the Celebrity Rumors and decided to follow it with due diligence before allowing it.  it was a spamback, but it had links to a wealth of good sites worthy of showing you.  Here they are.

While not the most important thing in a theme, the color scheme is certainly the first thing noticed by a visitor to your blog. This handy little color scheme picker will help you come up with an appropriate scheme quickly and easily.

I also found this three part series on usefull css code snippets. Part 1, 2, 3.

This is a nice graphically based use of rounded css corners complete with free graphics and code. The size they give you could easily work as a background image for your blog page.

This Web 2.0 Generator link page had a lot of great links for theme builders as well as just general bloggers.

Sadish Bala had some interesting links and advice of his own on his blog.

Emily Robbins hasn’t updated her blog, How To Blog, in along enough that I consider it abandoned, but that doesn’t stop the old stuff from being worth reading.

Design Disease has some great themes of their own for free.

I also found a really nice site, Web Designer Wall, with some recent articles on using large image backgrounds.

My limited programming knowledge didn’t make the next site very useful to me, but the more I am learning about Wordpress code, Devlounge’s article on how to write a wordpress plugin is where I am going to start reading.

The least utilized option in Wordpress, the custom field, is also quite possibly the most powerful function of the entire platform. I have been writing up my own tutorials on this option for several days now and thought I would share with you a few of the other great posts on the subject.

The Top 5 Uses for Wordpress Custom Fields  by  Oak Innovations Blog

For the vast majority of bloggers, this incredibly usefull, and versatile piece of functionality goes unused. At the moment you may be thinking that the reason you don’t use it, is that you have no use for it. This may very well be true but, its also likely that no one has really explained what’s possible.

Learn how to use Wordpress Custom Fields | Kriesi.at – new media design

WordPress gives an author the ability to add extra data to each written post and page. This data is called meta-data and is stored in custom fields.

WordPress Custom Fields Contest

If you are a wordpress blogger, how many times have you used the often overlooked feature called Custom Fields. It is sitting below this post page as I type and though I look at it everyday, I never got around to using it. Technosailor is organizing the WordPress Custom Fields Contest to bring forth the usefulness of this feature and its possible applications.

Jazz Up Your Site: 28 Ways To Use WordPress Custom Fields | Performancing.com

Reasons To Use Custom Fields

You create a custom field, then choose on a post by post basis what information you will add. That information can be manipulated by custom WP/PHP code to present additional textual or visual content when a visitor views a post page. To summarize:

1. Add metadata for reporting or other purposes.
2. Add visually cohesive elements to your site.
3. Manipulate information and control its display programmatically.
4. Make global changes across all your posts with a single code change, instead of manually updating each post.

The lists below show some ways that WP custom fields can be used to provide more textual and visual info to your site visitors. If you decide to change something, say a border or background or even placement on the post page, without custom fields you would have to make changes manually to each and every post. If you have hundreds of posts, you’d have a daunting task. With custom fields, you have structure and homogeneity through custom handler code.

redswish – a web design blog » The power of Wordpress Custom Fields

I can’t believe I’ve been playing with Wordpress for so long and never explored the Custom Fields feature. A website I’ve been working recently has required me to push the boundaries of Wordpress, or more appropriately my understanding and knowledge of it. In doing so I’ve bravely slipped deeper into the Advanced Options and lived to tell the tale – the tale of the Custom Fields…

WordPress Custom Fields; laying text over your lead graphic

WordPress Custom Fields; laying text over your lead graphic

For WordPress users, there are certain scenarios when the typical reverse chronological presentation of content is just not enough. I have experimented with different methods of presenting content on 5thirtyone.com each time a redesign is uploaded – from the text-centric to the image heavy version in use right now. With hundreds of WordPress driven blogs being published on a daily basis, it’s difficult to stand out; even more so if you stick to the standard two-column blog layout.

The undersigned » Blog Archive » WordPress how-to: Custom Fields

WordPress how-to: Custom Fields

Most WordPress users have seen the custom fields section when they write a new post or create a page – but what is it exactly?

Post 12 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

If you are reading this post then you have taken your first step in moving beyond the amateur blog level.  The first thing you need to accept is you don’t know everything and you should be reading a lot of blogs how to get set up right.  None of us know everything, and I am more than happy to point you to the people who know a lot more than me on any subject.  That said let me tell you what we can all agree on.

