Webmaster Heaven

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO Types

2010-05-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

Black Hat SEO- These are aggressive tactics used to gain high search
engines rankings that do not comply with the philosophy of the search
engines. Sites produced with black hat SEO techniques are considered
unethical spam by most web surfers because they provide no real content or
user experience. They basically look like pages of another search engine
or paragraphs of jargon containing keywords instead of real content.

The black hats, on the other hand, simply thinks of "How do I get links to
the site?" They pay no consideration to whether the links provide value to
the visitors and readers. The eventual strategy that emerges usually turns
out to be schemes like link farms and reciprocal link schemes.
Black Hat SEO are all about getting fast results. The method they use to
optimize their websites will often get the website to the top of the
search engines very rapidly, but when the search engines catch-on, the
website will very often crash or get banned.

For a while now, there is a battle going on within the Internet among
marketers that use SEO. Black Hat SEO is to use optimizing practices to
fool the search engines and the use of other traffic generating techniques
that are questionable or unethical.

White Hat Optimization- If you're thinking of using an SEO consultancy to
help your website get listed well on search engines then ask them a few
questions about bad techniques that you've heard of. This will probably be
enough for the unethical website optimization company to take the bait
whereas a good, ethical SEO consultancy will try to talk you out of it and
steer you in the right direction.

White Hat SEO remains more time-consuming, but it yields better long-term
results and has a more positive impact. People prefer to use web sites
they haven't been deceived into visiting, and search engines don't like to
list sites which have manipulated their way to a high ranking. Sites using
white hatted techniques usually don't have to worry about being removed
from search engine results.

The use of key-phrases can also be considered white or black hat as white
hat SEO'rs will use key-phrases in the natural context of a body of text, if
you write your web copy for your visitors and not the search engines you
will achieve better results.

White Hat SEO evolves writing good quality content. Don't try to use
spammy tricks. Deliver great content to your visitors and the search
engines. Don't hide text, or stuff Meta tags with keywords that shouldn't
be there. Make sure your title tag and other Meta tags reflect your page.

Boost Your Web Site with Social Bookmarking

2010-04-29T05:04:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk about social bookmarking when it comes to research engine optimization, and it's sometimes hard to see via the haze of marketing towards the true facts.

Basically, interpersonal book marking services go to websites for example Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious and create hyperlinks to your website, tag it and share it with the world.

This can assist drive visitors to your website in two methods. First, if you have a novel or fascinating site, people will normally be drawn to it and follow the links for your doorstep. People spend hours on interpersonal ebook marking websites and use it to find the majority of their info. Should you send readers to an interesting article or valuable assistance, they will naturally send a link to their friends, and their friends will do the same. Secondly, each among the links provided by a social ebook marking service will deliver "link juice" to your website.

"Link juice" is jargon for site believability in the eyes of search engines. Social book marking websites use a significant of believability, and with every hyperlink it provides your website a bit of that credibility. So even if nobody looks at the social bookmark on Digg, the site will assist your website a small a lot more credibility.

The way this functions is that when the bots from Google or Bing search your site, they discover back hyperlinks to sites having a significant of credibility. So even if it's just a blank hyperlink, those research spiders will assume that there's a reason for the hyperlink, thus believing that your site has credible information within.

There's a downside to social bookmarking providers though, there are lots of disreputable businesses that may take your money then spam interpersonal ebook marking websites with garbage -- and that garbage is directly connected to your site. The social bookmarking sites don't like it and nor does Google, utilizing a dirt cheap interpersonal book marking service is an easy way to get your website kicked out of search engine rankings completely.

Social Bookmarking Submission Tips

2010-04-29T00:59:00.000-07:00

Social Bookmarking refers to web based applications that allow people to store bookmarks online instead of just putting in the favorites or bookmarks on their computers. The direct advantage of this is that people can access their bookmarked sites from any computer, or even from a mobile phone.

The good aspect of social bookmarking is that it allows users to share bookmarks with other Internet users in a collaborative manner. Generally, social bookmarking takes place on sites where the users can create an account to add their bookmarks to. It's also helpful to do it on sites that allow users to insert keywords for the types of bookmarks they add. In that manner, they all can be organized and set into categories that other users can easily search through.

But how submit your social bookmarking successfully? The follow five tips can help you.

Firstly, when you post the article to a social bookmarking site, make sure the short description you provide entices potential customers, not with a blatant sales pitch but by summarizing the information that people interested in your type of products want to read.

Secondly, take care in adding tags of your most relevant keywords in order to make the link easy to find within the site. Some sites limit the number of tags you can add while others provide nearly limitless space to include every relevant keyword or phrase.

Thirdly, make your content easy to share. All of the major blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger include plug-ins to add a little ‘share' graphic to your posts. This allows readers to easily and quickly make one click and add a bookmark of your article URL at any site where they have an account.

Last but not the least, be sure to include a plug-in that allows readers to add your site to an RSS feed as well. These feed aggregators are a popular way for internet users to combine all the blogs they follow into one easy-to-find place that shows the most current updates to all their favourites.

Social bookmarking existed several years before and people will always discover new concepts about the bookmarking world especially with the fields of marketing and promotion. Many have benefited from its advantages and new ideas are still being developed to maximize its use. The online marketing industry and community eye social marketing as one of their major tools in the future. No wonder many social bookmarking sites have come to provide the basic advantages and enjoy the benefits of social bookmarking.

Some Tips for Web Page Headers

2010-04-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Are you a current business owner who has asked the question, "How do I get my website on the first page of Google and the major search engines?" Most business owners don't know that traditional media ad spending is down across the board. Television advertising, radio, newspaper and magazines are down an average of approximately 13% in 2009.

Implementing relative meta-tags in your website makes sure that it will increase effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign. On which you are investing lots of time and money. You can pick up any of your webpage and click on 'View' button at the top of the browser screen and select 'Page Source' it will show title tag at the top of the page.

Does your website have an actual contact form? There are a lot of websites that have just a mailto web link for users to contact the company. The problem with this is that you are reliant on the user having their own mail client installed and you cannot specify what information you want to collect. If you have a proper contact form on your contact us page you can specify what information you want to collect e.g. name, phone number, email address, website etc.

On-page optimization is the process of structuring or changing the elements on your webpage so that it can be found by search engines for specific keyword(s). The on-page elements or factors that you need to change in order to improve your website's positions in search engines include title Tag, header tags, page content, alt tag, meta description tag and meta keywords tag.

It allows anyone from any experience level, from a complete beginner with no website technical skills to those who are familiar with website building. For the users who already know how to build sites using all kinds of coding and language and scripts, this will make it much easier for them too. You can start producing websites that look as professional as the big name companies and you can do it by yourself and do it fast.

If you were working with a company that creates designer flip-flops that are embellished with crystals, symbols, jewelry and other decorative items. When you first start their keyword project, the first two keywords that the company will give you is: flip-flops and sandals. You can easily find that there is great search volume and much lighter competition around more specific search terms such as: embellished flip flops, crystal flip-slops, rhinestone flip-flops, decorated flip-flops etc.

Depending on how your templates are created, you can save Huge amounts of time by allowing the template or web editing software to perform repetitive tasks vs. you making them all on your own. A couple of examples might be your website's header, footer or common menu system. Let' say if each page of your website includes these common items, then you could save great time by having all of the pages call a "single file" that simply contains all of the requisite information for each respective section.

A favicon is basically an image that distinguishes a website/company from others. What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you see image of the latter G with red,green, blue and yellow colors?... Google of course! You see how easy it is to advertise and embed your brand in people's mind. That's the power of favicon. Simply put, a favicon for your blog or website, is another way to make "you brand" (your website/blog), easily recognizable.

Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly. Creating a site that is search engine friendly should be an objective of every company that wants to do business on the Internet. Search engines are the most common way for Internet surfers to search for something on the Net. In fact, 85 percent of all people who use the Internet use search engines as their primary way to look for information. By using keywords relating to your company in appropriate places on your site, you can improve how search engines rank you.

Making Money with Twitter

2010-04-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

On first considering about money making online, the primary approach that most people will consider will be twitter! Twitter is actually a micro blogging networking site which gives you message lesser or equal to 140 characters and not more. With so much good intentions and positive benefits, Twitter has set a new line of practice to make money online. Implementing right approach in twitter will make you get the best out from them. On building a best bond and relationship will be the core success of making handful income. The stronger you bind relationship with your network people will right away explain the success of your online business.

Online money making has become the most awesome gift, where you can bind long term business relationship with worthy clients across the world. Are you not using twitter to promote and get in touch with your customers? This shows that you losing a great deal or even it explicate your craziness of not knowing the supremacy of twitter! Twitter is a power platform which grants you to communicate with several hundreds of people at single shot. Twitter gives you an opening to build enduring relationship and even supports in selling products with quick approach. On joining twitter, you can sell your products to the network customers as most twitter members will buy products from people whom they know. For all these reason, twitter is defined to be the gold mine while it comes in product selling.

People who aren't using Twitter will have either not understand the power of Twitter or they might not be aware of its existence. On research, you can get to know the positive and successful stories of Twitter and their role in driving traffic towards your business sale. Twitter is the best mini blogging site that drives incredible volume of traffic towards your way and this promising fact has inspired everyone to join the network. Is making money through twitter is too hard? Any novice will have this question, because they do not know the procedure of joining the network. Actually, the role of joining twitter will not take hard time rather you merely have to spare minutes to join the network.

Text Importance Of SEO

2010-04-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

When you're approaching the design of your site, it's apparent that technology is king. Web designers will tell you that selecting the right platform to build your site can make a huge difference to its look and usability. As a consequence, many sites are built using highly complex technologies, filled with all sorts of bells and whistles.

Then the site is considered from a search engine optimization perspective. Under this new gaze, not only are the bells and whistles too much noise, but the technology platform the site is based upon is sometimes a liability. What site owners usually come to realize is that they would have been better off working from the basics, focusing on the best they could do with HTML and text.

When it comes to search engine optimization, it is clear that text rules. This is because of the way the search engines trawl the web. Search engine crawlers have become increasingly sophisticated over the years, but their bias is still toward the format they began with, namely text. If you can fit all of your content into text within plain, text-based code, there's a higher chance that the search engines will understand your site, making indexing a little easier.

A solely text-based site is not entirely attractive to your human users, and there must be some balance. At the same time, your SEO work will be cut in half if your site has nice, handy chunks of text to work with.

If your site is built entirely out of Flash, don't despair. SEO companies are able to work around Flash and other not-so-SEO-friendly technologies, and Google is constantly trying to improve the algorithm's relationship with web design technology. It is important, however, to be aware that the task isn't going to be easy.

Reduce the HTTP Requests Can Speed Up Your Site

2009-01-03T06:39:00.000-08:00

When a user is opening your website every object on the page (e.g. images or scripts) will require a round trip to the server. Those HTTP requests will delay the response time of your site, and if you are loading dozens of objects this delay can add up to several seconds.

The first step to reduce the delay from HTTP requests is to reduce the number of objects on your website. Get rid of unnecessary images, headers, styling features and the like. If possible you can also combine 2 or more adjacent images into a single one.

Secondly make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location. For example instead of using three CSS files to create the layout of your page:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/body.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/side.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/footer.css" />

You should use a single one with all the styling information:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style.css" />

Use the Height and Width tags for Speed Up Your Site

2009-01-03T06:28:00.001-08:00

This is a very important factor that many people (including myself until some time ago) tend to overlook. When you use images or tables on your pages you should always include the height and width tags. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. Here is an example of code containing those tags:

<img id="moon" src="http://www.domain.com/moon.png" alt="moon image" width="450" height="200" />

When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page contemporaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.

Tips to designing your own website

2009-01-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

As the rate of information technology increases, many small business owners and individuals are now aiming to increase their communication and business with the use of the Internet. Some of the benefits of the Internet is that people can frequently improve their knowledge, be critical, and analyze new concepts and developments.

Not only does the Internet provide an opportunity for people to access new and foreign knowledge, but people are also given the opportunity to share knowledge through the use of creating their own websites or visiting chat rooms.

The concept of building a website may at first seem to be foreign to the less technologically inclined, but once the basics of website building are mastered, then the concept becomes routine and easy to handle, especially with updates. However, the building of a website does not only involve conquering technology, but also the design of your website will largely affect how many visitors will stay on your site and the amount of information that is consequently attained. For example, a website that is offensive in their use of language or ideologies, or even which has unsuitable colors will deter viewers from going to the site. Below are some tips that need to be taken into consideration when building your website.

Here the tips:

Make sure the color of the text on your website is not too bright and is suitable for the content of the website. For example, if you are designing a website to talk about the death penalty, a pink background with yellow text may not be the most appropriate format.
The pictures or images that are presented on your website also need to be taken into consideration. A website incorporating cartoons and pictures of Barbie but which is aimed at mature age people in the content may not be as successful. Remember, when people go to a website the first thing they will see will be the graphics, and just as easily as getting to the website, people can just as easily go to another website.
Make sure the links that you put on your website are relevant to your content. Although advertising is permitted and incorporated into some websites, too much advertising and propaganda will act as a deterrent and may compete for the attention of the viewer. Also, although advertising may pay for the cost of maintaining your website, remember the initial purpose of designing the website and don’t let in-your-face advertising overtake your valuable content.
Although most people feel that a website is made more interesting when there are graphics on the site, do not put in too many graphics and make the size of your website too large. Viewers can become frustrated if a website takes too long to download and will go to another website.
Remember to reference everything that you have researched and include a bibliography or a list of references. Do not plagiarize. Plagiarism can have consequences if you are an academic, or you may be liable for court action if it is too serious. Remember to indent long quotes that you may have gotten from a person or from research. Acknowledge help and all your sources.
Be mindful of different ideologies and cultures. Colors for backgrounds may have significance to the content. However, in another culture it may have a completely different meaning and may be misunderstood.
Ensure that the content is concise and attractive to the viewer. The content of websites can be written in formal as well as informal language. This will depend on the target audience and what you want to promote. For example, a person who is aiming at a teenage market may want to use less formal language, however, if you are aimed at academics or mature age people, correct referencing and research as well as formal language will be better appreciated.
Ensure that the links that are put on your website work and that your website is easy to navigate. For example, endless links that go nowhere can cause frustration and deter people from your website. Information that is not concise or inaccurate can cause misunderstandings. Hence, check all information before you put it on the website and check your links before you publish the website.

The building of your website can be a challenge at first, but the rewards are that many people will have the opportunity to share in your knowledge and communicate with you in relation to your ideas. For entrepreneurs, websites have the ability to promote your business and also ensure that consumers have the ability to gain better information about your goods and services.

Sitemap, Your Key To Get High Page Rank

2008-11-10T16:08:00.000-08:00

Ranking high on Google needs a lot of SEO. One of the main SEO things is to make a Google Sitemap for you site. Usually webmasters place sitemap in their pages or they help with different wordpress plugins. Here I’m going to show you one of the easiest ways to upload your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. If you didn’t added sites in it then do it fast, as you have a lot of good statistics in there.

After you added some of your sites there click on of them and go check settings of it. In left sidebar you will see Sitemaps, click on it. There you need to upload your sitemap of the site you clicked on with the methods you select. For the blogger who hosted their blog on blogspot/blogger, simply put their sitemap's url as http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

If you are using self hosting blog, for making sitemap, one of the first ranked sites is XML-Sitemaps. Here create your sitemap by entering your site url. Download the sitemap and upload it to Google Webmaster Central, and you are done. This will help Google to crawl your site faster and maybe you will gain some positions on Google.

Identify Broken BackLinks with Google Web Crawl

2008-10-18T09:03:00.001-07:00

Web Crawl is one of tools inside Google Webmaster Tools that provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. This suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. It Identifies all the backlinks to your site which are pointing towards a Non-existent Page i.e. those backlinks which are broken

Consequences of linking to a Non-existent Page?
Though it doesn’t hurt much in case of your site’s SEO purpose but you are losing the effective PR juice which you deserve for your site. As Google will not rank a non-existant Page, the backlik becomes useless.
Also you will lose the important traffic which will come to your site following the backlink.

Steps to Using Web Crawl On Your Site:

Goto Google webmaster tools.
Add your site if you still haven’t done it.
Click on your site. You will be taken to your site Overview.
On the left side there is an option for diagnostics. Click on it.
Under that web Crawl Feature is present.

Growth Up Traffic Of Adsense Site With Using Social Bookmarking

2008-10-08T02:17:00.000-07:00

Bookmarking your sites, articles, videos and everything else you do online is a great way to get backlinks and drive traffic to your site. Bookmarking sites are where people go to have a list of their favorite sites online and to share these sites or other related sites with others. These sites can generate traffic to your web site(s) because the bookmarking sites have a very large community. But the most important aspect of this bookmarking sites is that you are getting quality one way backlinks. Backlinks are very important to have if you want to rank high in the search engines for your keywords.

Bookmarking sites can generate traffic more quickly than search engines because they index and categorize content faster than the search engines. So be sure to have a well planned and targeted bookmarking campaign and you will drive free targeted traffic to your web site.

When you start to bookmark everything you do online, here is a few of the main sites that you should be using:

1. Digg - this site is for people to submit stories that they find on the internet. When other people like your story, they digg it. The more diggs a story gets, the higher it is ranked. If you can get enough diggs your story can appear on the front page with the potential of getting thousands of views.

2. Technorati - is one of the main authority sites when it comes to blogs. They monitor the content, comments and links between.

3. Stumble upon - Bookmarking or telling people which web sites that you stumble upon and think are interesting.

4. Del.icio.us - high authority bookmarking site with a large community

when you are bookmarking be sure to add the correct tags to your bookmarks. This will guarantee that they are seen and will increase links to your site. When adding tags, be sure to pay attention to the format that the site uses.
The two most common formats are comma separated and space separated. Make sure you follow the correct format so you get the full benefit of each bookmark.

Bookmarking your sites manually can be very time consuming. Here are two tools that will help you make the process go a little faster.

So get started and sign up for accounts at these bookmarking sites and remember to bookmark everything you do online.

How To Improve Your Adsense Earning

2008-10-08T01:59:00.000-07:00

Adsense is a great program, if you run a content based website, then it can effectively offer you 'free money'. Basically just by placing Google's AdSense code on your site you can make money from anyone who clicks through on any one of those ads.

This is great and most website owners end-up applying for the AdSense program. Once approved the tendency is to log into your account, chose a few ad formats, place them on your site and wait for the money to start rolling in... or not...

The truth is that AdSense is extremely easy to implement (you just copy the text from Google's website and paste it into your own site). But it's actually fairly complex to get right. That's why many website owners feel very, very disappointed when they reach the end of the first month and little money has come through.

Partly this is because displaying ads on your site is a numbers game... The more people you have coming to your site the more likely it is that they will click on the ads on your site. Typically you will get a click-through rate of between 1% and 5% (ie for every 100 people who visit your site only between 1 and 5 of them will click on an ad). You can improve this number by altering the layout of your ads (ie ad size, font colours and border colours) where plain ads that actually resemble the overall look and feel of the text on your site tend to perform best. Basically you're trying to make the ads merge in with the content of your site so that they do not look like ads. That's why some of the more unusual ad sizes can look better than the standard 'banner' style of ads.

Obviously you also need to look after your SEO. You need to build more links so that more people find your website and see your pages (remember that earning income from ads is a numbers game, the more people who visit your site, the more clicks you get).

However, it's also often forgotten that each ad is worth a certain amount of money and only pays you a certain amount for each click. You want to get ads to your site that will entice your visitors to click on them and which will earn you the most income. This is why you need to pay particular attention to how your website is indexed and the keywords you have.

Your keywords should always be related to your site's content, however some keywords are better at getting high-paying ads than others. Also , the google bots index the whole of your site and if you have a complex page with lots of links this may not be a good thing.

The links and other text you have may lead to areas of your site and topics that are not related to the main focus of the page they're on (this is particularly true of portal sites and forums and article sites) and this is where Google provides tools to help you. One of the most important of these is a series of tags:

text of section

This tells Google that the text between those tags is the most important part of a web pate. Now, the remainder of the page won't be ignored but whatever's between those tags will be given extra weighting. Google recommends that you include at least 20% of a page's content in those sections and you certainly can't use it to just highlight certain words and phrases. But if your page is complex and especially if your page design puts some of the main navigation elements before the main content it can be very powerful.

If, however, you want certain text on your pages to be ignored completely for ad indexing you can use the following tags:

text of section

Using these tools can help you dramatically help the focussing of ads on your site and this can help your click-through rates and incomes.

The Competitor of Clickbank is out

2008-09-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Hi, blogger's friends
If you are familiar with Clickbank.com (R), or even if you are not but you want to make profits online, then you will want to check this out ASAP ...

While I like Clickbank, and they are a great marketplace but they are limited to many restrictions to sell products or earn affiliate commissions... Well, there is a GREAT NEW SERVICE now... It is a new FREE marketplace where you can sell any product you want.

Yours OWN product, or (the best part), You can become an INSTANT Affiliate for ANY item in their HUGE marketplace.

It is called PayDotCom.com!

Did I mention it is 100% FREE to Join! This site is going to KILL all other marketplaces and I by now, almost EVERY SINGLE SERIOUS online marketer has an account with PayDotCom.com

So get yours now and see how much they offer. Also, they have their won affiliate program now that pays you COLD HARD cash just for sharing the site with people like I am doing with you. They give you cool tools like BLOG WIDGETS, and they even have an advertising program to help you get traffic to your site.

If you want an ARMY of affiliates to sell your products for you, they also allow you to have Free placement in their marketplace!

Even better... If your product becomes one of the Top 25 products in its category in the marketplace (not that hard to do). Then you will get Free advertising on the Blog Widget which is syndicated on THOUSANDS of sites World Wide and get Millions of impressions per month.

So, what are you waiting for... PayDotCom.com ROCKS!

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Plus Minus Using Flash in Web Design

2008-08-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a powerful multimedia technology that brings life and color to the web. Flash however, comes with various disadvantages that often hinder its implementation in web page design. At a time when SEO is a necessity in web design, flash should be used very cautiously. Following are some reasons why:

Browser incompatibility
While it's true the Adobe Flash plugin has been installed in very many browsers, you often need the latest version of the plugin to view content created using new versions of flash authoring software. You are also not sure that every user updates their plugins diligently. This presents the risk of your flash content not being properly viewed by all your site visitors. Woe unto you if your entire site is in flash.

Near-impossible site indexing
Site engine robots cannot execute JavaScript nor index content that is embed within flash files. For that reason, flash site designers are encouraged to provide html or text only versions of their web pages. This should however be carefully implemented to avoid penalties of web page duplication and spamming search engine robots.

Very small screen fonts
For some reason, many web sites designed entirely in flash have very small fonts that are particularly hard to read. Worse, there are no ways of resizing the page text size used on such pages. The worst part is that flash sites have no accessibility features for visitors who use text-only browsers or those who are visually handicapped.

Distracting animations and eye-candy
Many overzealous designers often go over themselves to come up with extremely busy web pages full of flashy graphics, animated banners and other multimedia flash elements. With Flash, it's very easy to yield to the temptation of creating web pages full of eye candy that fails to delight the eye but ends up distracting thge mind. Be careful, most modern browsers e.g. Opera offers users the option of instantly disabling animated graphics and other multimedia content.

Slow-loading multimedia content
It is true that most Flash content is handled as vector graphics in flash authoring applications. On the web however, these files are incorporated as SWF flash files. In view of the ActionScript that facilitates animations and interaction, the file sizes increase. Ultimately, web sites with heavy flash content take longer to load. This can easily drive your visitors away. Flash content is to be kept to a minimum.

The Great Keywords For Growing Up Web Traffic

2008-08-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Keywords are not just for search engine optimization of your website, rather these can serve as subjects when you are writing fruitful content for your website. Keywords provide you with topics people are searching for. No wonder you would want these to be converted into informative articles.

How many keywords can one subject contain?
There is no dearth of keywords for a single subject, because there are millions out there trying to search for information and trying new keywords all the time. Therefore, proper research will reveal the numbers of available keywords for a single subject.

It is absolutely normal if you put in the main keyword and take use those which have highest numbers of clicks. This strategy will work when you are trying to market your website. However, using single line or vertical keywords can really make your website SEO friendly. If you want continuous flow of traffic your efforts should be directed towards building a user friendly and highly informative website.

Are website content keywords any different than the marketing ones?
Keywords for both purposes would be almost similar. However, for the purpose of building an informative website, you should use keywords with a wider spectrum rather than eyeing just the bull's eye. When building a website and adding content, it becomes necessary to include as many related topics as possible, this is what will bring in regular visitors.

Keyword mining software will always provide you with not just vertical keywords which are directly related to the subject. Instead through these software you will find keywords that are related to the subject but do not happen to be the very main stream ones. These keywords are very useful in providing you with topics that can become informative articles to a wide range of Internet users.

For example: If your website is about particular jewelry, it would be easier to attract traffic if it contained jewelry for men, women, children, different age groups, different occasions, information regarding what jewelry goes well with what apparel, with examples, etc. this would automatically increase use of the jewelry website and people would visit it often to get ideas and information. You can also provide visitors with information regarding preserving, cleaning and repair of the jewelry.

Can all the above keywords bring in traffic for the website?
Some keywords can be used simply for building your website. Though internet users do not search for the product or service using the keyword, you will be surprised to see that many who visit your website will check out the information page. If visitors find information worthwhile, you can be assured they will come back each time they want to more knowledge about the subject.

Keywords used for web content building may not always pull in traffic, but they are always helpful in retaining traffic if the content answers their queries and current problems effectively. You have the long tail keywords and short keywords; both can be used for building website content.

A Grandma has world's fastest broadband

2008-08-05T22:22:00.000-07:00

Sigbritt, a 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection.

Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second (40 Gbs) connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.

But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.

"This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.

"As a network owner we're trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections. And Peter Löthberg wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances," he told The Local.

Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.

"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.

Cisco contributed to the project but the point, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, is that fibre technology makes such high speed connections technically and commercially viable.

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.

Btw, I wish I was her grandson ... :)

How about your grandma, guys?

Source: The Local Sweden's News.

Best Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

2008-06-17T22:41:00.000-07:00

For beginner and even the expert, here are the simple and best ways for increasing the traffic to your blogs or websites:

Trade links with others website owner (Traffic exchanges) - This method should be related to the subject of your blogs. But is not encourage by search engines. This method able to drive unlimited amounts of traffic to your website. Traffic exchanges are websites that award its members with advertising credits in exchange for viewing other members websites or business opportunities.
E-zines or Articles - Write some articles and submit them to e-zines, websites and magazines that accept article submissions for free. And, include your business information and web address at the end of the article.

Online community - When people get involved in your community they will regularly come back to communicate with others such as online message board, forum or chat room.
Freebie - Give away the freebie to your visitors because this will increase your blogs exposure and attract many online users to your blogs at the same time.
Online directories - List your particular item or service for free. If you’re offering a free e-zine, submit it to all the free e-zine directories on the web.
Message Boards - Participating to other people’s questions and give comments and post appropriate information.
Exchange classified or sponsor ads - Exchanging ads or links means more traffic to the web site and make money online in converting the traffic to sale much effective to the blogger and internet marketer.
Free advertising Listing - You can post it on free classified ad sites, free for all links sites, news groups that allow ads, free yellow page directories, etc. Free advertising sites offer you free advertising to entice you to upgrade in the future. When you place an ad with a free advertising website you are basically testing that website to see if your ad will generate traffic to your site, once your ads begins to generate traffic, you will most likely upgrade your account.
Setup blog and post - Setting up your own blog is one of the simplest way to generate traffic to your website either free blog or self-hosted blog. Blogs help you to simply your thoughts and ideas and the best way to communicate in a blog is to write the same way you speak. Make sure that when you are blogging you use the keywords relevant to your niche at least 5 times in the body of your blog. You can get indexed rather quickly with blogs. Therefore generating a lot of traffic to your website through the search engines.
Backlinks - This way can be achieve several ways such as reciprocal link. Reciprocal links is when you place another marketers link on your website in exchange for them placing your link on theirs. Another way is to place ads free or paid in several listings across the internet using your url as the source.
Yahoo Answers - Answering questions related to your niche will help you to generate traffic to your website for the simple fact that Yahoo allows you to post your url as the source of the answer.
Thank You Page - When someone fills your form with their information it takes them to a thank you page where the message usually read thank you for your subscription. You can redirect your thank you page to any website of your choice. The reason the traffic is targeted is because the person signing the form was definitely interested in your product.
Opt-in Form - An opt-in form is a web form used to capture a prospects name, e-mail address or phone number. This way works if you offer a prospect a free gift or service, but they must fill out your form in order to receive delivery of their gift. One caution is to make sure not to spam your list, because just as they opt-in, they can choose to opt-out.
Post comments - Make comment to others people blog will let other people to click your link because people will curious about your comment and want to look more about you and your website.
Giving testimonials - This involve giving comments and endorsement to other people’s products. As soon as you use another person’s product, send a quick email to the person telling him/her how much valuable or helpful the product was to you. Soon , you’ll be having people putting your testimonials on their high traffic website with a link to your site.
Signature - Include your signature file with links to your web site at the end of all your postings or emails or even articles.
Submit your URL to major search engines - This increase the possibilities for online users to search your website with the keywords.

Free And Useful SEO Tools for Webmaster

2008-06-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

These free SEO Tools will help your web pages and your site as a whole to achieve a top ranking status in various search engine listings like search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

ROR Sitemap Generator
Sitemap is an essential part of a website. This helps the search engines to crawl your pages easily and smoothly. The easier your web pages can be crawled by the search engines, the more pages of your website can be indexed. Likewise, the more web pages the search engines can crawl, the more information they can stock in their databases. Hence, Google actively recommends to all websites to submit sitemap in suggested XML or plain text format.

Here is a free ROR Sitemap Generator that will crawl your website and generate an ROR Sitemap for up to 1,000 URLs, which is compatible to ALL search engines, not just Google, Yahoo or MSN.

ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object on a website (sitemaps, products, services, menus, images, reviews, contact info, business info, etc), so any search engines can better understand its content.

Note: To make your ROR Sitemap automatically readable by all search engines, choose the “ror/rss” format.

Website Grader
Website Grader is a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many aspects of your site and a final grade out of 100. When I first ran it on my site, I was at 56, now I’m up to 98. And my traffic has gone from 100 visits a day to 5000. I’m not saying it’s because of Website Grader, but it helped me determine problem areas.

Xinu Returns
Another web site I had written about a couple of months back that lets you quickly check things like your pagerank, rating, backlinks, and indexed pages. Xinu Returns is a great tool to get a quick overview of your the status of your site in the blogosphere. It also gives you tips for your title tags and meta keywords.

BrowserShots
This site is really awesome for webmasters. You type in your web address and then choose all of the browsers and OSs that you would like to see your website shown in. You can see how your web site looks on Linux, Windows or Mac and in all of the different browsers, including Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera. You can also choose the screen size, color depth, etc. BrowserShots is really great tool.

YSlow
YSlow is a Firefox only addon, but it is an amazing tool for analyzing a website in terms of performance and speed. It checks 13 different factors for a web page and generates a final score for the site. It also lists out the improvements that need to be made to ensure the highest possible grade. How it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% by using it.

WebSiteOptmization
Another tool you can use that is similar to YSlow, but no need for Firefox. This tool gives you a breakdown of various aspects of your site, including HTTP requests, DNS lookups, etc and gives you recommendations on how to make it load faster, etc.

BuiltWith
BuiltWith is a very cool site that creates a profile of your website based on what technologies your site is running on. This site really focuses on the actual technologies that your site is built with, i.e. PHP, Apache server, Google Analytics, etc. It also gives you a score out of 5 stars depending on how good those technologies are. Microsoft.com has a rating of 2/5! IIS sucks!

CSS Optimizer
Just about every website uses CSS in some way or another and each call to a CSS file takes time to download. If you can shrink the size of your CSS files, even by a little bit, you’ll save a lot of time on page loading. You can also go to the W3C CSS Validation site to make sure your CSS is valid. Visit its site for more info.

Minify
A very powerful tool that will take your JavaScript and CSS files and combine them together and remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace. I have used this tool before to reduce the size of my Javascript files by almost 40%. You can imagine the savings in load time because of that, especially if you use Wordpress where each plugin usually has it’s own Javascript file.

10 Firefox Extension to Fight Against Phishing

2008-06-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

Phishing is an attempt to steal an access, identity or useful information by making a fake pages. Usually they attempt to steal e-mail, username, password, bank account number, etc.

Never reveal your passwords. Not even to family or close friends. Of course you trust your family and friends but once revealed you can never be sure that they will not unwittingly reveal your password to someone else. There may be occasions, due to sickness or accident for example, when you have to allow family or close friends to access some on-line accounts. Following such occasions you should change your passwords as soon as practically possible.

The following are a few of Firefox extensions that could be use to fight against phishing attack.

1. PhishTank SiteChecker
Will block all phishing site according to data from PhishTank Community. When you visit site that were considered as phishing site by PhishTank, then it will show you blocking page.

2. Google Safe Browsing
Will give warning when a site page attempt to steal private data or bank account information. By combining algorithm combination with data about fake site from many source, then Google Safe Browsing will automatically recognize if you visiting phishing site.

3. WOT
WOT helping you to recognize phishing site by showing site reputation to your browser. So that you can easily avoiding phishing site. The Reputation were taken according to testimonial from WOT community.

4. Verisign EV Green Bar
This extension adding certificate validation to your browser. When you access ’secure’ site, then address bar text will turn into green and showing the site owner and certificate authority. This extension helpful to recognize fake site.

5. iTrustPage
Will prevent internet user in filling form to some fake site. When you visiting site that has form page, iTrustPage calculate value from TrustScore form page, to find out if those site are valid or not.

6. Finjan SecureBrowsing
Finjan SecureBrowsing examine link to your search result and give warning about potentially phishing link. Finjan will attempt to detect malicious code and script as well. After that will give green marked for safe link and red malicious link.

7. FirePhish
FirePhish warned you everytime you visit site that is considered phishing site or has suspicious script and code.

8. CallingID Link Advisor
CallingID Link Advisor verify whether if a link is safe or not before you fully open it. When your mouse point to that link then it will show you an detailed information about those link so you can easily recognize trusted site.

9. SpoofStick
SpoofStick make you easy to find out whether if those site is a fake by showing only valid and relevant domain information.

10.TrustBar
TrustBar give an advantage to user to give a name or logo site. Making it easier to find out if those site are fake or not.

Web 2.0 Ads Ready Template for Blogger

2008-05-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for a new Blogger template? Look! This is the best template the author have converted here at eBlog Templates. It’s a wonderful web 2.0 popular blog layout with some great built in ad spots (hence the template name) and features.

It’s either a 2 or 3 column template (you can change it on the fly) so you get the best of both worlds. This Blogger template is what we call a “powerhouse” template since almost all the features you need are already built in. On top of that, it’s quite easy to setup and makes your blog look like a professional site without much effort.

Features:

2 or 3 right side columns which are easy to switch (default is 3)
3 great location ad spots (header banner 468 x 60, three 125 x 125 buttons in sidebar, and a 468 x 60 AdSense banner above the first post)
Integrated Feedburner rss and subscribe via email sidebar module (also includes “add to favorites” Technorati link)
Built-in live traffic feed widget from FEEDJIT
Built-in MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog recent reader widgets
Dynamic tabs easily created by editing the link list widget
Search box without the need for a “go” button
Recent posts and comments widgets
Nicely designed individual blog post comments section
Properly setup Blogger layout editor

You can download this template at here or here.

Grow and build traffic your blog with Entrecard

2008-05-21T02:52:00.000-07:00

For who don't know, Entrecard is a new blogger tool that enables bloggers to exchange advertising space and in turn grow their sites. A very nice idea if I must say so myself. The cool thing about it is that it also works.

Unlike things like blogrush etc this one genuinely generates traffic to your site and brings dedicated readers that will be interested in what you have to say. So Click the link above and check them out and enjoy free advertising and traffic exchange. It’s one of the best ways to grow a new blog!

Entrecard has finally added the ability for users to have more than one blog in their system. You could implement this in the past by setting up an account for each blog, but this was a major pain in the neck. Now there’s a new option called “Linked Blogs”

This lets you add a new blog, or join up a different blog you had created a new account for. Linked blogs have the following properties:

Linked blogs are displayed as “Other blogs by this author” on the profile page
There are no limits on credit transfers between linked blogs
When dropping, the currently Active card is the card that is dropped
Each blog may drop on up to 300 sites per day

There are other features they have introduced (including a new home page), but this is the best feature I think. It’s interesting how once you get used to the base service a website offers, it’s the new stuff that attracts your attention, just like shiny kitchen faucets on an old kitchen. New features make the service exciting once again, give it that spot of freshness.

Edit and Retouch your Photo on Adobe Photoshop Online

2008-04-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Adobe System Inc, the maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop on Thursday launched a basic version available for free online.

Adobe says it hopes to boost its name recognition among a new generation of consumers who edit, store and share photos online. While Photoshop is designed for trained professionals, Adobe says Photoshop Express, which it launched in a “beta” test version, is easier to learn. User comments will be taken into account for future upgrades.

Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. And, once they register, users can get to their accounts from different computers.

Web-based software is increasingly popular, and Adobe knows it’s got to get on that train, said Kathleen Maher, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research. Many kinds of software are available for use online in a trend known as “software as a service” or “cloud computing”. The earliest were e-mail programs, but they now include services to create and manage content and even whole operating systems. And they don’t require time-consuming upgrades because they’re maintained by the service provider.

Google Inc. provides a host of such services, as do Microsoft Corp and others.

“This is the battlefield where Adobe and Microsoft and Google are going to fight some pretty big battles,” Maher said.

Photoshop enters the online photo-management arena many years after such services first appeared. Some companies have already made a big name for themselves, like 9-year-old storage solution Shutterfly Inc., photo-editing service Picnik or image-sharing site Photobucket Inc.

Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.

Ron Glaz, a research analyst at IDC, says the move was necessary for Adobe to keep pace. Users are less likely to switch to a software they aren’t familiar with, he said.

“They have a whole market that they are missing out on, and they need to make sure that the market is aware there is a Photoshop solution for them. As that market grows and becomes more sophisticated, hopefully it will generate money,” Glaz said.

“It’s one of those things, if you can’t beat them, join them,” Glaz said. “If they don’t join them, the long run could be really painful.”

For the real experience visit this free web based of Photoshop at here.

Obfuscate and Encode your PHP Code with Obfusc PHP 2.3.1

2008-03-22T06:12:00.000-07:00

Obfusc Php is an obfuscator and encoder based on a high quality PHP parser to ensure that all the syntax is properly handled. You don't need to install extension on servers,obfusc is a real obfuscator.

Unlike products that only encode the sources and decode them at runtime, selling only an illusion of protection. Obfusc PHP provides full control over the obfuscation process with a powerful user interface. You can decide case by case if an identifier should be or not obfuscated.

The default settings and decisions provide around 90% rate of obfuscation without human intervention for a normal project. You can make manual decisions and rise this rate in cases where obfusc is not 100% sure that understands all code intentions. If you want to preserve names as a part of an API for customers you can easily do this too.

From interface you can choose what files are not to be obfuscated and all identifiers used in those files will not be scrambled in the rest of the project. You can have more styles for obfuscated identifiers and you can choose if strings are scrambled or white spaces and comments are stripped.When stripping comments you can also preserve some PHP comments that you choose.

Features :

Replaces variables, functions, classes, members, constants names from PHP scripts with nonsense names and obscure strings, removes comments and white spaces without affecting functionality.
Starting with 2.0 it has encoder features to hide entirely the code structure.
Fully obfuscate and encode your project before buying!
No changes required to your source code!
No changes required on server!
PHP4 and PHP5 versions supported.
Easy to use (in 1-2 hours you can be an expert)
Advanced GUI
Great for source/project analysis. You can see easy how/where every name is used.

Download this PHP tools at Here.

Alexa Shuts Down Redirect Nonsense

2008-02-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

Alexa is a web statistics company that counts traffic from a number of sources, primarily its toolbar userbase. Alexa rankings have become increasingly important lately as Izea’s Text Link Ads brokerage uses Alexa rank and Google Page Rank to set the price on text link ads it brokers.

Webmasters looking for a boost to their Alexa rankings had been using a loophole in the Alexa system to get clicks on links to their blog counted in Alexa’s traffic counts. By adding “http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?” ahead of their actual URL, Alexa would redirect the surfer to their site and count one visitor in the process. This had picked up speed in recent weeks, including a fairly good sized faction of EntreCard users using the Alexa redirect as their EntreCard URL.

Read More on Blog Carnivals ...

Integrating Adsense in The Body Of Your WordPress Post

2008-02-15T21:19:00.001-08:00

When blogging, one of the best spots to place your Adsense Ad is in the body of your post. We receives 75%+ of it’s clicks from the ads that we integrate in the post.There’s only one problem with those ads. Google Adsense allows no more then 3 Ads on a single page, and with the standard tools Wordpress supplies, on all pages that have

read more | digg story

Yahoo rejects Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid

2008-02-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Yahoo Inc. spurned Microsoft Corp.'s $44.6 billion takeover bid as inadequate Monday, betting that it can elicit a higher offer from the world's largest software maker or find another way to deliver a comparable payoff to its shareholders.

The rebuff by the slumping Internet pioneer had been widely anticipated after word of Yahoo's intention was leaked during the weekend.

In its formal response, Yahoo said its board had concluded Microsoft's unsolicited offer "substantially undervalues" the Sunnyvale-based company.

Yahoo indicated it could be lured to the negotiating table if Microsoft ups the ante, without mentioning the price it has in mind.

"The board of directors is continually evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders," Yahoo said in a statement.

Investors appeared confident that Microsoft wants Yahoo badly enough to raise the stakes. Yahoo shares rose 34 cents to $29.54 in Monday's morning trading while Microsoft shares fell 46 cents to $28.10.

If Microsoft doesn't raise its offer, Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang assured employees in a Monday e-mail that the company is poised to rebound on its own and become a "must buy" in the $45 billion online advertising market.

"We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time," wrote Yang, a company co-founder who promised things would get better after he became CEO eight months ago. "Yahoo is a faster-moving, better organized, more nimble company well on its way to transforming the experiences of its users, advertisers, publishers and developers."

Just two days before Microsoft made its bid, Yang had warned Yahoo faced "headwinds" that made it unlikely the company's performance would improve significantly until 2009.

Yahoo's stock price had dropped by more than 40 percent in the three months leading to Microsoft's bid, valued at $31 per share when it was announced Feb. 1. The offer was 62 percent above Yahoo's market value at the time.

Many analysts believe Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft will eventually raise its bid to $35 to $40 per share, sweetening the pot by $5 billion to $12 billion in an effort to negotiate an amicable sale.

Microsoft was prepared to pay at least $40 per share for Yahoo a year ago, according to a person familiar with the talks between the two companies a year ago. Yahoo wasn't interested then because it was confident in its own strategy, said the person, who didn't want to be identified because Microsoft's 2007 offer was never publicly disclosed.

But a higher bid now could hurt Microsoft's own stock price, which has been slipping amid concerns that a Yahoo takeover could be more trouble than its worth. Microsoft's market value has plunged by more than $40 billion, or 14 percent, since the bid was made public.

Microsoft representatives didn't immediately respond to requests for comment Monday morning.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan predicted Yahoo's board will have little choice but to sell the company if Microsoft raises its bid to $35 or $36 per share. "Yahoo management has already exhausted the patience of its largest, longest-suffering shareholders," Rohan wrote in a Monday note.

If it doesn't want to pay more money, Microsoft could take its original bid directly to Yahoo's shareholders. Microsoft's management began preparing for that possibility last week by meeting with some of Yahoo's major shareholders to rally support for its offer.

In a more extreme tactic, Microsoft could try to override Yahoo's board by trying to oust the current directors later this year — a risky maneuver that would likely create hard feelings that would make it more difficult to cobble the two businesses together if a deal were consummated.

Yahoo also could fend off Microsoft by exercising an antitakeover device, known as a "poison pill," that would issue more company shares to make a buyout too expensive to pull off.

Although its profits have been dwindling during the past two years, Yahoo still possesses one of the Internet's biggest audiences and most valuable franchises. Microsoft believes it can build on those assets to become a more formidable competitor to Google Inc., which now holds a commanding lead in the lucrative online search and advertising markets.

Yahoo has reportedly been exploring an advertising partnership with Google as one way to boost its profits and remain independent. The company also has been looking for other suitors that might be interested in countering Microsoft's bid, but so far no one has stepped forward.

By rejecting Microsoft's initial offer, Yahoo's board is running the risk that the company's stock will plunge below $20 per share again if its suitor decides to walk away.

That scenario would probably unleash a flood of shareholder lawsuits, intensifying the pressure on Yahoo's management team to deliver on a long-awaited turnaround that has been in the works for the past 18 months.

Source: AP

Speed up your site with PHPSpeedy

2008-02-05T23:03:00.000-08:00

Leon Chevalier of Aciddrop has just released a free script that can considerably speed-up your website or blog's load time. PHPSpeedy works by making fewer HTTP requests, adding a far-future expires header, Gziping page components and minifying Javascript, CSS and HTML.

The end results are pretty stunning, in Chevalier's test (available at his site), a 271 KB page with 14 requests took 4.44 seconds to load. The same page after the modifications weighed in at 49 KB and just 4 requests, for 1.1s load time.

The latest version of the script includes an installer process that makes enabling the script on your own website for blog very, very easy. We tried it on our own WordPress installation and found the results to be as advertised and the installation process to be worry free.

For more specific WordPress 2.3.x instructions, follow us after the jump.For WordPress 2.3.x users, installing and enabling the script is very easy.

Read more this article here. or you can download this great script at here.

Digs' em - Brand New WordPress Theme Inspired From Digg.com

2008-01-25T21:51:00.001-08:00

Digg is a very popular website. Luck and the large mass of community was not the only two elements that carried forth the success of Digg.com. Many people, especially Internet marketers and search engine marketers fail to realize the importance of a website design. Dig's em is a new WordPress theme that carries forth a very search friendly design.

read more | digg story

Animated PNG in Firefox 3

2008-01-25T21:49:00.003-08:00

No more crappy 256 color animations! PNG rules, and now they're animated, excellent.

read more | digg story

Social Bookmarking Systems | Tips And Guides

2008-01-25T21:49:00.001-08:00

Social bookmarking systems are sites that allow Internet users to save and share all of the interesting web sites they come across. On the social bookmarking systems people can save links to Web pages that they want to remember and share with others.

read more | digg story

New Google Logo

2008-01-25T21:48:00.001-08:00

My idea of new Google Logo :).

read more | digg story

Getting that Expert Look on Your Website

2008-01-25T21:47:00.001-08:00

Gone are the days when flashing text, or having animated flames plastered all over your front page was cool. Now, surfers want to see simple clean looking websites that are well organized and clear on what the subject or purpose of the website is. Here are a few tips on what you can do to help ensure you aren't one of the millions of

read more | digg story

How to speed up your website!

2008-01-25T21:46:00.001-08:00

Boost your website load time by 500% with 3 lines of code.download script from http://aciddrop.com/2008/01/23/site-speed-boost-script-updated/

read more | digg story

Digg Alters the Definition of “Popular”

2008-01-25T21:45:00.001-08:00

Most people know how Digg works. You submit a story, and based on how many people vote it up or down, it will hopefully be moved from “upcoming” to “popular.” Until now it’s been based on sheer numbers, but last night Digg founder Kevin Rose unveiled a new algorithm which turns this upside down.

read more | digg story

Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop

2008-01-25T21:43:00.001-08:00

Learn how to create cartoon style clouds using Photoshop and a bit of Illustrator. Great tutorial covering the brush engine and layer styles to get a really great looking effect.

read more | digg story

AirTalkr: Single Messenger for Yahoo!, Google Talk and MSN

2008-01-25T21:38:00.001-08:00

Like Meebo, AirTalkr offers a web based instant messenger that lets you stay connected with your buddies on Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live and other popular IM services. But there’re a couple of reasons why you may want to give AirTalkr a shot ..

read more | digg story

Bill Gates' prediction for PCs in 5 years

2008-01-25T21:37:00.001-08:00

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says that people will see a sea change in the way they interact with computers in the coming five years. According to him, more intuitive and natural technologies-particularly touch, vision and speech interfaces-will become ..

read more | digg story

How google detects invalid clicks?

2008-01-14T21:05:00.001-08:00

We always hear that Google has a sophisticated system to detect the invalid clicks, and result in termination of the cheaters' account. But, how can Google do that? In this post, I summarize those ways that Google depends on to detect whether the clicks on your site are invalid or not. Google will not first ban your account immediately. Rather, they will first flag your account and Google will keep a closer eye to your account. In some occasion, they may send you a warning letter to notify your situation; but sometimes not.

read more | digg story

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

2008-01-09T04:04:00.001-08:00

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

read more | digg story

How To Change Eye Color with PhotoShop

2008-01-09T03:48:00.000-08:00

First, open up your Image. Enlarge the image to get a good view, close-up view of the eyes. Using the “Lasso Tool," select the area of the irises & eyes. By holding SHIFT then selected the other eyes w/ Lasso Tools. Patient & Fully attention are needed. After they are both fully selected, use Feather tool (Alt + Ctrl + D) to smooth the edges, but only a little (around 0.5 – 2.0 is good).

Copy the selected area, and paste it in a new layer. Make sure the new layer of eyes are on the same spot as the first layer.

However, if you want a different colored eye, keep the second layer of eyes in "Normal" mode and go to Enhance in the main toolbar, then Adjust Color | Hue/Saturation. Choose Colorize

Set the color as you like. I’m using this setting :

Click "OK" once your satisfied with your selections.

You can leave your image like that and merge the two layers, but only if you are happy with the results. If you still want to experienced with it, set the Blending Mode at the second layer of eyes into "Overlay" or whatsoever as you like
If you like the overall effect, but still wants the color looked lighter or darker, have a experienced with the opacity. For a quick lightening/darkening tool, use the "Dodge Tool" or "Burn Tool".

I lowered the Opacity of the Overlay effect to 70%. Then I used the "Dodge Tool" with a Range of 'Midtones' and Exposure of '100%' and clicked on each eye once using the tool. This is now my result:

OK. Enjoy your work!

Free 9 Beautiful 3D WallPapers: Cooool!

2008-01-09T02:06:00.001-08:00

IMAGE: Free 9 Beautiful 3D Wallpapers for your desktop

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The Right Way To Make a Robots.txt file!

2008-01-09T01:56:00.000-08:00

What is a robots.txt file? The robots.txt file is a simple text file that must be placed in your root directory (http://www.example.com/robots.txt). It tells the search engine spider which web pages on your website should be indexed and which web pages should be ignored.

You can use a simple text editor to create a robots.txt file. The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called “records”.
A record contains the information for a special search engine. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent line and one or more Disallow lines.

Here’s an example:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /uploads/

This robots.txt file would allow the “googlebot”, which is the search engine spider of Google, to retrieve every page from your site except for files from the “cgi-bin” directory. All files in the “cgi-bin” directory will be ignored by googlebot.

Which new commands is Google testing?
Webmasters have found out that Google seems to be experimenting with a Noindex commands for the robots.txt file. It basically seems to do the same as the Disallow command so it’s not clear why Google is using this command.
Other commands that might be tested by Google are Noarchive and Nofollow. However, none of these commands is official yet.

How does this affect your rankings on Google?
If you accidentally use the wrong commands then you might tell Google to go away although you want them to index your pages. For that reason, it is important that you check the content of your robotx.txt file.

How to check your robots.txt file
Open your web browser and enter http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt to view the contents of your robots txt file.

Here are the most important tips for a correct robots.txt file:
There are only two official commands for the robots.txt file: User-agent and Disallow. Do not use more commands than these.
Don’t change the order of the commands. Start with the user-agent line and then add the disallow commands:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /uploads/

Don’t use more than one directory in a Disallow line.
“Disallow: /support /cgi-bin/ /images/” does not work.
Use an extra Disallow line for every directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /support
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

Be sure to use the right case. The file names on your server are case sensitve.
If the name of your directory is “Support“, don’t write “support” in the robots.txt file.

You can find user agent names in your log files by checking for requests to robots.txt. Usually, all search engine spiders should be given the same rights. To do that, use User-agent: * in your robots.txt file.

What happens if you don’t have a robots.txt file?
If your website doesn’t have a robots.txt file (you can check this by entering your http://www.yourdomain.com/robotx.txt in your web browser) then search engines will automatically index everything they can find on your site.

Checking your robots.txt file is important if you want search engines to index your web pages. However, indexing alone is not enough. You must also make sure that search engines find what they’re looking for when they index your pages.

Google applies for image text patent

2008-01-07T09:54:00.000-08:00

Google has filed a patent for the recognition and use of text contained in images and videos. The application, made in June 2007, was published on Thursday and covers "methods, systems and apparatus including computer program products for using extracted image text," according to Google.

"In one implementation, a computer-implemented method is provided," reads the abstract for the application. "The method includes receiving an input of one or more image-search terms and identifying keywords from the received one or more image search terms. The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image-search terms, and presenting the image."

The Right Keywords for SEO Development

2008-01-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

Selecting a correct, proper and related keyword for your web site is key and most important as far as SEO is concerned. Selecting proper keywords is the base of the search engine optimization campaign. In other words it is the foundation of the search engine optimization campaign. At this stage, think many times and look around in the top search engines and/or use keyword selection tools to create a list of related keywords not only for your home page but every single page of your website.

During Selection of Keywords, make sure of following considerations:

First of all, select domain name which reflects the theme of your web site (if it is possible), however, if it is not applicable to get the related domain name then consider another, because it is not very important because most of search engines don’t give weight to the URLs.

Select keyword which are specifically related to your product or services you are going to offer. If you are using keywords in phrases then these must be meaningful short sentences, otherwise, yes your site will appear in top positions but there will be no use if no one is using that unnatural keyword phrase on the net. That means the keyword should be selected as per your product and services in meaningful short phrases.

If it is applicable, regionalize your keywords, because targeting on regionalized market will result more useful and targeted traffic with lower competition, in fact there will be more sales. For example, if you are selling product or service in Las Vegas, Nevada, then add Las Vegas or Nevada in your selected key phrases.

Select relatively less competitive keywords which will increase the probabilities of appearance of your site in top rankings.

After these considerations, you will find a good comprehensive list of keywords; now you can professionally and effectively optimize your entire site for all of your selected keywords, if you have series of landing pages with various services and products.

Another term which has very significant role in search engine optimization is Anchor Text; it has importance within inbound links. Inbound links from websites provides your site two benefits. The first and obvious is that these links can help your company by sending potential customers to your website. The second benefit is that Google and the other major search engines will see these links as votes of confidence therefore giving your website a boost in its rankings. When developing inbound links it is important to take advantage of keywords that your site might be targeting.

In the First paragraph I mentioned that you need keywords not only for your home page but for your other pages as well, it has paramount importance that your optimization efforts should never stop after your home page is completed, your entire site should be professionally optimized for maximum results.

At the last but not least, do not make mistake in selecting higher competitive keywords, this will lead your website dropping in deep pages of search engine results.

Source: Webmaster Tips

The Most Creative Website Design

2008-01-05T06:52:00.000-08:00

If we would like to develop our company in World Wide Web, then it's necessary to create the most creative website, so people can visit our website and want to take the information about our services and products. It is said that the first impression is the last impression and your website is the first impression to your target prospective clients. The impression should be developed by your creative website in visitor's mind so it's essential to create more creative website for first impression on our client's mentality so they want to visit our site again. To design the most creative website, follow below tips.

About Pages
If you want to get the ideas of your visitors, then feedback is necessary. Contact us page is also advisable to start a relation among you and your clients. You must give your email address so visitor can contact you directly and you can give support completely. About us webpage must be included to provide the information about your company. The information can be year of establishment, your growth, and name of country from where you operate. Home page must be included with links to all the other WebPages. All web pages must be given and the link to Home page.

Attractive
Your website should be attractive. The color selection for the pages has to be looked nice. The color of background has to be light and design has to be attracted by visitor first look.

Professional
Your website should be professional, in proper title pages. The content must be placed and unnecessary content must be avoided in a proper way. At first site, it should be able to show the visitor's interest for continuing your website. For example, you can visit our site - flash web design fort lauderdale

Small size of WebPages
WebPages should also be good looking and creative as well. WebPages must not be very comprehensive. Surfing of these types of websites will be simply avoided.

Text
Content does not issue; issue is look of expressions in WebPages. The background of the webpage should be light and text should be dark, it will be impressive. To read the text easily, the background should not be dark. All the fonts of the WebPages should be chosen properly which are easily available on every computer. In this case, visitors do not need to install new fonts in computer to read your text of your webpage. They can surf and read your site easily.

Capitalized Text
If you want to emphasize something, only when you should use capitalized text. Don't uses capitalize text in every sentences, it is hard to read.

Grammar
You should not be careless in text which is written in the webpage. You must not make any mistakes which may prove your ineffectiveness. Before finalize the text of your WebPages, you must check it. Any grammatical mistakes must not be made.

Background Images
You should keep minimum background images. Generally, it makes your pages harder to view and read.

Image Formats
Generally designers are using two types of formats GIF and JPEG. Let's know the difference between both formats.
GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format. For different types of images, this format is better with only some different colors like drawing, black and white images and little content that will be little pixels high. It is also supporting transparency. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It supports 16 million colors which are the best suited for photographs and complex graphics. It does not work well on line drawings, lettering or simple graphics.

Frames
When you are using frames in your website, it makes website ugly, confusing and more complicated.
Thus, the expert web designing companies have the best skills to design and online marketing skill and know that how to develop a website that should be one of the most favorable advertising tools in the biggest market of the world. Are you looking for web design fort lauderdale, you can certainly contact us at Ardis Creative.

Source: Peter Einheuser

phpMyAdmin 2.11.2 has been released

2007-11-04T06:05:00.001-08:00

phpMyAdmin, a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web has released version 2.11.2. This opensource tool currently can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields. phpMyAdmin's project have won the 2007 Source

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Free Three SEO WordPress Themes for download

2007-10-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

There are three free WordPress themes that provided by EasyWebTutorial with easily customizable and also optimized for your blog posts to rank well in the search engines. Those themes are in two columns and three columns layout.

Below you see the screenshots for each theme and the download links.
Downloads are available in two archive formats: .zip and .tar. You will need a tool like WinZip or WinRAR (for PC users) or Stuffit Expander (for Mac users) to extract the archives.

2C Right SEO

Download Links: ZIP TAR

2C Left SEO

Download Links: ZIP TAR

3C SEO

Download Links: ZIP TAR

Btw, the author released these three free themes under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Most Popular WordPress Plugins

2007-10-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

After searching and visiting many blogs, analyzing them and doing some interviews with WordPress members, finally we found and make the list the most popular plugins of WordPress:

The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

Search Pages - This plugin ties the built in search function in wordpress to the pages. The default installation only searches blog posts. This is an absolute neccesity if you are using wordpress as a CMS and not a blogging tool.

Search Meter - Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong on your site.

Static Homepage - If you want to use wordpres as a CMS instead of a blog this plugin makes the homepage magic happen.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.

Feedburner Replacement Plugin - Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.

Objection Redirection - This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.

Visitor IP Logger is a simple module that lets you see all IPs that visit your website. It uses a password-protected page to display the data that is collected automatically, once the module is activated.

Adsense Deluxe - A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog.

Adsense Injection - Another Dax special that randomly inserts Adsense somewhere in each posting. Not advisable for the control freaks, definitely advisable for sites with lots of returning readers who don’t normally click on Adsense.

Bunny’s Technorati Tags - A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.

AddThis Social Bookmarking will help your visitor promote your website or blog. Put the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, so any visitor can easily bookmark it. The widget works with all popular bookmarking services.

Amazon Links Pro is a plugin for adding relevant and contextual links to Amazon.com products. It generates code automatically and allows full customization of how and when contextual links appear within your content.

Kontera plugin adds the Kontera script to the bottom of the page. Also it is possible to customize your Kontera ads even further through the Options page. It is very easy not to set the color, and heading filtering of the ads. More options will come in the future. Furthermore the plugin restricts the Kontera ads to your blog content, and not outside of it. This optimizes the number of clicks the ads receive. Finally you can choose which posts to omit from targeting. This is very useful when you use PayPerPost, or other services that require you to remove anything that overlaps the content in your post.

Adhesive - Allows you to stick a posting to the top overriding the standard chronological order of things.

Bread Crumb Trail Generator - A little tricky to configure but very useful once you do. Especially nice when used on a static website.

Feed Copyrighter - Let’s you add copyright info to your feed. Makes it easy to track and follow scrapers.

Moderate Trackbacks - Not used as much as it once was Akismet catches most of the spam, but I keep it around as a backup.

Postie - A very powerful tool if you do remote posting via email. Takes a little tinkering to get it set up right but once you do it’s hands off. Combine with cronless postie for regular automated checking.

Related Posts - Automagically creates a list of related posts.

Recent Posts and Recent Comments - Shockingly these two plugins give you a list of recent posts and recent comments, go figure.

Flickr Photosets - If you are doing anything with flickr this plugin kicks ass letting you tie it into your wordpress bog. Especially nice if you’ve upgraded to flickr pro and have multiple albums, see an example.

Top 10 Posts - gives you the top 10 posts by views, very hackable see my top 100 posts for an example.

WP Cron - Makes all sorts of wordpress housekeeping features happen automagically. Just be sure to activate the main plugin first before any of the others or things may not work properly.

WP - Admin Bar - Puts a really nice navigation bar up for users who are logged in.

WP Contact Form - A very simple no frills contact form.

Change Color of Your WordPress Login

2007-10-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Tired with your WordPress Login Screen? Download this file for solve it!

Customizable Digg This! module for Joomla & Mambo

2007-10-23T11:37:00.001-07:00

Nice Joomla Component... DUGG! See it in action at www.overclockingwiki.org/joomla

read more | digg story

The Most Quality Online Tools for Webmasters

2007-10-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

In my many years of designing, developing and maintaining websites, I've come across many sites/tools that offer value to webmasters. Though I have a large list of bookmarks, I have narrowed it down to twelve (free) sites that I find to be the most useful, and I visit them often. I'm not listing them in order of relative importance, but rather in the order in which you'd go to them when creating a new website.

1. Overture's Keyword Selector Tool
When you're in the planning stage for your site, this will help you validate whether or not your idea is a good one. It will tell the estimated number of times that term was searched on in the last month, so you'll be able to get an idea of how in demand your site will be. It also provides related searches that include your term, which give you an idea of the content to include in your site.

2. Pre-built PHP Scripts
This site can save you a lot of time and money, in that you won't have to develop your site from scratch. Whether you're looking to implement a CMS or blogging tool, or perhaps including classifieds or a photo gallery, the free scripts on this site will prevent you from having to build from scratch.

3. Current web design style guide
This will give you many ideas and considerations when creating the actual template for your site.

4. CSS Tools
When you're designing your template based on item #2, you'll most likely need some CSS help. OK, so this link is actually to another list, but it's certainly an incredibly valuable and comprehensive one. If you have any question about CSS or would like help creating an effect on your site that you've seen on another, you'll most likely find the information there!

5. A Color Matching Tool
Unless you're an artist or very good designer, you may not instinctively know which colors work best with each other. So if your logo contains primarily #80ABBF blue, and you want to design your template around it, this site will help you find complimentary colors to incorporate into the design.

6. Favicon Editor & Generator
While this is not absolutely essential, it's becoming more common practice to for sites to have a custom favicon. (If you're not sure what that is, it's the little icon that appears beside the URL, the title in the tab, and the favorite/bookmark, depending on your browser. It gives your site a professional, fully-developed feel. You can 'draw' your own with this tool, or upload a 16×16 .png file to generate your custom favicon.ico file.

7. Free Stock Images
This is an enormous resource for those who want to place professional looking photos on their site, but don't want to pay the normally high price for stock photos. Alternately, I'd recommend iStockPhoto for very cheap stock imagery.

8. Search Engine Submission
Once your site has some structure and content, it's time to alert the search engines, and start drawing traffic! Here are quick links to the top three, you're on your own to find others…
- Google
- Yahoo
- MSN
- DMOZ

9. Sitemap Generator
To have your site indexed more quickly, regularly and completely, you need an XML sitemap that conforms to the current sitemaps protocol. If you have Joomla, WordPress or another CMS, you can most likely find a plugin that automatically generates your sitemap. For Blogger or Blogspot users you can use Google Webmaster Tools for creating this. Otherwise, use this tool to manually spider your site and create one for you.

10. Web Analytics
While you may have free web analytics tools that come with your hosting package, Google Analytics will give you insight into your visitors and their navigation on your site that simply can't be rivaled by any other free tools.

11. Search Ranking and Back-link Monitoring Tool
As your site grows, you can use this tool to monitor how you're tracking in search rankings for your keywords. You can also see how many backlinks your site has, and how many pages the search engines have indexed on your site.

12. Webmaster Forums
Join these forums, and you'll never look back! Here you'll find invaluable advice from thousands of other webmasters on how to continually improve your site, and increase traffic and profits from virtually any type of site!

Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts [PDF]

2007-10-22T02:15:00.001-07:00

Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts

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What do the pros use, Aperture or Lightroom?

