How to use Technorati Tags?

What is Technorati?

Technorati is an almost in real time search engine focused primarily on blogs, but really it picks up anything with an RSS feed that has been "claimed" in Technorati.

How do I claim my blog in Technorati?

It's a very simple process; in fact, I've claimed two blogs now with nary a fuss. Just go to the Technorati Claim Your Blog page and follow the directions. Technorati will give a claim token just like this, ZMMRTQ8W4TMU and post it in the body of your post or feed.

How does Technorati benefit me?

If you own a blog or website, and would like other people to find you, Technorati is an excellent resource to drive targeted traffic. First, you'll need to understand a little bit about Technorati Tags.

What are Technorati Tags?

Tags are basically just a way to categorize something. You can tag your blog postings, images, links, etc. with any tag you want. When other people search for something within Technorati, say "cheese", all the posts, images, links, etc. that have been tagged with the word "cheese" will show up.

Now, there is a bit of coding involved with this, but it's very non-scary. Go to the Technorati Tags page to get the code format that you'll need to use for your tags, or, you can check out a few of the Technorati Tools to automate the tagging process.

How does all this Technorati stuff fit together?

Okay! Here's what it all looks like:

• Sign up for a Technorati account.
• Once you sign up, you'll be asked if you have a blog to claim. Go ahead and complete this process.
• Now that you're all claimed and good to go, you can start tagging your posts (see above for more discussion on tagging).
• If you've claimed your blog and there's no problems (knock on wood), it should automatically update to Technorati without much help from you. However, if you'd like more of a say in the process, check out Technorati's developer center. More on this at About.com
  

The Blog & Ping Trick

As a new webmaster, you might have waited and waited for your website to be indexed by the search engines. Maybe Google or Yahoo's spider came by your website once or twice, indexed your main page but never did a "deep crawl", which means visiting and indexing the rest of your website's pages. Believe it or not, this is what usually happens to websites within the first month of being online.

What if you had hundreds of fresh content pages just lying around on your website, all linked properly through your top-down menu structure, and had a picture perfect site map, but you still had to wait for the search engine spiders to find your website important enough to fully index your entire website.

What if I told you that there is a new technique that could literally force the Yahoo spider to index your new pages, and even your whole website, almost immediately? Folks, we're talking in less than 2 hours!

This is something that many people in the Internet Marketing and Search Engine crowd have been talking about as of late, and it's called the "blog and ping technique"

Blogging, like I told you in an earlier issue, has become an important tool for new businesses looking to get their websites indexed quickly in search engines. You can easily use your blog as a content management tool and benefit from the added importance that search engines give to blogs.

But now, you can flip that around and use your blog to drive search engine spiders to your website at will!

What is the Blog and Ping technique?

Here's how the whole “blog and ping” routine works:

First, let's say you've just added some new content to your website (created a new web page) OR you've created an entirely new website that hasn't been indexed by the search engines yet.

Now, in order for the search engines to rank your new web page or website, you need them to visit your new page. How do you do this? Well, you could go out and get other websites to link directly to this page. Depending on the Page Rank of your website, you could wait a few days and hope that the search engines would eventually crawl your site and end up at your new page... OR you could use the blog and ping technique to get your new page crawled in a few hours!

Ok, in order to use the blog and ping technique, you need to create a blog, as I taught you in an earlier lesson . It's free and only takes a few minutes to do.

Search engine spiders love blog content – it's fresh, regularly updated and is the best online community tool around.

Since the “blog and ping” technique involves the Yahoo search engine spider, let's look at how you can alert the Yahoo spider to come visit your blog.

The easiest way to attract the Yahoo spider to your blog is to:

1. Create a My Yahoo account
2. Add your blog as content on your personalized Yahoo page (don't worry, I'll explain all this later on). In simple terms, this means that there is a link within the My Yahoo website (on your personalized page) which you will point to your blog.

Once you've done this, Yahoo gives you the option to notify them that you've added new content to your blog. This is called "pinging". When you "ping" Yahoo, they will quickly visit your blog and follow all links from your blog page. Thus indexing whatever pages you have a link pointing to!

Now that you can bring the Yahoo search engine spider to your blog at will, it's time to take this technique a bit further and use your blog as a launching pad for the Yahoo spider to index your website or any pages that you want.

All you need to do is to post new entries in your blogs containing links to the pages that you want indexed into your blog. That way, when the Yahoo spider reaches your blog and sees the new post, it will automatically follow the links in that post, and index any page that you want it to index!

