How to Import/Export a Blog to Blogger

How to Import/Export a Blog to Blogspot

New Feature: Import and Export in Blogspot
Today’s release brings another long-desired feature to Blogger: Import and Export of blogs. Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.













To export your blog, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to the Settings > Basic page. You’ll see the Blog Tools links at the top of the page for importing and exporting. (We also moved blog deletion up here from the bottom of the page. Don’t worry about accidentally clicking it, though; your blog wouldn’t be deleted until you confirmed on the next page.)

Once you click “Export blog” and press the “Export” button on the next page, your browser will prompt you to save the XML file for your blog. Keep it somewhere safe as a backup, or import it into a different blog. You can import one blog into another from the Blog Tools links, or when creating a new blog. Look for the “Advanced Options” at the bottom of the page.
















When you import a blog, all of the posts will get saved in an “imported” state. From there you can publish just a few, or all of them at once. Here are some ideas for what you can do with importing and exporting:

•Merge two or more blogs into one. Take the exported posts and comments from one blog and import them into another one.
•Move individual posts from blog to blog. After importing, select just a set of posts to publish and publish them with one click.
•Back up your blog to your own storage. You can keep your words safe and under your control in case anything happens to your blog, or us, or if you want to remove them from the Internet.
•Move your blog somewhere else. Our export format is standard Atom XML. We hope to see other blogging providers extend their Atom support to include import and export. And, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.
Caveats

•The export format currently only covers blog posts and comments to those posts, not blog settings or templates. To back up a Classic template, copy and paste the template code from the editor. To back up a Layouts template, use the Backup / Restore template option to download a copy of your template.
•Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
•At the moment there is a 1MB size limit on the blog you can import. This is a bug that we are correcting the issue.

Have you imported or exported your blog? Let us know about how it went in the comments.

Get Targeted Backlinks to your blog with Comment Kahuna

Every blogger, unless the blog is exclusively setup for private and limited purposes, is interested in gaining more quality traffic and better blog ranking in search engines. One of the widely recognized approaches to improve the position and attract more visitors is receiving quality backlinks. However, while task sounds simple and self-explanatory, the realization step is quite complicated. How can you encourage another blogger, preferably with good Google PageRank standing, to post link on you blog?



Comment Kahuna is one of the best free tools on the market, that will assist you in reaching your goal. It is a simple, but efficient utility that helps you in searching blogs related to the niche of your website. Use it to offer informative comments on the blog posts. This will give your website quality backlinks that search engines looks for while evaluating your blog position. Many of these blogs get lots of visitors, so if your comment is interesting, relevant and informative, some will follow the link to your website.


I checked multiple reviews on the web for the user comments, and most of them are super positive, so try for yourself. It is absolutely free, but the registration on site is required.


Website: http://commentkahuna.com

Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links Exchange

What is Reciprocal Links Exchange

Reciprocal linking is an agreement between two web site owners to provide a hyperlink within their own web site to your web site. Generally this is done to provide readers with quick access to related sites, or to show a partnership between two sites. Reciprocal links can also help to increase traffic to your web site in two ways. Firstly, you will probably have some viewers visit your site from clicking the reciprocal link directly. Secondly, most Internet search engines take into account the number of web sites which contain links to your web site; the more hyperlinks to your site found, the higher up in the search engine rankings (depending on the search term) you'll find your site.
Reciprocal linking between web sites became an important part of the search engine optimisation process thanks to the link popularity algorithm PageRank employed by Google, which ranks web sites for relevancy dependent on the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link.

For years people have said you need to submit to the search engines. With the advances in search engine spider technology, it is no longer a requirement to submit to the search engines. Rather it is a requirement to submit to topical directories. Reciprocal links and topical directories help you move forward and open the doors for more people and search engine spiders to find your site.

Three-way linking
Three-way linking (site A → site B → site C → site A) is also a kind of reciprocal linking but a special one. This type of linking is becoming increasingly popular since some search engines give less consideration to the value of normal reciprocal links (site A → site B → site A). Some search engines give a higher value to web sites that link to another web site without that web site displaying a return link, three way linking fits this critera while also offering a reciprocal return link from say a sister site.
The attempt of this link building method is to create more "natural" links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links, which are usually done between two domains.