• Figure out why you want to blog.  This is the most important step and the reason most people never bother with.  Deciding you want to blog for money is perfectly acceptable.
• Once you figure out why you want to blog you need to decide on what your blog is to be about.  This is one specific thing that your blog will be known to the search engines for.  This is going to be your keyword phrase.  See my post on picking your keywords for more information.  The short of it is you want to find something that defines your blog with a lot of daily searches, but not very many search results.  This choice will define your blog for a very long time so choose wisely.
• Once you know your primary focus you can start to choose a domain name.  Choosing something simple like your name seems easy enough, but frankly that isn’t necessarily the best choice either.  your name is a particularly bad choice if you want to sell your blog later.  Some schools of thought are Google will look more favorably on you if your keyword and your domain name are similar.  Once you decide on a Domain name register it.  You can do this almost anywhere so I suggest looking for a cheap place that has been around a while.  You can host anywhere once you have the domain, but if you lose the domain because you were dicking around making other decisions, then you are SOL and have to repeat steps two and three.
• Choose a blog platform and a basic theme design.  The fact is Google loves wordpress best of all, but without a well designed theme it doesn’t matter what kind of advantage you get from the platform you are taking blind swings.  Not only will you need to choose a good theme, you need to be able to alter or fix it yourself, unless you have a paid tech guy.  it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, if you don’t look profession to your readers your won’t be seen as a professional.  This goes doubly for google and every other search engine that could care less what sort of pithy commentary you make.  Search engines want the nitty gritty of posts.  They want meta information to match the text.  They want images that have full SEO treatments since they can’t interpret the visual.  They want to know what your navigation priorities are.
• Last but not least is you want to choose your host.  You need to do your homework and not let some affectation pull at your heartstrings.  You can switch hosts as you like.  Many hosts these days are even on month to month agreements so switching is easy.  The biggest thing to look for is how fast sites using the network move.  If the cost is next to nothing for a whole lot of promises beware.  Any company that doesn’t charge a minimum of $10 a month and promises the moon probably means that have three or four times too many sites for their bandwidth and if you ever try and use as much as the promised they will likely cancel you account.

If you can manage these steps you are well on your way to moving beyond the amateur blog level.

Post 9 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

This little vid is a test post look for some actual content later.

BlogBoy doesn’t often make political stands when it comes to the online world, but this is one that can’t be ignored. There isn’t a blogger alive who doesn’t need to consider freedom of speech issues in fact. In Yahoo news this morning they write about public online spaces not having the same freedom of speech rights as say your public park.

‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
“Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content
that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their
own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they
cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.”

That might sound ominous and horrible, just like everything that the Bush administration has done for the last seven years, and in a way it is all of that. On the other hand that is the nature of doing business. Suffice it to say blogging is a business or at least you should be thinking of it as such if you ever plan to make money.

These companies be they MySpace, Yahoo, Google or even your own hosting company all have an image to maintain. If you associate yourselves with them and threaten that image they have every right and not to mention a responsibility to their stock holders to maintain that image even if it means pissing off a paying subscriber. That is called risk management, the world revolves around it. Yes, sometimes it seems unfair, but life isn’t fair. If you think life should be fair take your candy ass somewhere else because I can almost bet I won’t like you or really care what you have to say.

Do you see how that works or get the subtle of what I have just told you? This space is mine and there is very little you can do to stop me from saying what I want. if this was MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal I could could still get away with telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’, however there are plenty of places I couldn’t and keep my account very long. Just as i could get away with saying what I would like to do to Cat Deeley or Kourtni Lind on those same places, I couldn’t tell you the same thing about the teenage girl who lives across the street. Not that she interests me in the least, I could tell you what I would like to do to her on my my own blog if I had such an interest. While I don’t have an unlimited ability to say those things because of the agreement I have with my hosting company, it certainly lets me go a lot farther than any community blog will.

Now if I wanted to write twisted perverse stories about the girl, i am pretty sure I couldn’t get away with that very long with Host Gator, especially if I used any sort of details. More precisely, I could until someone told on me and my account just disappeared. I am not willing to run that risk, even if I do get daily backups of all my databases and have every post stored locally for all of my blogs. I like the price I pay for hosting and get good service, so my risk management assessment says no to cute blond mid teenage girl meets thirty something blogboy who turns out to be the sperm donor that gave her life porn stories. There are hosting companies that would let me host that and wouldn’t even bat an eye because it is tame compared to some of what people post. Those companies have made risk assessments too, and charge you accordingly.

When it comes right down to it if you are a blogger and want to say what ever the hell you want, there are some rules you need to pay attention to. First unless your speech and ideas are very tame, you risk losing an account almost anywhere you go. If you want to say what is on your mind pretty much unfettered then you need to get yourself a domain account with a good hosting company, click the Host Gator ad to your right for a really good deal. Lastly if you are going to publish what amounts to porn, get a hosting company that specializes in and allows it.

Before you say you shouldn’t have to put up with a company interfering with your right to say what ever you want while using there service it is time to ask yourself if you want to be called a hypocrite. If you blog and use any sort of spam filter or moderate comments you are censoring another person’s speech. Know the game, know the rules and know that you will always be playing by someone else’s rules…

there may be a bit of downtime in the feeds and you may have to resubscribe to the Feedburner accounts.  We are transferring services between accounts, and Feedburner warned us possible interuptions.  We will transfer the account on 6/26 so please be advised.

Thanks

brad