Free Icons For Your Blog or Desktop

MaxPower is maintaining a listing of a bunch of free icons that may be the perfect addition to your blog. Some of the icons are really good others just so-so but the list is definitely worth scanning through to see if anything might make your blog pop just a little more.

Web Color Palette Tool

Just stumbled across this sweet color palette tool at ColorBlender.com. If you've eve had trouble decidiing on what color combo to use on a site then this is the tool for you.

ColorBlender has a slidebar for Red/Green/Blue and as you slide each bar the site automatically calculates a 6 color blended color palette for you. Even better yet once you've found a combination that you like you can export it to Photoshop, Illustrator or email it to yourself or someone else.

Exhaustive List of Blogger Templates

• Thur's Templates
• Solucija CSS Templates
• Free Templates - Blogspot
• Aman's Blogger Templates
• Noipo.org Templates
• Blog's Gone Wild - Free Skins
• Templates for Blogger, Blogsky, Persian Blog and Movable Type
• http://blog-templates.ravasthi.name/
• Free blog templates, original skins and new designs for Blogger
• Point of Focus Blogger Templates
• Blog Styles
• BlogFrocks
• not (that) ugly Templates
• Love Productions
• Diaphaneity Templates
• Templates by funk zyde
• Templates by Caz

Comment if you know of any other good template sites...

Keeping Stats on Your Blog

One key to building traffic to you blog is to keep track of who is coming to your blog and how they are getting there. In order to do this you need to use what is commonly referred to as a hit counter. A hit counter is a counter of how many people come to your site but it can also be a lot more. Good hit counters can tell you where a visitor to your site came from, how long they stayed, what web browser they used, what operating system they have, where they are located and more. Some of the info will be usefult to you (i.e. where they came from) and other info won't matter a whole lot for now.

Installing a hit counter is actually quite easy, all you need to do is paste a little piece of code into your blog template and off you go.

A few good, free options for hit counters:

• StatCounter
• SiteMeter
• CQ Counter

I personally have only used SiteCounter but the others should be good too, if anyone disagrees please let me know.

Using TrafficSwarm to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

TrafficSwarm is in the same vein as BlogMad and BlogExplosion. Its completely free to join and can help you as you start to build traffic to your blog. Just for signing up you'll get some free credits that you can redeem to get people to visit your blog. Then you can also earn additional credits by surfing other TrafficSwarm users' blogs. A great way to get ideas from other people's blogs, leave comments (with a backlink to your blog) and get some traffic to your site in return.

TrafficSwarm also lets you sign up for a free subscription to Revenue magazine, just for joining TrafficSwarm. Revenue is a magazine devoted to the latest trends in online and affiliate marketing.

tags: traffic swarm

Using Feedburner for Syndication

Feedburner is a great way to syndicate your content and get more people to read what you write. Feedburner offers a bunch of different services to help you build awareness of your content, keep stats on who is reading and even will help you with ways to monetize your blog.

A few highlights of Feedburner:

1. The Feedburner PingShot automatically notifies a bunch of web directories when you post new content.
2. Feedburner lets you easily setup email subscription lists.
3. Gives you serveral different chicklets to put on your site to make it easier for people to sign up for your feed.
4. Allows you to automatically add links to social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg, del.icio.us, Slashdot, Furl, Spurl, etc.) on each blog post and also in your FeedBurner feed. By using these links you can have your readers promote your blog for you. This is a very powerful tool for you to use as you grow your blog.

All in all, Feedburner is an awesome and free tool. Definitely worth checking out.

tags: feedburner

Blog Traffic From Yahoo Tip

If you are just getting started blogging, here is a quick traffic tip to possibly get your blog's feed indexed by Yahoo quicker.

1. Start a MyYahoo page.
2. Then click the "Add Content" link in the upper left. This will take you to a screen to search for content for your page.
3. Click on "Add RSS by URL" on the right side of that window.
4. Then type in your feed's URL, click Add and then on the next page click "Add to My Yahoo" in the upper right corner.

Thats it. Hopefully it helps.

Idea courtesy of JohnTP

tags: yahoo

Using Meta Tags

There is some debate amongst search engine optimization (SEO) professionals as to how important meta tags are these days. In the early years of the Internet meta tags were seen as a quick key to success. Search engines weighted meta tags heavily in determining search placement for websites. Meta tags weigh was high enough that their use was widely abused and has since led to less serious of an importance placed on them.

How to Setup Up Meta Tags

There are many different meta tags that are used by people. For the sake of simplicity I suggest you focus on two of them: keywords and description. Both are fairly self explanatory, keywords is used as a listing of keywords related to the web page and description is used for a short description of the web page. These tags are placed at the top of a web page's code immediately after the html title tag.

Keywords

For keywords, select between 15 and 25 keywords that you hope people will find your site when searching for. For example, if your website is about your favorite new music then your keywords tag might look something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="music, new music, music reviews, new songs, rock music, pop music, country music, top ten songs, new cds, number one song, number 1 song">

Description

For the description meta tag you need to write a 200-250 word description of your website. Some search engines will use this description of your site in their search results so make sure that it makes sense and uses proper grammar. Again, if your website is about your favorite new music your description tag might look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="Reviews of the latest new music in multiple genres such as rock music, pop music, country music and other new music.">

One Final Meta Tag - Robots

The only other meta tag even worth mentioning is the robots tag. Properly used it will look exactly like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
The robots tag is used to indicate to a search engine if you wish for a certain page to not be indexed by the engine, hence the "noindex". You do not need to use this tag to tell a search engine to index a page, without the robots tag your page will get indexed.

The Bottom Line

Only some of the major search engines use them and their weight is low but since it only takes a few minutes to set them up its worth it. Don't count on your meta tags to do much for you but they can't really hurt.

tags: meta tags

The Blogging Fool

Welcome to The Blogging Fool. This blog aims to serve as a resource for bloggers as they seek to increase traffic to their blog and in many cases learn to make money from that traffic. You can expect frequent updates on blogging tips, various resources to make blogging easier and other blog realted info.

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