Automated Linking
In order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines, a number of automatic link exchange services have been launched. Members of these schemes will typically agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.

Link Exchange
An alternative to the automated linking above is a Link Exchange forum, in which members will advertise the sites that they want to get links to, and will in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generated through such services are subject to editorial review.



Disadvantages of Reciprocal Link Building

I would like to list below some disadvantages of reciprocal links exchange.

1. Time and effort is higher than one-way link building practices.
2. If we exchange links with bad neighbor, our site may get penalized.
3. Good neighbor may become bad in future and put us in trouble.
4. Link exchange partner may remove our link without our knowledge while we still link back.
5. Search engines discourage link exchange.

List of Best Tools to Check Your Website Usability

List of tools to test a website

Usability is a qualitative attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. More impotantly it shows the user behaviour who interact with your webpage first time.

In this post I'm sharing some very useful tools for webmasters to check website usability. Here's the following list:

Feng-GUI

Feng-GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts
what a real human would be most likely to look at.

This offers designers, advertisers and creatives, a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the Flow of Attention.



Five Second Test

A simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces. A central test management screen helps organise and visualise your responses so you can get all the information you need at a glance.



Loop11

Loop11 is a web-based user-experience testing tool, allowing companies to conduct online, unmoderated user testing on any kind of digital interface. Loop11 is not a survey or web analytics tool, but a user experience tool… helping you to understand user behaviour.



CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is simple - show the hotspots where users click on in a site. This information is not the same as popular pages; instead this is practical information about how and where people click on your site. More importantly, CrazyEgg's approach lets you understand the difference between where you want your users to click and where they are actually clicking.

Traditional site tracking tools offer you a ton of information, including:

:: Popular pages :: Entry pages :: Exit pages :: Came from :: Visitor Paths :: Visit Length



Clixpy

Clixpy is a web usability testing tool. It’s very easy to install, just by pasting a few lines of JavaScript code in your site’s HTML. When users browse your website Clixpy traces everything they do and then plays it for you, giving you the opportunity to extract any information you may need.



ClickDensity

More than a Heat Maps ClickDensity is a full usability toolkit. With a unique integrated A/B Test suite, you can trial and analyze improvements at the touch of a button. It takes minutes to set-up. From the second you see the reports, they just make sense. Complements your existing web analytics for an unbeatable analysis of visitor trends.



Know more about Usability

Share your thoughts and ideas about website usability, leave a comment

Importance of Sitemaps In SEO

Importance of Sitemap in Search Engine Optimization

Sitemaps provide a way for Web sites to specify what pages within the site should be indexed and what new content has been added. Basically, it provides a communication channel between the search engine and the site. 

 A site map (or sitemap) is a graphical representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. 

 A hierarchical diagram of the pages on a Web site, starting with the home page at the top. A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the Web site for Web designers. 

 A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of site URLs and related attributes detailing what should be indexed within a specific site. It must be UTF-8 encoded. The following XML elements are required in the sitemap file: The webmaster can generate a sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information. 

Benefits of Sitemap: 

 · Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. 

 · This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. 

 · Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large. 

 · The site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

   

 The Importance of Sitemaps From SEO's View: 

A Sitemap is the representation of websites architecture and contains links to all the pages of a website. A Sitemap can be of two types, each having its own distinct purpose. 

 HTML Sitemap: 

 An HTML sitemap is created with keeping a visitor in mind. It helps the visitor in navigating the website along with giving a clear view of a websites sections and categories. 

 

XML Sitemap: 

While the HTML Sitemap is designed with keeping visitors in mind, an XML Sitemap is designed specifically for Search Engines. Search Engines send their robots, also called a 

 

Why Is A Sitemap.xml File Important: 

Searchbots to index a website wherein they encounter the sitemap.xml file. 

1. The Sitemap simply lists out all the pages of a website in front of the searchbots so that the searchbots know about all the pages in the website and index them. 