Steps to daily indexing

1. Start a blog
2. Create a Yahoo account
3. Add your blog's RSS feed into your My Yahoo account
4. Make a few posts in your blog
5. Ping Yahoo
6. Repeat

This is from Brad Callen
Professional SEO
SEO Elite: SEO Software

Tips On How To Make Animated GIF in Photoshop

1. Create a document with each frame of the animation on a different layer.

2. Select the layers to be used in the animation from the layers palette

• Note1: To select a group of layers, select the layer at the top of the group. Then hold the shift key and click on the bottom layer and this will highlight every layer in #
  

  
  
  Open the animation palette by choosing window from the menu bar and selecting “Animation“.

3. When the animation palette opens, it should look like this. If it doesn’t that means it opened in the timeline view.

4. Change to frame animation view by clicking on the flyout menu in the upper right hand corner of the animation palette and selecting “Convert to Frame Animation”.

5. Change every layer showing on one frame to every layer showing on its own frame, by clicking the flyout menu on the animation palette and choosing “Make frames from layers”

Note: All layer don’t have to be selected, to select a few layers use the copy layer button at the bottom right of the animation palette to add layers.

6. Modify each frame by selecting the frame on the animation window and changing it as desired in the main photoshop window.

• Note: To add or remove a graphic from another layer to any frame r, select the frame and in the layers palette, click the “eye” to toggle on or off the visibility for that layer.

7. Under each frame is an arrow head pointing downward. Click on the arrow head to display timing menu and select the display time for each frame.

8. From the file menu select export to export the document as a movie or under the save as option save the file as a gif. Be sure to select Save for Web and Devices (.gif under this option).

9. NOTE: If you want to loop your animation continuously you can select that option in window that pops up after you have chosen "Save For Web & Devices". Under the color table that shows up is "Looping options", just select "forever" and save it. You can also pick "others" and select the amount of times you want your animation to loop.

Thanks to WikiHow

Tricks in Writing and Using Technorati Tags in a Blog

Technorati is a popular web directory service that indexes blogs, ranks them according to popularity, allows people to create bookmarked blog lists and allows people to do a search based on categories, called Technorati tags. If you use tags in your blog and ping Technorati when you write new entries, you will likely see an increase in your blog traffic and your ranking.

Instructions

Step 1

Join Technorati via its website by registering and claiming your blog. The act of claiming the blog creates a link from your user name to Technorati. The blog claim process is very simple and offered via a variety of easy-to-follow directions that might depend on the blog platform that you are using. Kodus to E-How.com


Step 2

Write Technorati tags into your blog. Do this by either adding relevant text words that relate to your blog or that categorize your blog or by integrating tag links into your text. Some people add a section at the end of the blog called tags and simply list several links. Others integrate tags into their blogs, which can look more streamlined and result in a cleaner looking blog entry.


Step 3

Choose popular and relevant tags to bring visitors to your blog. You can check a tag's popularity on the Technorati home page to see what today's popular tags as well as today's popular searches. Either click on them to see blogs categorized in that category or write your own blog with a tag listed in order to later find your blog entry under the directory for that specific tag.


Step 4

Ping your blog when you finish writing a new entry with tags. Your homepage at Technorati has a tool that will allow a ping, which means that it will notify the directory that you have a new blog entry. It will classify your blog under your associated tags and notify those who have "Favorited" you via that user's homepage.

Facebook 101: 25 Tips and Tricks

Now you want your Facebook page to excel from others on the web. Here are 25 tips and tricks!


1. Use a current profile picture

While Facebook allows you to post as many pictures as you like, and tag yourself in pictures that your friends have taken, the Web site only allows you one profile picture, so make it count. You may very well have some potential suitors on the Web site, so be sure to portray yourself as accurately as possible. A clear, well-lit picture of you will help you to put your best foot forward, particularly if it's a portrait or captures you in the midst of one of your favorite activities. And you might ought to refrain from using one of the pictures from that New Year's Eve party, as your profile picture is accessible to everybody on Facebook, even with the privacy settings engaged.

2. Don't overdo your 'Interests'

With your 'Interests' section, you really have two routes lying before you. Taking the first route would be to fill this space with some kind of witticism, since asking somebody to sum up what most interests him or her in life on a Facebook profile is slightly ridiculous. A decent example would be to respond, "Facebook," for instance. The snarkier, the better, really. The second route would be to list the interests that best differentiate you; it's understood that you enjoy "chillin' with friends" and "reading a good book," so get more descriptive. Instead of "chillin' with friends, say, for example, "eating fried chicken livers while watching football with the boys." Instead of "reading a good book," respond with, "Victorian British literature."

