Technology can be a lot of fun at times. There is nothing wrong in asking questions, my policy is, if you ask, you might be a fool for five minutes, otherwise you would be a fool for ever.

Sometimes such questions can be a lot of fun. Here are three SEO questions I got via email or overheard.

Overheard: SEO is just adding H1 and H2 tags

Wish it was that easy. Heck no! What would I say to that? Does H1 and H2 tags work anymore?

SEO is a process that starts with the on-page SEO (of which H1 and H2 tags do play some roles) and extends to wherever you are willing to go or until you rank first on Google

My Site doesn’t come up first on Google, what should I do? (Asked after days of registering the domain)

Don’t even think about any appreciable traffic from Google for the first 3 months. Instead of spending time on worrying over your analytics report, write as many keyword posts possible.

Depending on the competition for your keywords and the work you or your SEO guy have put in you might show up in the top 10 results after 6 months or so. Usually you would come up first for your site name in about 2 months or lesser (given it is not a common phrase).

I don’t see myself on Google Search because my name has an underline on every page. People will search under my name not with an underline

That’s one of the weirdest explanations I have heard for not appearing on Google. I have no idea how he got this explanation.

Underlines and bold text are styling added to simple text using the CSS stylesheet. In the eyes of Google, it doesn’t matter if your text is underlined or bold-ed, it can index them all. And anything that Google index is searchable.

To see how Google bot see your pages, use a text browser like Lynx.

Related: The Top 10 Funniest Emails from @Labnol

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I have been working on a couple of projects lately, and all of them wanted one thing in common. They wanted to block users while the site was getting ready and show them a “Coming Soon” page instead.

Many plugins are available to allow only logged in users. After trying out many such plugins, I found this plugin – Members Only. Its simple, Free and Awesome!

Block Out Non-Members with Members Only

Using such a plugin has two purposes. One, Prevent Users from seeing your site when it is getting ready and two, block out search engines and prevent them from indexing your content before its final.

Members Only does a lot more than that. It can:

• Block Visitors from your site and Allow Only Logged-In users. This also blocks out search engines
• Take a normal visitor, who doesn’t have a login,  to any page you specify, may be a “Coming Soon” page or a “Contact” page.
• Protect your RSS Feed and allow access to registered users only using Feed Keys.

Using Members Only

Install the Plugin via WordPress Plugin Installer and activate it. Now From the Settings Sidebar go to Members Only and check the box that reads “Members Only?”

Everything else is intuitive. Click the following image to see the Full Options Page of Members Only:

Logged in Users can access their Feed Key and the custom feed URL from their Profile page. An example of such a feed is:

http://doman.com?feed=rss2&feedkey=b83ef6af61724c8bc8002270099032c2

Users can add this to their Feed Reader and read the RSS Feed the normal way. When I tried opening the feed in the browser after logging in, it gave an error, but it worked once I logged out.

Download Members Only

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If you have a popular blog with decent traffic and a community, you probably accept Guest Posts or at least some one would have emailed you if they could post in your blog.

Well, accepting Guest Posts is a good idea – you get a different view point, free posts, and some additional promotion from the guest authors side and so on.

But things can go bad sometimes; make sure you do the following checks

Two Important Checks for Guest Post Publishers

Check if the Post is Original

It totally sucks to see one of the guest posts you published on some one else’s blog. Many people think guest blogging as article submission. They write a post and sends it out to many websites that accept guest posts.

So how to check if the post is original?

1. The easiest way to check is by asking the author himself. Ask him, if the content he submitted is unique and has it been published anywhere else.

2. Google with a portion of the text from the post. If the post is sent to multiple blogs, the content is probably the same. Copy a whole paragraph and Google it. See if you get any exact matches.

3. Use Copyscape once the post is published. See if any matches come up. Then take down the post immediately and notify the author.

Check if the Post is Good

Biggest problem with Guest Posts is the post quality. It would seem hard to say ‘No’ to many guest post requests esp. from friends or acquaintances, but remember, its your blog.

Lately, I got over this problem and now accept posts only I think is good.

I turn down about 30% of the guest posts that reach me, and I haven’t seen anyone who is very unhappy. Majority of the times they get back with better posts and I get them up here.

Over to you – What do you do before deciding which post to publish?

P.S: If you like to write a guest post here, check the guidelines first.

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A Full Width Page is one that has no sidebars and all the width of the page is just content. Such a page has many applications. You might not wish to show sidebars on your contact page for instance. Well, lets see some better applications of Full-Width Pages.