2007-10-22T01:57:00.000-07:00

It's been exactly two years since Apple threw its hat into the professional photography ring with the introduction of Aperture. Adobe responded shortly thereafter with the introduction of Lightroom. So, how does the pro photography market look now?

InfoTrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America to determine which software they used for raw file processing. Here's what folks reported:

66.5% using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in
23.6% using Lightroom
5.5% using Aperture

To be fair to Aperture, it might be helpful to remove Windows users from the equation for a moment. Even after doing so, Lightroom's usage among Mac-based pros is still nearly double that of Aperture (26.6% vs. 14.3%).

It's also worth pointing out that photographers haven't started to abandon Photoshop as a result of using tools such as Lightroom. (Photoshop usage overall remains in the 90% range.) The vast majority of photographers seem to understand pretty clearly the different nature & roles of the apps, and they continue to view Photoshop as a must-have part of any serious arsenal.

Lightroom is clearly off to a tremendous start, and everyone here is really pleased & grateful to the photography community for such a warm welcome.

Source: John Nack

YouTube Videos for your Google AdSense is Possible now!

2007-10-22T01:34:00.000-07:00

Initially available only to US-based English language sites, video units deliver targeted video clips from YouTube partners, with advertising above the clip and superimposed over the bottom 20 percent of the video.
The use of text ads means Google has a large pool of advertisers to draw on for the new units.

The superimposed approach seems more visitor friendly than inserting pre-roll ads: who wants to watch a 15 second ad before they can see a 60 second clip?

Like regular embedded YouTube clips, the ads do not play until the visitor clicks on them, and the superimposed ads can be minimised in height to be less intrusive. Ads may be targeted to the content of the site and the video, or to the specific site. Payment may be based on clicks or impressions, but Google did not indicate how the revenue will be divided between itself, the site publisher and the video provider.

Publishers may choose to display only videos from particular categories or from specific providers. Launch content partners include TV Guide Broadband, Expert Village, Mondo Media, lonelygirl15, Extreme Elements, and Ford Models.

"This new program is a scalable and cost-effective way to distribute content online, creates a new revenue opportunity for publishers and content owners, and helps advertisers reach their target audiences in new and innovative ways," said Google officials. "It will also allow AdSense publishers a unique way to enhance their sites with fresh, dynamic content."

Third Quarter 2007 Results of Google: $4.23 Billion

2007-10-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

Following Yahoo's third quarter 2007 financial results, the Mountain View company Google today published its results revealing revenues of $4.23 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2007. It was already known that Google
is one of the richest companies on the web and today's results come to confirm this statement. According to the super giant, this quarter's results represent an increase of 57 percent in comparison with the same period of the last year and a 9 percent increase from the second quarter of this year.

"We are very pleased with the impressive growth we experienced across our business," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "Our core search advertising business experienced continued momentum driven by growth in monetization and traffic, and we are creating a wider and deeper ads system through our focus on innovation, bringing more ad formats to our advertisers. Our efforts to offer more products and services in international markets as well as effectively grow our technology infrastructure and add to our deep talent base during the quarter helped to deliver growth by enabling Google to reach more users around the world."

What's most impressive is that Google proved an amazing financial power since 65 percent of its revenues were generated by the company's websites and technologies, meaning that Google produced no less than $2.73 billion. In comparison with the same period of 2006, this year's results come with a 68 percent increase and only 10 percent from the second quarter of 2007.

The main source of revenues for the Mountain View company is still the United States which generated 52 percent of the total money coming to the Googleplex.

"Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $2.03 billion, representing 48% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2007, compared to 44% in the third quarter of 2006 and 48% in the second quarter of 2007."

If you'd like to read all the Google financial results, feel free to visit the official press release available here.

Source: Bogdan Popa

Improve Your Blog Appearance with YouTube Stylish Bar

2007-10-20T01:16:00.000-07:00

Many of you who own a website or at least a blog embed YouTube clips very often in order to make the content more attractive for the visitors. Because of that, the video sharing service released a new function which enables you
to create YouTube bars and place them on your website to invite users to view certain clips.

Obviously, the video bar can be configured to showcase only the movies from a certain channel or the ones which match a specific search query. The video bar can be easily implemented into your website because the YouTube video bar wizard provides you a simple code just like any embeddable video.

At this time, you're able to choose from two versions of video bars, vertical or horizontal as well as from several channels including most viewed videos, top rated videos and recently featured videos.

"Got a blog or website? Maybe you want to add some pizzazz in the form of YouTube videos. If you've ever embedded individual videos, you might be interested in adding a horizontal or vertical YouTube video bar. It's easy to set up and you can customize it to feature a specific YouTube channel, Most Viewed Videos, Top Rated Videos, Recently Featured Videos, or videos resulting from a certain search term," the YouTube team wrote on the main blog of the video sharing service.

The entire configuration process can be made in a matter of seconds as it only requires you to enter minimal details about the channels and the type of the video bar.

"If you're curious about what else you can do with the Video Bar, check out the GSvideoBar documentation. With a little more programming, you can change the player size, number of results, thumbnail size, and more," Google stated in an attempt to attract more users.

Source: Bogdan Popa

25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

2007-10-18T06:25:00.001-07:00

I came up with this list of signs that you might be a hardcore designer. A lot of these signs can overlap other professions too. From my experience, the following list contains mostly truths, mixed in with a little humor.

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Top 981 Free Wordpress Themes

2007-10-18T06:21:00.001-07:00

I think the is the biggest list of free WordPress Themes.

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How To Solve Duplicate content issue in WordPress to rank better in Google

2007-10-18T06:19:00.001-07:00

WordPress, the best blogging platform has a severe weakness - duplicate content. This tut shows you how to solve that problem so that you can rank well in Google, Yahoo etc.

read more | digg story

How to format images beautifully in blog posts

2007-10-18T06:18:00.001-07:00

Every one loves images in a blog post. Wondered how to format and display those images beautifully? here's how.

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Google: $600 and Counting

2007-10-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Google is at it again. No, I’m not talking about pushing the envelope in innovative search and advertising technologies; I’m talking about increasing the wealth of lucky shareholders who have enjoyed a 33.6% gain in price per share (PPS) year to date (YTD). Yesterday the internet behemoth, stock ticker GOOG, broke $600 for the first time.

Although the stock has been pushing all time highs for the last month, this psychologically important mark provides a good point for reflection on the how and why of the amazing performance of this stock.

It all started on August 19th, 2004, when Google held its initial public offering (IPO) at $85 per share. In the remaining months of the year the stock more than doubled to close the year over $190. The PPS more than doubled again in 2005. The following year was a volatile period, most of which was spent in the red. GOOG closed 2006 only slightly higher than where it began.

Statements declaring the causes of a stock’s performance are conjectures at best, but to my recollection the common thought in 2006 was that GOOG simply could not continue grow its earnings per share (EPS) at a fast enough rate to warrant its tremendous price to earnings (PE) ratio. This is a painful phase in the life of many publicly traded tech companies as they transition from what traders refer to as a “growth stock” to a “value stock.” In GOOG’s case the PE ratio contracted from 100 to the high 50s in a year when EPS grew over 70%.

Late in 2006 Google began taking actions that have rekindled the street’s love of this company as a growth stock. It started with the October purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Over the following months the company began to demonstrate its ability to monetize the video-sharing website through advertising, as well as negotiate the legal risk of user posted content.

Recently speculation about a Google phone has accelerated the growth of stock price. It is believed that the company will either produce a phone enabled with Google’s mobile applications, or more likely it will release a free mobile operating system and software suit that will be advertising funded. Google has clearly demonstrated its interest in the cellular space with its release of Goog-411 and its involvement in the FCC’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum.

Also adding fuel to the fire is the appearance that Google is gaining market share in the world’s hottest economy: China. A recent report by Analysis International indicates that Google increased its market share 4% in the last quarter to 22.8% versus the slower 1% increase by Baidu to 58.1%. Cynics have dismissed this by saying Google is not taking share from Baidu, but merely capturing more of the new market.

Whatever its plans, Google has shown the glass ceiling for its business may be higher than anyone has expected and it appears the stock is ready to run. Fundamentally the company is being valued at its historic lows, with a PE ratio in the 50s. Should the PE enter a period of expansion combined with sustained EPS growth, GOOG could easily hit the $800 target set by popular stock commentator Jim Cramer.

Wall Street analysts seem to recognize this potential as well. Of the analysts polled by Reuters, in the last month five have raised price targets compared to one lowering. TheStreet.com shows that of the 20 analysts the site covers, 16 rate GOOG a buy, 2 overweight, and 2 a hold. In other words none recommend selling the stock and the vast majority think you should be buying. All this optimism is the result of what is known as an “upgrade cycle.”

To top it off the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has been dropping interest rates to avoid a recession due to the imploding home mortgage market in the U.S. This is at least a temporary boon to stocks as a whole since a lower interest rate frees up cash for investment.

Could this picture get any brighter and could the GOOG rose smell any sweeter? Sure, there is always potential with this company, but a few words of caution are in order. First off it should be understood that some of the processes driving GOOG’s performance may have reached their limits. The analyst upgrade cycle is fairly well played out. How much more positive can they get on this company? Myopically positive analyst coverage is one of Jim Cramer’s favorite warnings that a stock may be reaching its top.

Also the FOMC could decide that the economy is actually cooking along nicely and stop the interest rate cut cycle. The recent jobs report indicated that America is growing employment slightly faster than expected lending credit to this idea. The dramatic plunge in the value of the U.S. Dollar will pressure the FOMC to hike or at least maintain interest rates in the near future. The negative effect of a rate hike was demonstrated in May 2006 when it led to an 11% decline in the NASDAQ over the next three months. During this period GOOG decreased nearly 15%.

Another development to keep in mind is the accelerated insider selling by Google executives. According to Form4Oracle.com, over the past 13 weeks Google insiders have sold over $420 million in shares versus the $290 million of the previous 13 week period. Although trading on inside information is illegal, street sentiment is that heavy insider selling is a negative indicator.

Later this month Google share holders will face an important hurdle when third quarter earnings are announced. This year Google missed quarter earnings estimates for the second time in company history when their second quarter failed to meet analysts’ expectations. Over the next month the stock sank 10%, although in Google’s defense the NASDAQ sank over 7% in the same period. If on October, 18, Google should again miss earnings estimates it will add great strength the sentiment that their growth is unsustainable and a nasty period of PE contraction will most surely follow. The flip side of this coin is that if they blow away the estimates, like they traditionally do, a lot of apprehension will be relieved and you can expect to see new money from the sidelines push the stock even higher.

The last word of caution that I will offer is to keep in mind the big picture of how big this company is. A recent report by comScore indicates that Google conducted over 37 billion searches in August. The company accounts for over 50% of U.S. searches and over 60% world-wide. These numbers are expected to keep growing. Google is so dominate that investors, myself included, think Yahoo! should throw in the towel on search and focus on other services where they have fighting chance. I recently heard Leo Laporte say that if you are not listed by Google you don’t exist online. Combine Google’s asymptotic march to 100% search market share with its printed advertising and mobile phone ambitions, and you have a company that is ripe for an antitrust lawsuit. This is an endgame to the unbridled growth that many people seem to regard as inevitable for Google.

Having stated all these pros and cons for GOOG, the only thing I can say with complete confidence about this company is to summarize a quote from an investor whose name I cannot recall. The future will be volatile.

Source: Andrew Campbell

Hacking FeedWordPress for Self Auto Update

2007-10-15T00:47:00.001-07:00

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you choose into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.

No Cron?

If you do not have cron-facilities at your hosting provider, you have a bit of a problem. The latest version of WordPress have built in WP-cron facilities now, but it is extremely badly documented, and apart from the developers, no-one really seems to know how to use the functionality.

With the lack of cron-support on our host, we would have to go to the manual update file a couple of times per day, and that would be annoying even by the end of the day.

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/update-feeds.php

Here is the fix

This little hack involves a bit of editing of the update-feeds.php file in your wp-content/-folder, and then subscribing to www.WebCron.org.
Its free, and it gives you the option to run specific urls every hour, or however you want to time it.
Webcron allows you to do tasks at set hours by looking for a page on your website.

The system allows you to enter a username and password, which would prevent improper use of the system, but it does not word with the FWP update script. The webcron service uses GET to contact the url, and FWP accepts only POSTs.

Our first task is to make sure the script is not forwarded to the login page. Open up your editor, and load the update-feeds.php file.

Now, we do want to ensure that the script can still talk to the WP backend, so we do not want to remove the login check, but simply by-pass it by adding the variables above the check function, with the correct values, like this:

It could be seen as a breach of security to put your login and password in the .php file, but who is going to be looking at it? Only people who already have access to your FTP, thats who.

We now have secured that the script is always logged in, and ready to communicate with the WordPress backend. But the script usually requires an layer of interactivity, where you as the user select which feeds (if not all) to update from a pulldown.

Here is where some additional editing comes into play. You simply add the variable to the beginning of the script, like this:

$_POST['update']='silent'; would work as well, but I left the verbose option there for debugging, and there is no reason to not leave it there.

There you have it. Its not a beautiful hack in its layout, but its effective. I wish the functionality of automated tasks were more better documented, so there would be no need for hacks like this, editing source .php-files and relying on 3rd party homepages.

