We’ve already established that how you act on Twitter is paramount in determining your success when using this microblogging platform. What you say, how you engage others, how you act towards them, all these matter in positioning you as either an ideal Twitter user to follow or a nuisance.

The following question is how to effectively choose people to follow on Twitter. There are literally millions of options to choose from and in most cases you know nothing of that user prior to seeing their Twitter profile page. What should you look for, what criteria are there to be used to decide if clicking the follow button is a good choice?

Again, this does not necessarily apply to people you know or whose work you follow. If your favorite bloggers are tweeting, of course you will follow them. You will probably also follow some friends and relatives for diversity. But these are people you already trust or look up to and the value of their tweets needs no further proofs.

1. Check out the numbers

How many people do they follow? How many follow them back? How many tweets have they posted already? If for example the person you want to follow has been tweeting for a week, has 3 tweets, follows 1500 people and only 5 follow them back, of which 3 are bots, that user is not someone you should follow.

If on the other hand they follow 10 people and tens of thousands follow them back, they won’t be a valuable Twitter connection. The most common scenario is that you’ll follow them, they won’t follow back, you will never engage in a meaningful conversation with them.

2. Check out their content

Is what they tweet interesting to you or your own followers? If the content they post is not in any way related to the fields or activities you’re interested in, following them makes no sense. Some people you follow for the great information they post, relevant to your job or line of business, some you follow because they cover your hobbies or passions, some you just follow because their tweets are a great way to relax. Of course, the reason you follow them might be the same for which other people follow you and retweeting their messages might be valuable to you. But if what they post is something you may as well leave without, the logical decision is to continue to ignore them.

3. Check out their conversations

Do they retweet other people’s stuff? How many people to they exchange replies with? If you’re on Twitter, you’re there to exchange ideas with other people, share tips and offer advice and be introduced to fresh content to users you might not be introduced to otherwise. If the only thing you get from following someone is fresh news from a field, there are dozens of other services that broadcast constantly.

4. Check out tweet frequency

If a certain user has not posted an update to their Twitter account in over three months, they probably won’t use that account again. They might come back later, but following them just to add a number to your counter has little value of any kind.

If they post on a regular basis, also check out how many tweets they post each day. Some people are power users that post a few updates every 5 minutes. If that does not bother you, then follow ahead. If you cringe at the thought of too many messages flooding your stream, step away from their profile

What do you check before deciding who to follow on Twitter? Which are the best criteria you’ve used up to now?

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Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.

There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.

WP No Category Base

The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.

There’s one downside to this method (actually the reason why WordPress decided to use the category base). If you’re going to use the same slug for both a page and a category (‘news’ for example), clicking on a link similar to http://yourdomain.com/news/ WILL take you to the category archive, and never to the page. So, be careful when choosing you permalink slug by keeping them unique.

For those using WordPress as CMS and not as a blog engine, this downside might prove useful when creating a page based navigation. Adding a page with a slug ‘news’ will redirect that menu link to the news archive, which is indeed useful.

Download the plugin: WP No Category Base

The plugin works with WordPress versions from 2.3 up to 2.8.4.

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The internet is filled with websites competing for the same niche, which makes it very difficult to attract visitors to each individual website. Without proper promotion, a website could just sit idle for days, weeks or even years and people wouldn’t notice it.

Website owners know this fact, so they have learned to adjust to the online fast-paced environment and one method of promoting websites they’ve come up with is to use link baits on their sites.

In this article you’ll find out what is a link bait, what types of link baits are there and how to plan and write the perfect link bait blog post.

What is Link Baiting?

The term ‘linkbait’ is used to describe a tool for websites designed to “lure” or generate incoming links to a particular site. It is there for the purpose of attracting web users to visit a website (increasing traffic), and as a result, they generate material which is linked and picked up by other sites.

Link baiting also pushes a site up on the search engine ladder, as a lot of search engines look at how many websites link back to yours, their quality, and measure your site’s value through these links.

Link baits definitely help promote a website, although not all link baits can be considered “good”. There are two basic types of link baits: good and bad link baits, based not on their effectiveness, but on their “attitude”.

Good Link Baits

A good link bait is simply anything that is meaningful, insightful, new, or interesting and also, is acceptable to a majority of web users. It could also give incentives to visitors, like contests.

