7 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers

SEO, as you might have already know, is an acronym for search engine optimization. In the simplest of words, it's the way search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com and others present your page in users' search results on their sites.

Cool, how do they that?

Well, they do that via sophisticated software tools, called spiders. Consider the whole internet as an empty room, with air particles as websites. Now sneak a spider into that room. Each tiny step that this spider would take now is essentially crawling a website (as the room is dark and full of websites). This is how search engines crawl through the web picking up site after site, studying them and ranking them. This ranking is important, really important. A higher ranked website by Google will always be on the first page of Google's search results for a related query compared to a lower ranked one.

So, in order to get ranked higher, you and I need SEO. SEO is like black pepper without which fried egg might not taste 'that' tastier. In simple words, in order for search engines to find your site and rank it higher than others in your field, you need to optimize it. Let's see how with these 7 simple tips.

Ways to SEO Optimize your Blog

Before starting with our 7 simple tips for a quality SEO, it's important to broadly classify those tips into two basic areas, on the basis of origin:

On-page Optimization

Refers to optimization of your actual web content including your HTML code, your text, as well as graphic content.

Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization, however, deals with things like backlinks (hyperlinks pointing to you site from other websites, apps and networks).

1. Create SEO Friendly Blog Post Titles

Post titles are important for SEO. They really are since they are deal makers or breakers. Whenever you write something, make sure you give proper attention to the post's title. Make your titles simple, intriguing, descriptive and gullible so that people may know what is this all about and what to expect. An even better approach is to wear searchers shoes while giving a title and think how would you Google it if you were looking for content like this.

Also, don't forget to include keywords in your title and keep it under 70 characters (or search engines would crop it before looking).

2. Improve the quality of your content

If you think 'content' isn't important for SEO, think again! Your content is the most important part of your site. While writing, don't copy-paste from elsewhere, don't stuff it with keywords alone, don't bombard it with images and multimedia files and don't write any lesser than 300 words. These all would affect your ratings quite poorly.

So, write original, use keywords in scenarios instead of straying them around (like I didn't use SEO here, SEO there in every next line), use images where they suffice and make sure you name them properly to appear in image search results, i.e. an image with the "img009.jpg" name would never appear in the image search results but "tips_to_success.jpg" would. The best would be to use text content and wrap them proper in HTML tags like <H2></H2> etc. (search engines likes content this way). Also, make sure your blog post's length is somewhere between 300-500 words - crossing over is fine but lesser isn't.

3. Keywords are keys

Keywords are terms that others may use to search for your content. While keywords are important for SEO, don't go on and stuff your site with keywords. This would make your content appear like a spam to spiders, who would neglect it henceforth.

Ideal is that once you have chosen your title (and included your keyword in it, as I have added keyword SEO in title above), use it in page URL, in your starting and ending paragraphs, as well as in article body where required without sounding awkward. Additionally, you may link it using anchor text to relevant resources in and out of site.

Adding keyword in the post URL using Custom Permalink

4. Meta-tags are important, but not 'that' much

If we had been living in early part of 21st century, meta tags might have done all the SEO for your site. Unluckily, we aren't. Google and other search engines have long left using meta-tags for finding site information. Hence, if someone tells you meta-tagging is all you need for your sites SEO, tell them it isn't.

Nevertheless, it's important that you use your keywords in your meta-data. Some themes already do that for you, if they don't (you can check that using page source or using view source code from browser), don't sweat. You can use 3rd party plugins like All in One SEO Pack and Scribe.

5. Socialize!

Make others talk about your site and share your content on social media sites or their blogs. It gets even better if somehow sites with high ratings link back to your site. This makes spiders think that you are someone important that everyone these days is talking about, resulting in enhancing your ratings dramatically.

Guest posting is another good approach for that. Comment on other sites, make friends with bloggers (best in business) and make them comment at yours. These tiny little things do matter a lot, resulting in enhanced SEO of your site.

6. Link in and Link-Out

Hyperlinks or Links are important from SEO perspective. You can use them to:

Link out to other sites, networks and posts, or even to your previous posts (also called inbound or backlinks) using anchor element with keyword.

Or even better, make others to link in to you, via sharing your content on their sites or social media networks.

As stated above, an even outstanding strategy for building links is guest posting.

