Writing Java code in blogger posts

I've been looking for a simple way to help me tweak my blog to show Java code.
This is what I've got after some changes in the blog template.

// Comment
public class Testing {
public Testing() {
}

public void Method() {
/* Another Comment
on multiple lines */
int x = 9;
}
}

All you have to do is changing your blog template and add some scripts so you can use the "SyntaxHighlighter" Library.
It works thanks to this post.

how to get your blog back on track after a long period of inactivity.

First, Let me apologize to all my readers for my absence. I was really busy lately because of an important exam that I hope I will pass.
As you all can notice my blog was inactive for more than six months. My Alexa rank dropped from 500k to 2M ! My PR dropped from 4 to 2 ! ( That's hard ! ah) . My visits kept an average of 50 visitors a week most of them from google. So to fix these problems I put some steps to take :

1- Finding new content :
I have to write and make some new fresh articles about the latest news. I made a tour among the E-magazines that I used to read and I found a couple of subjects that I definitely will write about. Since I was cut off from the world, I will need some time to figure out what is going on in the world.

2-Gathering old web traffic sources :
Get back tou your Web analytics and open the archives of the happy days ! The busiest months and the best traffic days and find out the websites that directed to you and try to post your content in them again. Believe me it's very efficient.

3- Gathering keywords :
This absence is a very good experience for my blog. In fact, I kept on having traffic from google. So it's very important to get those keywords and work on them more so you can still have traffic if you will get absent again.

4- Heavy social networking :
I will need thousands of diggs and stumbles. I will use everything I can use to get the old traffic.

If I follow these steps my blog will definitely be back.

Successful bloggers full story : Bryan Clark

I think it's encouraging to tell you some stories of successful bloggers. If they can do it so do you. I won't be talking about those blogging "superstars" as John Chow and others like him.. I will be talking about people who started from scratch and were so determinant to achieve their goals. I'm talking about somebody who were able to make a great success in a really short period of time. It's Bryan Clark with the "One Man's Goal" blog. Bryan's goal intended to create a respectable income by being a full time blogger within 365 days and after only four months he sold his blog for $8,500 !!

• One Man’s Goal was 4 months old
• Pagerank 4
• Over 10,000 backlinks
• 1,500 daily pageviews
• 750-1,000 daily unique visitors
• $941.27 Last Month
• SOLD for $8,500

Onemansgoal.com niche was about blog monetization. Traffic sources were mainly from social bookmarking sites, specially Stumble Upon. Monetization methods were from direct advertising, paid posts and adsense. Bryan Clark was so active and able to post one quality article per day. His writing style is original and able attract readers.
The blog was put on auction in site point and sold to Austin Long. You may be wondering why he put so much money in such young blog? Let me tell you that Austin was intelligent because he gained a loyal audience that he probably couldn't create it and his investment will give its fruits soon.

Best Digg strategy to hit the first page !

You always wonder how do people get dugg that much! After some days i figured out how to get some extra diggs and it's time to share it.

1- You should have friends.. a lot of them.. let say about 1000 friend on digg and let's hope you're using a junk mail for shouts notification or you'll have to unsubscribe from it. Having a lot of friends will allow you to broadcast your post to many people. So once you post your article on digg click on "share" and shout it to everybody.

2-So what you should say to your friends when you shout you should say something to urge your friend to digg your post. Let me tell you that : diggers are very lazy ! They find responding to your shout and digging your article is exhausting specially when they feel that they'll get nothing in return. So you should :

• Make a clue to the content of your post and tell your friends it's interesting and you should take a look
• Tell them that you will digg them back if they digg your post.
• Be nice, don't be pushy and don't forget to say "Hello.. please... thanks etc..."

3- You should add recent diggers. New diggers don't have friends and they will feel excited to have people interested in them and they will do everything you ask until they'll discover the "truth". Because diggers who have more than 1000 friend won't respond to shouts. Because they recieve hundreds every day and they won't waste their time with them.

Following these steps you will get valuable diggs that could allow you to hit the first popular page. Just to mention that traffic coming from digg.com is a quality traffic because you'll receive only interested readers and that means an extension of your audience.

Huge Pagerank updates..

