Using RSS Feeds for Incoming Links

Getting Search Engine Spiders to your most recent content is always a priority for most webmasters. Sometimes even getting the spiders to update your new content at all can take time when you have a new website. Here’s a tip for newer sites that should get the spiders going crazy & eating your content up.
There are a number of sites that aggregate your RSS feed & turn it into a static HTML page. This means you can submit your feed & the spiders will be able to find & follow those links.
Advantages include:

The link has the anchor text of your title
You can have upwards of 10 links on some pages
Title of the page can be chosen, or can be the title of your blog

Here’s an example of what i’m talking about on Feedburner:
Earners Blog Feedburner

Because I show the 30 most recent posts in my feed I get 30 links back to Earners Blog. I’m pretty sure Feedburner redirects now but the spiders still follow.
Here’s a list of other sites that allow you to use a facility like this:

Most of these services will require a backlink to the page with the RSS feeds so they initally get indexed by Google. Usually I open up a del.icio.us account & import all the RSS feeds then ping them from there. You should notice a nice increase in backlinks & spider activity after using this technique. Enjoy.

Good Internal Linking Increases SE Rankings

Beyond the creation of a website a lot of the average “internet marketers” focus is links, links, links. More to the point, External Links.
Whilst no-one can doubt that external links are all well & good why do I consistently see people not making correct use of their own Internal Linking?
After all, using the right anchor text within your own site is bound to have some sort of effect?
This blog is a testament to that exact theory. I’ve been using various internal linking strategies since launch & I’ve had nothing but sucess in a number of different areas:

Increased Indexing (A post is now normally indexed within 24 hours)
Deepness of Spider Crawling
Picking up More & More long tail searches (by using varying anchor text in links)
Ranking on Competitive Keywords with not that many “External Links”
Maintaining a high proportion of indexed pages
Reducing Supplemental Results

There are 5 ways I use internal linking for maximum effect:
Have a static sitemap, this allows SE Spiders to find all your pages & also you’ve got some nice anchor text leading to each page. I use the Dagon Design sitemap for Wordpress.
Have a related posts section after every post, this means you’re automatically linking to another 5-10 posts on EVERY PAGE. This dramatically increases the crawlability of your site & also naturally boosts your rankings. I’ve found this to work quite well even for affiliate review sites.
Interlink your pages with keywords. I use SH Autolink for this. Normally when I write a post I try to think of the most appropriate Anchor Text for it. Then I link to that page with the chosen Anchor Text. Say for example I might choose Internal Linking Strategies for this page. Any time I type that word on any other post, it’ll automatically link to this post.
Refer to other posts as often as you can. This not only helps your readers explore your blogs much deeper but it also makes other posts more relevant for more & more search terms. I try to vary the anchor text I use up to 5 times to give pages the ability to rank for larger breadth of keyword terms.
Optimize your Template to include proper anchor text. For example in my template I decided to call “Home” “Earn Money” instead. This means for every post I write I’ve got a link to my home page with the anchor text “Earn Money” instead of it saying “Home.” You can do this right across the board for things like reviews, popular posts & interviews.
These are all things that you can apply to your blog quickly & easily without paying any money & without having to hunt down any external links. Write some good content & the battle is half won

Simple jQuery Solution To A Simple Problem

When building out the Viget Extend blog, I really wanted to give some special attention to the real meat of the content: the code blocks.
After looking at some other dev blogs, it seemed like there were two types: Big Ol' Blocks and Little Snippets. The big ones deserved the full treatment: Scrollbars, full colorization, line-numbering, all of it. We accomplished this with SyntaxHighlighter, a cool JS file that handles all this work. The developers just need to slap a name="code" on their pre tags, and SyntaxHighlighter formats and colors everything properly. (View an example of the treatment)
The shorter code snips were a little trickier. We didn't want them to linebreak automatically (like code here at Inspire does) for accuracy reasons, but we didn't want to apply scrollbars to something as simple as a single line of code. The solution was a quick jQuery idea: Expanding the code block on hover, so they grow to the full width of the page.