7. Write Often

Sites with new content every day, or twice thrice a week have still far better ratings than those who post every fortnight. A better incoming content frequency makes spider come to your site regularly, resulting in better ratings and enhanced SEO.
Are we done then? Well, trust me - your sites rating is in your hands, not in Google or Yahoo. SEO is just about doing things neatly and in a sophisticated manner. Walk your site these 7 steps for a quality SEO and you will witness the difference yourself at Google, if no place else.

Remember, code clean, write original, socialize... this is what SEO is all about!

How to Choose an Affordable & Reliable Web Host

Many webmasters, especially personal website owners, always look around for web hosts that offer services which are both affordable and reliable so that they can get high performance with the minimum costs. However, it is not an easy task because being affordable sometimes means scams while being reliable may be the result of large expenses.

We are here because we want to help. Based on years of hosting experience, we have worked out several steps which need to accomplish if you are in the way of searching for an affordable and reliable web host. We hope that this guide is helpful.

1. Choose the proper price but not the lowest.

It is not hard to find web hosts offering cheap services with the price lower than $2/mo or even $1/mo, but are they really reliable choices? Probably not, because usually you only get what you pay for. Such kind of companies may outsource the technical support due to the limitation on budget or deliver bad performance because of the lack of high quality hardware.

If you want to run a small personal website with simple pages and posts, a service priced around $4/mo is enough, but if you plan to build a blog with rich content, an image site or an e-commerce site, you need a more powerful service which is usually priced more than $5/mo. Besides, a company with a long refund-period should be more reliable.

2. Know the company reputation from customer reviews.

When looking for a reliable web hosting provider, you are expecting to go with a company that has a high reputation (at least not a scam). At this time, what you need are the comments and feedbacks from real customers who know the company’s advantages and drawbacks.

If you feel time-consuming to do this, you can have a look on this best 10 award, listing the award-winning hosting companies that have a large user base all over the world with few complaints.

3. Search for the information about the company’s facilities.

The quality of a company’s data center and network facilities has a large impact on the performance of the service it offers. Therefore, you have to do some reading or searching to get information like the brand of the servers, the locations of data centers, the bandwidth providers, the quality of the networks, the data center power supply, and so on.

If a web host is reliable and powerful enough, it should have some or all of these equipment: out-of-the-box dual quad processor servers, uninterrupted power supply, diesel generators, first-rate network and routers from top companies like Cisco and Brocade, and a full security system. 24×7 server and network monitoring is also necessary in case that unexpected issues happen.

4. Check out the uptime guarantee and real records.

The amount of uptime decides that how long your website is accessible, so it can show the reliability of a company clearly. Nowadays, most web hosts have a guarantee of 99.9% server/network uptime. This guarantee is not an evidence of excellence, but if a web host doesn’t give it to customers, you’d better think twice before signing up.

Note that a guarantee is not enough because many companies may fail to fulfill it in practice. That is why you should find the real uptime records. Just search in Google or visit some professional review sites like HostingReview360 to browse the statistics in the past year or half a year.

5. Analyze the web hosting features.

A web host that is both reliable and affordable usually offers sufficient server resources including unlimited disk space and bandwidth, tons of easy-to-use tools like cPanel control panel, auto script installer and website builder, and many additional features.

If you have some particular requirements on features – Cron Job, for example, – you should go through the feature list carefully to make sure that your demands are fully met. In addition, a company providing free backup service is better as this adds an extra layer to the website data security.

6. Make sure of the quality of technical support.

This is a big point because you will desire to get a real person to help on the phone or live chat when your website goes down for unknown reasons or you meet troubles in managing the site. Besides, the person on the other side should know what is wrong and how to get it fixed.

To check whether the support is good, find out answers for the following questions. What channels does the company offer for you to contact a staff – toll-free phone, live chat, email or some others? Is the support available 24×7? Does the company outsource customer service? Is the response prompt? If the answers for all the questions above are positive, the company is worth trying.

How To Design The Best & Most Creative Business Card Easily

A business card is identity of your business. Most of the people know your business by your business card only. Making a good business card is a very important part of your business.

Think yourself, you have been handed hundreds of business cards but you keep very few selected ones in your pocket and rest in bins. The cards that you saved from the bin are either because the person is important to you or their business is important to you but most of the time you find the card worth saving because of its design and information delivered by it.

