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.

One of the four most important aspects of writing a post is picking out the right keywords from the text.  This isn’t something often mention in your standard how to blog post.  There is only one really good free tool and I reccomend using it every time you post.  Wordsfinder will pick out what it sees as your best go to keywords based on a Google Search.  You simply cut and paste your text into the box and it spits out a list of your best keywords.  Copy the the ready to use list, and paste it into the custom field value box in the Wordpress write/edit post page and label the key as keywords.  Remember to save or publish after this step or they won’t be part of the post’s data.

The second method for adding keywords requires a bit of theme editing.  I first saw this technique on Nathan Rice’s Blog.  I suggest you read his entire series on how to do Wordpress SEO. This technique will add your tags as keywords. If you are using good tags there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use them as keywords. If you are using a not so good program to autotag like simple tags, you should avoid this method as it could cause google to think you are keyword stuffing. (Stuffing equals reduced pagerank) However if you use an intelligent tagging plugin that uses semantic tags, like Calaise archive or autotagger or my favorite Tagaroo you are in good shape. Simply paste the keywords you got from Wordsfinder into the tag area and away you go.

This is where the theme editing needs to be done.
In the header.php add this below the title tags <title></title>
<br /> <?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) : if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?><br /> <meta name=”description” content=”<?php the_excerpt_rss(); ?>” /><br /> <?php csv_tags(); ?><br /> <?php endwhile; endif; elseif(is_home()) : ?><br /> <meta name=”description” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>” /><br /> <?php endif; ?><br />

In your functions.php add the following in the line above ?>

function csv_tags() {<br /> $posttags = get_the_tags();<br /> foreach((array)$posttags as $tag) {<br /> $csv_tags .= $tag->name . ‘,’;<br /> }<br /> echo ‘<meta name=”keywords” content=”‘.$csv_tags.’” />’;<br /> }<br />

Before undertaking this step I really reccomend you read Nathan’s fine article on the hows and whys of meta keywords.

Post 73 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

One of the most important aspects of being a successful blogger is choosing your keywords carefully.  This is just not something most people do when they learn how to blog.  I am going to run through a couple of steps for you really quick that will help you figure out your keywords.

1. Find out how you are ranked at Google Rankings.  I just changed mine here so google isn’t ranking me on the new words as well as I would like.  In single word phrases I top out with blog at 11.18% density which is pretty respectible if there were more posts and fewer search results for it.  My top three word phrases are Wordpress Option Field and Wordpress Optional Fields, based on a recent post.  What I really want to be rated on is How To Blog.
2. Once you know what you are rated on it is time to decide what you want to be rated on.  I use Free Keywords which was originally suggested on Courtney Tuttle’s Blog.  Start searching for keywords based on your general blog niche.  This is how I found How To Blog.  What you want is a keyword or phrase that has no more than three words to it.  The more daily search results you have the better off you are.
3. Once you have a particularly good keyword or phrase you need to figure out how it plays out on google.  Put your keyword or phrase in quotes and search.  While Google Personalization can really screw up the ranking of your results, it will have no effect on how many results it returns.
   
   
4. Optimize your choice by looking for a high number of daily searches and a low number, under a million, search results.  Look for how to use these new keywords in the near future.

I will revisit this post with you from time to time and let you see how my changes affect my placement for these keywords without stuffing the keywords where they don’t belong.

Post 72 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers.

The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific ideas. Simply put the guest book was stiff, bereft of use, pushing up digital daisies, had run down the curtained screen saver, had emptied the recycle bin with ccleaner, overwritten multiple times with randomized ones and zeroes, and joined auto-starting background midi files as things Skippy should never put on a site. The guest book was and ex-webpage! That was until I figured out a use for it.

I know you are thinking this guy is ought of his bloody mind. Well I might be, but never the less I know how to make the guest book useful once again. Every blogger gets comment like ‘this is nice’ and ‘I like the post’. For those of us kind bloggers using a dofollow system this is annoying crap. However with a nofollow guest book and a move comments plugin we can preserve those comments, because some of them actually mean what they say and could give a damn about the backlink, and keep our blogs from being fodder for spammers.  The second plugin you will want if you wish to keep dofollow status is a conditional plugin that allows for conditional nofollow noindex posts and pages.

Once you have your plugin installed you can start by creating the guest book. If you are a nofollow blog the process is pretty simple, just create called guest book add a few lines of text and stick the post link in your menu. Alternately if your theme allows for comments on pages you can make it a page and it should automatically go into your navigation structure. Assuming you are a kind dofollow blogger honoring your readers comments, you are going to need to do a few things differently for the guest book to work like it should and not screw up the rest of your blog.

After activating the plugins the next thing you will want to do is make a copy of your single.php and rename it guestbook_template.php. This is the file we will edit.  Top the top of this file you will want to add the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: guestbook
*/
?>

Once this page is uploaded create a new page using the guestbook page template.  Say a few words of kind warning about the kind of comments that should go in posts and the kind that belong here.  Set the page to nofollow and noindex and you are ready to go.  Move your comments at will and enjoy your new found guest book.

Post 8 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

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

Sorry about the mess everyone.  I am making some changes around here this weekend and will looking at a few different theme designs to decide what I like and don't.   If the theme changes on you mid read sorry for any disruption.

The current theme is the Freemium Theme by Ptah Dunbar.  Feel free to tell us what you think of it.

Brad

Update:

10-8-2008: We should be bck online here later today.  If you run a site about blogging I encourage you to check out http://www.bloggingfornoobs.com/topsites/

The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase.