$("pre").hover(function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "765px"}, 250);
    }, function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "437px" }, 250);
});

This was all right for a while, but soon we began running into posts like this one, where one or more of the blocks just didn't need the expanding treatment. In these cases, the jQuery effect was just annoying.
For a while, I just let it be, but this morning the answer hit me: We could probably do something to get the width of the code block's contents, and trigger the effect based on whether not the content width exceeded the block's. The first part was just setting up a variable to get the widths of both the block and the block's contents:

var contentwidth = $(this).contents().width();
var blockwidth = $(this).width();

But this isn’t quite enough, because the ”contents” traversal method needs a definite element to grab, and the pre tags only contained plain text. We needed to add an inline element to wrap the text:

$("pre").wrapInner("<span></span>");

This wraps the inside of pre tags with spans, but adds a problem: Now we’ve got errant spans showing up in our bigger, SyntaxHighlighted blocks. So we need a quick selector fix:

$("pre:not([name='code'])").wrapInner("<span></span>");

All better. The last step is to put it all together, and add the if statement that’s going to test whether the block expands or not:

$("pre:not([name='code'])").wrapInner("<span></span>");

$("pre").hover(function() {
    var contentwidth = $(this).contents().width();
    var blockwidth = $(this).width();        
    if(contentwidth > blockwidth) {
        $(this).animate({ width: "765px"}, 250);
        }
    }, function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "437px" }, 250);
});

For an example of the finished effect, and the width discrimination, see Testing For HTML Tags in Rails Plugins.

taken from www.viget.com

Delicioso the free Social Bookmark Submitter

Delicioso is a completely free program that will let you submit in mass to Social Bookmarking Networks. Pretty nifty program. This will allow the search engine spider to crawl your sites deeper & also help you remove any pages from the supplemental index.

Delicioso

Provided you have already registered with any of the following Social Bookmark networks you can just include your account details for bookmarking:

Tagtooga
Del.icio.us
Furl.net
Simpy.com
Blogmarks.net
Shadows.com
Spurl.net
Netvouz.com

This can easily take a lot of the legwork out of transferring your bookmark lists between Networks. Some additional features include bulk import of URL’s & a crawl mode that’ll crawl your website looking for all the URL’s it can find.

You can download Delicioso from the Tagtooga Website here

If you’re looking for a bookmarking application with more features you may also be interested in checking out Bookmarking Demon. This software automates account creation also

Styling Code Snippets with CSS

Although there are many useful plug-ins out there that dress up code snippets, I would like to share a technique playing with the background of the <pre> and <code> tag with CSS.

View Demo

Common Problem with FireFox

When trying to add some padding to the <pre> tag, FireFox creates a cross-browser bug where it interferes with the spaces created by the space or tab bar. See below for an example.
CSS FireFox Code Bug

Solution
We can go around this issue by nesting the <code> tag within the <pre> tag and specifying a margin in <code>.

HTML

Start out by placing your code snippet in between the <pre> and <code> tag. Note that anything inside of the <pre> tag is preserved (spaces and line breaks).

<pre><code>.classname {
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
}
</code>

CSS

<code>pre {
font-size: 12px;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
background: #f0f0f0;
border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
line-height: 20px; /*--Height of each line of code--*/
background: url(pre_code_bg.gif) repeat-y left top; /*--Background of lined paper--*/
width: 600px;
overflow: auto; /*--If the Code exceeds the width, a scrolling is available--*/
overflow-Y: hidden;  /*--Hides vertical scroll created by IE--*/
}
pre code {
margin: 0 0 0 40px;  /*--Left Margin--*/
padding: 18px 0;
display: block;
}
</code>

Make <pre> Tags Print Friendly

To make <pre> tags print friendly and make the code wrap to the next line, Tyler at www.longren.org shared a great technique to tackle this issue. If you are new to print style sheets, check out my previous tutorial.

View Demo

Conclusion

If you haven’t dressed up your code snippets yet, now is a good time. Feel free to take the background images of my samples as well. If you have any questions or know of any other techniques, please share them!
taken from http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/styling-pre-tags-with-css-code-block/

Social Bookmarking List an Ultimate Dofollow Resource

Ultimate Dofollow Social & Link Building List

14. Feb 2009 | 48 Comments

Dofollow

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

There’s sites/resources I’m missing
One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content.

Social Bookmarking Management Sites

These sites allow you to keep a record of your favourite sites & organise them accordingly. Similar to how Bookmarks work in your browser, except you can now access them from anywhere at any time. Use these to bookmark the pages you want to increase rankings too.

Social Search Sites

Social Question & Review Sites

Social Content / Article Hosting Sites

These sites allow you to host articles. Use them to leverage links to your own network of sites, some sites allow unlimited links in the articles, some are limited to 2 or 3.

Social Image Sites

Social Networking Sites

Blog Hosting Networks

Create blogs around specific topics & use them to link to your network of sites.

Forums

Connotea

Wiki

CSS Galleries

Do you have a beautifully designed CSS site? Then there’s hundreds of dofollow links out there for the taking. Submit it to the sites below.

Social Bookmark Submission Software & Websites

If you’re looking to automate any of your submissions there are a few options: