Guest Post by Girish G. If you wish to write one, check out the Guest-Blogging guidelines.

Write articles and submit them to article directories

Submitting your own articles to article directories has been proven time and again to generate steady, long term traffic to one’s website. Another way to take advantage of your articles is by collecting a list of Ezine publishers and submitting your articles to them.

This accomplishes 4 things.

1. It sets you apart from others as an expert in your field.
2. It helps give you and your site name recognition.
3. It provides many links back to your site to help increase your rankings.
4. It provides viral traffic as your articles are spread over the Internet.

Effective use of Signature

A simple, little thing such as adding a signature block to your email can bring traffic to your website. A signature block is that small block of text you see at the bottom of an email you send or receive. We’ve all seen this many times and you probably didn’t even realize that this was prewritten text that goes out with every email sent from a particular email address.

Normally, your signature block should consist of your name, your website URL and perhaps a slogan. If you don’t have a signature block setup in your email, DO IT NOW! This is yet another form of advertising you can capitalize on very easily.

Add your signature block on all your outgoing emails, your auto-responder messages, when posting in forums, everywhere your name goes, your signature block should be there.

Build a list of subscribers.

Your list is the ultimate tool for keeping in touch with your website visitors. You will hear many, many times about how having a huge list of subscribers can literally mean big income for you.

Having a huge subscriber list allows you to generate mountainous income by selling multiple times to the same customers over and over again. When you need money, all you have to do is find a quality product and endorse it to your subscribers.

With an opt-in list you can get massive high-quality traffic to any website instantly. Having a large subscriber list also opens many doors for you. You will have greater success getting JV partners, as well as opportunities literally thrown at you.

The benefits are endless.

Create a weekly newsletter. This is a great way to start out building your list. Create a free gift package, maybe a report, an eBook, software, etc., that you can provide to your signups as incentive. Make sure your signup form is placed predominately on your site.

Free Giveaways – Free Report

A Free Report is great incentive for your newsletter signups or squeeze page prospects. You can take a couple of PLR (Private Label Rights) articles or an eBook, create a report from them. Just make sure it has the same subject type as your business or newsletter so you keep the interest going.

Once you have created your free report, offer it as incentive for visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

Everything is billboard

Advertise everywhere you can. Classifieds and Safelists, among other of these types of advertising places, can still get you traffic. They may not be as effective as they once were, but they are still around and plentiful. Commenting effectively, guest blogging etc are again different forms of advertisements. Explore the opportunities.

Socialize, Connect and get Connected

This topic is enough said, but due to the importance and relevance I would like to special mention this. Select three or four favorite social networking websites and actively involve in this, again this is another list building activity. By saying this, never overdo it. Be moderate and genuine in your involvements.

Create your own products – start an affiliate

Creating your own product is not that tuff, you can create a simple screen cast video, an eBook , a podcast but make sure it gives some value to the readers. Then start an affiliate program! Starting an affiliate program is one of the greatest ways to get high quality traffic to your website. Almost every successful business online has got an affiliate program. It multiplies your revenue and popularity. If you haven’t started yet start doing it NOW.

The Author,  Girish G is the owner of dotgiri.com. He is also the author of the “Proven Traffic Building System” which you can download for free by signing up to his newsletter.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Must ‘Do List’ for Successful Blogging

Today I had some fun with .htaccess and thought you would find it useful. This is what happened.

When I changed my Theme last month, I made a “Hire Me” Page. Surprisingly, Soon I found this page on the second/third page on Google for the search “Hire WordPress Designer”.

Soon my SEO brain told me, work on it and get it to the front page. That is a real deal.

To start with, I changed the permalink from hire-me to a better permalink with keywords as hire-wordpress-designer-seo.

Google takes a long time to re-index an already indexed page, at least that’s what I have seen here on Million Clues. That’s when I decided to go for a 301 Redirect.

Help came from Taming The Best, in the form of the following article:

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider/visitor friendly strategy around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache (check with your hosting service if you aren’t sure).

It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you *have* to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option.

A 301 redirect is implemented in your .htaccess file.

Sourced from htaccess 301 redirect tutorial

So I downloaded the .htaccess file from my root directory of this domain and took a backup, if you mess-up the .htaccess, you probably mess up almost everything. And added this code:

redirect 301 /hire-me/ http://millionclues.com/hire-wordpress-designer-seo/

This is basically a 301 redirect which redirects the page to the new location and tells the search engine spider that the page has moved permanently. Using 301 means, the new location gets all the link juice the old location enjoyed.

I added this after a line of code that made it look appropriate, you should probably add it at the end of all the code in it. It works like a charm

To check if your redirect is working properly, you can use this tool – Redirect Checker. Simple and Intuitive.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: How to Change Permalinks of a WordPress Page without Losing Traffic

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

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Most Hilarious SEO Questions to Ask

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

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: WordPress Plugin to Block Users and Show A “Coming Soon” Page Instead

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.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Guest Post Publishers Checklist

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.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Make a Full Width Page For Your WordPress Theme

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.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: 15+ Most Common Web design mistakes Reviewed

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

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Finally, Here is a sure shot way to remove WordPress meta Generator Tags

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.

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Blogging to the Next Level

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?

Sourced from: Million Clues! | Follow on Twitter | Fan on Facebook

Leave a Comment: Organise Gmail Emails with Folders