So, if you are planning to design a business card for your business then we are here to help you design the best one. We have a very interesting and informative infographic here depicting important steps in creating business card.

Your business concept is of course the most important thing in your business card. It should directly communicate the nature of your business. Content like your name, business name, title, contact information are the most critical information. Next comes the font you select for representing different information. You can use the same font throughout or different font for different sections, all your choice.

There are many important things we need to know. Let us have a look at this infographic below.

How to Manage Email Marketing List Effectively

Most of the companies out there use email marketing to connect to their customers and generate more sales. They have got a huge email lists and sends emails periodically.

However, this list maintenance is a very important thing. We need all need to tackle spring cleaning once in a while. We have an interesting infograhpic providing us a very effective process for keeping that list nice and clean, with some tips along the way.

Know that your customers will mark your emails as spam if they don’t find any interesting content. So, try to make your content interesting. Send them interesting content on regular basis. Also, try to reconnect with the customers who have unsubscribed.

Try to keep your key message to the first 35 characters of your subject line. It will help you to get reach out more mobile customers. There are many other things we need to take care of to get the maximum out of email marketing.

How To Become a Successful Software Devloper and Get Your Dream Pay

You know the average salary of a software developer is $69,000. A very good amount for a comfortable living. Know that demand of software developers will become double in upcoming decade.

So, it is a safe and good career to choose. If you have a degree in Computer science than you are already there, just a little bit of training or internship required. Even if you are not from CS field but from some related field like Maths or Physics then too you can become a very good software developer by internship.

However, if you are not from any of these fields then too you can become a successful software developer but it would be little tougher.

We have a very interesting and informative infographic telling about how to become a software developer in easy steps. Once you have got the degree and the internship or training then you can either go for large corporation, go for freelancing or your own start-up. Each of these has got good scope.

How Google and Facebook Compare Candidates for Job , Talking Tech Talent

Google and Facebook are the top choices of all the tech candidates. Tech candidates from all fields, be it coding, engineering, designing, security, networking, hacking and others want to be hired by these companies.

Google and Facebook not only provides high salary packages but also attractive perks to their employees. That’s why employees love to work with them. Know these attractive employee perks at various tech companies.

So, how do you make it to Google? or Facebook? Only talent won’t succeed. You need to know what goes inside when they come to hire employees. These creative companies need creative people who can take them further high. They compare many things. We have a very interesting infographic below depicting How Google and Facebook compare in the eyes of job candidates and employees.

How To Check If A Website Is Banned By Google Adsense

Google Adsense is very powerful, high quality and reputed ad network. Not only it provides high quality service to its advertisers by providing various ways to advertise, removing scammers from its ad network but also it take care of its publishers. Adsense team makes sure that publishers’ website will always get optimized, high CPC, relevant ads so that publishers can make most out their adsense account.

To maintain its quality, adsense manually review advertisers campaign as well as publishers websites very frequently and bans scammers from both sides.

If you’re an Adsense publisher and if your site is banned from Google Adsense then there can be lots of reason behind it. Major reasons are:

• Invalid Clicks
• Encouraging Visitors to click your ads
• Hiding Content behind ads
• Placing ads in floating bars.
• Putting too much ads at above-the-fold
• Illegal content – Copied, Spammy, 18+ content, etc.

Most of the adsense publishers are getting banned due to these reasons. Usually, if publisher has a long relationship with Google Adsense and he is providing good experience to advertisers, invalid activities not directly bans/disables your account but it disables ads on that specific domain/website. If he continue to play with adsense using invalid activities, within few days, his adsense account will get banned.

If you ever used any other PPC networks, you know how much they pays. For me, other ad networks pays 1/10th of adsense.

So, the adsense publisher whose domain was banned from Adsense usually try to sell that domain name. Many buyers are getting fooled by this tactics.Buyers see good reputation, traffic stats and ranking of the site and purchase it for higher cost to make lots of money from advertisements (Google Adsense) but they don’t check whether the site is banned by adsense or not. Even if they want to check, there is not any tool like Google Adsense Banned Sites Checker available to their knowledge.

