Wow today I was checking my social networks when I received a surprise from MyBlogLog. They have being doing some changes on their service the latest weeks, starting by the About Me widget, now you can see your avatar and bio in addition of your services. It was a good update, but as Yahoo! is constantly ascending, they also update the Recent Visitors widget.

The new Recent Visitors widget is pretty good, based on a web 2.0 style now you can easily add people as friend, by placing the mouse over the widget you can see a little window with the main information about that user. Also you can join to a community and see how many members it has.

Now, they changed everything!! see how your profile looks now:

With this new style is more easy to navigate on your profile, you can see your messages, what’s hot in your community and the recent activities of your friends in the same window. I really like this design, now you can see your recent friend’s activities on services like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc etc…which allow you to be connected closer with that user .

If you still reading this post and you didn’t see your mybloglog profile, don’t waste your time! go to your profile and check the updates by yourself .

Today someone send me an email asking me for a page which he added to him bookmarks and today he tried to visit it and it was impossible to him. The page was not deleted, I just changed something in the permalink but he got an 404 Error Page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server cannot be made at all.

However this issue was good because it makes me notice that my 404 error page really sucks and I start to think how could I improve it…So I was thinking, in which circumstances someone get an 404 Error Page:

• When the url is written bad.
• When the url is deleted from the site.
• When the permalink is changed.

So I thought that is annoying when someone get a 404 message, the person is waiting to see the content and instead the person need to go back in the browser or verify the url. However that’s boring, so I will give you some tips to improve your 404 error page as I improved mine and give to the user a more pleasant sailing.

1. Be friendly with the user: ok may be this could be considered stupid but not everybody knows what a 404 error is. Normally this kind of pages only show a single message: “404 Error – Not Found” or something like that. The experimented user know what it means, but if you are not an Internet lover, you surely won’t know what to do. In this case, you need to tell them what’s happening, a little message explaining it is sufficient for this.
2. Include a search bar: if the user couldn’t find something, you need to help him to find it! how? if he is interested in something specific, he’ll want to find it, so what’s better than a search bar? a good and simply search bar could solve the problem, adding it to your 404 error page could help the users to find their wants.
3. Offer personal assistance: exist the case that the user simply can’t find what he is looking for. In this case you should offer personal assistance, let them know that you are willing to help them finding what they want. Placing a link to the contact form will be enough in addition of a little note.
4. Offer other posts: may be they can’t find what they want because simply the content does not exist on your blog. What should you do in this cases? offering other posts could be a nice way to attract them to your blog. I used a wordpress plugin called Customizable Post Listings for this, it let you to set random posts where you want with a simple php function: you can set the number of posts, the format of them, the author of them…inclusively you can set categories, so the plugin will only show random posts under these categories.

Building a 404 error page could be simple, but it’s very important for any website because depending of how is it configured, the users can leave or stay in the site when they can’t find what they want.

Happy blogging!

Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping provided in the last post, ping is a computer’s network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. When you ping a service, it means that you are sending a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it in the server.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, it ensures that your content will be seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help you to rank your posts for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It lets you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You just need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then, Ping-o-Matic will send pings to all those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on these sites!

That is a good way to do it, but it is boring because it’s manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies to all those popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now, people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services at ping-o-matic, by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend you to ping Technorati directly with every new post and update, instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.

Over the Internet there are too many services which pay for reviewing services or websites. BuyBlogReview is a service of online Blog Advertising since 2000 and have served hundreds of customers worldwide. With BuyBlogReviews.com you can register as advertiser or blogger. As advertiser you are enable to get your products, services or websites reviewed by bloggers, improving the buzz you need for your website to gain qualified search engine traffic. If you instead are a blogger your task will be write reviews about advertiser’s services, getting paid for that.

What about the advantages or disadvantages of using this service?

As advertiser you can use this new method to promote your website, the bloggers will write a review of your website, product or service and they will link back to your site to give you the more power on your link popularity, pagerank and alexa rank. This way, you will get more traffic through search engines because your link will be for everywhere, so you probably can get potential customers, improving your sales. There is no way to lose, buying a review you will gain the traffic and rank that you need to get success in your online marketing.

What about the bloggers? ok the main benefit is that you will get paid just for blogging something you like, in my case I could search for marketing opportunities and with good feeling I will post about it, getting paid for that. One of best ways to monetize your blog is reviewing services, products and websites, ever while you review something related to your niche. So you will find a lot of opportunities, and the more you post, the more money you will get, it’s simply and awesome .

Disadvantages? I don’t think so. As advertiser or as a blogger, however you will win.

How it work?

