How to Erase Arrows Before Links on WordPress Sidebars

This is another post for all of you Wordpress bloggers out there. I spent a good amount of time searching for this little trick that allowed me to delete two little arrows that appeared before every link I made in the sidebar. It was something small but it was bothering me for days. If you know what i'm talking about, it's probably bothering you as well.

Anyways, if you would like to get ride of the two little arrows pointing to every one of your links on your sidebar then you need to go to your main css style page. "style.css" and look for a code that look anything like this:




Try searching for the word "before" and if it's listed with the sidebar tabs that's most likely it. Another example of what it might look like is this"

And just delete it, but remember to always copy and paste the entire code into a program like notepad before you make any chances, so if something goes wrong you can paste the content back into your blog template and be good as new! I hoped this help and I hope you didn't spend too much time looking how to fix this solution because not too many people have written about it. I was certainly surprised.

WordPress Plug-ins

With everyone reading this blog and creating their own blogs, there are going to be billions out there. With billions of blogs out there, how are you going to make your blog stand out to search engines? No matter how good your blog is written, you might not get any attention without have a strong presence in search engine results. If you're creating your blog with WordPress, I have compiled a list of 20 very useful SEO plug-ins to help make your blog presence be known on search engines. Check out this list:

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.
Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.
Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “GoogleGoogle,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.
HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.
Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.
Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.
Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.
Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.
SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.
SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.
SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.
SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.
SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.
SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.
SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.
SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.
SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.
Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.
Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.
TGFI.net SEO Wordpress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

Get Paid to Blog?

On a completely irrelevent sidenote (sorry!) I wanted to discuss the question on getting paid to blog. Does it work? I'm not talking about what my experiment is trying to accomplish here. I'm talking about the very ads that are placed on my blog, even I clicked them and it got me to thinking. Besides the ads on my blog, are there other ways to make money of my blog and my ever so apparent blogging expertise? Now usually I'm not such a sucker for website ads, but I've heard so much about making money off blogs that I thought there must be legit websites out there.

So far, the sites that I have read about and taken a look at have been

1) PayPerPost
2) ReviewMe
3) SponsoredReviews
4) FreeLance Home Writers

The top two, according to popular demand seem to be PayPerPost and ReviewMe. SponsoredReview also seems like a good choice, but it does not have quite as high of a success rate. FreeLance Home Writers is a different service where they actually pay you (larger amounts of money) to write articles, and there is a start up cost. I personally don't work with companies that require a start up fee, but I have heard some good things from a few people (mainly journalists and other writers).

Does anyone else have any personal experience with any of these sites? I would be very interested to hear the opinions of others because my blog is just a baby blog and does not qualify yet. When it does, I fully intend to test a couple of these sites but I would really like to hear back from people who have had some success or have had failures dealing with Paid to Blog sites.

Using FileZilla as a FTP Server

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, Filezilla is an extremely useful tool. Yesterday as I was messing around with my WordPress blog: http://occoastalnews.com, I discovered the usefulness of Filezilla. While I have not had a need for FileZilla yet on my Blogger blog, I thought I would talk about it for the other people that are using Wordpress or another blog platform. FileZilla is a fast, reliable, and secure FTP/SFTP client that allows you to transfer files between Web sites and PCs running Windows.

Filezilla is very useful when you are running another blog platform that allows you to edit the actual template. (Blogger has less customization so most likely you will not need it) But, on my Wordpress blog I have been able to backup my template, find the banner images and customize them to look like my own and customize pretty much anything on the template. I spend about two days straight trying to learn how to do all of this, so I'm not going to be able to write about all of it but I will post helpful links and shortcuts to cut down on the time you need to spend. I do have to say that Google has provided the best tutorials. I have simply typed in what I have been trying to do and I've been able to find quick answers. For more complicated matters, try searching Youtube for videos on what to do.

Helpful YouTube videos on WordPress Editing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atKFIUBXxLA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONwxdAkhZgA

If you're looking more towards how to use FileZilla with WordPress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4XdkHJRMhg

Adding Google AdSense to Your Blog

I've been to numerous website now and I've found theres a big discussion on whether or not to ad Adsense in the beginning of your blog deve lopment or when you already have a large amount of traffic. Well, if you look at it as a business standpoint, I would say why not add it right from the beginning. As long as it does not clutter or shadow the real objective of your blog, I don't see how it can possible be a negative. Depending on your blog platform, I have found that it is pretty easy to add advertisement, like Adsense, to your blog platform. *Especially if you're using blogger.


Blogger

There is really no instructions needed for adding Adsense to your blog while using Blogger. There are too ways to add advertisements to your Blogger blog. Either do it in the Layout Tab and add the ads as if their were any other add-on or widget. Or, select the monetize tab and select the preferred layout from there. Even if you place ads in your blog using the first method, remember to still go to the Monetize tab so that Adsense knows that you've done this and so you can receive analytics.


WordPress

Wordpress is a little bit more difficult, but still all together pretty easy. If you want to do as little work as possible, select a WordPress 2.8 themes with Adsense already added and SEO optimized code. Otherwise Follow the steps below:

1) Log into Wordpress and select the Appearence link, followed by the Editor link.

Your screen should look something like this in WordPress 2.8




2) Locate the HTML pages to the right, and the one where you want to place Adsense. For this example we will use the sidebar.php.

3) Copy or write this code down:



4) Paste it in the desired location: (See Locations Descriptions Below)

For the bottom of the Sidebar column, paste the above code in this locations in a default sidebar.php:

For the ad to be right at the top of the page:

For the bottom of your posts:

Have fun with it, mess around with the locations a little bit, but remember to always back up your work. Either copy and paste the entire page code (before editing) to a program like notepad. Or download Filezilla, which will be recommended and explained in a later post.

Also if you would like to receive more information on where/how to paste the ads in more locations, please refer to this website which was a big help to me: Link

MORE MORE MORE Traffic to Your Blog!

I was expecting to be done with todays portion of this blog experiment already but I came across another website that was EXTREMELY helpful on how to get search engines and blog directories to find your blog. So I've spent the last hour reading over this blog and following the links that are provided. I don't know if they will really bring traffic but they are all well-known sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN so I am sure they cannot hurt. Try checking out this site:

http://imhelendt.wordpress.com/2006/09/16/increasing-traffic-to-your-blog/

This site gives you about a dozen links to where to submit your site for webcrawlers. Ranging from the top sites like google, to lesser known sites like Walhello.

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN
4. Scrub the Web
5. Exact Seek
6. Alexa
7. Walhello
8. Blog Search
9. BlogPulse
10. BlogFlux
11. Blogorama
12. Popdex

* Helpful Hint - For this entire process I created a seperate email account (Yahoo!) because I don't know how much spam I'll receive, but I'm sure it will be a lot. Also, most of the sites are going to ask you to verify your email address so make sure to use a real email address.

If anyone knows of other similar sites that have different, yet still useful content please feel free to comment and post the link.

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