A great example of “good link baiting” is Daniel Scocco’s post: 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid. It’s a very useful and comprehensive article that managed to attract over 350 comments. Unfortunately, DailyBlogTips.com does not display trackbacks, but, judging by the huge amount of comments, we can imagine how many back links that article received.

Bad Link Baits

Bad link baiting, on the other hand, is publishing controversial or contentious content, which can be highly effective, although some may find it distasteful.

An excellent recent example of “bad link baiting” is Shoemoney’s post – SEO Has No Future – a very controversial topic that not only managed to attract a huge amount of back links (Blogsessive included, twice now), but also an impressive amount of comments.

In order to write a good and effective link baiting blog post, here are some tips on the actions you need to take before getting started.

Brainstorming

Write down all the ideas that you come up with on a certain topic, no matter how weird or far-fetched they are. You don’t need to edit your notes at this time since you would like to build a “database” of all your ideas on the matter.

Filtering

Once you have gathered all the ideas you could think of, the next step is filtering them. Break down the ideas into their Concept and Content components. Separate the format (Concept) of the suggested link bait (quizzes, contests, tools, etc.) and the subject (Content) of the suggested link bait (celebrities, Microsoft, ads, etc.) into two lists.

Evaluation

Critically evaluate all notes under the Content list, ignoring those that are in the Concept list. Check if the ideas are appropriate for the current time setting and if these are the ideas you would like to write about. You might also want to research if there is any related news that complements your link baits.

Matching

Once you’ve prioritized your Contents, you can now match them with your Concepts. If you want your link baits linked to a specific music website, write down the Concepts that would match there, like top ten, awards, contest, etc. By matching the right Content to your Concept, you can make sure that your link bait would reach your targeted audience, meaning what you’re writing about is effective.

Some people believe that good link baiting is a great SEO tool, and they are right. With proper use, link baits would surely increase traffic to any website.

Photo credits to Dale Eurenius

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Since its launch, over 1800 people downloaded the Simple Balance 2.0 WordPress theme. For that, I thank each and every one of you!

The idea behind this theme was to keep it as simple as possible, yet effective. Simplicity in administration is one of the keywords behind its creation. But some things need a bit of coding knowledge to tweak.

One of them is the email subscription form, which, once you install the theme, serves only as a design template that does not work unless proper code has been added to it.

I’ve been asked via comments and email what’s wrong with it, or how can it be made functional and this made me write the following step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate the FeedBurner email subscription form in Simple Balance 2.0.

Getting the FeedBurner Email Form Code

Here’s a quick screenshot that illustrates the required steps:

Step 1: Click the Publicize tab;

Step 2: Look for the Email Subscription item in the left side menu and click it;

Step 3: Copy the form code and paste it in a .TXT file for later use.

Once you’ve pasted the code in a .TXT file, you’ll see that it looks a bit blocky, not being properly formatted using new lines and TAB’s.

Below is a sample of my code (do not copy it unless you want your readers to subscribe to my feed). Try to come to a similar formatting by breaking the line in the same places I did it.

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true">
	<p>Enter your email address:</p>
	<p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p>
	<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
	<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
	<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" />
	<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com"
	target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>
</form>

Unless you want to display the link back to FeedBurner, you can delete right from the start the following line:

<p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>

Editing the Simple Balance 2.0 Email Subscription Form

Now that you have the FeedBurner form code, all you need to do is to integrate it with Simple Balance’s custom designed form.

No need to panic, as it’s a much easier job than it seems. First, you need to locate the theme’s files and open the file called lsidebar.php with your preferred HTML (or simply Notepad) editor.

Next, you need to locate the following chunk of code (normally starts of line 22):

<h2>Subscribe by Email</h2>
<ul>
	<li class="rssForm">
		<form action="">
			<input type="text" class="rssEmail" />
			<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />
		</form>
		<small>We take privacy seriously.<br />
		Your email address will <strong>not</strong> be shared.</small>
	</li>
</ul>

Now, go to the FeedBurner form code and copy the one part that is similar to mine as shown below:

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true">

The only difference is that instead of ‘uri=Blogsessive’ it will have your blog’s name.

Remove the styling contained in this line by taking out this chunk of code:”

style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"

and copy the remaining code (similar to the one below):

<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,
height=520');return true">

Ok, did you copy the code? Now, let’s head back to the lsidebar.php file, to our previously selected chunk of code.

