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Visitor comments on your blog can be a rich source of interesting content for your blog. Most bloggers edit comments to correct spelling and grammar, take out abusive language or just make them more interesting.  Many blogs allow comments from visitors.  And there are just as many that don’t.  I know of some bloggers that have issues with comments and so promptly disallow it even on blog platforms that do.  So how can you make your blog site interesting without comments?

You can use programs like ForumUp that allows you to attach a free forum on your blog. That way, you can allow your visitors to click on the forum link where they can post their comments.  Another is to invite readers to submit articles as guest writers to your blog.  You can then edit these articles and post them.  Just make sure to acknowledge your guest writers.

Flash designers might rejoice that Google does index flash sites.  But for the webmaster, bear in mind that Flash sites will require a lot more tweaking than HTML pages to get a content-based site rank high.  Search engine crawlers use your site’s text content to determine relevancy and while Google can now parse SWF files to see textual content in the file, most Flash animation just make it difficult if not impossible for Google to make out the text right. 

Most, if not all, Flash developers enjoy breaking up text and graphic elements for animation effects and this can confuse Google’s parsing algorithms.
If you need to have that fancy Flash for your website, try to discourage your Flash developers from too much text animation.  Flash is perhaps the best thing to happen in making your website look great.  But just don’t expect to get great SEO results.

One of the worst nightmares of any SEO practitioner is to learn that the site he has labored to get a high Google page rank has been upgraded with all Flash pages.  That essentially throws all the SEO work out the window.  While Google has enhanced its search engine algorithms to recognize and index Flash based websites, there’s still no evidence that SEO works on them.

Using Flash no doubt creates an engaging and appealing website, if the designer knows what to do with it.  While SEO can be done, here are some tips to make it even more SEO friendly.

• Continue to use keyword-descriptive page titles and meta tags.
• Embed your flash file into HTML pages with regular text links on your internal pages.  Otherwise, create non-Flash versions of your site or create text representations using noembed tags.
• Rather than having your entire site in one Flash site, break it up into different Flash files embedded on HTML pages.
• Use JavaScript plug-in for detecting Flash that are XHTML compliant.  They are said to be better than non embedded tags.

Getting your website or blog hosted carries a bandwidth limitation spelled out in the hosting package you took.  Unless you signed up for a huge or unlimited bandwidth, you need to make sure you make use of your bandwidth allocation intelligently.  Bear in mind that aiming to increase traffic to your site means eating up your bandwidth allocation at any given time.  While you can get a high page rank and generate the most traffic, you have to content with your bandwidth.  The last thing you want is to be suspended by your web hosting service for exceeding your allocation.

That often means making your website easy to load to as many of your anticipated site traffic.  Images, Videos or Flash animation are fine but you need to strike a happy balance between spicing up your site and making it easy to load.  Minimize your images to just 20kb and your videos to 100mb.  Better still, get your images and videos hosted in a picture and video site and just leave a thumbnail on your website.

You can ask your web host to that for you.  In fact, this is one basic service that most web hosting providers do for its clients – count the number of hits to your PHP site. Otherwise you can do it on your own using a PHP that your site can all.  Create a counter.php and a hits.php files in the same folder using this script.

<?php
$fd = fopen( ‘hits.php’, ‘r’ ); // Open the file to read
while( ! feof( $fd ) )
{$tmp = fgets( $fd ); //Get the. number of hits into tmp variable.}
$tmp = $tmp + 1; //Increase count by 1.
fclose( $fd ); //Close  file opened for reading.
$fd = fopen( ‘hits.php’, ‘w’ ); //Open the file for writing.
fputs( $fd, $tmp ); //Write the data.
fclose( $fd ); //Close file.
echo “$tmp”;
?>
Then embed this code into your PHP web page.
<?php
include(”counter.php”);
?>

If you’re doing SEO for your blog or website to improve your Alexa and Technorati  ranking, the Webmaster’s Tool from Google’s Webmaster Central has been enhanced precisely for this purpose and should help webmasters in this area.  It has been improved to show a list of external and internal links to your site in tabular form and you can click to view each as well as download in CSV format.

Submitting your blog or web site at the Webmaster Central will allow you to view these links so you can better monitor each to be sure you don’t have any dead back links to your site.

It was a great discovery to take the bus to work.  After I took my car for a most needed engine overhaul, I thought I’d take a week off, but as soon as I found the joys of commuting in Glendale, I think I better contribute to saving planet earth with less use of my carbon dioxide emitting car.  It isn’t as hard as I thought.

There are some things I’ve learned, like waking up early to get to the bus depot, keeping small change in your pocket for the bus fare, and, since it takes almost an hour to get to the office, I had to make sure my iPod or netbook is fully charged.  It’s interesting to discover that my WiFi works and could surf the internet while commuting.  Doing productive work on the bus is entirely new to me.  But it sure grows on you.

There are many start-up businesses in Europe and the US that have made remarkable strides with online portals taking on the world as their market literally is on their fingertips.  There’s hardly any capital outlay that traditional business would need, like having a store and middlemen to distribute your products.  All you need is some tech savvy colleague who can design and publish your e-commerce site on the net and some people to get inventories and shipping done.

This should very well be the business model for entrepreneurs in developing countries where capital can be difficult to get.  It’s just unfortunate that where online commerce has the potential to beef up the local economy, they can get encumbered with slow internet bandwidths and the cost of hosting. Hopefully, these things will change as telecommunication and computer hardware costs settle to more affordability.