2. A Sitemap helps the searchbot in distributing Page rank across all the web pages with the help of tag. This ensures that all the inner pages of a website also have a good page rank. 

3. The tag of the sitemap.xml file gives the searchbot an indication of how frequently the web page will change. This tells the searchbot to visit the website with the same frequency to index the changes made. 

One can either generate a sitemap.xml file manually or there are free sitemap generator tools available online to help generate a sitemap. Though most of the free sitemap generator tools have a limit of up to 500 pages, Paid tools give you the freedom to create a sitemap of unlimited pages. 

A Typical Sitemap.xml File Looks Like: 

< ?xml version= “1.0” encoding=”UTF-8” ?> < url> < loc> http://www.yoursite.com/ < priority>0.9 < changefreq>weekly < /url>

 < url> < loc>http://www.yoursite.com/about-us.html < priority>0.8 < changefreq>weekly < /url> < url>

 < loc>http://www.yoursite.com/services.htm < priority>0.8 < changefreq>monthly < /url> 

 < url> < loc>http://www.yoursite.com/contact.htm < priority>0.7 < changefreq>weekly < /url>

Worst SEO Mistakes You Can Make

Biggest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Mistakes Expert Make
Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.

1.Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc.
2.Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’ or ‘there’.
3.Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.
4.Use search engine friendly permalinks. Make sure the URLs do not have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters.
5.Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.
6.Do not use underscores (_), use hyphens (-) instead.
7.Do not use session id in URLs.
8.Use sticky posts.
9.Use tag clouds.
10.Have a category description paragraph.
11.Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Use category specific RSS plugin for WordPress)
12.Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.
13.Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain.
14.Research the target audience and aim the site content appropriately.
15.Keep the content up to date. Visitors don’t like outdated content. Updating the content frequently also attracts the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.

Have you identified any SEO mistakes that you commonly make?

Seo Tips for Launching a New Website

Basic Tips For Launching a New Website While Keeping SEO In Mind
Search Engines like Google and Yahoo have become intelligent in the past 4-5 years. It is very difficult to game search engines nowadays by manipulating tags and keyword stuffing. For a new site it may take 6 to 9 months to achieve competitive rankings at Google. From SEO point of view, I recommend the following steps for launching a new website.

i) Registering a domain name with similar Keywords
Pick a domain name which either has keywords associated with your product/service or your brand name. It is better to go for short domain names which are easy to remember. If your target market is global, go for a .com domain. If you are targeting a particular country or language, it is better to register a domain name in TLD of that country. For example, go for a .jp or .co.jp domain, if you are targeting Japan. I recommend you to register the domain for at least 2 years; more the better to gain the trust of search engines.

ii) Domain Hosting
Host your site with a reliable hosting company. Stay away from companies which allow hosting of pharmacy, gambling and adult sites, or have a history of serving spam. If you are targeting a particular country/language, it is advised to host your site in that country to boost your rankings in the local search engines for that country/language.

iii) Registering with Search Engines
Since search engines give important to domain aging and can track parameters like the registration date & first crawled date, you better register your site with search engines as early as possible. Even if your site is not fully ready, it is better to make a temporary one-two page site and register with the search engines at the earliest. Getting indexed in MSN may take only 3-4 days, whereas it may take 2-3 months to get indexed in Google and Yahoo. To speed up this process, you should build incoming links from authority websites. More the links a site receives, the less it is ignored by the search engines. It also reduces the Google sandboxing time for new sites. Submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central also ensures that your site would get crawled and indexed regularly.

iv) Build trust with Search Engines
To build trust with the search engines, you should build your incoming links and content at a regular pace. Keep your content unique and relevant to your products/services. Building links from relevant websites will boost your rankings.

v) Have Web Analytics In Place; Monitor Results
The only way to know whether you are satisfying your goal (and delivering results to your business to make up for the investment!) is to track and monitor your increase in visitors and conversions. As a general rule, if your end result is too design focused, you’ll see fewer leads; If it’s too search focused, you’ll see fewer conversions. With balance in mind, results you will have…your boss will thank you for it!