If you’re also a buyer and you’re thinking to make HUGE money from Adsense using the domain name/website for which you’re bidding, I am telling you some tools to check if that site is banned by adsense or not.

Tool #1 – Google Adsense Sandbox

This tool is created by Amit Agarwal (from Digital Inspiration) which lets you to check Google Adsense advertisement for any website. Simply, put URL to the provided textbox and click “Preview Ads” button, it will show all type of adsense advertisements for your website. You can set country to get an idea about which ads are showing up for foreign visitors to your website.

Also, this tool let you check if a website is adsense banned or not. How? Well, just put URL of any adsense banned website, and click “Preview Ads”. If no ads (blank ads) are appearing for that website, it means, Google Adsense has banned that website.

These are some of the adsense banned websites to check: digitalpoint.com, who.is, durgapuja.co.in.

If it doesn’t confirm you if the entered domain name is adsense banned or not (because the tool tells itself “if you see blank ads, Google may have banned your site”). So, for confirmation, you can use any of the below tools.

Tool #2 – Adsense Blacklist Check

It is a quick tool to check it straight – whether a site is banned by adsense or not. Just enter the website’s URL in the provided box. And, hit “Search”. Within few seconds, the website will tell you whether your entered website is adsense banned of not.

Tool #3 – Banned or Not ???

It is another tool to get a straight message about whether a domain is Adsense banned or not. Both the Tool #2 & Tool #3 are similar. Use it to double-check a domain or as an alternative if you don’t want to use Tool #2 or if it is down.

Tip for Adsense Banned Publishers

Whether your loving domain is banned from Adsense or your whole Adsense account is banned, don’t think your journey to make money online ended. There are better options online to make money and that’s too from your blog/website. Take a closer look to best Adsense alternatives, best CPM ad networks these articles contain the best PPC & CPM ad networks, many of them can generate you even higher revenue than Adsense

Good luck!

How to Increase Alexa Rank – 10 Proven Tips

Alexa rank mirrors a website’s popularity and the overall traffic status. And every efforts to increase the alexa rank of your blog is time well spent.

There are lots of controversy about alexa rank and actual traffic status of a website. Still, a good number of advertisers rely on alexa rank of the site,before putting money on it.

I will tell you 10 genuine (not artificial), easy to implement and proven tips to improve your alexa rank in shortest possible time.

My sincere advice to bloggers is – Not to adopt unscrupulous methods (using software etc.) to artificially boost your blog’s alexa rank. Your alexa rank should looks natural, and it should coincide with the actual age of the blog or website.

REMEMBER: Alexa system counts traffic originating from browsers installed with “Alexa Toolbar” only. So, visitors visiting your blog without having Alexa Toolbar in their browsers are discounted by its ranking algorithm.

1. Claiming your site

The first and foremost thing you should do to improve your alexa rank is to –Claim your site.

Enter your site’s domain name, description and country name carefully and correctly. Your site description should be short, descriptive and informative enough to portrays your site’s brand value to attract advertisers. This short description should also contains the important keywords related to your niche.

When you claim your site, you have to place the Alexa ID inside your blog header, thereby helping alexa system to access and evaluate your site effectively. By claiming, you can also respond to user reviews about your site.

2. Installing Alexa Toolbar

The next step is – Installing Alexa Toolbar in your browser. Point to remember is, you should install the toolbar in the browser and PC/Laptop which you use most of the time to update and visit your blog.

I mean, you should always access and publish your blog content using the same browser and PC installed with Alexa Toolbar. It helps to increase your alexa rank in a big way.

3. Display Alexa Widget

Place Alexa Traffic Widget on your blog or site. Again, an effective way to improve alexa rank.

When visitors click on the Alexa Widget displayed on your site, the traffic algorithm receives a +Ve signal, thereby boosting your alexa rank. Simply, displaying of the traffic widget also works like a charm.

4. Publish Content Regularly

Frequent updating of your blog with fresh and unique articles is the 2nd most important tip to increase alexa rank. The 1st is – Traffic originating from browser installed with Alexa Toolbar.

Alexa system loves fresh content, just like any other search engines. So, publish at least 3 to 5 blog posts every week. Frequency of content publication is directly proportional to the increase in alexa rank.

5. User Engagement

The more your users are engaged on your blog, due to more page views, low bounce rate or more time spent; the better will be your alexa rank.

