New WordPress Theme Launched!

Ok, I’ve finally managed to spend a good portion of my Saturday evening tweaking, testing and configuring this new theme locally. Seems like I’ve ironed out most of the bugs I encountered earlier and viola, this theme is finally live!

Since I couldn’t be bothered hacking the social bookmarking plugin using jQuery, I decided to look for a plugin that uses jQuery already. SocioFluid is a great social bookmarking plugin that uses jQuery. It has a cool feature which is similar to your navigational bar on mac computers.

I’ve also added adsense in the header and within the posts in hopes of generating some dollars from this website, but mainly to try it out and see what it is capable of since I’m working in the search industry. It’d be quite a handy piece of knowledge to have and master :)

There are also 4 125×125 banner ads available for advertising, so feel free to contact me if you’re interested. Most likely I’ll charge a flat rate rather than CPM/CPC models as I couldn’t be bothered going through tracking systems.

If you do encounter some strange or unexpected behaviours on the site, please let me know and I’ll fix it. Obviously I’m unable to go through each post and make sure they all look correct.

Tell me what do you guys think. Is it better? Worse?

Better I hope :)

Blogger: Social Bookmarking Widget – Link Baiting

I promised Hong Yi’s mum that I would write a social bookmarking widget for her blog on Google‘s Blogger so I’ve spent part of my valentine’s day writing this widget for her.

The purpose of utilising social bookmarking widgets is to allow you to expand your reach of readership to literally hundred and thousands to millions of readers on these social bookmarking websites. Therefore, you are not limited to your normal direct traffic, existing referrals traffic and organic traffic but if I may use a SEO term, using ‘link baiting’ to bait readers in an ocean of readers to your website in the hopes of driving traffic, increasing visibility and branding, and ultimately getting links to your website.

One of the most important SEO aspects is link building or in other words, to increase the amount of links to your website. It creates authority, trust and relevancy to your website, thus improving your organic rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also read my post on how to optimise your page.

Of course it is important to remember that before you submit your own articles, make sure that you write well, have a very attractive and optimised title, and a great first paragraph. In addition, write about what people would love to read about, things that are useful, relevant and informative to them. Never submit articles that are too “salesy” in nature and obviously useless information to the general public (i.e. how you’re emo-ing about the rainy weather).

Include pictures, videos and space out your paragraphs. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a screen full of words bunched up together.

Social Bookmarking Widget

I’ve only created this widget to include some of my favourite social bookmarking websites. Feel free to modify the code and stylesheet to your preference.

Here’s a screenshot of what the widget should look like once implemented (highlighted in yellow). You can visit my old blog to see how it looks like (make sure you turn off javascript or else you’ll be redirected back here).

Before you do anything to the Blogger template, please make sure you that save a backup before making any changes!
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