4 Different Styles For the Popular Posts Widget

Blogger allows us to easily add a "Popular Posts" widget, that we select from its list of gadgets, and we can do that by going to the "Layout" of our Blog.

This gadget, as the name implies, shows which are the most visited blog posts, and you can set it to display the info you want in four possible combinations: (1) only the title of the post, (2) a thumbnail of the image and the post title, (3) post title with a summary, and (4) post title with a thumbnail and a post snippet.

This is an element that you shouldn't miss in your blog because it encourages your visitors to navigate through your content and that can result in higher income if you're monetizing your blog because it would generate an increase in the number of pages visited, and in turn, can attract the users' interest to subscribe to the blog and to read interesting content.

Preliminary steps: Add the gadget, if you haven't done it yet.

1. Select the "Layout" tab and add the "Popular Posts" gadget in that part of your blog you want to appear, such as in your sidebar, by clicking on "Add a Gadget".

2. Configure the widget to show only the post titles. You can do this by clicking on the "image thumbnail" and "snippet" checkboxes, as shown in the following image.

3. After configuring the widget, save the changes by clicking on Save, and then Save arrangement.

Customizing Numbered Lists in Posts + 3 Examples

From the Compose tab of a Blogger post, we can create numbered lists using the "Numbered List" tool.

A numbered list is achieved through the HTML code of a "ordered list". You don't have to worry about adding the HTML, because the editor does it for you by using this tool. If you go to the HTML tab, you'll see that the list you created appears something like this:

   <ol>
<li>The content of the 1st. element</li>
<li>The content of the 2nd. element</li>
<li>The content of the 3rd. element</li>
<li>The content of the 4th. element</li>
    etc...
  </ol>

This tool will automatically number each element of the list taking an "order", hence the name "ordered lists in HTML". In each element a number is successively generated (from 1 onwards), though you can not see this in the HTML code.

Customize the scroll bar (scrollbar) with JScrollPane

JScrollPane is a jQuery script that allows you to change the blog' scroll bar, ie the browser scrollbar.

Although we can use CSS to change it, the problem is that is not standardized, because with CSS we can make it work only in Chrome and Safari; and in the case of Internet Explorer it also has its own code but obviously it only works in that browser (I don't know which versions). So what we will do then is to give a new look to the scrollbar but by using jQuery, so the change will be visible in all browsers.

Demo

Page peel effect using jQuery

Page Peel is a popular page flip effect that when your cursor is passing over it, will show "what's behind" as if it would be a book. There are many ways to do this, many of them use flash files which makes it less customizable, however, the one that we will see in this post is made with jQuery.

Usually, the content that is "behind", is an image for subscribing to feed, but you can put any image and link to any page.

Demo

You can see an example in this demo blog.

On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

We know that SEO Off Page refers to the search engine optimization techniques that can be done outside of your website, such as link wheels, reviews, social bookmarking, social media (references and followers), sidebar links, among other techniques. However, without a proper on-page seo optimization, all would sum up to a non-optimized webpage without quality, which will not reach the traffic expected to have. This is mostly because search engines (especially Google) pay much attention to the alt and title tags (for images), meta tags, internal links, robots and so on, in order to display the content of your web page to the user who made a specific query in the search.

To never fall in this depression of search engine optimization, you can choose a good and reliable blog platform like Blogger. If you are working only on Blogger, here are some on-page optimization tips that might help you to become successful in the blogging world and increase the daily traffic to your blog.

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your Blog

The Alexa Rank in its time may have been pretty important for the SEO, however, these days is already losing its importance due to the changes in the algorithm that Google applies from time to time.

The company displays information about visitors of a website, which in turn, classifies this in a ranking, generating estimated statistics about visitor traffic and links pointing to the website. In a few words, the Alexa Rank does not directly affect SEO, but rather serves as a reference for measuring the traffic type, popularity by country and other metrics.

If you would like to enrich or have a good Alexa Rank of your website, here some ways to do it, with short-term results.

5 Ways to Increase the Alexa Rank

Daily Content: Try to publish at least 2 articles per day and within a month you may start to see some changes in the Alexa ranking.

How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

Google Analytics is a platform created with the purpose of helping us to track the number of visits and page views on our blog, which also uses several filters to check exactly from where the visitors are coming via standard or custom reports.

Google Analytics is the leading free tool that has a good relationship with the internet marketing and offers suggestions and improvements or benefits for our website.

As Analytics is part of the variety of Google tools like Blogger, many bloggers still don't know if it is possible to add the tracking code in Blogger. Implementing analytics in Blogger is very quick and easy, so you don't need to be experts or web developers. Here's a small guide for placing the Google Analytics tracking ID on our blog.

Implementing Google Analytics on Blogger

1. Do you have a Google Analytics account? Then it's perfect. If you don't have one, please Register.

2. Within the account, we'll go to Admin and in the Property column, click the menu, then click Create new property, where we enter the information from the website.

3. Click on "Get Tracking ID" and it will provide a box with a code, select and copy the code (CTRL + C).

4. Now let's go to our Blogger account.

5. Look for your blog and click on it, then go to Template > click the Edit HTML button and paste the code previously generated in Analytics before the </head> tag (CTRL + F in order to find it).

And this would be the entire procedure. Within about 24 hours, we shall see the first statistics of our blog in Google Analytics, otherwise check the following:

- Double check that the code has no spaces or characters.

- Doesn't have errors in the configuration

- There are no poor implementation of the filters.

- The Flash plugin is working or javascript is enabled.

- You will have minor issues if you are receiving visits from China (this conflict is not yet solved, according to Google).

4 Alternatives to Google AdWords

Many think that Google AdWords is the only tool dedicated and available to perform a study such as a keyword search, but it isn't so, today I refute this idea by collecting some alternatives that, although are not equal to Google AdWords, at least encourage us to make good keyword analysis for the SEO of our website.

Going back a bit, for those unfamiliar with the main features and tools of Google AdWords, we can find a very simple interface yet complete in every sense.

- AdWords appearance has changed, however there is a chance of returning to the old design;

- allows you to place a phrase or keyword, a web site and use the categories;

- for a better keywords search, you can apply filters such as location, language and add custom fields (competition, local or global monthly searches, CPC, Ad share, etc.);

- displays keyword ideas in columns with the amount of local and global monthly searches and approximate CPC;

- you can download keyword ideas, search results in a format to open with Excel.

Having recalled and refreshed the memory a little with the characteristics of AdWords, now it is time to learn about other options both free and paid.

Redirect Blogger 404 Error (Page Not Found) To Homepage

A 404 error page tells you and search engines that a page is not found by displaying a text similar to it "Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.". This may happen because you have changed your URLs over time, either removed a few pages when you overhauled your design or a visitor may have accidentally misspelled an URL inexistent in your blog, so it automatically redirects to the 404 error page (page not found).

And probably this will not make a good impression on the greatest potential users of our blog. Before the user clicks the back button or close the window/browser's tab, thus leaving our site forever, we may want to redirect 404 error in Blogger to a page, where are chances that the visitor will continue reading our blog.

One of the most used methods is the "meta refresh" but the problem with this method is that it breaks navigation (doesn't allow to return back). In this case, the best method is by using Javascript about which I will go in detail below.

Top Commentators Widget with Avatars for Blogger

The commentators are a fundamental part of any blog, since they are the ones that give life to the blog, opening and replying to discussions which leads to more activity in the posts.

It is therefore very important to know which are the most active users of your blog, the users who leave more comments, and for this reason, today I present a great method to display a list with the top commentators.

The gadget will look something like this:

This Top Commentators gadget comes with user's avatar and is done with JavaScript.

How to Add the Top Commenters Gadget to Blogger

Add a forum on your Blogger blog with Nabble

Forum is a platform where visitors can interact with each other and discuss different hot topics. There you can add desired topics for getting comments and diverse suggestions on them. If you have a good traffic, then you can place questions on daily basis for the potential visitors to answer, thus your forum simultaneously converts itself into a huge frequently asked quesions section "FAQ". Forums will provide your visitors an open social atmosphere to express their useful ideas and share other's ideas.

In this brief tutorial, I have explained simple steps to add a forum to your Blogger or blogspot blog. So let's get started!

How to Create a Forum With Nabble

How to Add an Admin Control Panel in Blogger

A while ago I've posted some tutorials on how you can remove the Blogger Navbar or add a Peek A Boo Effect so that it would show only when we mouse over on top of our page.

How to Add a Recent Forum Topics Widget to Blogger

If you are using the Nabble forum in your blog is very likely that this gadget will interest you because, as the title suggests, it will display the lastest topics that have been published in your forum in a very similar manner to the recent comments gadget that works with the blog's feed.

If you want to add a list with the Recent Forum Topics then follow the steps below:

How to do natural SEO on Blogger

Although many insist that blogs hosted on free servers, such as Blogger, are not ideal for getting your blog well-ranked, the truth is that a blog hosted by Blogger can be really fast and well positioned on the Internet if you are using the right SEO tools.

Now, given the latest updates from Google, the best would be hiring a specialized person. However, if you don't have the resources or you want to learn doing this job alone, you can choose to begin with the natural SEO.

Here are some tips to do natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization).