There was a time when some webmasters result to shady methods to get a good placement in Google. They employed black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques such as keyword stuffing, invisible text, and doorway pages to get great rankings in results pages.

It would have been better if those who manipulated the results provided something of value. Sadly, that was not the case. Instead of getting highly relevant content, users were provided with info that had no substance whatsoever. Read more…

Advances in technology and the increasing number of online publishers have made it possible for anyone to become an author. You don’t have to jump through the hoops of traditional publishing, and you don’t have to invest a lot of money in traditional self-publishing. If you can write the book, you can format it, upload it, and make it for sale. If it’s popular enough, you might even make (a lot of) money on it.

You don’t have to be an aspiring Stephen King to want to publish your own book. Businesses of all kinds can publish e-books not only to generate revenue, but also to promote their websites and create greater awareness of their brand. Here are just a few ways that you can use e-books to promote your website and your brand: Read more…

In this ever-changing virtual world, it has become mandatory for web developers to find out the latest and trendy ways to enhance the overall look of their websites. Web development, a decade ago, was just a simple static display, but now it has turned out to be more dynamic with the emergence of new technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and some other breakthrough in the field of web development. Earlier the trend was focusing on media capabilities but now the trend has totally shifted to better usability and aesthetics.

Generally predictions are tough and when it comes to an industry which is changing with the blink of an eye, it is really going to be a challenging task. Well, we have now stepped into the New Year 2013 and why don’t we go out on a limb and make some predictions on web development trends for 2013? Certain things are arguable while others are irrefutable. Who knows what is going to be in and what is going to be out from the trend list 2013. The top web development trends that could make their way in 2013 are: Read more…

Effective internal link strategy is useful for spreading link juice and building healthy site architecture. To achieve that, you should make sure that all the internal links on your site are working well. In other words, avoid broken links. If your site has too many broken links causing 404 error pages, not only it will have a negative impact on your site’s SEO rankings but also prompt visitors to leave your site.

Fortunately there are a number of free online tools available on the web helping you to check the link status on your site and report if any broken links are detected. In today’s post, we’ve listed some of the best internal link checkers and broken link detectors helping you to build a user-friendly and SEO friendly website. Read more…

Every year, Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithm with the aim of providing quality web pages to its users. The giant search engine also applies over 200 different signals to reward websites with quality contents by ranking them high in the search results. On the other side of the coin, Google penalizes low-quality websites by either lowering their search rankings or removing them off from the search results.

Last year Google has rolled out its major algorithm change called “Panda”. While the update has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality sites, it has also identified low-quality sites and upgraded their rankings. Early this year, another algorithm update named “Penguin” was released to penalize websites that employ webspam techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and link schemes.

Google has been emphasizing many times on its blog and help forum that we should make sure our sites comply with its quality guidelines and develop more unique, original and quality contents rather than focusing on any algorithm tweaks. Having said that, if we can step into Google’s mindset to find out how it has been looking for high-quality websites. That will certainly save us a lot of time and efforts. Below we’ve compiled a list of ranking signals and guidance that might be used by Google to determine how websites rank in the search results. Read more…

Link building is an old search engine optimization strategy that has existed for years, nearly since the first days of Google’s algorithmic existence. Social networking, on the other hand, has only been around since roughly 2007 or thereabouts. However, despite its newness, it’s slowly starting to supplant or at least rival long standing backlinking strategies.

One particular factor that has wrought enormous changes on the entire field of optimization is Google newfound insistence on and enforcement of actual quality in websites; you’re no longer going to cut it simply by creating thin content, spamming out a bunch of cheap links to whatever websites you can and stuffing your website with keywords to the point of unreadability. Google now wants search rank to be guided at least in large part by human interest and as much of it as possible within your niche. Read more…

Nowadays, smart phones and tablet computers are everywhere. These Internet-connected mobile devices are too good for connecting people, web browsing, playing games, watching videos and listening to music. Apart from communication and entertainment purposes, mobile devices can also be used for work and that includes web development. If you happen to be a web developer who is always on the move, instead of bringing your heavy laptop everywhere why don’t you develop websites using tablet or smartphone while having a coffee at Starbucks? Isn’t it cool?

Online IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) are the common web development platforms embraced by many web developers who code using their mobile devices. Read more…

Undeniably Twitter is the most popular microblogging service on the Web. Almost every website owner and blogger has integrated the social networking tool to their sites. This enables their visitors to easily “tweet” about information and updates found from the site which helps in attracting more visitors.