Ok lets talk about the blogger panel and how you can start to make money with this service. On

ce you register, you need to add your blog by clicking on manage blogs in your main panel. Then, It will take up to 72 hours for your blog approval, but it’s more faster, in my case I got approved in a couple of hours.

After get approved, go to Find Opportunities in the main panel. There you will find infinites opportunities where you can bid, you only need to click over the campaign name and there you will see the requirements of the review. Normally, the advertiser will ask you for some links and anchor texts, you need to cover this aspects and you will be fine. After writing the review, click Bid Now and fill the form about the review.

Payments

As the main payment method for bloggers, all the payments are made via paypal automatically after 15 days. Payment is sent every two weeks thats 1st and 15th of every month. They will charge 30% of the review cost, this mean that you will get the other 70% from each review.

Looking for something new? don’t wait more and Sign Up to BuyBlogReview and start to Get Paid Blogging.

Hello wordpress bloggers, yesterday I was talking about some great plugins for wordpress to improve your search engine optimization. Today I will tell you some tips about how you should set your wordpress to get success on search engines.

WordPress is considered one of best blogging platforms because it allows to perform Search Engine Optimization functions that most of the other blog platforms do not support. This includes elements like title tags, meta descriptions, related posts, optional excerpts, and other easy ways of making the Search Engines clearly aware of your content and what it is about.

Best format for Permalinks

The permalinks or permanent links are one of best ways to improve your seo. By activating them, you will have links permanently for every post you write, so if you have them deactivated just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel and activate them. For this permanent url, you can set different formats: Date and name based, Numeric and Default. Also there is an option to customize this format, so you should check that and set the structure /%postname%/ and nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. Try to avoid using dates as subfolders, this ties your post to an specific date, limiting your ability to update old posts. Also, using dates as subfolders may result wrong in search engines because your post will be ranked with less weight and this will reduce the crawl rate. If you noticed, my blog has dates as subfolders. I changed the structure just like I recommend here but the problem is that wordpress change automatically every url’s post, so this mean that every oldest post linked in my newest posts won’t be find, redirecting you to the 404 error page. I’m thinking a solution for this, don’t worry .

Use your keywords on slugs

Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. For example, you can use www.yourdomain.com/blog-setup-basics.php instead of something like www.yourdomain.com/?p=140. If you don’t set a slug ( you can find this at the right of the posting screen ), wordpress automatically will set as slug the title of your post with a “-” between words. Try to avoid “the”, “or” and “and” in your posts slug, and use some of your blog keywords on it to get success in search engines indexing.

Enable Pinging

This is a little out of place but it’s good to mention it, what is a ping? pinging sends a signal to the Search Engines to come take a look at your blog every time new content is added or changes are made. This gives you a big SEO advantage, as it ensures your content is seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help your posts rank right away for less-competitive keywords.

Following this tips, you will be optimizing your blog for search engines, google, yahoo, msn, ask etc etc…The implementation of your keywords on your permanent links is very very important and it’s something that you should have in mind when you are setting a post tittle and slug.

There are too many plugins for wordpress which help you to improve your search engine optimization, but you can eventually download and install a couple of them and test which one work best for you, because in the blogsphere there are many plugins which do exactly the same.

Now I’m going to share with you a couple of plugins excellent for SEO, but also you can check the wordpress plugins data base for other plugins.

SEO Title Tag

As you now the page titles are very powerful in the Search Engines, so this plugin really helps your WordPress blog’s optimization allowing you to give to each post its own unique title tag – one that is uncoupled from the title of the post. This enables you to write a title tag what is good for the Search Engines while keeping a post title that will appeal to humans. If you want to improve your SEO, you should start by downloading this plugin .

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using. It have too many useful options as for example, add a description of the post for the meta tag, so when a potential reader find your post in a search engine it will see that description you wrote. Download this great plugin, I recommend it !.

Related Posts

Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts list based on your tags, and also it add the related posts to your feed. You can set the mount of related posts you want to show plus another features like showing a comment counter.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

This plugin creates a tag cloud for your blog by enabling you to group posts together based on “tags” you include when you write your posts. Tag clouds help your SEO by creating internal links to relevant pages using good keywords. Ultimate Tag Warrior is not compatible with WordPress 2.0 by itself, so be sure you download the Compatibility Thing. This plugin may be a bit difficult for non-coders to get working right.

Lucia’s Linky Love

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Social Bookmarking

I personally dislike this plugin, I don’t like to see all those many little icons at the bottom of my posts. Instead, I prefer to use the feedflares of feeburner, with them you can see a couple of links which I previous selected them.

If you use another plugin and you consider it’s very useful, please comment on this post to share it with all the community. In the following days I will be talking about search engine optimization on wordpress, stay closer !.