POST SMARTER BLOGS WITH EASE

Image via CrunchBase

This is definitely a ‘must have’ tool for all bloggers!

Every time I write a post, I have to do a google search for images to use to spice up my write-ups. I also often struggle to choose the right tags that will optimize the visibility of my posts with various search engines. Many times, when I do a google web master tool analysis of my sites, I am always swamped with error messages that say the labels I used are preventing google bots from effectively crawling my sites. At times the google bots return “url not found” crawl errors. Well, all these will be history from now on (I hope) because I literally “Stumbled” on a website which provides an amazing application that works well with any hosting platform. This is Zemanta!

Zemanta is a free ware browser plug-in which creates smart links, provides contextual pictures and images, suggest proper tags to use for your post. The most beautiful thing about this plug-in is that it does all of the above as you are typing your write up. So,by the time you finish up typing, you have the links, the tags,and the images all ready to be selected with a simple mouse click. Cool indeed! Zemanta makes blogging effortless and fun! Downloading the plug-in and installing it is also a breeze.

This is my first post using Zemanta and I hardly can wait to see how the end product turns out. Try it yourself and see what I mean. Here is the link to the website where you can download the plug-in – http://www.zemanta.com/. You will never regret installing this application! But please do me a favor and return to this post to give me your feedbacks/comments on how you are doing with Zemanta. (You can always uninstall it anyway in case you find it not to your liking.) Cheers!

Important Note For Bloggers: When you click a Zemanta suggested image from the Zemanta sidebar for use in your post and publish it for the first time, you will always get an error that says “your HTML can not be accepted”. Simply click the box just below this error message that says ‘Stop showing title or body HTML errors for this post” and click the publish button once again.

Blogger Banner Exchange – Make Your Visit to My Site Worthwhile!

(YOU DON’T HAVE ONE? I’LL MAKE ONE FOR YOU FOR FREE!)

I am barely two months now as a blogger. And like any other upstart blogger, I want to improve traffic to my site and at the same time improve my ranking with such sites as Technorati, Alexa, Google, etc. (You guessed it right! I also want to monetize my blog.) My membership with Entrecard (with their “U drop I follow promo) is helping my daily traffic a lot up to now. (A million thanks to all of my regular EC droppers!) My Mybloglog and Blogcatalog memberships are also doing me a lot of good in accumulating quality readers, gaining good friends and establishing new contacts. To help myself and other upstart bloggers just like me who visits this site, I thought of adopting a “Banner Exchange” program of my own and make the visit worth your while. I found out about this from being a co-sponsor to a blogger friend’s blog contest (Help Children – Win EC credits – see the post below with the same title). When the contest got underway and banners and linkages were posted, my ranking improved a lot. For my Trader’s Hub Site, from an Alexa ranking of 1,036,00, it improved to 782,000 while my Technorati Authority jumped from 4 to 14!

It is simple and it will do wonders for your blogs. We exchange banners and our links become more permanent and more visible to Search Engines. (I noticed that subscription to rss feeds is not really helping much to boost our ranking.) All you need to do is reserve a section in your side bar or your footer and post my banner code there. I will even make it easier for you by making the banner for you – I will make the banner for you using a screenshot of your site ( or your EC banner if you have one!) Here’s what you need to do:

1. Copy the code of any of my banners below and paste it in your site.
2. Click the pen icon at the end of this post and post a comment indicating whether you want a new banner or if you want me to use your EC banner ( if you have any). Please post your URL and email address too.
3. Post a message in my shoutbox (at the sidebar) after you’ve done steps 1 & 2 and you are done.

Every time a new member subscribes to our exchange, I will be sending all of you an updated code so you can update your own. For this site, I placed the banner exchange at the sidebar!

<a href=”http://bigdaddyrichard-swirlingthoughts.blogspot.com/”><img src=”http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/7189/1379033574oo6.png&#8221; border=”0″ width=”125″ height=”125″ alt=”Powered by BannerFans.com” /></a><br />

<a href=”http://bigdaddyrichard.blogspot.com/”><img src=”http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/747/1379033579us1.png&#8221; border=”0″ width=”125″ height=”125″ alt=”Powered by BannerFans.com” /></a><br />

<a href=”https://bigdaddyrichard.wordpress.com/”><img src=”http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2998/1379033575ey4.png&#8221; border=”0″ width=”125″ height=”125″ alt=”Powered by BannerFans.com” /></a><br />

HAPPY BLOGGING!