Locate this code:

<form action="">

and replace it with what you’ve copied from the FeedBurner code.

While we’re here, locate this line of code:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" />

and replace it with this one:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />

Now, we head back to the FeedBurner code to copy the two lines similar to these:

<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>

Again, instead of value=”Blogsessive” you’ll have your blog’s feed name. After you copy the two line, go back to lsidebar.php and add them below the previously edited line:

<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />

and above this line:

<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />

Ok, we’re half way there. No, I’m joking. That’s all. You’ve implemented the form and it should be fully functional and looking pretty much like the one I’ve used to exemplify this tutorial.

Save the lsidebar.php file and upload it to your FTP server.

The End Result

Your code should look similar to mine (except for the feed name mentioned in two places):

<h2>Subscribe by Email</h2>
<ul>
	<li class="rssForm">
		<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"
		action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post"
		target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/
		fb/a/mailverify?uri=Blogsessive', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,
		height=520');return true">
			<input type="text" class="rssEmail" name="email" />
			<input type="submit" class="rssSubmit" value="Subscribe" />
			<input type="hidden" value="Blogsessive" name="uri"/>
			<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
		</form>
		<small>We take privacy seriously.<br />
		Your email address will <strong>not</strong> be shared.</small>
	</li>
</ul>

Now, you’ll be able to provide your readers with a functional email subscription based on FeedBurner’s code, but looking like the one designed for your free WordPress theme of choice: Simple Balance 2.0.

Any questions on this tutorial? I’d be happy to answer you in the comments section.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

How many times did you come across a blog post that seamed to deliver the right information, but the post itself was just too hard to follow? Countless times, I bet.

And so, what seamed like the perfect solution for your searches, easily turns into a nightmare.

Quality content is NOT enough

Writing a good article is obviously not enough to make people read it. There are many things that can be done to attract readers and back links to it. In the past, I wrote a few blog writing tips on how to make your blog post more readable and the proper structure of a blog post. Now, it’s time to take a look at some of the things that you should not do when writing a post.

The traps of WYSIWYG editors

For most people, the WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) built in the blogging platform is a great tool, one that easily allows us to style our content in just about any way we want, but this “power” is tricky. Here are a few things you need to take in consideration whenever publishing a new article:

1. Publishing and editing content

Don’t simply copy-paste content in the blog’s editor from any other source that allows styling (MS Word, websites etc). The styling will also be imported and will break your blogs’ overall look and feel. Try passing the text through a basic editor, like notepad first, and apply styling in the blog’s editor after. Another alternative would be writing the article directly in your blog’s editor or using a publishing software like the Windows Live Writer.

Take a quick look at Windows Live Writer in this introductory video:

2. Misusing fonts

If your blog’s theme is using one font-family, you should stick to it when creating or importing content. If you’re not satisfied with it, you should edit the overall style of the theme instead of just using different fonts in blog posts. Adds a lot to a blog’s clean, friendly look. Also, keep in mind to always use web safe fonts. Never mix up fonts, too many colors or font sizes. A proper, easy to read font size is about 11 to 13 points/pixels.

This is not a good thing to do:

3. Acting all emotional

Blogging requires passion. If you don’t have it, you might as well quit. But, when too much passion gets expressed in your blog posts by using smiling faces and all sorts of emoticons, you might just manage to drive a few readers away. I don’t use them, but if you insist on using them, don’t overdo it.

4. Excessive linking

While linking to other blogs is a sign of appreciation, filling your blog post with links is not. It will make your post hard to follow, will probably get skipped by readers (links will not be clicked) and from a SEO point of view, you’ll probably get penalized by search engines for being considered a spammer or content scraper.

5. Embedding different types of media

It’s nice to see a relevant image here and there or a video embedded, but again, overdoing it is simply madness. Of course, if your blog post would be a gallery of photographies from an event, or a tutorial that requires videos and images it’s ok, but even so, you need to place the media in a clean, proper order to make it easier on your readers’ sight.

6. Advertisments

If you’re looking to monetize your blog, having ads showing up in hot areas it’s a must, just don’t place an ad at the end of every paragraph of your post. It’s simply annoying!

Over to you

From a visual point of view, that about covers all the things that drive me away from reading a blog post.
How about you? What similar situations have you encountered while browsing the blogosphere?

