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So you took the big step and removed no-follow tags from your blog’s comments and/or trackbacks? Great choice but it’s not quite over yet. There’s quite a few smart (at least by their reasoning) people that will try to trick your willingness to reward comments and links by using your blog as a free linkback service for their blogs.

How to find a DoFollow spam comment

The first thing to look for is the name of the commenter itself. Proper commenters use their name or online alias, or at most the domain name of their site. Spammers instead use keywords to promote relevancy to the page they’re linking to. So for example, someone with a blog about making money online would use “Make money blogging” as his name, so he would get a link to his blog with relevant keywords.

Also the link url is always suspect. Beware of deep linking. I had a guy comment on my “7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites” article with the name “Blogging tools” and the url pointing to his blogging tools category on his blog. Smart yes? Well.. not really. Nice try, but when i do decide to run a free link service, I’ll be sure to announce it.

Comments on old posts can be used for the same reason. An older, well linked post with PageRank is a good target for a spammer to get some links back to his page. Use this handy plug in to automatically close comments and trackbacks on older posts.

I also make it a habit to follow links from commenter to check out their site and will generally delete comments with links that point to made-for-AdSense sites and article scraper sites.

DoFollow spam is obnoxious and annoying. It provides little to no value to the discussion, most spammers will just try to stroke the poster’s ego and make it look like they are contributing.

I use these plugins on this and other sites and highly recommend them.

Feedburner Feedsmith
Redirects RSS requests to your Feedburner feed.

Fuzzy recent posts
Display recent posts on the sidebar.

Live
Shows real time visitor statistics for your Wordpress blog.

Popularity Contest
Display your most popular posts. Highly customizable.

Subscribe2
Manage e-mail subscriptions.

What would Seth Godin do
Shows a greeting to new users and invites them to sign up for the RSS feed

All In One SEO pack
Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress.

WP-Cache
Ultra fast caching plugin.

Akismet
Spam blocker.

Adsense Deluxe
Ad management plugin.

Getting a domain with an existing Google Pagerank and several backlinks might be better than building up PR yourself, it takes considerable time and effort to get a domain from zero to a respectable point. With these tools you can see listings of expired and soon-to-expire domains, and place a backorder to grab the domain as soon as it expires.

Network Solutions expiring domain names
Alphabetical lists and a search engine for domains under the Network Solutions hosting company.

Inet411.com’s Expired domain with PR list.
This tool will also display Pagerank for each domain and allow you to place a backorder on the domain. There are several PR6 and PR5 domains on the list.

Domain Broadcasting expiring domains search tool
Allows advanced search and listing for registered users only, only shows results for the first 6 pages if you are not registered for a pay account. Use the other tools first.

If you are planning on getting an expiring domain you should check for a fake Pagerank with this tool.

Writing consistently in English has been the hardest thing about blogging, everything i write always seems better in my head than when i type it down. There is no real solution when English isn’t your first language, you just need to constantly practice and evolve your writing to a point where you’re happy with it. Below are a few ideas you can use to better your grasp of the written English.

1. Think in English

Just do your thinking in English instead of your own language. This is hard to get used to at first but it will help to get your mind in the habit of writing more than a few sentences in English.

2. Watch movies without the subtitles

Again, this will help you to get your mind to work in English and not your native language. Listening to spoken English will also help you catch new words and how they are used.

3. Do not translate what you write in your own language

You will always find inconsistence when translating between your own language and English. Think about how the text will seem to an English reader, not yourself.

4. Have a native English speaker go through your writing and make suggestions.

This will help your writing the most, and the more people read it, the better. You will often get different suggestions from different people depending on their expectations and what they are used to reading

5. Read other blogs

There’s a certain style and jargon that goes through every niche that might take you some time to pick up, especially on some concepts that don’t translate well between languages. Take sailing for example, a native English speaker might use a word to describe something that will only seem natural to English speaking readers and translates to a completely different thing in another language. One of my favorite blogs is CopyBlogger, which has excellent style on his articles.

6. Read books, but don’t use book writing as a blueprint for blog writing

Books will help grow your vocabulary but “bookish” writing is very different from blogging, which is more like a conversation between writer and readers.

7. Proofread. Then proofread it again.

I never proofread enough, and end up noticing spelling errors a few minutes after posting. This is important for any blogger, even more so when English isn’t your first language.

