Helpful tips, latest gadgets and News
by Tricia
If you’re interested in learning more about maintaining, promoting and marketing your site you might want to visit the WebmasterWorld forum.
I hang out there every so often in order to learn more about which affiliates people are using to monetize their site, when Google is going to update websites page ranks and tool bar PR, and just to keep in touch with the webmaster community.
You can learn quite a bit just by reading forums like this one.
by Tricia
I’ve found that while a number of people have mastered the art of using their WordPress blog to write text based posts they often have trouble adding images. Since there are a lot of bloggers out there who are not true webmasters in the sense that they know how to write basic code I thought I’d occasionally write some easy to follow instructions.
How to place an image to a WordPress post:
In an earlier post I told you how to upload an image into a post. Here I will discuss how to center an image, or wrap text to the left or right of an image.
Note: This technique might work well with other blogging platforms too. I’m only writing it as wordpress instructions since that is the blogging platform that I’ve used the most.
To center a picture just either center it while you are in “rich text editor” mode, or put this extra code around the image code itself:
< p align="center" > image code < /p >
To have a photo to the left or right of a paragraph you must have the paragraph tags around the particular paragraph that you’re sticking the image in :
ie < p >text of paragraph < /p >
with your image code beside the first paragraph tag
< p > < image code > text < /p >
BUT … inside the image code simple put align=”left” or “right” near the img tag like this
< p > < img align="left" rest of image code .... < /p >
Please eliminate all of the spaces between the tag codes when you place this code on your site. For instance < p > shouldn’t have spaces between the < and > tags.
BTW hope this helps!
by Tricia
Which sites should you be sure to get listed in so that you will gain more visitors? Well, everyone wants visitors and being listed in the search engines won’t guarantee more visitors if you don’t have some half decent quality on your site, but it will certainly help.
Whenever I create a new website I go around to all of these sites and submit my url:
Google: This link takes you directly to the Google add your url page. You only need to submit the index page of your site. If you’ve set up your navigation on your page, created a sitemap on your site or by using Google Sitemaps, Google’s spiders will eventually crawl your whole site.
Yahoo: This link should take you directly to Yahoo’s free submit site page. You’ll need to sign in with your Yahoo I.D. in order to submit your site. Again, you only need to submit the top level page of your site to get Yahoo to begin spidering your site. Alta Vista, and All the Web pull their results from Yahoo’s Overture listings.
Yahoo Site Explorer – I’ve also listed all of my websites and Blogs on Yahoo Site explorer. You can list your site url and your site’s RSS feed in the explorer.
MSN Live Search URL Submission – I’ve found that sites get listed fairly quickly on the MSN search engines when I submit there.
DMOZ – Open Directory Project – A number of search engines pull their search results directly from the listings on DMOZ. Netscape, and AOL are among the popular search engines that now use the Open Directory Project. You’ll need to scroll through the DMOZ directory until you find an area that suits your site, and then submit or suggest your url in that area. It can take a long long time to get listed in DMOZ, but don’t give up hope.
MSN Submit It – get your site listed on MSN as well. I’ve found that when I submit my new sites to MSN they get picked up quickly.
If you have a blog you should submit to these sites as well:
Technorati – If you want visitors this site is one of the best to get listed on if you have a blog. Sign up for an account at Technorati, and then select “Claim Blog” and follow the directions to get your site listed.
The Truth Laid Bare – Another important site to be listed on. Register for an account, and then add your blog. You’ll have to put some code on your site so that the Truth laid Bare site can track your blogs popularity and links in and out.
There are plenty more search engines and blog directories to list your sites in, but these are the ones to begin with, and in my opinion are the ones that are most important if you want to begin getting visitors.