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets For Photoshop: Part 4

2007-10-10T01:12:00.000-07:00

76. After you created a text you can click on font type tab and tap "down" key over and over to scroll through the font list and see the changes in (relatively) real time. A feature that I am tired of waiting to happen in illustrator.

77. Still in text mode, a trick from Microsoft word to apply hi-light to your text hit Ctrl+Shift+ <> to resize your text, to your preferred font size. Pressing Ctrl key while you are typing also gives you a free transform box temporarily and will go if you release it. Resizing text also works by pressing Ctrl+T (on selected layer, not when you are typing). It still retains as an editable text layer after.

78. And remember, pressing enter when you type will take you to a new line just like typing a letter but pressing Ctrl+Enter or Enter on numeric key will finish what you type.

79. You can drag a layer on to any other opened images in Photoshop and it will copy it as a layer (better than copy and paste image). Holding down Shift while moving it will snap the image right on the center of the other opened image

80. If you are working with sets....

Click on the set, in the blending mode it shows pass through by default... if you have an adjustment layer within a set and you want that adjustment layer to effect those layers underneath it within the set only, set the blending mode of the set to "normal" instead.

Mentioned before with more explanation:

- Pressed F to switch to 3 different viewing mode... when I first try it I said "wtf? what it's for?" Well, if you are sick of painting your image on the corners just to find yourself resizing your current image window, with F you can pan way outside your image. Happy corner painting!!

- Create a new file, 500x500 px, create a new layer, get a standard brush and paint a dot on the top center of your image (like the number 12 position on a clock). Press Ctrl+Alt+T, it will duplicate your original layer and free transform the new one. Move the pivot point (the circle with little dot in it found when you are free transforming something) to the center of your image, rotate your image 30 degrees to the right and hit OK to confirm the transform

now.........

Be excited..........
Hit Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T 10 times and see what happens!

81. When using the "move tool" you can select any layer by holding down the CTL key(CMD on a Mac) and clicking on the part of the layer on the canvas with your mouse. This way you won't have to go to the Layers palette every time and you don't have to keep checking on or off the auto select options for the move tool.

82. You can link up layers without going into the layers palette, by selecting the layer (how I just mentioned above) and holding down CTL + Shift(CMD + SHIT on a Mac) for each additional layer you want to link up. You can unlink them by clicking on the layer again.

83. You can delete more than one layer at a time.......by linking up all the layer you want to delete, and holding down CTL(CMD on a Mac) while you click on the garbage icon to delete the layer.

84. When using the type tool you can ok it by pressing CTL + Enter(CMD + Enter on a Mac) instead of clicking on the check mark on the options.

85. If you have more than one type layer, and want to make any of the following changes color/font/size/alignment/initializing to all of the type layers at the same time.....All you have to do is link up the type layer, hold down the Shift key and in the options for the type tool make your change i.e. color, size, etc.

86. You can use your number pad to change opacity for a layer.... I.e. type 5 and the opacity will be 50; type 55 and the opacity will be 55. You can use the number pad for any tool that uses opacity...like the airbrush tool, stamp tool, brush, gradient, etc.

87. Pressing Tab key will hide the Tools palette and any other palette that you have on the stage. Pressing "F" will change between Full Screen modes. Using these two tips you can view your work Full Screen without any palettes.(You can press CTL+Alt+0 to fit your work to the screen, or you can press CTL+0 to zoom to 100%)

88. Pressing the "+" and "-" keys while holding down CTL+Alt will resize the whole document window, not just the work area.

89. You can delete a layer by holding down the "Alt" key and pressing "L" twice......actually now with Photoshop 7 you got to press "L" three times. It's not actually a keyboard shortcut, but it's a quick way to do it....don't know if it works on a MAC.

90. Pan documents with the space bar.

91. Ctrl+click a layer (in layers palette) to select it's transparency.

92. Ctrl+Alt+click between 2 layers in the palette to group them.

93. Alt + click in “add layer mask” button to add a black layer mask (instead of a white one).

94. When you select something, pressing Ctrl+J will copy the selected area and add another layer with the copied area - opposing copying the layer, making a new layer, and pasting it.

95. To glue the palettes together (all palettes combined into one strip), you just drag & drop a palette onto the end of another palette (watch the rectangle that indicates where the palette will get attached to).

96. Hold down Alt while Burning to Dodge instead, and vice versa.

97. Ctrl-click a layer to select an objects; alternatively, you may select more than one object/s in more than 1 layer by holding Shift while using the method just mentioned (Ctrl-click). To deselect, just press Ctrl+D.

98. If you have a mini scroll on your mouse, you may use that to zoom in (scroll up) or zoom out (scroll down).

99. Need to locate a layer quick? Use the Move Tool (V) and right click on the area the object lays. There should now be a “cursor-menu” with all the layers that is in that particular area. Now take a good guess and see which one of them fits the shoe; select a layer and Ctrl-Click the layer in the Layer Palette - see if the selection traces the object you desired to edit/find. Useful for those messy people (i.e. me!).

100. Need to get rid of a background quick? Assuming you at least know how to crop around an object, do so. Now press Ctrl+I or Shift+Ctrl+I for Inverse Selection. Press Ctrl+X to %@#!* that part out, and you should be left with the object!

101. Want to save the time from loading All your Photoshop brushes, when your Photoshop accidentally forgets to load them up (happens to me sometimes)? Select the brush tool, and click the little arrow pointing right (located at the top toolbar), next to the Master Diameter tick. Go down to Preset Manager and now there should be a menu of all the brushes currently loaded. Click on the first brush (top left) and scroll down to the bottom. Now hold Shift and click the last brush (bottom right). This should highlight all the brushes. See the “Save Set” to the right in the menu? Click that and name your brush set whatever you want, for this matter I just name it All (so I remember that this brush set contains all the brushes I currently have loaded, and is located near the top when loading the brushes up).

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets For Photoshop: Part 3

2007-10-10T01:10:00.000-07:00

51. To center an image, Ctrl + A , Ctrl + X, Ctrl + V, I think it also puts that image on a new layer.

52. Ctrl+E will merge the highlighted layer down to the next

53. When you have a brush selected, using [ or ] will scroll up or down that brush list.

54. Double clicking the zoom tool will make the image 100%, double clicking the hand tool will fit the image to your screen resolution.
55. Typing Content:

Ctrl + H will hide the highlight on your selected type.

If you click once while your type is selected on the font list, you can use your arrows to scroll up and down and see the fonts change on the fly!

Alt + Left or Right arrows will change your tracking in increments of 10
Ctrl + Alt + Left or Right arrows will change your tracking in increments of 100
Ctrl + Alt + Up or Down arrows will change your leading in increments of 10 pts
Shift + Ctrl with <> will change your font size in increments of 2 pts

56. Ctrl + Alt + T to make a copy of the layer in which you want to transform.

57. Ctrl + Alt + Right arrow. duplicates the layer you are on.

58. Change the active layer : Alt + [ or ].

59. Move the active layer up and down : Ctrl + [ or ].

60. Link 2 layers: with move tool click in the first layer hold Shift and click in the second one.

61. Ctrl+[plus key] will let you zoom in on an image anytime while Ctrl+[minus key] zooms out. Ctrl+Alt+[plus key] will zoom in AND RESIZE the window to fit the image size... same for Ctrl+Alt+[minus key] as well.

62. When using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click backspace to undo a lasso step.

63. Pressing X will switch the selected foreground and background colors.

64. Pressing D will reset the foreground and backgrounds colors to black and white.

65. If your image has multiple layers, create a Marquee selection and press Ctrl+Shift+Cit won't work if you selected a hidden layer) will copy the image into memory as if they were flattened! Paste it on a new document to see the result.

66. Ctrl+Alt+Z will do multiple undo, versus just one.

67. Ctrl+click a layer thumbnail to select the layer transparency

68. To see what your layer mask looks like (and edit it), Alt+click its thumbnail in the layers palette

69. Press and hold Ctrl+Alt and click the Help bar with your mouse, drag it down and highlight "About Photoshop" and let go of the left mouse button for a different About Photoshop splash/screen.

70. When using Polygon lasso tool hold Shift to make a perfect line, it goes every 30 degrees

71.Photoshop CS2: Group many layers by clicking the layers you want to group by clicking it while holding the Shift key down, and then press Ctrl+G to group them into a folder for means of better organization.

72. Ctrl+Shift+N creates a new layer with a dialog box; Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N gets you a new layer without the hassle.

73. Back to brush, [ and ] will increase/decrease your brush size, Shift + [ or ] will soften or harden your brush edge.

74. Still in [ and ], Ctrl + [ or ] will move your currently selected layer up and down the hierarchy and Shift + [ or ] will select upper layer or lower layer.

75. Stamp Tool (s) is used to copy an area of image (defined by alt+clicking and area) and paint it somewhere else (cloning). It also works when you have multiple images open at the same time. Alt click an area of any opened file image and paint it anywhere else.

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets For Photoshop: Part 2

2007-10-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

26. Hold Shift and press "+" or "-" it will switch between the layer mode:

N = Normal
I = Dissolve
M = Multiply
S = Screen
O = Overlay
F = Soft Light
H = Hard Light
D = Color Dodge
B = Color Burn
K = Darken
G = Lighten
E = Difference
X = Exclusion
U = Hue
T = Saturation
C = Color
Y = Luminosity
Q = Behind 1
L = Threshold 2
R = Clear 3
W = Shadow 4
V = Midtones 4
Z = Highlights 4

***The shortcut works even for following situation:

***Alpha turned off, Indexed Mode, Line tool, Bucket Tools, Dodge and Burn Tools

27. While using Brush or any other tools, change the opacity by typing the number.

*** type one number for % of it's ten times [4=40%]

***type two number for exact % [press 7 then 2 will get 72%]

28. Hold Alt while clicking on the eye icon beside the layer, it will hide all other layers.

29. Hold Alt while clicking the pen icon beside the layer, it will unchain this layer from all layers.

30. Select a layer, hold Alt and click the top edge of another layer, it will group them.

31. Hold Alt and click the button "Create a new layer", it will create a new adjustment layer.

32. Select a layer and hold Alt, then click on the garbage can button. It will instantly delete the layer, marquee where you want alpha and Ctrl+click the "Create new channel" button, it will create an alpha only on the area you marquee.

33. File> Automate > Contact Sheet: this can create a small thumbnail for every file, this can save you some time from searching.

34. When Move Tool is selected, toolbox on top can be useful from time to time, these are "Auto select layer" and "Show bounding box".

35. While Move Tool is selected, hold Shift (Alt+Shift+Right click) and allow whether or not to make a current layer chain with your upper layer.

36. With grid on, click the top left corner of the grid and drag to anywhere on the image to set the pivot, double clicking on the icon again reset the pivot.

37. After, draw a path on the image with pen tool, Ctrl+shift+H can hide/show it.

38. Control Navigator with keyboard sometimes can be more time efficient than mouse.

***

Home = move to top left corner
End = move to right bottom corner
PageUp = move up one page
PageDown = move down one page
Ctrl+PageUp = move left one page
Ctrl+PageDown = move right one page
Shift+PageUp = move up 10 pixel
Shift+PageDown = move down 10 pixel
Ctrl+Shift+PageUp = move left 10 pixel
Ctrl+Shift+PageDown = move right 10 pixel

39. Ctrl+Tab allows you to switch between different image files you are working on.

40. F12 = Revert to how the file was the last time you saved it.

41. Shortcuts for Channel: RGB, CMYK, indexed color...

***

Ctrl+"~" = RGB
Ctrl+1 = red
Ctrl+2 = green
Ctrl+3 = blue
Ctrl+4 = other path
Ctrl+9 = other path
Ctrl+"~" = CMYK
Ctrl+1 = light green
Ctrl+2 = pink red
Ctrl+3 = yellow
Ctrl+4 = black
Ctrl+5 = other path
Ctrl+9 = other path
Ctrl+1 = Indexed
Ctrl+2 = other path
Ctrl+9 = other path

42. hold Ctrl then you can draw a red box in the Navigator thumbnail for viewing.

43. Hold Alt and click on any of the history steps, that step will be copied and become the most recent one.

44. Alt drag a step from a serial action can copy it to another action.

45. Alt-click the flare preview thumb, and you can fill in numerical co-ordinates for lens flare.

46. Holding Shift + Alt while transforming an object will do it proportionally, from the center.

47. If you have the move tool selected and you want something duplicated just hold the alt key and move the image, holding the Shift + Alt while doing this, it will move it along one axis.

48. If you want to straighten an image that is crooked (maybe from scanning), click on the eyedropper tool or hit the I key 3 times to get the ruler. Click on the left side of the straight edge, then the right side of the straight (but crooked) edge. The choose Image> Rotate Canvas> Arbitrary, Photoshop will give you the degrees of rotation you just click ok.

49. If you create something in Illustrator, copy and paste it in Photoshop, it will ask you if you want this to be a pixel, path, or shape layer.

50. If you have a mask on a layer and you want to place a image in there and keep the mask. Simply open the image, say copy, and then Ctrl click on the layer to select the mask and use Shift + Ctrl + V to paste it into the mask which will also put it on a new layer as well.