I'm very happy to see my PageRank jauge coloured in Green !! My PR jumped from 0 to 4 after only two months of blogging.. Sounds wierd doesn't it ?
This huge change is caused by the changes in Google PR algorithm which is trying to fight paid links. There are many programs of selling links where you get paid to link to a certain website using some targeted keywords. This will increace the PageRank of the website so he can get a great deal of visitors from search engines. As a result, Links in first pages will be for those who pay more. Google is responsible of keeping his search results meaningful and ranked for their content not for their money power.
Blogs are a big links market, so google started to penalize bloggers for selling links. That meant a full blogs reviews by spiders. At the same time, good content bloggers were rewarded by some PR points.

Losing PR is bad for your blog, it affects your traffic because you will not hit the first pages of google search. At the same time Paid links make good revenue for bloggers. So we are between two choices. It's really confusing...!

Some ProBloggers see that we should forget about the PageRank and keep on improving our blog content. PR isn't everything and Google isn't the only source of traffic. We shouldn't make the PR enslave us. If it improves ok, if it doesn't keep on working and make your blog your piece of art where you can satisfy yourself and gain more readers to you thoughts.

Monetize your blog with Smorty :

Most of bloggers are trying so hard to make money through their blogs. They keep on writing and trying to gain more traffic to capture a click or two on their text ads. Then they feel depressed when all these hours spent on that blog didn't pay well..
Now all that is just an old story ! With Smorty every post you write worth money. Smorty pays bloggers to write about a product and link back to its URL. It offers 6$ as a minimum for an article and that makes blogging a more efficient activity ! You can improve your earning through it once you promote your blog and make it get a better PageRank. Having a better blog can get you a 100$ per opinion post. What makes Smorty intresting is that they pay you weekly through your paypal account.

How does it work :
first of all, a PayPal account is obligatory to get your earnings. Then you submit your blog, after less than 72 hours they will inform you if your blog is approuved. Then you can log in and pick some tasks and write about them then submit for approval, it can take to 5 days to accept your post.

Smorty is useful for advertisers too. blog advertising is effective since it has loyal readers and a huge audience. So you can get real visitors and custumors if you are linked by someone who have credibility and several readers. You gain also important linkbacks that can improve your Pagerank. To advertise on blogs you are requierd to pay a minimum of 10$ per post. They higher amount you pay the better blogs you get linking for you.

In conclusion, I feel that Smorty is a heaven for newbie who want to get paid to blog and an efficient tool for advertisers. I highly recommend it for both bloggers and adervtisers.

Blogspot .. advantages and Drawbacks

"Blogger" the newly customized blogging service made by google. Millions of bloggers around the world are using it. all google's blogs are under the "blogspot" domain. This free service is famous between bloggers but still have many limits and drawbacks.

Advantages :

• The blog templates are coded in a way that they're well viewed by the Google's search engines. So we can consider this as an advantage since your blog will get much traffic from google if you're using his templates. In fact the blog is easily crawled by spiders and any new keywords you use will be rapidly saved.
• Blogger is flexible with all kind of entries like the bookmarking tools in footers and RSS subscription like FeedBurner.
• Easy comments moderation and posts edition.
• Adsense blends better and easily with blogspot, you will just allow you're template to be connected to your adsense account then blend the ads will be blended automatically with the background. You can easily put ads after every post. You don't have to get the code from your adsense account.

Drawbacks :

• The dot blogspot subdomain can affect the image of your blog when it comes to advertisers to choose where to advertise for their products. Actually, it's not only about Blogger but it's the drawback of having a free domain name..
• Unlike other Blogging templates themes, blogspot's aren't really beautiful. You can do a better presentation with WordPress. Moreover, the columns are difficult to manipulate; you can hardly get three columns with blogspot while it's easy with wordpress..

So if you're hesitating whether use it or not , this is the whole story.
Or if you're a blogspot user let's share what you liked about it and what you disliked...

How to get dugg.. more diggs = more traffic

Digg.com is a huge bookmarking community where a great number of bloggers meet to read posts and "digg" their articles to get more visitors to their blogs. Digg dot com is becoming a very famous website and it maintains crediblity because it uses a certain "voting" process to best articles. The better the article is the most is it dugg !! If you're not member yet you should do it now !