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I know I wanted those visits and I got them! Further more, I kept on getting lots of new visits for a long period of time. Even now, almost 3 months after.

For me, a blog’s design is always a key element (of course, along with content) in deciding whether to come back and read again, or not. I know, I’m a designer and I have an appetite for good looking websites. But then again, would you prefer reading the same content in a unique, beautiful layout or a poor, overused one? This is one thing I’ve already told you in my past blogging tips articles, now let me argument that!

When launching Blogsessive I had to deal with the choice of winning time buy using a free, but customized theme, or creating a new one from scratch. For 2 weeks I used a free template, until I finally managed to find time to develop the one I currently use.

Beautiful easily turns into popular

When I applied the new theme to my blog, I took the time to submit it to almost every important design gallery I’ve found on Google, and went through all of them from the first 2 results pages. Although I’ve submitted to about all of them, the most active was the listing on CSS Mania who sent Blogsessive about 2000 visits in a matter of 3 days.

The total amount of visits from these galleries finally peaked at about 4000 visits, but that’s not all. Every week I keep getting hundreds of visits from those listings or from design blogs that linked here (adding to the Technorati authority).

How many of those visits have been converted to readers? That really depends on your niche. If you have a design blog, you’ll probably convert quite a few of them, but as your topic get further from design, you’ll convert less. Still, it’s a great jump start for a blog that would get little to no traffic at all. In the end, it’s similar to getting a good Stumble Upon reaction.

Before the listings, nobody knew about Blogsessive. The next day I started receiving organic traffic for the “Blogsessive” search.

Where to find a good designer

There are many places where you could find professional help in designing a beautiful, unique theme for your blog. You could post a listing on Elance or Guru, or use Google to look for freelance designers, but remember that most times, high quality comes with high investment. Make sure you take a good look at your future designer’s portfolio and references and see if the investment is equivalent to his job quality.

Daniel Scocco wrote a great ProBlogger guest post a few days back on how to get a professionally designed blog. It’s very informative and you should read it. Also, take a look at the comments too. Some interesting things were mentioned there.

Don’t be shy

If you’ve already found someone but you’re not quite sure about the price-quality balance, I’ll be happy to offer my views on the matter, just drop me an email.

Be inspired!

Photo credits to Zoran Ozetsky.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

After reading Kevin Muldoon’s review of PicApp.com, I’ve though about sharing some tips on where and how to find free images to use in your blog posts, like I do.

I know for a fact (and Kevin confirms this too) that many bloggers use Google’s Image Search to find free photos to use on their blogs, which is cool, but not necessarily legal. Let me explain.

The Google bot has a nasty habit of indexing every information and file that is linked from your pages, which basically gives him access to the /images directory of every website. This can be fought by using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to directories and files.

By indexing these folders, Google will share through his results copyrighted images used to develop the websites, or images from professional photographers’ portfolios. So, these images are not free. And so says Google:

“Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.”

So, why risk using copyrighted images when you have quite a few options of free or extremely low-cost photos available? Check them out below.

Free Photos from stock.xchng (sxc.hu)

Until now, stock.xchng has been my favorite tool for free images. Some of the images require a author notification of use, some don’t. They are all big, some have quite a high-resolution. For some topics you’ll find the perfect photo, for others, you’ll need to take a metaphorical approach, but still, they are free.

Free Photos from EveryStockPhoto.com

EveryStockPhoto is a service similar to stock.xchng, but check this out: they have 3,161,661 free photos in their database as I’m typing this. Definitely worth taking a look. Various photos come with various licenses.

Free Photos from PicApp.com

PicApp is a new website, currently in BETA stage, that lets you look (and use) for creative & editorial images. They are all high quality (like you would find on Getty Images), but there’s a downside. When embedding the image on your blog, a small animation produces when mousing over it, making way for some sponsored ads. True, the high price of the image rights don’t pay for themselves, and this is PicApp’s solution to provide high-quality FREE images. I would definitely recommend them if you’re running a celebrity or news blog. Paris Hilton, Geoge Cloney, Hillary Clinton, they are all there!

Free Photos from Photoree.com

Photoree is a service that’s searching Flickr database for images released under the Creative Commons license. After you sign up (free), you have the possibility of creating filters to display only images of interest to you. Thanks CTI97 for suggesting to add this service.