101 Hidden Secrets Tips For Photoshop

2007-10-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

I divide this article by four posts, here is the first section:

1. Press Tab will hide tool bar and palette, Shift+Tab will hide only palette.

2. Hold Shift + click the top blue bar for toolbar and palette will move them to the nearest edge.

3. Double click the top blue bar, on any palette window, to minimize it.

4. Double click the gray background will bring up open file option, Hold Shift+double click will open up the browser.

5. Sick of the default gray background around your image? Select paint bucket, hold shift and click on the gray background, it will change to whatever color you have in your foreground color box.

6. In Photoshop, all "Cancel" buttons in a window can be changed to a "Reset" button by holding Alt.

7. Caps lock will switch your cursor for accuracy.

8. Press F button, it will switch between 3 different screen modes and give you more working area.

9. To draw a straight line, click then move to the end point and hold shift + click.

10. Hold Ctrl will temporary make any tool into move tool until you release Ctrl.

11. Ctrl + Alt and click drag the image, it will make a duplication of the current image over lay on top.

12. Hold Space bar, it will make any tool into "Hand Tool" until you release Space bar.

13. While in Zoom Tool, Ctrl+space = zoom in, alt+space = zoom out.

14. Hold Ctrl and press "+" or "-" it will change the % for image in navigator window.

15. When Using eyedropper tool to capture foreground color, hold Alt and click, it will instantly capture the color for background.

16. With Measure Tool, draw a line then hold Alt and draw another line from the end of the first line, it will measure the angle.

17. Ctrl+Alt+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z will go back and forth in the history.

18. Alt+Backspace and Ctrl+Backspace will fill in the whole screen with foreground color or background color, Shift+backspace will bring up option window, Alt+Shift+Backspace and Ctrl+Shift+Backspace, will fill the image with foreground or background color but will leave the alpha transparent area alone.

19. When free transforming with Ctrl+T, hold Alt to keep the original image and then to transform a duplicated layer of it. Ctrl+Shift+T to repeat whatever you did in the last transform.

20. To make sure your Crop is on the edge of the image, hold Ctrl while cropping.

21. Ctrl+J will duplicate the current layer.

22. Ctrl+Shift+E will merge all visible layers to one layer, Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E will make a copy of the original and merge all visible layers.

23. While using Marquee Tools, hold Alt it will make the starting point as a center of the selection.

24. Ctrl + D to deselect, Ctrl+Shift+D to reselect what you deselected.

25. While selecting with Marquee tool, pressing the space bar can allow you to move the selection.

Tobe Continued ...

Useful Tips for Effective Web Design

2007-10-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some essential web design tips that every web site should follow. Design your web site by following these tips and I guarantee that visitors will have a great first impression of your site.

Fast Loading web site designs - This is the number 1 tip that every web designer should follow. You might design a web site that looks fantastic but few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. Your designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load. Remember, you might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. Click here to for 10 tips to fast-loading web pages.
Clear Navigation - Once a visitor has come to your site you need to make them go through your site. To do this you need to have clear navigation. Make sure all your important links are at prominent places. Preferably right on top - that's usually where a visitor first looks. Make use of menus on the right and the left. Try to link to as many pages of your site. Let your information be accessible from all parts of the site. You never know what a visitor may be interested in. Try to also use the footer for your important links.
All Resolutions - Today, there are computers with all kinds of resolution. They range from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 and go even higher. Your job is to design your site for all these resolutions. The best way to do this is to design your site in terms of percentage and not pixels.
Browser Compatibility - Make sure your site is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in Netscape as well as in Internet Explorer. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE. Usually Netscape gives some problems, especially when you try doing complicated HTML designs. But don't give up too soon, usually with patience these problems can be easily fixed.
Readable and professional looking fonts - Don't ask me how many times I've clicked out of a site just because the font is in Comic Sans and the color is a bright pink or green. Just by looking at the font you feel that the site is not a professional site. Don't use Comic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers. If the font you use is not available in a visitors computer the web site will use the default font of your computer which is much worse. So try to keep to common and professional web fonts. The fonts that I always stick to are Arial and Verdana.
Minimize the use of images - I believe that sometimes simple designs are the most effective for the web. Keep your site simple but neat. Don't clutter your page with big, bulky images that take ages to load. Instead use tables creatively and design eye - catching icons that will draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site. Tip - Visitors are usually more interested in content than in design.
Use of white space - Try not to clutter up your page with too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts. Again use the Keep It Simple principle by minimizing the use of graphics and using a lot of white space. White space gives a sense of spaciousness and overall neatness to a site. Notice the white space in our site.
Check for broken links - Always check for broken links within a site before uploading it to your web server. In Dreamweaver you can check for broken links by right clicking on any file in the Site Files Window and then clicking on Check links - Entire Site. If you don't have this facility you need to upload your site and then check it using online tools like Net Mechanic.

Source: EntheosWeb

FireFox 3: The Browser that netters wait for

2007-10-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

Experience the power of the new Firefox 3. Its now in alpha stage and is now available for download(For testers and developers).

Firefox 3 comes bundled with a lot more features and ease of use.There have been much improvements in performance, stability, and security, and it’s also going to present several new user facing features.

There have been much modifications in Bookmarks,Content Handling,Micro Format and malware detection,private browsing and several other feature..

If you wish to test the alpha release of Firefox then get it here.
(Remember this is just an alpha release not the final one)

How to manage your PPC

2007-10-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

In the age of the virtual consumer there is no venue of advertising more widely utilized than the internet; unfortunately, this means that everyone is doing it. It makes it very difficult for the small businessman or woman to gain the proverbial "leg up" on the marketplace. For this reason many are looking for an alternative to traditional means of marketing.

The marketing offered by Google in the form of pay per click advertising has provided an option. If you have ever explored the options for advertising on the internet will know about Google Adwords. Google's Adwords permits a marketer to create their ads based on specifically chosen keywords. These ads will in turn be shown alongside the results from searches made on these keywords.

If you happen to not be familiar with Google's Adwords you only need to go to www.google.com and put a search term in the search box. You will be taken to a page that has a section on the top and on the right side that is labeled 'sponsored links'. Ads in the 'sponsored links' sections are made using Google's Adwords.

Launching and managing a Google AdWords campaign can be a daunting proposition.

There is no doubt that the extra exposure provided by such an endeavor can bring exponentially increased profits; however, the fact that AdWords operates on a pay per click basis (the advertiser is charged a fee for every time a browser follows the link to their website) means that it can quickly deplete an advertising budget.

This is why it is vital that pay-per-click advertising campaigns be managed with great care.

The first item in question is the careful selection of keywords. It is essential that the keywords pertain to the subject in question and be specific enough to ensure that the browsers who are viewing them are likely to make a purchase but general enough that anyone browsing without a specific idea of what they are looking for will be directed to the advertisement.

As the marketer contemplates what to bid on a keyword they must consider what amount will fit into their budget for their campaign. Ads online will undoubtedly bring leads that will not produce a sale and just end up being an expense. It is vital that the marketer take care when assessing the possible profits of campaigns before committing himself to the venture.

An advertisement that the advertiser is paying thirty to forty cents a click on will inevitably appear higher on the list of sponsored links than one for which the advertiser is only paying ten to fifteen cents a click. This makes it more visible to the average internet browser who is generally unwilling to look beyond the first few pages. This exposure means nothing if it is constantly bringing unproductive leads and wasting thirty to forty cents a click.

After you select keywords and set your campaign in motion you must carefully check the progress of the ads and keywords. Ads that are unproductive just lead to wasted advertising monies.

An advertisement placed on a search engine such as Google will have a link tracing it to the website, allowing the webmaster to determine precisely how much of their website traffic and sales were generated from that specific ad. An ad that generates a very small percentage, will need to be reformatted and possibly withdrawn entirely.

Careful management of a pay per click campaign is an essential component to its success. There are numerous companies that, should the advertiser feel that they are not up to the task themselves, will happily step in to fulfill the management duties (for a fee, of course) and lead a campaign to success.

Contributor: Kirt Christensen

3 Main Components of a Successful AdWords Campaign

2007-10-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

The internet is crowded with marketers who tout the merits of Google's AdWords, spilling forth the message to the young and lazy businessmen, that for a small fee they will share the secrets to making hundreds of dollars each day, doing as little a 3 to 4 hours of work from their den, in their pajamas.

Wait a minute. Lazy?

That's right. The simple truth of the matter is that AdWords is not that difficult to navigate. With a little bit of effort on their parts everyone who has willingly handed over their money to these so-called "experts" could learn everything they need to know without spending a single penny.

In order for an AdWords campaign to succeed it is necessary for the strategy to contain three key components:

1. A successful keyword. The keyword decision is the most important decision for an Adwords campaign. Without efficient keywords to get business going the rest of what the marketer does won't make any difference.

The secret to choosing a keyword is to choose one that is general enough to allow the consumer who has never seen nor heard of the product in question to be directed to it while at the same time being specific enough that it is not going to generate an excessive number of false leads.

It is a fact that the search engines will be requiring a fee from you for every time someone clicks on your ad even if sales are not made as a result. The main thing for them is whether they are making a profit.

The significance of this is that when an ad has a common keyword (advertisers can go to the search engine's data base and find keywords that are often used in ads) it may bring in tons of visitors but not many sales.

AdWords has a number of tools available for marketers who are having difficulty finding an appropriate keyword for their ad. By visiting www.adwords.google.com advertisers will have complete access to some of the greatest pay per click resources on the internet.

2. High bid rankings. The basic fact is that internet searchers come from a broad range of demographics. They usually know what they want and want it right away.

This means that they are not going to have the patience to search through hundreds of pages of information; if what they are looking for is not within the first five to ten pages of a search they are probably going to attempt to send their search in a new direction with a new set of keywords.

If you are a marketer this means that you need your ads on the first page or so of search results. This is tricky because the as are put up by how much a marketer is willing to pay per click and not by when they were turned in.

Finding that vital balance between the desired exposure and the amount of money shelled out is a necessary but difficult task. While being on the top of the display list is desirable and garners attention it isn't helpful if your budgetary concerns don't allow enough exposure.

Lucky for us that Google has a feature that lets a ceiling be put on the amount of money spent on ad campaigns. If the ceiling is reached, the ad is labeled inactive and not shown in the search results etc.

3. Follow up. With all due care and diligence given to the setup of the ad campaign, there are no guarantees that it will bring in the desired results. The marketer should remain vigilant so the can see how the ads are performing and avoid any problems and make changes to their campaign as warranted.

There it is! All the key features of a profitable Adwords campaign have been laid out for you without a high price tag. The ball is in your court .are you going to take it and score?

Source: Kirt Christensen

How to Drive Targeted Web Traffic to Your Site in 15 Minutes

2007-10-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day, internet marketing is a business about driving more targeted traffic to your web site and eventually turning into qualified and convertible buyers.

From Perry Marshall, a PPC expert says: “It’s about getting in front of people who are looking for you to sell right at the moment and get them to response.” With PPC, you have the ability to reach your target market almost instantly.

Several attractions of using PPC:

quickest and fastest way to generate targeted traffic.
market a wide range of products and services to global audience
precisely control your targeted audience and date of advertisement
simply set up a good campaign in less than 10 minutes and let it run autopilot
pay only when visitors click in your ads.
no upfront cost
pay only a "certain amount" per click which is decided by you.
ads display on the first page of search engine with bidding of keywords determined solely by you and your choice of keywords.

Pitfalls of PPC: Cost you a dime (hundreds or thousands of dollars) if set up wrongly, mainly the selection of keywords.

To create a profitable PPC campaign which drives targeted traffic to your web site instantly, it is imperative to follow the simple tactics listed below:

(1) Perform a thorough keyword research for your product.

You want to find some niche keywords that can drive targeted traffic to your website. A good keyword to use is usually a question-type keyword, name of products, url of the product's website. A keyword can be classified into broad-type keyword, phrase-type and exact-type keyword.

For instance, you are using 'internet marketing' as a keyword.

A broad-type keyword is simply typing internet marketing in your campaign. Hence, as long as any users type in internet or marketing, your ads will display.

A phrase-type keyword has quotes enclosed the keyword and it is written as "internet marketing". When a user keys in a phrase like internet marketing business or online internet marketing, your ads will be shown.

Lastly, an exact-type keyword is written as [internet marketing]. Your ads will only be shown when an user keys in the exact keywords internet marketing in the search engine.

(2) Create a campaign with well written title and description.

Your title should create curiosity so that people will click on your ads. It should contain keyword so that your ads will be noticed easily and subseqently, high chance of ranking in top 10 positions. The description should entail benefits and features of your products. Preferably, it should include your keyword. The keyword added in your ads will appear in bold on the search engine.

(3) Always Test, Test and Test your campaign

Create 2 variations for your campaign to test the headline, description and url.

For example, I create a campaign with 2 variations using internet marketing as keyword.
In the below variation, I am testing the title/headline of the ads. Use the title of ads which is more popular with the audience. A popular ads will be shown more often.

Ad #1:

Title: Internet Marketing Scam
Description: Internet marketing makes $98K with
242% increase in sales scam exposed!
(your site url)

Ad #2:

Title: Internet Marketing BS
Description: Internet marketing makes $98K with
242% increase in sales scam exposed!
(your site url)

Source: Marsden Tan