Sunday, August 26, 2007

Adsense Widget for Monetizing Your Blog


ADAM-0NDI-AHMAN
Originally uploaded by missmellydean
If you are interested in monetizing your blogging, adding adsense to your blog is very important. Where you place your adsense does impact the number of clicks you get.

Many people place their adsense on the right column or at the top. This may lead to ad blindness which occurs when you look at the same format over and over again. They know those listings are advertisements and unconsciously filter them out.

A good way to overcome ad blindness is to put adsense in unexpected places. So you might want to experiment with placing your ads between posts. This placement is in the natural flow of text which may lead to a greater amount of clicks on your ads.

Have you wanted to insert your Google adsense between your blog posts without complicated coding instructions? You are in luck. Apparently, there is enough of you out there wanting to insert adsense, that Google has now developed a new adsense widget. You can add your adsense between your blog post just the same way you add adsense to other areas of your blog.

Google has a new post titled "Get Inline" at their adsense blog at adsense.blogspot.com. They show how to add adsense. It is really easy to do like everything else on Blogger.

This is what you need to do:

1. Log into your Blogger account.
2. Go to your blog's template tab and click on "page elements" link.
3. Go to "blog posts" and click on "edit" located on the lower right corner.
4. Under "select items" check the "show ads between posts" box.
5. Under "configure inline ads" you can select how often you want your adsense to appear. For example, you can them appear after every post or after every other post.
6. Next, you can customize your adsense such as choosing format and colors.
7. Most important, save your changes.

Since Google now owns Blogger, Google is becoming responsive to input from Blogger's users. Hopefully, we may see more changes and improvements to Blogger as feedback to Google continues.

Many people place their adsense on the right column or at the top. This may lead to ad blindness which occurs when you look at the same format over and over again. They know those listings are advertisements and unconsciously filter them out.

A good way to overcome ad blindness is to put adsense in unexpected places. So you might want to experiment with placing your ads between posts. This placement is in the natural flow of text which may lead to a greater amount of clicks on your ads.

You need to follow Google's term of service for adsense placement. You can be banned if you break the rules. You are allowed to have only three ad units per page. However, Blogger makes easy to follow the rules by allowing a maximum of three ad units in the blog post. So, you will not exceed the maximum limit if you add adsense between blog posts. You just cannot go on to add adsense anywhere else on your blog.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Top 6 CMS


agave
Originally uploaded by castellani.marco
CMS stands for Content Management System which is a software program used in managing a website. You often don't need any knowledge of html code or web languages in order to use a CMS. This method of creating a website is sometime called "wysiwyg" or "What You See Is What You Get" because the content during editing appears to be very similar to the final product.

There are many CMS system to choose from and some of the most popular CMS are open source or free. All but one of the top rated CMS systems I have included are from winners of the CMSWire contest and the top hits from opensource.com.

1. Joomla

Joomla is a free, multifunctional content management system or cms. Due to it's ease of use, it has an ever growing community of more than 40,000 users and developers. It's simple, browser-based interface makes it easy to add content pages to your website. For many people, Joomla's attraction is it's ability to be modified with the many hundreds of component addons and plugin that can be added to the website system framework. This way your website can be made to fit your needs. Also, Joomla does a good job of managing the web content needed to run the website.

2. Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS that is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database. It is an excellent, lightweight, flexible system which can be used to making a variety of sites from blogs to large community websites. Drupal's simple design is easy to customize and it has built-in search tool and search-engine friendly URL's as an extra add on module.

Drupal has many features for building community sites. So, it would be a good choice for a blogging or news site, but it can also support a standard website.

3. Plone

Plone is a free easy to install, full featured, flexible enterprise-ready CMS. However, if you want to add an extension you need a good grasp of Python and web programming. Even if you just use the default installation, you will have a very full featured website to use. Plone is built on top of Zope and has much of the extensibility that Zope has to offer. Plone would be a good fit for someone who is familiar with programming and needs a flexible, scalable CMS.

4. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple has many enthusiastic reviews. It is as the name states. It is a free, very simple CMS that someone with no web experience can use to create and manage a page based website. It is very easy to add content and addons to the site. A list of modules is included in the admin interface from which the modules can be downloaded.

Unlike, Drupal, it does not have community based features such as commenting or forums. It is good for someone who just wants to add or update pages to a brochure ware website.

5. Mambo

Mambo, formerly named Mambo Open Source or MOS, is a free, easy to use CMS. Mambo has attracted many users through it's ease in adding and managing web pages. It's more advanced features such as page caching, advanced templating techniques and robust API has attracted users who are looking for a more complex website. Mambo also offers RSS feeds, forums, polls, blogs, news flashes and etc.

Mambo is useful for creating simpler as well more complex websites.

6. WordPress

Last, I have included WordPress among the CMS system. Both Wikipedia and Gobala Krishnan in WebPro News believe that Wordpress has expanded beyond being an open source blogging tool to becoming a CMS. Since it is enormously popular, I have added it to the list. Gobala Krishnan explains that,"it's all a matter of having clear goals and the right plugins and partnering with the right services."

For example, WordPress was used by medical blogger Graham, at Standford University's medical school, to create a Community Health Resource Center website.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

How to Construct Hyperlinks for Search Engine Purposes


Just follow the path.
Originally uploaded by Schepers
Hyperlinks are used daily everywhere in the web. They are found in blogs, websites, advertisements and etc. In fact, the huge network of web pages known as world wide web or www is interconnected by hyperlinks and would not exist without them. Hyperlinks are not only found in the web, but maybe used in almost any electronic media such as CD-ROMs or game consoles.


How Can I Use a Hyperlink?


You use a hyperlink every time you click on a live link. It would say something like, "Click here for a free widget." When you click there, you are automatically taken to another website where you can download or order the free widget. A hyperlink or live link is the word or phrase covering a website address.


How Can I Make a Hyperlink?


A hyperlink is HTML code consisting of two ends or anchor tags and a direction or valid web address. The hyperlink text is usually underlined and in various colors to show the current status of the hyperlink. The different colors would tell you if the hyperlink had been "visited" or "activated" for instance. When you code a hyperlink it looks something like this, but with <> at the beginning and the end.



href = "web address"> text or image message < / a


This hyperlink will take you from one web address to another address. I have added extra spaces so that the link will not be live. For a live link, there should be no space except at the beginning between the "a" and "href." To go a particular location on a web page, you would use slightly different HTML code.


How Can I Go to Specific Location on a Web page by Hyperlink?


You will use the same HTML code but with one small change. Instead of using a web address, you will use a fragment identifier and the "#" symbol. It would look something like this, but with "<" and ">" added at the beginning and end.


href = "# widget"


Next, you will need to indicate where you want the hyperlink to go to on the page. To do this, you would write code to the location. Then, you would place the code on your web page at the place where you want the hyperlink. It would look something like this, but with the "<" and the ">" added at the beginning and end.


name = "widget"


How Do Hyperlinks Help Search Engines?


Another tool to find websites is the search engine. This in turn relies on hyperlinks to locate other websites. Today there is an enormous amount of websites to search through. So the search engine uses a page ranking system to determine which website to bring up first. The page ranking system is largely based on hyperlink or link popularity.


Although the page ranking system is pretty complex, it all boils down to one simple rule. The more page links or hyperlinks you get, the higher rank your website page gets. Another simple rule measures the quality of the page rank. One link with a high page rank gives a higher page rank to your website than several links with a lower page rank. So together, quantity with quality works together to assign a page rank to your website. This in turns, determines whether a search engine will bring your website up first, tenth or etc. in response to a search.


To learn other HTML code, you may want to buy a comprehensive code guide. Also, there are free internet tutorials that will teach you the basics of HTML code.