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…

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…

Social media, the online media platform that has turned the world of communication and mass media head over heels. From communication to advertising, from personal communication to mass communication, social media has forayed into almost every business vertical and sector. This has been the trend in the past ten years, and certainly will be so in the foreseeable future.

At its current rate of gaining prominence, it could soon slay other traditional media forms such as print and broadcast media. The current social media revolution has been spurred on by increased access to and widespread usage of broadband Internet around the world. At this juncture, social media has become an irresistible force of the Internet world. 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…

Content management systems have replaced the ancient ways of hand-coding CSS and HTML pages. Whether it is a corporate website, or a social blog, content management systems are crucial for easy management of a website or a blog. You might have different approaches in displaying your website like adding plenty of pictures, advertising services, rendering technical support or owning an e-magazine. To meet the requirements of the different approaches there are different content management systems available, each having its own strength. Though there are a collection of content management systems available in the online marketplace, I’ve hand-picked the seven best content management systems of 2012 taking into consideration aspects like usability, features, plugins, and more.

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Which is the best website to check Google search algorithm updates? Every year, Google rolls out changes to its search algorithm with the aim of providing better search results to Internet users. While most of the changes are minor, every once in a while the Internet giant will make significant algorithmic changes such as Panda and Penguin updates which greatly affect the ranking of search results.

As a website owner and search marketer, we should keep ourselves updated with the latest Google algorithmic changes. It helps us to understand how Google ranks the search results so that we can make necessary changes to our website driving more organic web traffic. Below we’ve compiled a list of website, blog and forum where you can keep track of Google updates making your SEO (search engine optimization) effort easier. Read more…

Email marketing campaigns follow a simple and very straightforward funnel shaped design. This funnels wide end starts when you first build a website, promote it and attract general visitors. From there, it narrows down through to percentage of visitors who subscribe to your email list, percentage who read your emails, percentage who click on the link inside them to visit your sales page and finally, the number of people who ultimately buy your products or services.

The email marketing funnel acts as a filter and guide, leading the most interested buyers steadily forward through trust building on your part until they reach your buying page and are convinced enough to make a purchase. 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…

Wondering how to show your name and photo under the title of your blog post in Google search results? Look no further, this is the right post where we provide a quick tutorial guiding you to link your online content to your Google+ Profile.

Once you’ve gone through the tutorial, your authorship information will be displayed in Google search results as shown in the image below. Read more…

Interlinking blog content is one of the best ways to keep visitors stay longer on your site. It provides a good opportunity for new visitors to explore more blog posts and pages, encouraging them to understand your site better. Additionally, if your blog contents are well interlinked, not only it helps visitors to easily navigate throughout your site, but also makes sure that search engine spiders can successfully crawl your site and index contents faster. SEO wise, interlinking improves your site and page ranking on the Google search results.

To help you interlink your blog posts, pages and keywords easier, below we’ve compiled a list of WordPress plugins which you’ll find them helpful. Any other easy ways you know for interlinking blog content, let us know in the comments section below. 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…