10 Rare Blogger Tips And Tricks For Blogspot Bloggers

Problogger.net is having a blog project and I thought I'll write this post and share with you 10 rare blogspot tips and tricks I've picked up from other bloggers or learned from my experience with blogspot.

Before we move on to the tips I must say that compared to other free blog services, blogspot is better, simple, powerful and gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility. But when you go on using it you notice it is very crude and lacks many features. I think these 10 tips will greatly help you over come those short comings in blogspot and give your blogspot blog a more professional look. So here are the 10 blog tips for your blogspot blog. Please use the comments to let me know if you want to know more about any of these tips and also to add your own tips and tricks for blogspot bloggers.


1. How to track All recent comments

For most blogspot users tracking and responding to recent comments is a major problem. But there is a easy way to track your most recent comments left anywhere in your blog, be it in your latest post or in a old post somewhere in the archives. Blogspot provides a aggregated comment feed where you can see your blog's 25 most recent comments.

The comment feed URL for your blog is:
YourBlogName.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full

E.g. Comment feed for Planet Apex blog is:
http://planetapex.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full


2. Add a Menu Bar

A menu bar helps visitors navigate a blog easily and also gives it a professional outlook. Beautiful Beta explains how to add a menu bar for a blogspot blog in this post.

3. Remove the nav bar

The navigation or nav bar at the top of blogspot blogs is a eyesore and makes the blog look unprofessional. It can also cause a lot of trouble because of visitors clicking the "notify objectionable content" button, which will make your blog to be suspended for day's or even weeks until cleared by Blogspot administrators. You can get rid of the nav bar by making the simple modification explained in this post.

4. Change blog post title tags

You can be losing a lot of potential search traffic because of the default way Blogspot displays blog post heading in search engines. To overcome this you must change your blog post title tag from the default: "Blog name" + "Post title" to appear as "Post title" first and then the "Blog name" in search engine. This post explains how to do it.

Update: The old hack code for optimizing the Blogspot title tags in the above link no longer works. You can find a new hack in this post at Blogger widgets.

5. Install a blog traffic counter

Blogpost not having a inbuilt traffic counter is a major short coming. So make sure you install at least a basic traffic counter in your blogspot blog. I have installed both SiteMeter and Google Analytics to track and analyze visitors to this blog. For more information on choosing traffic counters see this post.

6. Best way to stop spam comments

Spam comments is a major problem in blogspot. I find the best way to fight spam in blogspot is to enable "word verification" for comments. Ever since did it I haven't got a single spam comment. To do it, go to your blog Dashboard's "Settings" tab section and enable "word verification" for comments.

7. Minimise or Remove Site wide Links & Blogrolls

Google can be a huge traffic driver to your blog and the PageRank Google assigns to your blog has a huge impact on the amount of traffic you get from Google. As Google PageRank is calculated from the number of incoming and outgoing links to your blog, sitewide links and huge blogroll in your sidebar reduce your PageRank. So it's better if you have a separate blog post for Related Links and Blogroll and link to those posts from the menu bar or side bar.

8 Insert AdSense inside Blog Posts

If you are thinking of making money from ads in blogspot blogs this will be invaluable. AdSense ads are reported to perform best when they are placed inside blog post, specially between the post title and content. 'Voice of Colombo' explains how to insert a AdSense ad Panel inside every Blogspot post here.

9 Add social bookmark links after every post

Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon etc. can be a huge traffic generator to your blog. So why not induce readers to bookmark and market your blog post by placing a link to these sites after every post. This post explains how to add social bookmarking links after every blogspot post.

10. Beware of free blogspot templates

There are hundreds of free blogspot templates available in the internet. But be very selective when you choose a template for blogspot blogs. I've read about many complains from bloggers who have implemented third party templates having blog display problems and not getting indexed properly in search engines etc. due to bad code designs. Even India's ace blogspot blogger, Digital Inspiration is having problems with search engines due to his template. So I think it's wise to go for one of the default templates provided by blogspot. Thanks to the new facilities provided by the new blogger you can always make simple changes like put in a banner image etc. and make your blog standout in the crowd.