One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will display all of the posts in a nice chronological order. This is especially nice on multiple author blogs like ProBlogger. I know some of you are thinking isn’t this just an archive page? The answer is no. A good archive page should give you little more than a quick excerpt of the post. My preference for an archive page is nothing more a link to the posts.

Here are a few more places where I make use of page templates since I am having a hard time actually finding other good uses of them at the moment. This page makes use of the Pandora Internet Radio Widgets on a single page rather than a sidebar present throughout my blog. The contact form on the Free Online Music Articles site makes use of the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form by Mike Cherim & Mike Jolley. Most of the other pages on this blog utilize my standard article directory information with the automatic pulls from the blog’s information. It saves needing to write these over and over again for different sites utilizing that or similar template. Plop the info into a template and it puts in all of the correct information. Another popular or should be popular page template is the sitemap. If you look at it there is a sextion for my pages, not all of which are listed on the landing page header. You get a list of my categories with how many posts are in each category. Then there is a listing of the ten latest posts in each category. If there were mutlpile authors to this blog you would find a listing of the ten latest posts from each author as well. Notice, this page template has absoluetely nothing to do with your google xml sitemap.

In the end if you are capable of doing simple theme editing you can create a wealth of useful pages not possible in your standard blog layout. If you aren’t so handy with the coding, try looking for themes that provide you with more template oportunities. Not only wiil they create a better reading experience many of the them will improve your SEO.

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

About the Author

Deepak has provided free online marketing tools like free classifieds and free ads sites for more than a decade, followed by article marketing and social media link building tools.

We all know it and we all hate it, and believe it or not we have all participated in it to some degree as internet noobs. There are several ways to deter spam on a blog. First is the use of plugins, I like Askimet WordPress. it works really well and used by most of the big name bloggers so that is good enough for me.

The second place to deter spam is with email. if you are a pro blogger you need to have your contact information out there. It is your internet business card and people need to access it. There are some nice forms that will do, but those are only a partial solution, because unless you are able to program it to accept attachments, links, etc it doesn’t have the functional range of email. Posting your email address openly though is a call for spammers, and while many companies like Yahoo and Google do a good job at filtering it for you others don’t. I have found the javascript code below however works very well and keeps bots from collection your email, yet displays it just like it would a normal link.

var name = “your_name”;

var domain = “your_name.com”;

document.write(‘<a href=\”mailto:’ + name + ‘@’ + domain + ‘\”>’);

document.write(name + ‘@’ + domain + ‘</a>’);

// –></script>

I didn’t write the code but I have been using it for years and can tell you that it does work when it comes to bot harvesting. it doesn’t stop assholes from giving it out and listing it elsewhere but nothing does and you just have to live with that if you want to play this game.  Check the header and you will be able to see it in action.