If you're already a member of Digg you must have already met the problem.. It's how to get dugg and dugg to hit the homepage or at least be in first pages for a while.. I learned some tips about it and it's time to share it :

Integrate the digg button to your posts :
Try to make it easier for people to digg you. Integrate the digg button in every post you make. It's easier if you're using a blogger or a Wordpress cms. You have just to paste the code given by the "digg-tools" in every post footer. It's better if you put it next to the title because most surfers don't get to the end of your page.

Put attractive titles and descriptive texts :
Try to attract digg readers by attractive titles that showing like "how to ", "best 10 tips...". don't put classic and non informative titles. In the small descriptive text about your post try to be funny and controversial. Motivate readers to click and find out what is it all about.

Ask your friends to digg : That can't increace your points and make you rank better

Join digging Bloggers network and exchanges diggs. Ask them to digg your favourite articles and digg them back in return. I use the "stumle group" in BlogCatalog. I feel free to ask people to digg me and bookmark me.. It's a good place for a "shamless blog promotion".

Create a nice profile , put an avatar and don't hang arround with an unknown shadow. Make your pseudo and avater funny. Add friends they will get "suspecious" and add you back.. comment other posts .. Be active that will give you a better image to diggers.

Timing matters .. try to submit your posts early in the morning because it's when people are free to read...

Now would you be gentile and digg it for me :p

Alexa ranking : is it Important ? How to improve it ?

I was looking in seo forums about ways of improving my Alexa rank, I was stunned when I found seo people aren't interested in that rank. I read answers like "what would you need that for? It's not that accurate so it's just silly to do anything about it." but there are more than one reason to prove that Alexa rank is important.

Why is it important ?
I was frustrated to get kicked from Review me and Text ads links for lack of alexa rank!! May be I submitted my blog a bit too early in such affiliate programs. The moral of the story here is alexa rank is used to measure the value of advertising on your website. Look at this picture. Text ads link use alexa rank to sort blogs to the advertiser. So let us take it for granted now : you have to improve your Alexa rank !!


How does Alexa work ?
It's controversial. Everybody is criticizing alexa's way to rank websites. In fact, it's based on the number of visitors that surf on a certain domain using the alexa toolbar ! As we can see here, Website dealing with webmastering and have a great web savvy audience are more likely to get better ranking because most of their visitors use this bar. The main idea here is that alexa ranking can't be accurate, but as webmasters we have to deal with it.


How to improve my alexa rank ??
If you have one visitor per day. You have to make Alexa know abour him when he open your page!! So you have to :

Sensitize your audience about the importance of alexa rank by writing articles about its importance and ways of improving alexa rank.

Urge your visitors to setup alexa's toolbar: It's efficient , try to put a download link of the alexa's firefox add on you website. If you succeed to convince most of your readers to install this bar you'll see how your rank will grow up rapidly.

Put alexa rank widget in your website : don't be ashamed if your rank is way too far. putting this widget is important because everytime your page will load the widget will ping your domain into the alexa rank counter and that will make them feel that you have visitors.

Set up alexa navigation bar in every computer that comes on your hand. then bookmark your website as the home page. specially in cyber cafés . I know it sounds silly but it works. Maybe your URL will hang on as home page for days before somebody would change it.

Finally, be patient, as your traffic grows your alexa rank will boost rapidly in first millions but once you hit the top 100k the competition gets a bit more difficult. let's say it's an imperfect word, where such an inaccurate ranking tool would affect the monetizing of websites but we have to deal with that. The first step to take is to set up the navigation bar NOW !

Promote your blog with Blog carnivals

As bloggers, we deal with many challenges to promote our blog. It's all about making more traffic, backlinks and readers. Blog carnival is a community that provides you a way to make that happen. It's an efficient tool to keep you on the challenge. Many successfull bloggers, as Steve Pavlina and John Chow recommend it.

How does it work?
In this website you'll find a great number of bloggers. Once you create an account you'll find a huge number of "carnivals". A carnival is a room where you can submit a link to your post that deals with the same theme of the carnival. If you're a technlogy blogger you can find several blogs dealing with this subject. Once you submit your post, few days later the blogger will post an article where he puts all the links submitted. Few days later check you visitors source and you'll find new links directing to your blog. I checked my backlinks and I found some prestigious blogs with a good PageRank directing to my blog. That can help you to improve your PageRank and drive more traffic to your blog as well. Create your own Carnival and post some carnivals. You'll get credits from fellow bloggers as you. Nevertheless Carnival posts are provides a good and various content to your visitors. Why don't You start promoting your blog Now !