Free Photos from FreeFoto.com

FreeFoto has been around for many years and has a database of about 115.000 photos, organized in about 3000 categories. While some tech photos are a bit “old”, you’ll always find here nice travel images. They are free to use, but at a web resolution and with a link back and attribution. Higher resolutions are available for a price.

One Dollar Photo Resources

This is a somehow recent type of selling images online. Websites like Dreamstime.com, iStockPhoto.com and Stockxpert.com sell stock images for prices that go as low as one dollar. Basically, anyone can register and start submitting images that would generate revenue. By selling the images more than once, the owner can afford the low price for a very good quality. So, if your online activity generates enough income, these photos probably worth a $1 investment.

Other Resources

Some photographers share their work with the public, releasing their photos under the Public Domain license. You you’re one of them, or know one, add a comment and I’ll add it to this list:

• FreeArtisticPhotos.com

Tight Budget?

No more! Now you can have your free or very cheap, but most important, LEGAL photos to spice up your blog!

Photo credits to Miguel Ugalde.
Post has been updated to include EveryStockPhoto.com and Photoree.com.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Have you ever come across a post title that startled your interest, but as soon as you got to the content you couldn’t read it? I did! And why didn’t I read the post if the title was so interesting? Because the content was too cluttered. Because no matter how valuable was the information, I simple could not pull my self to go through a labyrinth of words to find the good ideas.

When you’re offering quality information, are you willing to lose your readers because you did not organize your blog post the right way? It’s extremely important to have a better structure in each blog post, before you hit that “Publish” button, and by doing so, you will dramatically increase your blog’s readability.

What I need to find in a blog post

As I said, I often come across long, cluttered posts that annihilate the initial interest. I bet that most of them offered great insight on different matters, but, to make me read them it would have taken some of these elements to guide me:

• Write a short introductory paragraph and tell me exactly what I’m about to read.
• Make use of paragraphs and line breaks. Huge blocks of text are very hard to scan.
• Make use of lists. I’m a list fanatic. Lists are easy to scan and stand out of all those text blocks. Try to put valuable information in them.
• Whenever you talk about numbers and statistics, use graphics. It’s much easier for me to read and interpret a graph, instead of reading 2 paragraphs about percentages.
• Give me more things to read. In your posts, sometimes you mention things that are related to the topic, but you don’t want to develop more. Link them to a place where I can read more about them, preferably on your blog, but it’s OK if it’s elsewhere too (Wikipedia.com for example).
• Whenever you link to another blog post or website, use strong, descriptive text anchors.
• Ask me questions, smart questions. I love to put my mind at work, and if the question is interesting enough, I’ll answer in your comments, or even blog about it, giving you a free backlink.
• Create blog post sections and use subheadings so that I can jump between paragraphs of interest.
• Use basic text styles to make some ideas or elements more noticeable. Use bold and italics.

Conclusion

To achieve success in life or business, you need to be organized. A post is successful when it gathers more readers and backlinks. Organize it. Keep the important information clean and noticeable, and you will see not only more readers, but also more time spent on your blog and a lower bounce rate.

If you’re looking for more information on how to organize your blog post you should also read this article: The Proper Structure of a Blog Post.

Photo Credits to Jay Simons.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A blog’s success is measured by the number and loyalty of its readers. Not by how many visits it receives daily, not even the number of backlinks. In the end, the more time your visitors spend on your website, the more pages they visit and the more they come back or further recommend your blog are the real measuring tools of your blog’s perception. In this post I’m going to cover 5 important factors that can improve this perception.

While writing about topics of interest or optimizing your blog for better search results could be enough to generate visits, the readers’ interest has to be maintained through a perception improvement.

Readers tend to react better to bloggers to whom they can relate, to bloggers that have similar views, ideas, even lifestyle. That’s why it’s very important to find your voice and give everything you write a personal note.

With the abundance of information hitting our brains each minute, we have to filter everything right from the first contact. The first impression is vital. Take your time to rethink and possibly rewrite your headlines, maybe even reconsider your blog’s design & structure, the placement of different sections that could generate further traffic and more reading time.

Peoples tend to evaluate things based on the general impression left by the group that these things are part of. In our case, being part of a blogging network can, and in most cases will, result in a transfer of perception quality. Pick your alliances carefully and always aim for the winning situation, since this phenomenon can produce negative effects.

