Tuesday

Best Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

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.

Monday

Free And Useful SEO Tools for Webmaster

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.

Sunday

10 Firefox Extension to Fight Against Phishing

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.