8. Stop using the dictionary.

Just keep writing what seems natural for you, and keep the dictionary and thesaurus for when you’re completely stuck.

9. Sign up for a forum and start threads.
Forum posting will help you practice your writing in a much more relaxed environment and quickly compare it to other posts. And forum posts are generally much closer to the average blog post than a book or tv and will help you work out a more fluid writing style.

Don’t forget to proofread

These are just a few general guidelines that worked for me, it does not mean that it will work for everyone, but it’s a good starting point to improve your writing. The most important thing to keep in mind is to never stop practicing writing better. As your experience grows so will your writing improve and your writing will be more fluid and natural.

Twelve simple ways to promote your new blog.

1. Add an About Me/Contact page
2. Submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
3. Replace the default template with something better
4. Register your feeds to as many rss directories as you can.
5. Install All in one SEO and Akismet spam filter
6. Sign up at technorati and claim your blog
7. Comment on five other blogs with subject similar to yours
8. Add the address to your forum signature and reply to 5 threads
8b. If you don’t frequent a forum with interests close to your subject, start now.
9. Stumble your main page on StumbleUpon
10. Submit an article to Digg & Reddit, and ask some friends to vote it up
11. Add your blog to a blog directory
12. Sign up for Google AdSense, even if you don’t plan to have ads right away

Something i keep seeing on blogging tip lists is this: Be passionate about your subject. It’s also an idea that’s completely ridiculous. You don’t need to be passionate about something to blog about it, you don’t even need to like it. All you need is enough knowledge on the subject to keep a regular posting schedule, and enough drive to go through the process of building a blog from zero.

When you’re monetizing a blog, treat the process like it’s work. All those hours spent promoting and optimizing for search engines might be better spent playing a game, but really, it wouldn’t be called work if it was fun to do.

If you haven’t heard yet, Smashing Magazine, the blog that, uh, smashes web stuff into your screen has redesigned. The thing i noticed the second the page loaded was their navigation. They moved the menu on the very top of the page, even over the Smashing logo. The new design puts the focus on the current news and the popular posts sidebar which sports over 50 of the most popular posts (i stopped counting at 50). This is a great way to reduce bounce rate by providing a long list of past content and smashing magazine has a huge amount of great information in older posts.

The color scheme and style of the site remains pretty much the same, so it’s not going to surprise many of the old readers. For a blog, it’s a really big decision to move the navigation and topics on the very top of the page.

Northxeast.com also has an unusual design for the main page. The only news that appear on the main page are posts titles, and not a word from the article’s content. NorthxEast can do that because they already have a reputation for solid writing and informative articles and their visitors are sure to click on links if they like the title.

The Northxeast titles are some of the best entry titles i’ve seen on a blog, if you need some title inspiration for your entries, definitely take a look at the posts they publish.

Do you blog from work? Do you also blog from home, a net cafe and a friend’s house? Well, i do. On Friday afternoon i needed some files on a future article and i realized i had everything on my work pc, i wouldn’t be able to get to these files before Monday. This happens far too often and it’s become a permanent setback to always having to carry around a flash card or a cd. Not to mention i keep forgetting that damn things everywhere.

A man with a plan

During the next weeks i will be moving the bulk of my blogging and general office-type activities online. Productivity web apps are a dime a dozen these days, even Google is getting into the game with Google Docs. My first attempt to move my work online will be eyeOS, an open source web desktop solution.

My needs from an online desktop
There are two ways to move from the real desktop to an online one, either find a solution that handles all desktop applications under one roof, or combine different tools and services. Using a different tools is a more flexible solution, but managing an ever growing list on logins and passwords is not my idea of ‘web productivity’.

Consistency between applications is also important. Office apps must save documents that are compatible with everything (including ms office), image editors should save jpg, gif and png files with some sort of ’save for web’ function.

No fees

Everyone wants something for nothing. I’d be willing to pay for a web office solution some time in the future, but not now, and not before it’s become indispensable for my blogging.

Decent looking

Thats the designer in me speaking, but if i’m using something daily, i want it to look great.

What i plan to replace with web based software:
Basic image editing with Photoshop

You can’t beat photoshop for design work, but i want the ability to do some basic editing, adding text to an image and saving it for web use without it. I’ve used some of them in the past and found them as an ok tool for non designers, now i’ll have to find one for everyday use.

