0 50 Great Widgets For Your Blog

Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. We’ve assembled a list of 50 useful or simply cool widgets for your pleasure. And remember, the first rule of widgetizing your blog is – don’t overdo it!
MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers – this widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.
Mashable – get the latest social networking news from this very site.
Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge – display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.
Preview Anywhere – see a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.
Twitter Badge – if your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then a Twitter badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.
Digg News – display the latest Digg links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.
FEEDJIT – real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.
LineBuzz – inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.
Flixn – display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.

3Jam – lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.
Jaxtr – with Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.
LinkedInABox – show off your LinkedIn profile. Perfect for personal blogs.
Box Widget – enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.
Price of gas – displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog.
iBegin Weather Widget – Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.
ClockLink – display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.
Film Loops – display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.
Daily Painters – display paintings from famous painters on your blog.
WhoLinked – show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.
Criteo AutoRoll – displays links to blogs similar to your blog.
Bitty Browser – embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.
Leafletter – create a mini website and embed it into your blog.

WikiSeek – search Wikipedia with this simple widget.
FeedCount – show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.
Technorati Link Count – display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities – Technorati.
MyPageRank – another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.
CheckPageRank – in addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.
BlinkxIt – embed a link to related videos directly into your website.
Skype button – display your Skype online/offline status on your blog.
RockYou Horoscope – not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.

del.icio.us Tagometer – display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.
del.icio.us Linkrolls – this badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.
Timelines – need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.
PollDaddy – PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.
Vizu – another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.
AnswerTips – display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.
AnswerBoxes – give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com
Now Playing – if you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes and others.
BuzzBoost – display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.
LibraryThing – show off the latest books you’ve been reading.
Plaxo Address Book – let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.

AuctionAds – a widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.
aStore – similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.
Plazes – show your current location on a Plazes map.
Stockalicious – track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.
Yahoo! For Good – create a charity badge and ask for donations for a worthy cause.
Giftspace – your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.
MixMap – see where are the visitors to your MySpace profile from on a map.

Google Map Widget – display a searchable Google Map on your website.
Google Video Search – add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.
Odeo player – display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.

0 Submit Your Blogspot Blog Sitemap to Google

Submit Your Site and Sitemap to Google
For a step by step walkthrough of how to submit your Blogger blog to Google, verify your site and add a sitemap please refer to my article Submit Your Blogspot Blog Sitemap to Google



Submit Your Site and Sitemap to Yahoo
Yahoo has a fair share of the search engine market and therefore getting your Blogger blog crawled and indexed needs to be a priority. For an in depth discussion on how to submit your site, verify it and submit a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer please see my article Submit Blogspot Sitemap to Yahoo



Submit Your Site and Sitemap to MSN
You can now submit a sitemap directly to MSN at Webmaster Center. For detailed steps in submitting a Blogger site and sitemap to MSN Live Search please refer to my article Add a Blogger Sitemap to MSN Live Search



Submit Your Site and Sitemap to Moreover.com
Historically submitting your Blog sitemap to Moreover.com expedited indexing in MSN because of a standing arrangement that Moreover would provide the submitted feeds to MSN for crawling and indexing. At the time of writing this article it is not clear if this is still useful as sitemaps can now be submitted to MSN directly. However, it can't do any harm so I suggest giving it a go.

To submit a sitemap to Moreover copy and paste the following line into your internet browser address taking care to replace yoursitename with the actual name of your site:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If all is well you will receive the following success message:

Submit Your Site and Sitemap to Ask.com
It is worth submitting your sitemap to Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves. It is considered an important search engine and owns Excite, Bloglines, MyWay and iWon. Ask.com also is a participant in the Sitemaps Protocol Program.

It is easy to submit your Blogger sitemap to Ask.com. Simply copy (Ctrl + C command) and paste (Ctrl + V command) the following line into your internet browser address bar. Be sure to substitute yoursitename with the actual name of your site.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Provided there are no issues you will see the success screen:



This article explored how to go about submitting your blog and sitemap to 5 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, Moreover.com and Ask.com

0 Blogger Blogspot SEO Tips and Tricks

In this article I will be discussing the following Blogger help tips for SEO:

• Adding Your Blogger Blog to Major Search Engines
• Optimizing Blogger Post Titles
• Utilising Meta Keywords and a Meta Description
• Using Keywords in Alt Tags and Image Titles
• Using Target Keywords in Your Post Content
• Optimizing Blogger Title Tags
• Optimizing Your Blogger Permalinks
• Making Use of HTML Heading Tags Within Posts and Post Titles
• Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to your Blogger Blog

Get Your Blog Listed by Major Search Engines
Getting listed in the major search engines is a must if you want to get traffic from search engines. I have written several in depth articles about how to add a sitemap to major search engines and how to add your blog to Google, Yahoo and MSN so I will not repeat myself. Follow these articles for step by step walkthroughs

Optimize Your Blogger Post Titles
Major search engines lend a lot of weight to titles so it is important that you craft your post titles carefully. To optimize your post titles make them keyword rich and ensure the title clearly explains what the blog post is about. Try to put your keywords at the beginning of your title for best results and avoid repeating your keywords within the title. Avoid long titles as Google only displays about 65 characters in the search results anyway.