2) CommentLuv: This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors.  CommentLuv will give a title and link to the latest blog post of the commentator.  This deep link will help them in the Google rankings.  It also makes you a popular destination spot.  Once again you can get some comment spam, but that is trivial as having a link directly to their website paints them as an asshole should you choose to publish it.  The same rules for moderation apply with CommentLuv.  This plugin also adds “Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post” which is another popular Google search phrase.

3) Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin requires a little bit of work.  You have to replace your themes comments.php with the provided comments.php before activating the plugin.  This is a simple matter and you will likely want to edit the plugin itself through the WordPress Plugin Editor.  I find the default border color and width too light to really stand out and show the threads, but it is an easy fix.  This plugin also moves the trackbacks and pings to the bottom of the post rather than intermingling them with actual comments.

4) Quoter:  With Quoter you and your readers have the ability to both quote article text, but other comments.  If you run a hotly contested blog like politics or other charged subjects you almost certainly will want to use this with some sort of comment moderation.  It is powerful, and like the others has the power to be misused.  This is just one more instance where you need to actually work your blog rather than thinking you can sit back and do nothing.  Quoter is another plugin that will require you to add a bit of code to the comments.php.

5) Subscribe To Comments: This plugin makes it easy for people to track new comments by email of posts they care enough to comment on.  “Subscribe to comments via email” is another Google search phrase popular with people looking for blogs to post on.

All in all you have to ask yourself do you want people who are searching for places to comment?  My answer is most definitely.  There will be some assholes who leave spam, but most people are going to read the article and post something relevant to avoid linking their name and blog with spam activity.  Not everyone who searches for these terms will comment on your blog if it isn’t interesting so you must have good content.  in the end you really have to decide what level of commitment you your blog and its readers you want to have.  If the answer is very little you probably should just quit blogging.

Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say.

Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A Pussy!”

Most bloggers want their blog to be a source of income, a business if you will, but they won’t treat it like one. Almost every time Firefox highlights a comments section with nofollow tags, I shake my head in wonderment. These people just don’t get it. They are letting timidity or laziness get in the way of their business’s goals. The most often heard response of why they won’t turn it off is they don’t want the hassle of dealing with comment spam.

If you are getting a few hundred comments you don’t need to remove it, because some other part of your business model is working really well. That is a different story altogether, they are offering such high quality or value that they can get away with offering nothing else to their customers. Everyone else, that claims they want to make money, need to quit being pussies and take off their nofollow tags for comments.

Here is why you need to do it from a small/new business perspective. If you keep the nofollow tags and aloofly say “I don’t want to deal with comment spam,” this screams you are just lazy and don’t care about your customer. It also puts you in the arrogant beyond belief category thinking you are so important you will spend more than a few minutes cleaning up spam a day. Your blog readers are your customers. They might only come to browse, but if they comment they are leaving the store with the crap you are selling.

If they leave a botted comment that akismet picks up, they shoplifted and your auto-theft system picked them up and hauls them away no trouble for you. If they left a “Hi, this was interesting,” comment they bought the cheapest thing they could. Maybe they meant it or maybe they didn’t. Nofollow tags on those mean you took their money, scowled, and didn’t bother to even say thanks with a smile. In fact if you are moderating your comments you probably said “Fuck You!” and hit the spam button. Whether they meant it or not you have alienated them, by playing king of the sandbox and acted like a six year old bully.

Then there are the customers who really mean something to your business. These are the ones who give good relevant comments. You don’t have to remove the nofollow links the first time. You can use Nofollow Free or some other plugin and make it several comments if you like. You should of course have a page marked Nofollow-DoFollow Policy and let them know your posting policy. It is no different from a brick and mortar store posting the return policy or “we will prosecute shoplifters” sign. By removing the nofollow tags you are saying: “I thank you for making my blog better. I appreciate your comments and am willing to do a little work in the area of spam control to keep them coming. Here is your reward.”

If you want your blog to be a business, then you need to start acting like it is a business and treating readers like paying customers. Put out quality merchandise. Post your store policies. Say thank you to all of your customers. Honor the really good customers. Last, but not least, don’t be a pussy when it comes to doing a little work.

Link Note: The links on this post all go to good people who have the nofollow tags removed. They understand the value of doing this, so don’t screw with them by leaving spam.

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs.

The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger.

John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals.

Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions.

Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an interview with Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam Network

Earlier in the week I posted that PepperJam Network was giving all new publishers who signed up with their network a signup bonus of $10. Today I’ve managed to get a quick interview with Pepperjam Network’s CEO and President Kristopher B. Jones to ask him about the network, why he started it and what tips he could give us as publishers for using it in a way that earns us the most money.

John Chow has been pushing NeverBlue Ads pretty hard of late. I am also interested and owe them a return phone call. It seems these days even the bigger blogs are abandoning google so fast we can smell smoke. Possibly it is the guys at google taking the torch to ever more bloggers. It is hard to say for sure.

Earlier in the week John also wrote on TinyMasive.com

What do you get when you combine the contextual advertising of Google AdSense with an interactive shopping widget that can offer some pretty good deals to the visitors of your site. In some respects, TinyMassive.com may just look like another shopping-based ad network, but over the course of doing this review, I came to discover that it has a few unique qualities as well.

There are many other networks available. Some of them are sketchy. Some of them just hard to get into. Some of them only in beta, like Yahoo. They are out there though and for those who are frustrated with Google, fear not there are options.