Twitter has its own set of tools which you can use to display your Twitter button and status on the site. In case they can’t fulfil your needs, here we’ve compiled a list of third-party online tools and WordPress plugins specifically designed for integrating Twitter to your blog. We hope these tools can help you promote your site better, tweet to your followers easier, and attract more visitors. Read more…

Website validation and testing are both important processes we must conduct before putting any website online. By validation, we can check our website against standards and requirements published by Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) or WapForum. This necessary process is to verify the correctness and quality of webpage code to ensure that the page is working properly with nice appearance.

Additionally, we should also conduct a series of fundamental tests such as browser compatibility, page load speed and simulating as a first time visitor or repeated visitor to determine the user friendliness of the site. In today’s post, we’ve compiled a list of highly useful online tools for validating and testing your website in an easy way. Enjoy! Read more…

The competition in the world of online entrepreneurship is, indeed, a tough one. As more and more online stores and companies come into business, the more difficult and tricky it gets to maintain your pool of customers, let alone, add new clients to your base. But then again, there are always ways to go about this for the wise and resourceful online business executives. One of which is to use the available tools in order to make your website a smashing success and lure more of your target market into availing your products and services.

In this regard, one of the most useful and efficient tools which is widely used nowadays is the A/B Split Testing. In fact, this technique has been around for some time. But just the same, it has proven itself to be no less than powerful through the years. Read more…

In the previous post, we talked about getting links from high Page Rank websites and blogs can help you improve your site’s SEO and increase your PageRank score. But before that, you need to make sure the backlinks you obtain do not contain “nofollow” attribute as this kind of links won’t give you any SEO benefits. To make your life easier, below we’ve gathered some search engines for you to dig out websites and blogs that allow you making comments and generating backlinks without “nofollow” tag. It’s important to make constructive and useful comments, contributing value to the post’s discussion. Bear in mind that any spam comments you make will be easily filtered by the system like Akismet or manually deleted by the site owner. So please, don’t spam!

In addition, we’ve also included useful Firefox addons and Chrome extensions assisting you to highlight “dofollow” and “nofollow” links on any webpage you surf. Read more…

When it comes to running a successful website or blog, the first thing you should do is to publish quality and unique web contents to build a strong base of royalty audience. The next thing you need to do is to have an effective strategy for increasing your site’s traffic. On the web, you’ll find many blogs and forums sharing a variety of tricks that claim to be useful for enhancing web traffic. If you decide to give those tricks a try, make sure they comply with Google’s website quality guidelines to avoid your site from being penalized or even banned by Google.

Today we’ll be focusing on how you can get more traffic from Google search engine through obtaining quality backlinks. Read more…

Google Webmaster Tools is a must for every webmaster and blogger. It provides detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google, which can be hardly found from other website analytics tools. The free web service has many excellent tools and features allowing you to check indexing status and optimize visibility of your website. It also provides abundance of traffic data which is useful for improving the SEO of your site.

Webmaster Tools is pretty easy to set up, all you need to do is verify that you’re the site owner, and then you’ll be able to use the tool instantly. To assist you fully utilize the power of Webmaster Tools, here are 10 basic tips you must know! We hope you’ll find this article useful. Read more…

Nowadays websites are getting more complex, it has never been easy for webmasters and bloggers to ensure their site 100% safe from security threats. Fortunately there are some free web-based tools out there, helping you to scan your site for defects and vulnerabilities.

There is a saying that goes: “prevention is better than cure”, we, as a serious webmaster should regularly monitor the health level of our site and identify any possible security loophole. In today’s post, we’ve gathered 23 really useful web application security tools for website owner like you. Just give them a try and share your experience with us in the comments below. Read more…

Link building plays an important role to determine the success of your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Every webmaster wants to get higher search result ranking for website or blog. If you managed to get your targeted keywords ranked on the first page of Google search results, you’ll receive tremendous traffic to your site. On the contrary, if your site is not SEO optimized with targeted keywords appeared on page 5, 6 or 7, people are unlikely to reach your page. In short, the better your website is SEO optimized, the more traffic you’ll receive. And, the most effective way to boost your site’s SEO is through link building.

There are many ways can be used to reach out webmasters and drive backlinks from their sites for free, but most of them are time consuming. In today’s post, we would like to recommend you some reputable and reliable tools that can make the process much faster and easier, bringing your link building and SEO campaigns to the next level! Read more…