Great Resources for FREE Blogger Templates

Blogger is one of the most popular hosted blogging platforms out there, but many people are still surprised when they learn you can customize the look of your blog well beyond the pre-built options the site offers.  Finding these other templates can be a bit of a task, so we’ve come up with over 30 resources to help you find brand new designs, converted WordPress themes, people who will build unique custom templates, and more. What are you waiting for? Get out there and freshen up your blog!

What is your favorite resource for Blogger  templates?  Tell us in the comments.

Free Templates

5ColumnTemplate.Blogspot.com – This site only offers one template with five variations, but it isn’t every day you see a five column theme for any blogging platform, and it is actually pretty clean in presentation.

AllBlogTools.com – A collection of over 100 templates from an assortment of a lot of smaller designers. You can look them up by layout, color, subject matter and so on.

Blogger-Templates.Blogspot.com – Keeps a small selection of top-notch Blogger themes up and running.

Blogger-Templates.Deceblog.net – A small selection of unique themes for Blogger accounts.

Blogger-Templates-Directory.Blogspot.com – A large directory of Blogger templates, links to resources for further development and a whole lot more.

BloggerTemplates.org – Doesn’t seem to have been updated since it originally launched, but all of the templates still work, and have a lot of resemblance to WordPress themes.

BlogspotTemplates.Blogspot.com – Several pages of Blogger templates with tips on how to use them.

BlogspotTemplate.com – Right around 100 templates for Blogger of varying styles and colors.

BlogTemplates.Noipo.org – A small selection of graphical and text based templates for your blog.

BTemplates.com – Features a wide assortment of over 600 free Blogger templates that can be browsed by category, tag, number of downloads and so on.

Carl Galloway’s Blogger Templates – A small selection of some fairly unique templates that haven’t been updated in some time, but are still fully functional.

FinalSense.com – Offers over 300 templates for your Blogger account. Have just about every theme and color combination that you can think of.
FreeBlogger-Templates.Blogspot.com – Focu
ses heavily on simplified Blogger templates that make for the easiest reading possible.

FreeTemplates.Blogspot.coms – A blog dedicated to bringing you nothing but free Blogger templates. Nicely categorized, and easy to browse.

FreshBloggerTemplates.Blogspot.com – It has been a while since this site released any new templates, but their designs are very clean and still in working order.

Gecko & Fly Blogger Templates – Offers many Blogger templates, most of which are in a more “classic” style, as well as tutorials on how to tweak your blog even further.

GoSuBlogger.com – A large selection of free templates that mix original work with converted WordPress themes.

Isnaini.com – A large and varied collection of templates for use on Blogger, along with a detailed tutorial on how to properly insert them into your account.

JackBook.com – Besides offering a large selection of free templates, with a heavy saturation of video game inspired themes, JackBook also offers tips and pointers on better SEO for your blog.

OurBlogTemplates.com – An odd mix of nearly 200 free templates for you to use and with a dash of reviews of DSLR cameras.

PannaSmontana Templates – Numerous free templates for Blogger, but the site is entirely in Italian. Thankfully it is well designed and you can find your way around.

Public-Template.Blogspot.com – Features a mixture of free templates for you to download, tutorials on how to make your own, and admiration for templates they enjoy.

Simple-Blogskins.Blogspot.com – Offers a handful of free skins for your Blogger account.

Template-Godown.com – A site specializing in converting WordPress themes to the Blogger friendly XML format.

WP-Themes.us – Yes, the name points to them being all about WordPress themes, but they also provide a nice selection of free templates for Blogger.

Yanku-Template.Blogspot.com – Offers some very slick looking, free, Blogger templates of the 2 and 3-column varieties.

How To Launch A Blog On Blogger Platform

Creating a blog on blogger platform is a matter of minutes. Anyone can create it very easily by following some simple steps. If you are planning to launch a professional blog on blogger platform, some things need to be taken into consideration before you create a blog. It will not only help you in creating a unique, clean and crawler friendly blog, but at the same time it will also save you from messing it up, if you do not plan from the very beginning.