SEO tips : A good keyphrase choice is the key of a successful content

Are you tired from not being relevant to search engines. Are you spending a lot of time on writing but Google still not paying you back? These are some SEO tips that you should follow in every post you make. It's about developing a rich text with primary keywords.
Making a quality content is the main bloggers' concern. They use their writing skills to make a post that makes them feel satisfied... But for search engines ugly posts could rank first! How to prevent that from happening?

Choose your primary keyphrase.
You have just to ask yourself : what am I blogging the most about ? What ever the answer is , You will concentrate your work on ways to make your posts relevant to people on search engines results.. Put yourself in the surfer's shoes, what would you type in the google search bar to get informations about what you're blogging. Actually you should have done that during your long searches in blogs and websites to collect informations for your future posts. So you had a contact with the ranking issue and you visited your competitors (those who deal with the same subject as you). Your future goal is to make your URL rank before them for a certain keyword search. Go type this word in the Overture keyword suggestion tool . If you're blogging about "travel" type the word in it and after some seconds you'll recieve most popular keyphrases about your theme.

Two keyphrases strategies :
Once you get most popular keyphrases you have to choose between promoting your blog with the highest keyphrases and compete with well ranked blogs and websites. Or stick with lower one and try to get the first page as soon as possible. The challenge here is competition. You have to choose between ranking in the third page of google result for the most popular keyphrase or rank in the first page with non-popular one. Now it depends on your ambitions. If you have a long breath to make a long living blog, If you have the courage and the motivation to struggle in the keyword war, pick out most popular keyphrases and get to work !!

Smart coding... cater to spiders !!
Search engines use spiders to crawl your pages, 'read' your content and pick out relevant keyword. So you better read your post with the spider's eyes ! How?
<>keyphrase < / title >Spiders read from up to top. First the read the title of your page, that means what is between the title's html tag : make sure your keyphrase appear in it. Other tags are very important like <> emphasis < / em> , <> bold < / b > and <> strong < / strong > . Spiders aren't blind !! they detect blod caracters and italic etc... They detect paragraphs too, so you better break you text into paragraphs and use your keywords in it. Spiders read from the top down so you better not be late to reveal your what you're talking about : put your keyphrases at the beginning and avoid long introductions.
Spiders consider your linking and the way you describe the objects you're putting in your page ( images) so you should put the right html tag for it :

If you're linking to other site do not just put their domain name, describe the content you're linking to. example : instead of putting < title = "soechat.com" href = "http://www.seochat.com / "> < / a > you'd better put < title = "best keyphrases tips " href = " http://www.blogger.com/seochat.com "> how to improve your keyword with seochat < / a >

If your're putting a picture, rename it in order to fit your content. don't let the default name put by your camera or as you download it. for example instead of putting :
< alt = "my best photos" src = "http:photo008.jpg "> put < alt = " best travel photo in hawaï trip " src= " hawaibestphotos.jpg "> That will certainly help you getting more visitors through google images search.

Beware!! A double edged weapon
If you get lost in stuffing you're text with keywords it will end up with one of the worst webmaster's nightmare : getting banned by search engines.
If your text contain keywords more than 5% of it that will be considered as SPAMMING !! Search engines will put a filter to decrease your ranking for these keywords and will end up sooner or later with banning your URL form showing up in their pages!

Useful links :
Best search engine keyword tips
Choosing primary keywords strategies

how to make your pages fit most visitors...?

Making your visitors navigate easily on your website is good to obtain the loyalty and more page views. Every web developer has to take care about the fluidity of navigation on his pages and enough flexibility to fit all users. That means fitting most used browsers and speed networks. So how can we make this task easier?

Pam Hoffman, one of our dearest readers asked previously in this blog:

Something I've been wondering for awhile - how many users are on what kind of machines?
My thinking is that you optimize your website for the majority of users on the most popular machine.
For example, if I wanted to add video to a blog post. Will it be viewable by the majority of visitors?