This can be achieved by writing informative, unique and fresh content on a regular basis. This is almost similar to the ranking signals used by Google to rank content in SERPs.

6. Collect Links

The momentum of your link collection is directly proportional to increase in alexa rank.

You can adopt methods like guest blogging, infographic, link baiting with unique or controversial blog posts etc. Consider guest blogging in your niche for editorials links.

Breaking a great piece of news on your blog and social media also attracts lots of links from other sites.

7. Blog Commenting

A great way to collect back-links to increase alexa rank.

All incoming links, including links from blog comments is displayed on your Alexa site-info page. But you should only add comments on blogs belong to your niche, and your comments should be constructive and add value to the topic. Finally, use this strategy in moderation, to be on safe side (Google Penguin).

8. Visitors Review

Reviews submitted by your visitors helps to improve your alexa rank instantly.

You can display an Alexa Review Widget on your blog, and appeal your fans and followers in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to write a review. There are evidence of alexa rank Boost in a short span of time due to more number of reviews.

Again, over a period of time, blogs with more number of visitors reviews achieve higher alexa rank faster than blogs with fewer reviews, with same amount of traffic an links.

9. Target Your Content for Webmasters

If your blog posts are meant for bloggers and webmasters, then your alexa rank will increase rapidly. Because they will always visit your site from their browsers installed with Alexa Toolbar.

10. SEO Your Blog and Blog Posts

Finally, traffic counts, when it comes to improving your alexa rank.

Search engine optimize your blog theme and every blog posts for higher ranking in search engines. The more the traffic visit your blog, the better will be your alexa rank.

Apart from organic traffic, visitors from social networking sites, specially webmasters and bloggers also help in a great way. So, social media marketing should be in your agenda for a fast increase in Alexa Traffic rank.

How to Blog For Success and Make Lots Of Money

If you are planning to make blogging as a full-time career, and want to make big money out of it, I’m here to teach you – How to Blog successfully.

There are 1000s of new blogs spring-up everyday in blogosphere. Even, there are 1000s of old blogs (but not so mature) die everyday due to various reasons.

While blogging, there is a clear-cut line between success and failure, which consist of – Passion, Hard work and Creativity. If you think you have all these 3 ingredients within you, then I’ll tell you the tricks of the trade – how to blog better for money and fame.

1. Set up your blog

• Niche: Choose your niche or passion for the subject matter of your blog carefully. Lots of bloggers fail because they choose wrong niche at the beginning.

Again, changing niche is not so easy. It’s like changing your entire business model. There are instances, bloggers had paid great price for changing their initial niche, with loss of subscribers, traffic and ranking in search engines. So, don’t follow the trend blindly, instead, choose your passion, the thing you like to do every day without getting bored, for months and years together.

• Domain Name: Name your blog wisely, because you will be recognized or associated with this name in future and will be for lifelong.

Don’t buy a domain name in impulse. Have a great brainstorming session. Take some time to think about your niche, keywords and business model around it. It may take days, and even weeks long.

Finally, your blog’s domain name should be short, catchy, easy to remember and closely resembles your niche or subject matter. Either go forHostGator.com or GoDaddy.com to register your domain name, as these web-hosting service providers are reliable with a great after sales customer service.

• Platform: Choose your platform smartly. Blogging platform is like your stage, where you have to perform everyday. And the UI (User Interface) or Admin Console is the green room, where you have to rehearse and work hard everyday.

Although there are plenty of blogging platforms available like Blogger,WordPress.com, WordPress.org, TypePad, Drupal etc., I personally like and advice you to go for WordPress, the best blogging platform with cutting edge technology.

Checkout this WordPress Hosting Review to know more.

2. Publish content regularly

Your contents are your products. Make great content, polish them and decorate them for your readers to consume. It’s the content what makes a blog great.

Feed your blog with fresh and unique content regularly. If possible everyday. Lots of blogs die because they are not fed properly on a regular basis.

Both, your readers and search engine bots visit your blog for content. Give them sufficient reasons to visit and follow your blog. If you really want to make big bucks out of your blog, then publish at least one article everyday.

Content creation: Do a good keyword research around your subject matter. You can take the help of Google Trends for it. Then write down at least 50 to 100 keywords, which are in great demand. Your keywords should be a mixture of both long-tail and head-terms.

Then craft your blog post with one keyword in mind. Try to give a different angle to the article. I mean, your post should be unique and different from other bloggers who have already published about the topic.

To get content creation idea you should visit other bloggers’ blogs on a regular basis. You should be a voracious reader of others’ blog posts to be a great content creator and a successful blogger. You can try Quora and Redditto get some new idea to create content about your subject matter.

3. Set up your Social Media Profile

Social signal plays an important role in higher ranking of content in Google search. Even Yahoo! and Bing also incorporated this in their search engine ranking algorithms.

There is no need to be active on 100s of Social Networking Sites. Its time consuming and distracting. Set your social profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. These are the leaders in social media at present time.

You may also consider joining social media news sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.com for traffic and publicity.

You should also verify your Google Authorship Markup which display the author’s image alongside the URL in SERP. It greatly improve your blog’s CTR (click through rate).

4. Set up GWT (Google Webmaster Tools)

Google offers free tools, data and diagnostic aids to make your website or blog search engine friendly. Along with Google Webmaster Tools, you should also join Bing Webmaster Tools for better visibility in Bing search engine.

By using GWT you can geo-target your blog to a specific country, you can remove your blog’s site links on search results, crawl errors and statistics, index status, your robots.txt file, and even any malware on your blog.

You can know about the search queries or keywords people are using to find your blog. Inbound links to your blog and internal link analysis.

You can submit your sitemap in GWT for faster indexation. If you want to remove few of your URLs in Google search due to some reasons, then GWT is the right tool for you.

What else? You can improve your HTML structure, like duplicate title tag, meta description etc by using this amazing free tool.

5. Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must have tool for all bloggers. You have to know your efforts and strategies are going on right direction or not to be a successful blogger.

Google Analytics provides you the source of traffic to your blog (Country, Search engines etc.), what instruments they are using (Desktop, Smartphone etc.), the browsers, and most importantly – how the web-readers are interacting with your blog.

Watching your blog readers in real-time is a sheer fun!

You can gather a lots of intelligence about your blog and blog posts / pages using Google Analytics. You can know about the entry page, exit page, staying time and bounce rate etc.

6. Set up Google AdSense

When it comes to CPC (Cost-per-click) and CPM (Cost-per-impression) advertising, Google AdSense is the best. There are bloggers who earn 1000s of dollars per month by displaying Google AdSense ads only.

It shares the maximum possible revenue with you, compared to other AdSense like services. If you have busy blog and receive plenty of search engine traffic then AdSense is the best option for you to earn revenue.

AdSense pays every month, when your earning reaches US$ 100. It offers options like cheque, Electronic Funds Transfer, and Western Union Quick Cash for convenience.

Warning for novice bloggers: Never click on your AdSense ads, even for testing. Google has a great tracking system of fraudulent ad clicks. This is the single reason why most novice bloggers get banned by Google AdSense.

Few bloggers become smart and click on their own AdSense ads after removing cookies from the browser every time. Google easily detects this type of tricks and impose ban as soon as possible. It’s very difficult to get the ban lift or get another AdSense account, if you are banned by Google.

You just can’t cheat Google’s top source of income by applying fraudulent tricks.

Finally, basic knowledge about SEO, hard work and consistency matter a lot for successful blogging. You aim should be to make a recognition for yourself, drive plenty of traffic from search engines and social media, and in the process earn huge bucks.

How To Display More Than 3 AdSense Ad Units On Your Website

Have you noticed – Few websites display more than three AdSense Ad units on their web-pages.

And, if you are an AdSense Publisher, you must have thought showing more than three Ad units on your blog or website.

I’ve two news for you – A bad news and a good news. Let me tell you the bad news first.

BAD News…

You can’t display more than 3 AdSense Ad units on your (any) web-page at any point of time. It is against the AdSense Program Policies.

AdSense for content: Publishers can display up to three AdSense for content ad units on each page. And out of that three ad units, you can display no more than one ad unit of size 300 X 600 on each page. For rest other sizes you can display more than one ad units on each page.

You can display up to three link units on each page. These policies are both for desktop as well as mobile optimized sites.

AdSense for search: You can display maximum up to two Google AdSense for search boxed on each page. Again you can place a single link unit or image ad on pages with AdSense for search results.

GOOD News…

You can display more than three AdSense ad units for content on each page. But… But you have to become a Premium AdSense Publisher for that.

Premium AdSense Publishers are the publishers who have more than ten thousand page views (>10,000) per day. This is not for small-time publishers earning 300$ or 400$ per month.

Even though you have a high traffic blog, you can’t apply for premium membership. An AdSense representative will contact you via phone as well as mail and change your account status to premium.

These are dedicated AdSense account – Where you can control the number of ad units, ad sizes etc. Moreover, the AdSense advisory team will contact you time to time for better optimization of your ad units in terms of placements and size for better performance.

Till then stay away from DFP…

DFP or “DoubleClick For Publishers” is a program offered by Google which manages your ad inventory in an efficient way.

Again DFP is meant for Premium AdSense Publishers who can display more than 3 ad units on their pages. These are the advance AdSense users who can control the number, size and placement of ad units using this (DFP) tool.

Stay away from misleading blog posts and forum threads, where people advise you to use DFP to display more than three AdSense ad units per page. Always remember – Google is very strict about its AdSense T&C. Once your account is gone, it’s very difficult to revive again.

Where To Find Free Blogger Backgrounds and Textures

Blogger is a fantastic tool for amateur and professional writers that have a passion for publishing online content. Unlike WordPress or hosting companies that require you to design your site before ever getting started, Blogger is a ready to go service right out of the box that will allow you to start writing for yourself or others on day one. The effort required to sign up for an account is minimal, and you can really get as creative as you want, whenever you want.

Even if you aren't familiar with web development or design, that's okay. Blogger is a place for everyone. Thanks to the overwhelming support of the Blogger and creative communities, there are plenty of free to use resources out there to make your site look great and keep you focused on what you love best. Here are some of the top sites for acquiring blogger backgrounds that won't cost you a dime and will look incredible.

Shabby Blogs

Shabby blogs offers some unique texture and graphic rendered Blogger backgrounds to choose from. All of the designs that they have are created to be standard width so you don't get a lot of flexibility to choose from; however, there are guides out there that can teach you how to extend the sidebars, header, and footer of your screen if you find one you love and this is something important to you. In addition to offering Blogger backgrounds Shabby blogs also has a section for cute little buttons that you can add to your site to give it an extra special touch.

Hot Bliggity Blog

Aside from having one of the coolest and creative names to say out loud, Hot Bliggity Blog has a wide selection of patterned-based blogs for your site. You can choose between different color schemes, and they also offer three different sizes to pick from, standard, widened, and full width. Best of all, they are really easy to install. All you have to do is click on the install link underneath the image. From there it will copy the code for you into your clipboard and give you instructions on where to paste it.

Dotty Dot Dot

Dotty Dot is the place to go if you like geometric type backgrounds that are heavy on squares, plaid, circles, and of course dots. The website is a little bit hard to navigate, but they have a sidebar with a bunch of tags to help you sort through all the available templates and find something you like. Just about every color you can imagine is available if you plan on matching your Blogger backgrounds to your favorite color or font style. The widths of the most of the templates vary so some have heavy padded sidebars, whereas some are very skinny.

LeeLou Blogs

Lee Lou Blogs offers Blogger backgrounds that look a lot like you would find in a scrapbook with a heavy dependency on small pictures and vector graphics. These free templates would go great with any home improvement blog or DIY arts and crafts writer. Most of the free backgrounds are standard size with the high padded sides, but like anything you can get access to more templates if you want to take advantage of any of his premium designs.

CgTextures

If you just want something basic real basic that won't distract customers from your content, you can head over to CgTextures. Their site is full of photos and textures that could be added as a background image with a reduced transparency. The blog would still look great and you wouldn't have to worry as much about trying to match your font style and color so that it fits in with the background. Instead you can draw more focus on what's important and less on the site's bells and whistles.

Every Stock Photo

Bloggers that want less of an 'artsy' look to their site and instead more of a serious appeal can get a picture from Every Stock Photo to use as the background image. You can also benefit by using some of the pictures offered through this site within your blog posts so that you aren't stuck buying things from premium image providers. There search bar and navigation panel makes it easy to find exactly what you are looking for to see a unique feel to every page.

Shizoo-Design

Shizoo-Design is a German based design firm with about 554 different patterns to choose from. You can find everything from conservative shapes to abstract rainbows and splashes of color. All of the textures are provided in a range of size, anywhere from 1000x700 pixels to 1300x600 pixels so that they will comfortably fit your entire site's background and work with most browsers and computer screen sizes. Brushes and custom icons are also available from the site, free of charge.

Patterns of Change

Patterns of Changes offers Blogger backgrounds that are cartoon oriented and that can best be tiled across the screen. The site is perhaps one of the easiest to use compared to all the others on the screen, providing a simple navigation bar where you can choose what color you'd like the pattern to be. When you select one of the colors provided, it will come up with a bunch of different patterns usually associated with that color. For instance, when the color brown is selected, one of the choices ia brown cake. Blogger backgrounds for this site might not be the best choice for business professionals, but they certainly are fun.

How to Add a Background Image using the Blogger Template Designer

If you have a background image that you want to upload, then follow these steps:

1. Log into your Blogger account and go to Template, press the Customize button on the right side. Once the Blogger template designer has opened, you'll see the Background option on the left - click on it:

2. Now click on the box below the Background image title and it will open a window from where we can select a default background image. On the upper left side of this window, click Upload Image and select the image you would like to use from a location on your computer.

Note that you should use a JPG, GIF, or PNG image that is no more than 300k in size. If your image is too large, then you can use the Kraken.io image optimizer to make the file smaller.

3. After you've uploaded your image, click 'Done' and you'll be taken back to the background menu. Here you will see additional options like: Alignment, Tile and Scroll with page:

• Alignment: change the position of the background image to start either horizontal (left, center, right) or vertical (top and bottom);
• Tile (Repeat): if you want a small background image to fill the page, choose to repeat (tile) horizontally and/or vertically; 
• Scroll with page: the box is checked by default, this means that the background scroll along with the page contents. If you want the background picture to not move as the page is scrolled and stay exactly where it is, uncheck this box.

4. For a background image with plain color in the middle for content, you might want to remove the main and header background. Navigate to Advanced > Backgrounds and type the word transparent inside the Main Background and Header Background box:

5. If the background is smaller than the content area, we can fix this using CSS. Scroll down and click on the Add CSS option, then paste this CSS code inside the box:

body {
background-size: 200%;
}

.body-fauxcolumn-outer .cap-top {
background: none;
}

Note: to change the size of the background, modify the 200% value in red.

Once you're happy with the results, press the 'Apply to blog' button and enjoy the new background for your site.

How to Change Background in a Custom Blogger Template

Sometimes the above options might not appear in some custom Blogger templates if the body.background variable hasn't been defined. In this case, we will need to access the HTML of the template:

1. Go to Template, click the Edit HTML button and click anywhere inside the code area. Press the CTRL + F keys to open the Blogger search box:

2. Paste or type the following tag inside the search box and hit Enter to find it:

]]></b:skin>

3. Immediately before the ]]></b:skin> tag, paste one of the following code snippets:

For a large background image:

body {
background-image: url(IMAGE-URL.png) !important;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: center top;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-size: 100%;
}

Note: the no-repeat value prevents the image from repeating either vertically or horizontally. Use background-repeat: repeat-y if you'd like the image to repeat vertically, or background-repeat: repeat-x if you want it to repeat only horizontally. To increase the size of the background, change the 100% value.

If using a repeating pattern, add this CSS code instead:

body {
background-image: url(IMAGE-URL.png) !important;
background-repeat: repeat;
background-position: center top;
background-attachment: fixed;
}

4. Open a new tab and upload your background image to Blogger or an image hosting site, and copy the URL of your hosted image to your clipboard. If you don't know how to do it, please take a look at this tutorial.

After you copied it, replace the text highlighted in blue from above with your image url.

5. Finally, Preview the template to ensure that the background image appears as you want, and press the Save template button to save your changes. That's it!

Using the 8 sites listed above, you have a wide range to choose from when creating a site that really represents you. Given the right tools, designing you blog can be a fun hobby to enjoy that can spark your creativity and improve the quality of your writing. With such a large selection, the hardest part of setting up your new theme will be finding which one you like best.