Making a Sales Page – Traditional sales pages don’t have sidebars (haven’t you seen those pages with lots of customer feedback and that pages where you have to scroll miles and miles to see the end?). Removing Sidebar makes it look better.

Search Result Pages for Google Custom Search Engine – If you choose to display results of Google CSE on your own pages; the script they give you can insert ads on the right of the searches just as we see on Google. A full width page can make way for the ads.

Enough, lets do it.

Going Full Width on any WordPress Theme

As an example, I will use this Theme – This Just In!. It’s a simple and elegant Free Theme and comes with an image gallery just below the header.

Step 1 – Make a Page Template

Pages in WordPress are defined by page.php in the theme. Make a copy of page.php and rename it as fullwidth.php. It doesn’t matter what you name it, it can be yourname.php instead.

Now add the following to the start of the code in fullwidth.php :

<?php
/*
Template Name: Full Width
*/
?>

Save and lo! we just defined a custom page template.

Step 2 – Rip Off the Sidebars

Sidebars are included in the page template using this :

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Delete it from fullwidth.php. In most themes it should be towards the end of the code. Sidebars are gone.

Step 3 – Define a Full Width Style

Open up style.css and find where the style of the content area is defined. Usually its called #content. In our example theme, the style is defined as:

#content
{
margin: 5px 35px 0;
font-size: 1.2em;
width: 575px;
float: left;
display: inline;
}

You can see that in line three the width of the content area is defined as 575 px. Copy paste all the above said code and define a new ID #contentwide as:

#contentwide
{
margin: 5px 35px 0;
font-size: 1.2em;
width: 850px;
float: left;
display: inline;
}

The only change being the width in line three as 850px. The value 850 px was found by trial and error.

Step  4 – Add the style to the Page

If you try making a full width page after step 3, you will get a page with no sidebar, but the sidebar area is blank. Why? The page still uses the style in the content ID. Open up fullwidth.php again and change the id content to contentwide in the code.

<div id="contentwide">

That’s it, upload fullwidth.php and style.css to the theme folder.

How to Actually Create a Full Width Page?

Open a New Page Editor. Write in some content. From the right sidebar of the page editor, from the section called Attributes, select Template as Full Width.

Publish the page. Congrats!

If you have any queries or if I missed anything, use the comments. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. What are you using that full width page for?

P.S: If you need help with your theme to make a full width page, contact me with your details.

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A guest post by Steeve. If you wish to write one, check out the guest-posting guidelines and details.

The top most common web design mistakes most designers make. There are several websites where web designers were unable to come up with a proper web designing solution.

Page Titles

Untitled documents

Untitled Document is the default title for pages produced in Dreamweaver and other web design programs. Many of them forget to change it.

Same title for all pages

The title is very vital. Help the world know which of your pages they want to see.

Non-descriptive titles

The page title is the headline for your link in search results. Not to mention an important factor in determining those results. Instead of “Tom’s Page” try something like “Cartoons by Tom” or “World of Cartoons.”

Meta Tags

Duplicate Meta information on all pages

The keywords and description Meta tags in the head of your webpage help all search engines to classify your page. If you duplicate the tags across all WebPages of your website, they will look similar to searchers. Customize the keywords and descriptions for each page or don’t use them at all.

Site Structure

No index.html in the root directory

By default the index.html or index.htm, index.php, default.htm, etc. is displayed when you visit http://www.yourdomain.com. If you don’t incorporate it, users will get an error message.

Disorganized file structure

How you arrange your website files won’t influence what the website looks like but lack of organization can make your life hell when you’re trying to update or redesign the site. Use directories (folders) to help organize your pages and images.

Uploading non-web files

Unintentionally uploading a few Photoshop files can eat up your disk space speedily. Store your resource files such as Photoshop images, Word files, etc. in a separate folder outside your local web folder.

Pages

Under Construction pages

If a page isn’t ready to post then don’t post it. Keep in mind “Under Construction” is believed to be a temporary condition file and, after a month or, so it starts to seem permanent.

Frames

There are good reasons why you may want to use frames but there are no good reasons to actually use them.

Horizontal scrolling

The smallest amount common denominator for monitor width is currently 800 pixels. People need to leave space for scroll bars and page margins etc. so 760 pixels is a good standard width for your web pages. Wider may be satisfactory depending upon your target viewers.

Worthless content

If you don’t have anything to say, please then don’t say it.

Out-of date content

If your content is no longer appropriate, delete it and upload new one, if you’re going to incorporate a copyright notice, update it each year.

Overly long pages

Differing to popular belief, there’s nothing wrong with long web pages if the content deserves it. But, if it can be done rationally, it’s usually a good idea to have several shorter pages instead of long pages. If you have long pages then do offer additional navigation to make it easy for readers to move within the pages.