How To Start?

I would strongly suggest you to go for a customized domain for your blogger blog. It gives professional look and feel to the visitor. Once you have chosen the niche of your blog, it's time to look for a good domain name.

Choosing a good domain name is not an easy task and requires some brainstorming. Configuring and integrating your own domain with blogger blog is not difficult at all. Add the following host record in your domain hosting control panel.

HOSTNAME        IP ADDRESS/URL              RECORD TYPE

    www            ghs.google.com.                      CNAME (alias)
     @        http://www.yourdomain.com/         URL Redirect

Once you have added these records, go to your blogger dashboard and click Settings tab, then go to Publishing subtab. Click the Custom Domain link and follow the simple procedure to add your domain URL and click ok. Once it is done, it may take from 1 to 3 days before the DNS records of your domain are cached all over the world in domain name servers. You can also see blogger help of configuring custom domain with blogger.

Choose a good theme

The next step is to choose a good theme for your blog. There are hundreds of blogger templates to choose from, and depending on the niche of your blog, you may choose a specific type of template. Do not go for bright, multicolored and fancy themes.

Tweaking the theme

Almost every template needs some customization as per bloggers requirements. Designing a good landing page from your chosen template is not difficult at all. All it requires is a bit of CSS editing and some add-on widgets. With simple CSS tricks you can make your blog posts more spicy and attractive.

Initial setup

Once your theme is tweaked as per your needs, start building the core pages of your blog. Do not straight away start posting. First create Archives, Contact and About pages with old timestamps, and place a link for each page in navigation menu. It is always advisable to make these important pages beforehand, because any new post on blogger always comes in recent posts. If you will try to make them later, they will appear in recent posts. You can use Disqus commenting system for your blog, as it supports multi-threaded conversations, video comments and standard track backs. A Wordpress style contact form is must for Contact page. Blogger currently has no option to create such form, but you can use Kontactr, to create a customized contact form. Install at least two web analytics script in your blog template, because in case one of the services fails still you can get the traffic data from the other one. Of course Google Analytics should be one of them, the other one can be Sitemeter or Woopra. Both are excellent web analytic services and I use all three of them for my blog. Do not forget to put a search box in the navigation bar. Here is the code.

Building on foundation

Once initial setup is complete, you can start posting on your blog. The first 25-30 posts on your blog matters the most. Make good long posts and put the cream in these posts. Populate the Popular Posts section with selective hand picked posts.

Monetization strategy

After all the hard work, its time to monetize your blog. There are many approaches to that, and you have to choose the best one for your blog. I would strongly suggest leaving home page free from ads. If your new blog's home page is stuffed with ads, it may annoy the visitor and you may loose your valuable subscriber. Some 125x125 ads in the sidebar are fine, but avoid ads between posts on home page of your blog. Only when the visitor clicks the individual post, ads should be placed in the body of post.

Posting structure and frequency

Every blogger has it's own approach in building a post, still there are some common traits in every good blog post. Often novice bloggers take some time to come up with a definite pattern and structure for their posts. Whatever your approach is, stick to your style for uniformity in your blog posts. If you have time constraints, I would suggest you to publish at least two good long posts per week.

Blog Promotion

Unless you do not tell the world, no one is going to see the gem you have polished. Blog directory submissions and RSS feed submissions is must for any blog to grab attention in the blogosphere. You can submit your blog and its feed in most popular blog directories and feed syndication services. Another good way to promote your blog is popular social bookmarking services

Viewing Tags Using Tag Clouds on Wordpress

For every blogger and website owners out there, tags aren’t new. They know that these though not required, had been essential parts of their every post. Why? Well basically, in computer jargon, tags are non-hierarchical keywords given to articles, posts, images, internet bookmarks or any bit of information. They are generally hyperlinks that lead to a compilation of items that are connected with it. These tags which can be selected personally and casually by its creator and even by its viewers if allowed by the network, are descriptors of your data and allow it to be located again through searching or browsing. They aid classification and are a way of helping viewers to find content on your page.