Text editing

I keep most of my blog writing on the wordpress dashboard, which i find lacking to say the least.

File storage

I need access to files from everywhere, with a decent file upload and download limit. For this, i could live with just having a simple ftp account on serverdome to upload and download files from.

RSS feeds

I use feedreader right now, which, while excellent software only runs on windows machines.

This post was written using the text editor of the eyeOS web desktop and the images edited and saved with with Pixenate.

Search Engine Optimization has become such a debated topic, it’s hard to find a technical blog that hasn’t touched the issue in the past (and i see no reason why this one should not). If you’re just beginning with SEO for your blog the four tools below are a great way to get started.

SEO Quake add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer

The SEO Quake addon for both the major browsers helps your optimization efforts. From the SEO Quake toolbar you can see the Pagerank, Google index, Google linked pages, and similar results for Alexa and Yahoo for the page you’re viewing, as well as SEO information for links in search engine results. One interesting feature is an automatic keyword combination extraction from whatever page you’re currently viewing.

All in One SEO Pack Wordpress plugin

This plugin for Wordpress will optimize your blog to be crawled and indexed by search engines. It protects you from duplicated content, optimizes the entries titles and automatically generates meta information. The way Wordpress manages it’s categories and permalinks is already excellent and makes it very easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, and this plugin will help fill the gaps between some of the more technical aspects of SEO.

Website Grader SEO tool

This online tool will analyze your site on the fly and provide a report on where the site is lacking in Search Engine Optimization. It did miss some minor details when querying serverdome.org but provides good suggestions on where to focus you optimization efforts.

Google Adwords Keyword tool

This is a free tool by Google to assist advertisers using its Adwords network but we can use it for our own benefits. You can see exactly how competitive a keyword or a combination is, how many people search for each keyword, even how find out trends in keyword queries. While it isn’t a dedicated solution to optimizing keywords, this tool by Google is always my first stop when researching keyword SEO.

Conclusion

Like i mentioned in the title, the links above are nothing more than tools, and SEO has as much to do with tools and software as it has to do with creativity and knowledge. Third party software and plugins can help so much, but operating and writing with SEO in mind will take you to the next step. Blogs structure is generally excellent for SEO and most bloggers need do do very little to have their sites indexed and crawled by search engines.

One final tip

I’m surprised this is not mentioned more often in wordpress tutorials. When you first install wordpress, change the permalink structure to something simpler. For example yesterday’s post on ad placement had the following url structure: http://www.serverdome.org/how-the-top-bloggers-display-their-ads-percentages-and-numbers/. Having the name of the post as the adress instead of a string of seemingly random characters will help both search engines and readers. To change the permalink structure just log in to your wordpress installation, go to Options, Permalinks and as a custom permalink structure enter “/%postname%/” (without the quotes).

We are celebrating(?) the first ten days of serverdome.org today. Getting this blog up and running proved both harder and easier to do than i anticipated. The technical part was easy, wordpress made everything a breeze and having experience installing and tweaking it for others certainly helped. Keeping up with a daily schedule was the hard part even during these first few days. I decided to keep a plan for the next thirty days of running serverdome and publish it here as an added incentive to stick with it.

Write at least one post a day
Making time each day for writing articles, my plan is to not only have at least a post a day, but at all times have at least the articles for the next two or three days already completed. Sitting down and writing a quality article to post that same day is almost impossible. The plan is 30 articles in 30 days without having to resort to top ten links posts to keep my pace.

Work less on the blog
I spend way too much time poking around analytics statistics, testing wordpress plugins and generally tweaking the site. It’s part of the oh my shiny new toy effect of having a new blog. I’ll but aside a few hours each weekend for improving the site and statistic crunching but stay away from analytics and the serverdome template during the week.

Write better copy
Sweet and simple. And hard when English is not your first language.

Improve on the Plickr template
Add support to the Plickr wordpress theme for many of the popular plugins like Flickr Album and Related Entries and rewrite part of the code to be more readable.

Things that would not deserve bold text on their own:
Comment on another blog once a day, fix some of the glaring SEO mistakes, remove or replace the blogrush widget with something better and finally open comments on the blog.

Most of the ideas here came from problogger.com’s “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” feature. If you’re just beginning with your blog and want something to read that will help you for a long time that is the place to start.