Unnecessarily short pages

In an attempt to make the content fit the design, most of designers regularly resort to a series of short pages when one long one would be more user-friendly.

Orphan pages

Pages you fail to remember to supply links that don’t exist as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Alien pages

Pages that totally disregard the look and feel of the rest of your website leave users feeling like they’ve been suddenly transported to a website far, far away.

Have fun designing!

The Author, Steeve, works in web design at PLAVEB Corporation.

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Most WordPress themes add a meta generator tag to the code. This tag is used to get the statistics of how many sites and using which WordPress versions. It looks like this in the browser:

The bad thing about leaving the tags there is that, any potential hacker can easily identify which version you are using. From another angle, if someone manages to find a security glitch in any WordPress version, he would be able to search for all blogs using that particular version.

One way that used to work was by deleting the tag from the theme. Open up header.php and remove this line:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />

I have found that removing this doesn’t fix this often. One sure shot way that always work is using functions.php to add a little code:

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>

If you do not have a functions.php in your theme, make one. Make sure this line is above all the code in the file. I am yet to see a case where this fails.

You could use this plugin instead.

Well, hackers are smart people, removing this tag wont make your site super secure, but it would be a little step. Another step would be renaming the default user-name admin to something else, here are three ways to do it.

Related: 13 Tags to Remove from your WordPress Theme

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It is rightly said that a blog grows in levels. You climb a couple of steps and then comes a plateau. You stay there for a while, going to the next plateau is twice as difficult.

For a considerably long time, I was stuck at a plateau, in terms of RSS readers and traffic. Adsense is no longer a concern, if you might have noticed, Million Clues is now Adsense free. Going Adsense free is not going Ad free, I am experimenting with static ads and affiliates.

Planning is vital for any progress, here I expose my current strategy to take this blog to the next level. Your suggestions are most welcome.

A Post A Day

I have heard that blogging daily makes a lot of difference. Some Logic – People see you every day in their reader, reading your blog becomes a part of the daily activities. More posts = more pages, more keywords, more traffic?

I have been doing this for the past three weeks, and I hope to keep going. Having a time-table helps me prepare for the days post.

Right now, I am experimenting by posting them at different times of the day (thanks to the scheduler in WordPress) to see if that makes any difference.

Well, coming up with long and deeply researched articles is not practical (given that I had to spend my day in college), so the plan is to do longer posts on holidays and shorter ones on other days.

No, I wont be writing to for writing’s sake, as always, if there is nothing worth saying, I don’t mind breaking the plan at all.

Comment Wherever Relevant

Comments bring traffic, gain backlinks and above all, Comments helps in networking. Being active on Twitter helps me find interesting posts to comment on. I try to leave as many relevant comments possible wherever I go.

A Firefox Add-on, Autofill Forms help me fill out the comment forms easily. Saves a bunch of time, you can get it here. Thanks @theAnand for sharing it with me.

Related: How to get Quality Traffic by optimized Commenting

Be active on ReTweet Groups

I have memberships in a bunch of ReTweet Groups; I used to be a dormant member. I have started getting active on a couple of them and wish to join more of them as well. Such groups helps in networking well, plus they help you push your best articles on Twitter.

If you are the moderator of any such groups, I would like to join in, get in touch.

Massive Guest Blogging

Daniel of DailyBlogTips presented an interesting idea of how guest blogging on many blogs in the same week can increase the returns from those guest posts dramatically.

I like the mass guest blogging strategy because it creates synergy. That is, the results you will get with the 20 guest posts packed in a single month will be larger than the results you would get if you were to publish these same posts scattered through a longer period, say one or two years.

Why is that? Because when people see your name (or the name of your blog) everywhere on a short period of time, they start wondering what the fuzz is about, and they get curious or motivated to visit your site and possibly to subscribe to it.

Source: The Mass Guest Bloggging Strategy

A reader following a popular blog in a given niche is highly likely to be following other popular blogs in the same niche as well. If you can manage to get your posts published on a number of blogs in a short time, the reader gets to see read your post on all of them (before he/she forgets you). That reader is more likely to come over to your blog and/or add yours to his RSS reader as well.

I am hoping to do that in the last week of April, once its done, I will let you know how it went.

I hope I can stick to the plan as long as possible, seeking your cooperation and suggestions.

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I got a sneak-peak into some of Gmail accounts (na, I didn’t hack). I saw that they were using labels to sort their emails; did you know that you could organize emails into folders?

Folders with Labels and Filters in Gmail

I had touched this earlier, but didn’t go into the details. Suppose you wish to sort all notifications and updates from your blog into a folder.