While we’re not proud of it, we tend to judge people based on stereotypes. We judge them by their culture, occupation, age, sex, religion, race and more. We’ve been fighting this mentality for a while now, and probably it’s going to take more. Whenever you give away personal information, keep in mind that some of these subjects can affect the way our blog will be perceived by the general audience.

Readers have sources they respect. Look for your target audience’s favorites and consider driving a marketing campaign through their blogs. Remember all those commercials where TV, movie or sports stars recommend different products? It’s basically the same thing, a transfer of perception and respect from your readers’ sources to your blog.

Do your best to keep on publishing good, original content, but always remember that your personality, tastes, habits, group affiliation play an important part when it comes to building a name for yourself and your blog.

Photo credits to Sigurd Decroos

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

wp_list_pages() is one of the most common WordPress template tags. Sometimes, the little white space that some browsers add to the output of this function can create a big mess in your theme’s template, making it hard to style, especially when trying to create a horizontal list. The fix for this is quite simple and requires minimum coding knowledge, if none at all.

The Problem

The wp_list_pages() generates either a series of <li> elements containing links to all of you blog’s pages, or a full unordered list with a heading at the beginning.
The output of this list looks like this:

<ul>
<li><a href="#">Page name</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Page name</a></li>
</ul>

While some browsers don’t have a problem with elements being generated on new lines, in some, this method causes a white space to show up in front of each list item. This space becomes visible and annoying when trying to create a horizontal menu with background colors and equal horizontal spacing.

The Fix

To get rid of the white space, your output would need to look like this:

<ul><li><a href="#">Page name</a></li><li><a href="#">Page name</a></li></ul>

This can be achieved by using a small PHP function that will take the code generated by wp_list_pages() and turn it into something similar to the example above. To make this function available for use in your templates you need to edit the “functions.php” file, found in you theme’s directory. If you don’t have such a file, create an empty one and name it “functions.php”.

In functions.php add the following code at the beginning or at the end of the file. Just be careful not to paste it inside another function and cause the script to break.

function qbkl_nospace($input) {
$output = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t"), "", $input);
echo $output;
}

Usage

To apply the fix, simply find the wp_list_pages() in your theme’s template (usually header.php or sidebar.php) and edit the code according to the following example:

Find:

<?php wp_list_pages(); ?>

Replace with:

<?php qbkl_nospace(wp_list_pages()); ?>

This fix works with any function or template tag that generates the same problem.

The white space generated by wp_list_pages() has been a nightmare for many WordPress themes designers. It doesn’t have to be one for you!

Where is wp_list_pages() located?

Although it’s not recommended that you alter the base code of WordPress, advanced users might feel like taking such a job.

If you need to alter the output, wp_list_pages is defined in the post-template.php file, in the “wp-includes” folder of your WordPress blog.

For further tweaking, you might also need to adjust the walk_page_tree function, located in the same file, which makes use of the class Walker_Page, extending the Walker class, both located in wp-includes/classes.php.

* The above file names and locations are confirmed for WordPress 2.5 to 2.6.3.

If you’re having any questions or need further assistance, please use this post’s comment form.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

So, you’ve just got a brilliant new idea for a blog! That’s awesome!
You already know what the blog is going to be about. Plans are shaping inside your head. You can already see titles, content, ads and you even know what theme to use.

There is only one little problem: you need to register a domain name. And not just only a domain name, but one to help you better promote your blog, one that truly represents your ideas and stands out in the crowd. In this article we will cover the best ways to find and register a perfect domain name for your blog.

Register a domain name

The first place you need to look is the website of a company that offers domain registration services, such as GoDaddy, Dynadot, Moniker or NamePros. For a comprehensive list of domain registrars, rated and reviewed, please follow this link. The minimum price of a .com domain registration with a trustworthy company is $5.99, while the maximum goes up to $9.99. Some of the domain registrars offer a free domain name along with a hosting account opened through their services.

On these websites you can also make a domain search to find out if your desired name is available. Be careful where you check the domain name availability, in the past there have been reports of companies that register your queried domain, only to offer it back for a higher price. It is always a good idea to do a search over the internet for forum topics and blog posts about your chosen registrar’s services and business conduct.

Assuming that from all your searches there are no available domain names, there are still three options that might just get you that perfect name.

Domain name snapping

Your first option would be to try and “snap” that name as soon as it becomes available. This kind of service is offered by companies such as SnapNames & Pool, where for a fee you can ask them to try and get you that domain name. Working with a “domain name snapping” company gives you improved chances to finally get that name. Assuming that there are more people who want to acquire the same name as you, you won’t stand a chance against the snapper’s bots if you try to register the domain by yourself. If you and all these people will use a snapper’s services and the domain name gets snapped, an auction will be opened and the highest offer will take the domain. If you are the only one that wants the name, as soon as it’s snapped it will be transferred to you.

Domain name auctions

If the above option doesn’t sound appealing to you, you can always check for registered domain names available for online auction, either on marketplaces like GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket, Sedo‘s Domain Catalogue and Moniker’s Aftermarket or on the marketplaces available no famous internet and computer related forums like: NamePros, Digital Point or SitePoint. Here, registered users place domain names from their portfolio for sale at prices as low as $0.01. Since on these forum markets there is no contract signed, the risk of getting scammed is greater than on other markets, where the company that owns the market acts as an auction leader and payment intermediary.

Expired domains / Dropped domains

If you’ve tried both of the above options with no success there is still one think you can do, check for expired and dropped domains. Such lists of expired domains are regularly uploaded and updated on websites like StuckDomains. Since these lists are public, there is always a chance that someone else saw that name and registered the domain before you.

Tip: When auctioning online for a domain name you should first try and find out the real value of that name, including valid PageRank, backlinks indexed in search engines, domain age, domain length and keywords. All these will help you pay the right price and not more than the real value of the domain.

Thus being said, we wish you good luck in you domain search hoping that our little guide on how to register a domain names has helped you in your name hunt.

Domain Names for Bloggers

Looking for the perfect domain name for your blog? Look no further! Check out the Domain Names for Bloggers series on Blogsessive and choose from a variety of handpicked available domain names covering a wide selection of topics.

• Domain Names for Bloggers (16)
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• Domain Names for Bloggers (6)
• Domain Names for Bloggers (5)
• Domain Names for Bloggers (4)
• Domain Names for Bloggers (3)
• Domain Names for Bloggers (2)
• Domain Names for Bloggers (1)

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

You’ve finally got your WordPress blog online and your hopes up. You’re writing articles and expecting readers to drop-in soon, but time passes and nothing happens. You know your articles are a good reading, so why aren’t readers showing up? That’s because you need to improve your online visibility, your WordPress SEO score.

In my past article, Better Blog SEO Plugin, I’ve presented a tool to help you easily manage your SEO needs. Now it’s time to explain how to test the results, and if the results are not as good as expected, how to update your content and SEO accordingly.

Let’s say you’ve optimized your home page and/or post page for some keywords, but still search engines refuse to index you higher and searches for those keywords aren’t providing you with any visitors. Most probably, that’s because your content is not relevant in relationship with the provided keywords. At this time, you have 2 choices:

1. Rethink your website’s keyword list and meta tags

Scan through your posts, find the most common and relevant keywords and modify your keywords meta tag accordingly. Use these keywords in the page’s title tag and for the description try to get a small paragraph that uses in a logic and readable way the provided keywords. The closer this description comes to a text paragraph available on the page, the more relevant it will be.

2. Rebuild your most recent content around the old keywords.

This option is the most time-consuming, but if you know you’ve got a good keyword list, with good search engine results (only not for you), then it should worth the effort. Always keep in mind how much competition you have for that keyword list, and how powerful that competition is. Otherwise you’re efforts will be in vain. It’s always better to fight for 1.000 relevant results and get the most of it, that for 10.000.000 results and get none.

Once you’ve done one of the above steps, the best thing you can do is to check the results with one of the following free available online SEO tools:

DomainTools.com – The Whois tool available on this domain provides users with a SEO rating of the queried domain, as well as with a SEO browser to analyze you page from a search engine’s point of view. It also makes suggestions on the things that still need to be done to increase your SEO score.

SEOCentro.com – SEO Centro provides user with a very helpful, free online meta tag analyzer. This way you can learn more about your meta tags, their relevance and also the most popular keywords found in your blog’s content.

There are of course many more online SEO tools, but these 2 should be enough to help you find your way around your blog’s SEO.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive