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.