Title tags are important if your Blogger blog is to attract traffic and rank in search engine results. On your blog home page the blog title appears between the title tags while on each individual post page it is the name of the article itself. While the title tags themselves are unseen by the visitor to your blog they are read when search engines crawl your blog.

Search engines use title tags to display your post title as a headline in search engine results. Search engines also display a description of the article either by extracting it from the post content usually by picking up the first 150 characters of your post or by reading the meta description of the post if one exists.

Meta descriptions can be crafted for individual posts in Blogger to good effect. Make descriptions unique for each post and ensure they contain your target keywords and keyword phrases to encourage search engines to extract snippets from them. To find out more about adding a meta description to an individual post please see my article Adding Meta Tags to Blogger Blogspot Blog for Better SEO


Add Meta Tags and Blog Description to Blogger
Adding meta keywords and a blog description to your Blogger Blogspot blog can boost your rankings by helping visitors locate your blog using keyword and keyword phrases. To find out the best method of inserting these into your Blogger blog please refer to my article about Adding Meta Tags to Blogger Blogspot Blog for Better SEO


Use Keywords in Alt Tags and Image Titles
Optimize the images used on your blog by making use of the alt tags and image titles. For some tips on SEO and images please refer to 10 Tips to Build Site Traffic for a Blogspot Blog


Use Target Keywords in Your Post Content
Make sure you know your targeted keywords and use them within your post content. One of the factors in determining rankings is the relevance of the targeted keywords in relationship to the text that appears in the post content.


Change the Order of Post Title and Blog Title for Better SEO
One key change you can make to Blogger that will markedly improve the SEO of your blog is to adjust the title tags.

By default Blogger title tags are not optimized for search engines. The name of the blog appears before the name of the article which is not search engine friendly. Since search engines read left to right and give preference to what appears first having your blog name display before your post title is significant. To improve SEO it pays to adjust the order of title tags so that the your post title appears first:

Blog Title | Post Title

to

Post Title | Blog Title

To find out how to adjust the title tags of a Blogger Blogspot blog please refer to my article Adjust Blogger Title Tags to Improve SEO


Optimize Your Blogger Permalinks
Hand in hand with a title tag is the permanent permalink that is created when a post is published. If the title of the post is more than about 35 characters long you will strike problems with Blogger because it will shorten the title to a 35-40 character permalink. Some very ugly results happen because of this factor. For instance imagine a permalink such as:

http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-create-improved-permalinks-for.html

A totally useless permalink results because the blogger keyword has been left off. Learn more about crafting titles and working around the limitations of Blogger permalinks in my article How to Create Search Engine Friendly Permalinks



Improve SEO by Making Use of Headings for Post Titles
Heading tags are important for optimal SEO. Most Blogger.com templates use html header tags sized <h2> or <h3> for the post title. In the past major search engines like Google gave precedence to tags with <h1> ahead of anything else but how important <h1> tags are today is less certain. You could tweak the heading size of your post title if you wish however take care to ensure the look of your template isn't compromised. A bigger font will result and this may mean other parts of your blog will need to be adjusted to compensate. To find out what size your blog title is look for the following lines in your template.

<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
<h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
<b:if cond='data:post.link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.link'>&t/a>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url'></a>
<b:else/>
<data:post.title/>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</h3>
</b:if>


As can be seen this template blog title is in <h3>. To change the size of the tags just substitute the appropriate header tag where <h3> appears


Improve SEO By Making Use of Heading Tags Within Posts
Heading tags can be used to good effect in your posts. Make sure you have only one <h1> heading per page if you have one at all and reserve this for your post title. Make use of <h2> and <h3> headings throughout your post to emphasize key points and targeted keywords. Major search engines do take notice of <h2> and <h3> headings when crawling your blog. To add emphasis to a heading within your blog simply enclose the heading in <h3> tags.


Add Breadcrumb Navigation to your Blogger Blog
There is a hack that can be used to add breadcrumb navigation to a Blogger Blogspot blog. Adding breadcrumb navigation can boost your SEO of your blog as well as improving how readers get around.


A breadcrumb provides text-based navigation by displaying the visitor's location within a blog. A breadcrumb provides shortcuts to enable visitors to quickly get around your blog and jump from one part of your blog to another. For example a breadcrumb for a post about meta tags would be Home > Meta Tags >Add Meta Tags to Blogger for Better SEO. An anchor text such as 'meta tags' tells search engines about the subject of the linked page. Search engines view a breadcrumb with a text link to relevant keywords in the post as important.



This article has focused on providing you with solid Blogger SEO advice, tips and tricks for the Blogspot Blogger. It will help you achieve good SEO results for your blog. Good luck. If you have time let me know about your experiences.