Consequently, as to further help your viewers in finding content on your page, you need to add a tag cloud on it. A tag cloud is a visual collection of tags with their corresponding weights which depends on how frequent you have used them. More often, weights of these tags regularly used are illustrated in larger fonts or otherwise accentuated and the displayed order is basically alphabetical, therefore allowing probing a tag via alphabet and via popularity.  Typically, tag cloud may contain 30-150 tags (Tagclouds). Tag clouds are interactive, which means, tags are hyperlinked therefore permitting the user to surf on the data. When selecting a tag from a tag cloud, it usually leads to a collection of posts connected in it.

These tag clouds are illustrated using inline HTML elements. Thus, you are able to control how they would appear as to their order, either alphabetical or random, how they are sorted according to their weights and more. You can also huddle your tags semantically so that comparable tags appear close by. Then, heuristics can be utilized to decrease the dimension of your tag cloud either you are trying to group the tags or not.
That means, you can customize your tag cloud. All you just need is a tag cloud generator (which we will discuss separately) and a little knowledge on HTML.

Since tag clouds uses HTML and the tags’ range is only within the page, then, for you to indicate that the linked-to page acts as a tag for the current context use the rel attribute value “tag” (i.e., rel=“tag”). The rel=“tag” is exclusively designed for “tagging” content, naturally web pages or portions of it, like blog posts. It is NOT designed for “tagging” random URLs or external content. Although there is demand for an all-purpose decentralized syntax for tagging URLs external to the current page it is beyond the scope of our tags. So basically you cannot use this to help you in taking the top rank on search engines. Nonetheless, it is still essential since your viewers can have the ease of finding related posts.

So look for a cloud generator now, create your tag cloud, customized it, and start collecting your tags for a happy probing in your blog. Make the life of your readers easy.

Optimizing Your Website Brings Traffic

If you want your website or blog to get good traffic, you need to apply some Search Engine Optimization tricks to entice the search engine spiders to visit your site and rank it highly in the results pages.

Many people avoid using SEO techniques because they think SEO is complicated and difficult. SEO can be complicated and is often best left to professionals. However, you can take a few simple steps to greatly increase traffic toyour site.


The first step in optimization is keyword research. Keyword research is an easy process, although it can be a bit time consuming. Thanks to several online tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword tool, you can find keywords yourself and begin using them inyour site content. Start by typing in a word or short phrase that best describes your business service or features. If you are selling auto parts, for example, type in “auto parts” and let the keyword tool go to work. It will show you how often the word is searched for on a regular basis. It will also provide a list of similar keywords used in website searches.

The next step in choosing keywords to optimize your site is to choose the top five or so keywords and run a Google search on them to determine how much competition there is for each one. If a keyword is searched for 1,000 times a day, but there are 2,000,000 websites in the search engine results for that particular word, you may want to consider a different keyword without quite so much competition. By creating more precise keyword phrases, you can whittle down the search competition.

Once you have your list narrowed down to about five keywords, it is time to start using them strategically on your website or blog. For instance, an ideal use of a keyword is in your domain name, but many businesses have already established a domain name and cannot easily change it. You do have other options to use your keywords There are several other places you can add your keywords to help optimizeyour website for the search engines.

The search engine spiders will check you title first, so use your keywords in your website title and page titles as often as you can. Headings and subheads are other great places for your keywords to be noticed when your site is scanned. Using keywords in these two places will increase your visibility in the search engine results. However, because the rules the search engines use to comb sites change on a very frequent basis, it can be difficult to keep up with these changes. For many business owners, hiring a company specializing in Search Engine Optimization is the best route to get their websites ranked quickly and frequently on the results pages of the popular search engines.

Debbie Dragon is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

Edward Roberts Jr. is a owner of GlobeTourGuide, a tourist destinations blog who managed to appear his blog on first page of Google and Yahoo search.

How about you? How do you manage your website's traffic?