Well to answer that, let me explain that for such compability with your visitors, it's not the hardware that counts but the software. I mean if a visitor couldn't view your website content that is because of his browser capabilities: browser, Java support, flash versions, Operating system, Screen resolutions and Color bits.
Second, the speed network has an impact on his navigation ; if your putting a video in your homepage that will make the page more heavy and slower to show up. Nevertheless, streaming this video ( as youtube or google video) will take more time if he has a slow network. So he won't wait enough to play it.

For the notice, some statistics showed that more than 65% of Internet users still navigate with a connection between 28kb/s and 1 Mb/s. That means that the majority won't have enough time to open heavy pages and play video content. They will wait and wait then they will end up clicking the "X" button ! That doesn't mean not to post videos on your pages but do not exaggerate.
Here are some statistics about connection speed :

" CONNECTION SPEEDS Less than 14.4K bps 3% 28K bps 17% 33.6K bps 16% 56K bps 24% 56K - 1M bps 14% Greater than 1M bps 26% " source

1- Get to know your visitors..
You should have an idea what kind of software your visitors are using.. which browser,OS and can they run Java and flash with it. Than what are the connection speed do most of them have ( DSL, cable , 56k Dial up...). Then try to make your pages fit these criteria ; no heavy pages, no heavy Javascripts etc..

2-How can I get these information ?
As I previously posted, a good Web analytics tool will make all this job done.. I recommend Google analytics or Xiti.. Both of them give detailed statistics about your visitors.

How to improve my PageRank ?

Any webmaster or blogger has to understand PageRank and how it functions.. The best explanation I found is in the wikipedia :

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important"."

So as you can see, increasing your pagerank is vital for your blog success. If you can make your website important in the eyes of google search engine you're saved! The main question is how...?

First of all, Google use spiders that visit your URL regularly.. So you'd better have something new for the spider or else you will be badly indexed. You have to show google that your site is worthy to be visited.. and that's by building a huge and updated content about the subject you deal..

Second, you have to make websites linking to you ? If people are linking to you that means your website is important.. But don't wait for them until they link for you ! Do it by yourself! submit your website or blog in directories and blog search engines. If you're a blogger submit your articles in E-magazines with putting your URL as the source of the article.

Third, visit other websites and ask the webmaster for partnerships. Exchanging links will help improving your PageRank and will increase the number of your visitors too..

Finaly, never copy and paste other's content. Any copyright violation could index your URL in the black list !!

You can check your pagerank using the google bar or visiting this website.

Tips for a new blogger...

The fact of making money from your blog is very motivating, isn't it? It's by putting ads in your blog and get paid for clicks like the Adsense program. But it doesn't seem as simple as that ! Because you will face the biggest Blogger challenge : Traffic !

Once you start blogging, don't expect to have dozens of visitors to read your posts and put some comments. Simply because you are unknown in this large network. Imagine that there are millions of people writing about the same subject as you. So how can you beat them first to the visitor? Do not feel that pessimistic, it's hard but not impossible! There are some tips to follow and the job will be a piece of cake.

1- Choose your blog main theme :
Just choose the nearest subject to you. Something you love talking about or you're addicted to ... that will help !! If you are a Football addict and Sport is what you like telling to you friends why don't you write about it. If you have some professional skills in some fields why don't you share it with others.. (gardening tips, cooking riecepees, computer skills ....) Something you're good at, and you can talk about it. Just don't talk about everything and nothing ! It will disturb the visitor...

2- Be Brief, clear and Informative :
Statistics has shown that Internet users are quick readers. They don't stick so long with the page.. If they don't get what they want they will click on X or get back to research page to find something else. Unless you attract them with good content ; brief, informative posts. Just get directly to the point, don't make long introductions and avoid useless chattering. Express yourself! write as you talk, because your communication with the reader counts to attract him and make him come again. Post regularly because quantity counts.

3- Help your readers :
It's by giving them some important links, be generous to show your source of information and anything that could enlarge the subject you deal . Use every way possible to explain : pictures, graphs...

4- A nice layout:
Don't disturb your reader with colorful background and don't make your pages too sad either.

This is just for the beginning and you will see more detailed tips to make your own successful blog.