3. Don't underestimate the importance of your 'Favorite Music' section

As any self-respecting music geek knows, one's musical taste says a lot about somebody, so be judicious in listing your favorite bands in your profile's 'Favorite Music' section. A thorough music section, mentioning your appreciation of Gene Vincent, might make the difference in whether or not that cute rockabilly girl (or guy) responds to your message. Don't be yet another one of those people that says, "I like pretty much everything." Get specific, giving artist names (and, if you're up to it, album titles). One tactic that seems to be popular is to sort your iTunes according to the "Play Count" or "Last Played" tabs, and then copy down what you find. These tips – save the last one of course – also apply to your Favorite Movies and Books sections.

4. Invite All of Your Actual Friends (and Family)

For those of us who grew up in the pre-Facebook era, it's sometimes tough to reach out to old friends and say (in a smarmy voice) "will you be my Facebook friend?" But it's something we should all get over, because the flurry of social-networking only starts getting good when you have a size able community of folks you know and like that are also out there making new friends and contacts. it just means you'll get more cool stuff in your in-box, and also means you're more likely to hear from some random person you went to grade-school with (or maybe an old flame), which, to be honest, is kind of the most moving thing about social-networking (reconnecting with long-lost folks, that is). This writer is even getting to know far flung members of his family that he wouldn't otherwise have much rapport with if it were not for Facebook.


5. Don't add random friends

We have a hard time understanding the mindset of wanting to send friend requests to perfect strangers in faraway places, but plenty of people do it. If it happens that you stumble across somebody on the Web site whose profile piques your interest, it is best to send that person an introductory message. You wouldn't ask a stranger to lunch without speaking with them first, would you? Thanks to Lee Bains. Continue here

Ten Fast Breastfeeding Tips

Here are a collection of tips from breastfeeding gurus, moms, health care practitioners, and others who care about breastfeeding moms and babies.

1) An uncomplicated birth makes breastfeeding less complicated because mom and baby are way more alert and awake, getting breastfeeding off to the best start. If at all possible , plan for a natural birth.

2) Insist on no unnatural nipples. Alert infirmary staff in writing and verbally that you are going to be breastfeeding and make them aware you donot desire your child to get any kind of synthetic nipple.

3) Find a Pediatrician and OB or Midwife who supports breastfeeding. Some give lip service to the “breast is best” mantra, but counsel weaning to formula at the first sign of difficulty. Find a real breastfeeding advocate who will help you overcome challenges if they come up.

4) hear the baby. Babies nurse for a wide selection of reasons, some of which have zilch to do with hunger. Nursing frequently guarantees youcan bring in a healthy milk supply to meet your infant’s wants. It is also relaxing to him and eases his transition into the planet.

5) Wear your baby. Wearing baby in a sling makes nursing easier because baby is close to you. Wearing him helps to organize his movements and help him target nursing. It also makes nursing in public much more at ease. Dr. William sears related about this : “Probably one of the most wonderful aspects of a sling or carrier is that it permits breastfeeding on the go. Busy mums can nurture their babies with the best nutrition, yet still continue their active lifestyles.”

6) Talk to your infant’s dad and your family. Be certain to communicate to your folks how strongly you are feeling about nursing. Sell them on the advantages so they’ll support you.

7) Learn to nurse in public. Breastfeeding writer Amy Spangler announces : “I encourage younger girls, if they have got a comfort level doing so to please breastfeed their babies wherever they’re because till we get that critical mass of girls doing just that, weare not going to change the angles of the general public.” Practice latching baby on in front of a mirror so you can learn how to do so discreetly.

Don’t compare your baby with others. Healthy, well fed breastfed babies come in all sizes and shapes. Your baby will grow in a particular pattern generally due to genetics.

9) Get your latch right. Learning to latch your baby onto the breast is one of the most, if not the most important thing you can do to avoid agony and guarantee satisfactory draining of the breast ( which leads to an abounding milk supply ). Fetch help if you and your baby are having trouble.

10) Try cosleeping. Sharing sleep with baby makes breastfeeding easier. Babies who sleep with their mums take in more milk and excite mom’s breastfeeding hormones. And everybody usually gets more sleep. Thanks to Halds