Speaking about blogging applications, these are flexible & easy-to-use software which empower you to publish the content of your website with just the click of mouse, and enhance the efficiency of bloggers like you by helping in saving a lot of your valuable time and energy.

With blogging applications, you can:

• Share your thoughts and connect with a global audience.
• Build your online presence and improve search engine rankings.
• Personalize your blog with free themes and widgets.
• Get statistics, trackbacks, comments etc. about your blogs instantly.

To give you an overview of what blogging software we have in store for you, let us take on you on a journey of our repository of blogging applications, which best address your web needs and can be easily installed in a single click.

WordPress

WordPress, the most popular free blogging platform focusing completely on usability, web standards and aesthetics, gets your blog up & running in a few minutes time. LimeDomains currently support version 2.8.5 of WordPress.

Some of the popular plug-ins on WordPress are:

All in One SEO Pack –This plug-in provides SEO integration, and automatically optimizes post titles and keywords for search engines besides generating META tags automatically. It also helps you avoid the typical duplicate content, and fine tune page navigational links.

Automatic SEO Links – This plug-in is an efficient keyword promoter, and helps you save a lot of your valuable time. It enables you select a word/phrase for the automatic linking, and set anchor text in a ‘nofollow’ format or otherwise. It makes your site interlinking better, and allows you to control external links with custom keywords.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plug-in helps you create a XML sitemap for major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. for better indexing of your blog. This enables search engine bots to crawl through the entire structure of your website, and retrieve it successfully.

HeadSpace2 – This powerful plug-in helps you manage a broad range of meta-data & SEO tasks such as tagging of posts, creation of custom titles & descriptions for better SERPs. It also helps you add particular JavaScript & CSS to pages.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – This plug-in allows you to add robot metadata, index, follow, nofollow, noindex, link attributes to pages. Using this plug-in, you can also prevent indexing of your login page.

LifeType

LifeType, an open source blogging platform with multiple user support & a built-in WYSIWYG editor, supports podcasting, automatic thumbnail generation, bulk file upload, a file browser and custom descriptions for each file through its administration interface. LimeDomains currently supports version 1.2.8 of LifeType.

Some of the popular plug-ins on LifeType are:

Copy Article – This powerful plug-in allows you to copy an already existing article into a new one by adding extra functionality to the ‘Edit Posts’ page. It gets enabled as soon it gets listed in the ‘Plugin Centre’ page, and does not have configuration options.

Validate Trackback—This plug-in catches almost all spam trackbacks, in which the spammer mentions URL for a non-blog HTML page. In short, it offers validation of trackbacks for preventing spam trackback.

Gallery Images —This plug-in enables you to retrieve the latest image(s)/random image(s) in the database, and display it at any location in the blog. Also, this plug-in can display images from a certain album, as & when required.

Related Posts—This plug-in creates a list of related articles for each post.

Comment Notification—This plug-in enables you to send a message/notification to your Google/MSN/Yahoo account whenever any visitor comments on your write-ups/blog posts.

Geeklog

Geeklog, a full-featured CMS empowering you to manage dynamic web content, has a built-in support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection and more . This blog engine has a great suite of highly customizable plug-ins, which are added from time to time by the developer community. LimeDomains currently supports version 1.5.1 of Geeklog.

Some of the popular plug-ins on Geeklog are:

Paypal plugin—This plug-in enables you to have a list of online products, and then accept payments via PayPal.

SocialShare plug-in—This plug-in empowers you to add links of different social networking websites and icons at the end of each of your posts. You can enable/disable any of the preinstalled shared links or even create your own.

Autosave plugin v1.0.3—This plug-in helps you to automatically save an article or any static page,

Metatags plugin v1.0.3 —This plug-in enables you to put ‘keywords’ and ‘description’ meta tags in articles and static pages.

NavMan plugin—This plug-in helps you to install and manage navigation such as the site header menus. It also offers autotag support.

b2evolution

b2evolution, a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog publishing system, is inclusive of all the features of traditional blog tools, and extends them with features such as file & photo management, advanced skinning, multiple blogs support as well as detailed user permissions. LimeDomains currently supports version 2.4.5 of b2evolution.

AdSense plugin—This plug-in enables you to insert AdSense ads into your blog post, and monetize it effectively. It also ensures that you do not display too many AdSense ads on your page.

Dailybooth plugin—This plugin helps you to mention the size and optional title above the latest image that you’ve uploaded. It also helps you to specify an optional bit of digital text below the image to link to your page.

Autoblog plugin—This plugin helps anyone, who installs b2evolution create a new blog, and the corresponding category in which it would be posted.

Footnotes plugin—This plugin facilitates you to add informative remarks in the footer without disturbing/playing with any aspect of the main text of your post. You can add smilies in your post and galleries in your post.

Sample Rendered plugin —This plugin helps you search for content placed in a post, and replace it with some other text.

Get started with these powerful blogging applications, which will power your entire site at LimeDomains.

Start blogging today!

To share your thoughts with global audiences, you plan to start a WordPress blog. However with millions & millions of blogs already on the Web, your blog must contain that ‘EXTRA’ for obtaining high search engine rankings.

Search engines have great affinity for fresh content. What better than blogs? We’ve compiled some good SEO tips, which you must try out when you get started with your blog. So read on to decode the SEO secrets to apply to your blog!

• Use post title in permalink: We recommend you to integrate post title in the permalink of your blog post. A SEO-friendly permalink is one that is inclusive of the post title since it has been observed that search engines index such posts fast.

When you post a blog, a URL such as this www.myblog.com/?p=150 by default is created. To make the URL more SEO friendly, you can change the permalink settings on WordPress. Go to your WP blog dashboard then click on ‘Settings’, and then ‘Permalinks’. You can then customize your permalink like this www.myblog.com/category/postname.
Also, this link structure of your blog post will help you refer to the post in future, if you decide to migrate from WordPress to any other blogging platform. This is not possible with default permalink structure.

• Use keywords in Blog Title: Try to search keywords that your potential readers might use to spot your blog, and then use them effectively in the first 60 characters of the blog title. This would be enhancing your keyword ranking on major search engines.

• Manage page title: The Page title comprises of the most significant tags on your blog page. You must try and position these between h1 tags. It’s recommended that a page title must be brief yet inclusive of keyword.

• Use WordPress plug-ins: WordPress has a rich repository of plug-ins using which you can optimize your blog properly.

•    SEO plug-ins: WordPress has a number of SEO plug-ins such as All-in-One SEO pack, installing which you can do the required optimization such as adding titles, tags etc. and obtain higher search engine rankings for your blog.

•    Google Sitemap plug-in: When you update your blog, its URL is submitted to the Google index by Google Sitemaps, and then its visibility on Google is monitored by Google sitemap plug-in. This plug-in creates a XML sitemap for your blogs, which will help search engines to index the same.

•    Related posts plug-ins: We recommend you to use related posts plug-ins like Simple Tags as these generate deep links under each post linking to related posts within your website owing to the presence of common tags. This fetches a great number of visitors from search engines as these love internal linking of pages within your website. If anyone integrates full RSS feed in a website, the links will be directed to your pages. This increases the usability of your blog manifold thereby enabling search engine crawlers to index your previous blog posts too.

• Inbound Links From Relevant Sites: Links are an index for the page value of your blog from search engine’s point of view. Hence, link building is quite essential. It is a proven SEO technique, which gives a tremendous boost to the search engine rankings of blogs.  Social bookmarking, article submissions, press releases are some of the good link building strategies.

• Use Ping services: Search engine spiders must be informed about the blog posts that you add from time to time. How to inform them? Through Ping services such as Ping-o-Matic. This gives a remarkable boost to your SEO endeavor as when you post your blog, tracking services, blog directories & search engines get notified about your new blog post. Your blog post then gets searched & indexed in a few minutes time. The more ping services you use, the better will be your chances of getting web traffic from these sources.

• Blog often: We advise you to practice blogging frequently since search engines are always on a hunt for new content posted on the Web. Every new post added is a new entry for search engine spiders as well as readers. In order to make your blog stand out from the rest of million other blogs, add updated & keyword-rich information so that your blogs get indexed faster by search engine bots faster.

If you do not have a blog,  get started with blogging on WordPress. We, at LimeDomains, offer you one-click WordPress hosting. So, get started with your WordPress blog with a click of mouse at LimeDomains.

Do you have any more SEO tips to share with us? We look forward to your suggestions.

Web 2.0 has brought along a new marketing tool, blog. Photo blog, video blog, art blog….the list goes on! The blogging, as a phenomenon, has firmly got its grip over us, and become a part of our day-to-day life.

No matter you’re an individual or a startup company or a big corporate if you are on the Web, it is most likely that you have a blog.

Let’s find out how churning blog content can benefit your business:

Helps you attract Target Audience

All businesses need web traffic. An average blog entices approximately 55% more visitors than a website. If your blog has a bit of personal or informal tone along with commentary function, you can gain a better insight into your target audiences’ perspective. And, this would help in building an interactive environment that would involve your potential visitors also.

Helps you build Relationships

Instead of stuffing your potential customers’ Inboxes  with your promotional emails, use a blog to build relationships. It’s a platform from where you can tell your target audience what extra you have to deliver. You don’t need to essentially talk about your product only, but anything relevant to your audiences. This would reflect how much you know and how you stand out from the crowd.  You can also interact with them through your response to blog comments posted by them, feedback forms, surveys etc.

Build Customer Trust

Netizens have become bored of repetitive marketing messages from gazillions of product companies on the Internet. You can simply talk about your product, your perspective and get labeled as a reliable & authentic business. Also, this is a subtle way of marketing, which can generate customer loyalty & trust.

Helps you build Brand Reputation

A good brand is the result of value-based customer experiences. A blog also helps you gain insights into your customers’ psyche, their needs & preferences etc., which in turn will help you decide which aspect of your product you need to work & improve upon.

Get found on  the Web

A blog also gives your business multiple ways to be found on the Internet. There are a number of blog directories, where you can submit your blogs and the search engine bots will index your blog. The more is your brand visibility, the better are chances of your brand establishment.

Gives Boost to organic Search Traffic

Search engines have great affinity for fresh & unique content. Adding keyword-rich blog content will make your site more appealing to search engines. This may result in giving a remarkable boost to the search engine rankings for your website thereby increasing your web traffic considerably.

Gives you a low-cost investment marketing tool

With a number of blogging platforms such WordPress, Lifetype etc. easily available, you can have your business blog up & running in minutes. You can use Blogging as an effective communication tool since it involves low investment but generates high ROI, if utilized to its full potential.

If you have not used this web2.0 Marketing and PR tool tool, get started with business blogging in a few minutes’ time with open source blogging applications such as WordPress, Geeklog, LifeType and B2evolution on our platform.

The popular blogging platform—WordPress—can be installed easily after you have purchased a domain name and a hosting plan from us.  Setting up your blog using WordPress on LimeDomains won’t take much of your time and effort. Our one-click installation solution makes this task extremely intuitive and user friendly. All you need to do is to choose  from a wide array of professional-looking themes  in tandem with your website requirements.

Here are steps enumerated below that would help you setup your blog on LimeDomains easily and quickly:

Step 1: Log in to your LimeDomains account. Go to Control Panel -> Create Website

Step 2: Enter the details related to your domain name and hosting plan and proceed. A message that your website has been successfully created appears.

Step 3: Click on ‘Applications’ tab under the ‘Hosting Management’ section of Control Panel in your account.

Step 4: Select ‘WordPress’ and click on the link of ‘Install’.

Step 5: Choose the location (or subdomain), you’d like to install the application to. Also, select a Database & Dbuser and click on ‘Finish’.

Step 6: Enter the Blog Title and a valid email id. Click on the ‘Install WordPress’ button.

Step 7: Note down the password and then click on ‘Log In’. Enter the user name as admin and the generated password.

Hey, you’re done! Your WordPress blog is successfully created on LimeDomains now. Get started with blogging today and share your thoughts with global audiences.

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