Simple Blogger Tutorials

There are quite few good Syntax Highlighters out there, one of them is “ Prettify ” which is simple and lightweight. Prettify states that it can automatically guess and highlight code snippets for many languages (best on C-like and HTML-like ) and also has many language extensions, if you need one. So I setup a simple demo to test it and the result was quite good.

Adding Description Meta tag is one of the good SEO practices. These tags are HTML attributes which tell the search engines about the content of the page and describes it. Description tags don’t helps in ranking high within search result pages but helps in good clickthrough rates. Many years back, search engines used to show the result snippets of these Description Meta tags but recently some search engines, like Google, shows preview snippets depending on user searches. Just like any other top CMS, like WordPress.org, blogs powered by Blogger also have the feature to add Description Meta tags to every page, you just need to enable some settings, in this tutorial let us see how.

Why use any other translate widgets with or without images of country flags when Google translator widget can translate texts of any webpage and is capable of translating to 64 different languages (and increasing) automatically and instantly to readers speaking language. Google translator for websites can be added to any website or CMS, like WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc. with ease. While the steps of adding this widget is all same but here I will mainly write about how it can be added to Blogger blogs. Blogger has this widget, you just need to go to your blog’s Layout tab and click “Add a Gadget” link. A popup page will open, scroll down below and you will find the Google Translate gadget. But there aren’t much options to select from to customize it, that’s why let’s add it in a different way.

After the introduction of Google +1 button (Plus One), it has become a trend for the publishers to add it to their websites and blogs, whether it is hosted on Blogger or WordPress. So the general question that will pop up in our minds is what is so popular about this +1 button ? Well, the answer is, when you finds a web content to be useful and click Google +1 button to share it on Google+ , it will not only help your friends and contacts on Google+ Circle to get to know about the interesting content but will also help them to find more relevant search results on Google.

If you are looking for free open-source fonts to design your blog’s texts then nothing is better than Google web fonts. Blogger has been using Google web fonts for quite a long time, you can find it by clicking the Customize button found under Blogger Template tab of your blog. But there aren’t many web fonts available to choose from as many as the font directory has, isn’t it? Or you have a custom Blogger template where you want to add web fonts. Let’s start with Merienda as our example font and see how we can add this to Blogger.

Previously I had written about animated floating widget for Blogger which was or still is popular. But many didn’t liked it for the animated effect and wanted it to be fixed while scrolling. Many requested for this and after giving a thought I am writing this for you. So let’s get started with it and add a fixed sharing buttons widget that will float to the left (or to right) of the Blogger post section.

On April 24, 2012, Google released a new search algorithm , later it was named Penguin. This was mainly meant to stop “webspam”, that is, mainly to bring down the sites which use “black hat” methods to rank well in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), like, violating webmasters guidelines , keyword stuffing, participating in link schemes, etc. When I read it I was happy that after the Panda update , Google moved a step forward to stop those spam sites who wishes to rank well within SERPs by shortcut methods. But as days passed, I became very sad and depressed as I found out that my blog also got hit by this update. My traffic dropped below 50%, some of my great posts cannot be found within SERPs and some went very down.