Start with making a filter.You will find the link to create a filter near the search box.

Now in the subject box enter some unique text that all mails from your blog have in its subject line.

Almost all emails from my blog (emails from contact form, new comment notifications, comment moderation notification, database backup, Google Analytics reports) carry the blog name in it.

Click Next Step and you will get more options like shown below. The most important one here is to select Skip the Inbox (else it won’t make much difference). Apply a Label – Create a new one and name it Blog or your blogs name.

Click on Create Filter. Now you will have a link with the name of your filer in your sidebar.

All emails from your blog will not go to your inbox, but will stay here. Now you can keep your work separate from personal emails separate from subscriptions etc etc.

Multiple Inboxes to Multi-task

The Labs tab under Settings has an interesting utility called Multiple Inboxes. Enable it and save, you will see a new tab in your Settings named Multiple Inboxes.

Here you can specify up to 5 additional panes (apart from your main inbox) and choose how you want to see them, either one on top of other or side by side.

Now all the folders will be shown as separate inboxes. Pretty cool, huh?

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Google Webmaster Central Blog is a must watch blog for any webmaster who would like to stay-on-the edge. Recently Google rolled out a SEO Report Card which is an impressive SEO optimization guide.

Here are some awesome resources from the Google Webmaster Central Blog that will help you get started with SEO.

SEO Basics from Google

• Google SEO Starter Guide – The basics, condensed down into a neat PDF with images and links to tools and resources. Download PDF.
• Webmaster Guidelines – Guidelines on design and Quality. Also a list of standard procedures to be done, once your site is ready.
• Google SEO Resources for Beginners – More links for the learner.
• Google SEO Report Card – To properly understand the contents of this PDF, requires a certain level of understanding of SEO. It was released just days ago; it analyses Google’s own product pages and suggest ways to optimize them. Download PDF.

Have fun!

Update: Pradeep has come up with a summary of the Google SEO Report Card which would help the new-to-seo peeps.

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Like many of you, I love free themes. If given a choice, I would still prefer a free theme for these many reasons (provided the choice doesn’t have a Free Custom Design):

• Theme is Free. Why spend a buck when you can get them free?
• Free Themes are usually simple and doesn’t have many theme options. If you have tried editing some premium themes, you will know the difference. They make things easy to the end-user, making editing them complex.
• More importantly, Free Themes are often released under GPL, meaning, I don’t have to worry about license wherever I use it, or whatever I do with it. (This is one reason why I love StudioPress Themes, though its not free)

Once you decide upon a theme, you don’t want it to look like every other blog that uses the theme, right?

A unique theme works more like a brand. People remember the blog by its looks (close your eyes and think of some of the blogs that you visit frequently). So to stand out from the rest, you have to make it look different.

Lets see how we can make a custom theme out of a Standard Free Theme.

The process includes the following 5 steps:

• First we make a Unique Custom Logo
• Second, we change the Color scheme.
• Then we add a Background image to the theme.
• Then we make an Image Map for the header.
• Finally we add a BIG FAT Footer to the theme.

That Unique WordPress Theme is Just 5 Steps Away

Make yourself a Custom Logo

Now don’t start feeling that making a Logo is a designers job. Though, creating a perfectly meaningful Logo requires a lot of thought, most of us do not need that kind of one.

The logo is the biggest branding element of the theme. Adding a good one to it instantly makes it unique.

To design a logo:

• First get yourself an image editing tool, like GIMP (its free) or Photoshop.
• Download some Cool Designer Fonts for Free.
• Now it should be a piece of cake. Find yourself some GIMP tutorials, there are lots of them. Here is a good one that guides you to make a Web 2.0 style logo. If you cant figure it out, I bet you have a designer friend who would gladly help you.

Here are some Free Logo’s I created, you can download the PSD file as such and edit it to match your blog.

Upload the logo into the theme and it should look a lot different from the default one already.

Change the Color Scheme

Changing the color scheme is easiest and most effective of all, you need the following tools to make it easier:

• Firebug Plugin For Firefox. (A quick tutorial on Firebug)
• Adobe Kuler (see the right sidebar and Get Kuler Desktop) – To find awesome color schemes. There are many other aids online, google should help. I like Adobe Kuler and use it often.
• ColorZilla Firefox Add-on to pick awesome colors from other web pages.
• Notepad++ to edit. Any normal text editor would do, but this one gives you line numbers, so its easy to move around and edit.

Install all these and we are set.

If you know CSS, you can open up style.css and change the required fields by inspection. The following method is for those who do not know CSS, all you need to know is included below.

Install your theme on your blog and load your blog in Firefox with Firebug installed. I have chosen the Undedicated Minimal WordPress Theme for explanation.

Load up Adobe Kuler and find a color scheme of your liking. Or pick color from some other theme you like using the ColorZilla plugin for Firefox.  Have the hex values of your scheme ready in a notepad or so.

This is how the Theme looks like, we are going to change the color of the navigation bar as an example:

Right Click an empty area of the Navigation bar and select ‘Inspect Element‘ – Its added to the menu by Firebug. This brings up Firebug.

Firebug Loads up - Click for Full View

The right side shows the style used for the Navbar. look at the parameter that says background (the middle arrow). You can change the color of the navbar by changing that color value there (hex). Changing color in Firebug shows it instantly on the page, but it is lost upon reloading the page.

See the third arrow on the right? That’s the line number where the code is present in the stylesheet. Open up style.css in Notepad++. Press Ctrl + G to go to a line, give the line number as 373 (from the example) and you will see the same code there.

To change the color to green (the color of the arrow here for example), change #EFF0FF to #67c728. Save style.css and upload it to server. That’s it!

The Final Result - Green Navbar

Repeat the same on every element whose color you wish to change.

Add a Background Image

Here is a case study of my personal blog – Kuttappi. I have used the Cutline WordPress Theme. Just by adding a background image, the theme looks a lot different from its original.

Original Cutline Theme by Chris Pearson

This is the one that is now live at Kuttappi.com

Customized Theme on Kuttappi.com

Now lets see how a background image works.

First you need a background image. The background image is often a small graphic that is repeated throughout the page, here is an example of one such image:

A Sample Background Image

When this background image is repeated over and over, we get the background and it looks like this:

When the Background Image is repeated

Making the Background Image

The width of the image depends on the width of the content area + Sidebar. In most themes it is denoted as the wrapper. In some others they call it the body. Open style.css and see the width of the wrapper (or that of the body). This is an example:

#wrapper
{
width: 641px;
margin: 0 auto;
background: #403f3f url(“/images/background.png”);
background-position: center;
background-repeat: repeat-y;
}

Here the width of the background image should be greater than 641px. Make one using GIMP or Photoshop. Sometimes its safe to copy one, oops, I mean, take inspiration from another free theme’s background

The background is set by the third line of the code above. The color specified (#403f3f) could be the color of the side of the background (in the sample image above, the dark blackish border), so that the space beyond the image will blend in with the graphic.

The ‘background-position’ parameter center’s the background image and the ‘background-repeat’ parameter repeats the image throughout the length of the page in y direction.

You can use a height wise image as the background and make it repeat in x direction to get similar effect, but then you will have to use it with the outer wrapper, not the inner content wrapper. As an example check the RockinBlue WordPress Theme. Open up style.css and you can see these codes:

body
{
background: #ffffff url(images/blue.gif) top center repeat-x;
color: #000000;
}

This is the short-hand version of the same code we used in the first example. Here the image blue.gif is repeated in the x direction.

You can digg more about Background image here from w3Schools.

Use an Image Map in the Header

An Image Map is a single image graphic, but we can make portions of the image to link to different places. I have used an image map in my header here, here is an example which links to all my active social media profiles:

The good thing about image maps is that you can align the images any way you like without doing any CSS styling. Also, an image map loads faster than the individual images, since there is only one http request instead of 8 in the above example.

SBA of BWS has an excellent tutorial on making Image Maps:

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to map hot spots onto images for WordPress.org or Blogger blogs. Doing this can spice up your design and beef up your blog’s navigation. Remember, “a picture is often worth a thousand words”!

Learn how to make Image Maps: Use Image Maps to Add Link Hot Spots in Your Graphics

Add a Footer Section to the Theme

Many themes do not have a BIG FAT footer. A footer is a great way to promote your post and an ideal place to show off all those social media links. If your theme doesn’t have one, it would be a great idea to make one for yourself.

The footer is defined in the footer.php file. There are two ways to make a footer easily. Find yourself a theme that has footer already and get inspiration from it

Or follow this tutorial on making a Widget Ready Footer and make one. Note that you will also have to edit the stylesheet to add footer styling for widgets.

One More Thing

Here are some additional minor tweaks to make the theme completely yours if you are that savvy:

• Remove unnecessary footer links that came with the theme.
• Edit the theme details in style.css and make it undetectable. (Not recommended, its always good to give back love to the makers).
• Checkout this collection of 50 WordPress Tutorials for more customization guides.

If I missed anything, feel free to ask them in comments. Enjoy Theme Hacking

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