Guest Articles – Page 6

Blogging

The dos and don�ts of SEO

admin
December 23, 2012
22

The dos and don’ts of SEO
Getting to the top of the search engines is big business. If you aren’t on the first page for your particular search term, you probably won’t receive many clicks. Nearly all users click on an ad in the top 3 positions. Getting your site to these positions though takes careful planning and effective implementation. Far too many people dive straight in and start building links when they actually don’t know the current state of their website and what needs doing to improve it. In this post I’m going to go through the fundamentals of ranking a website, illustrating what to do and what not to do. It isn’t an SEO blue print and rather a post to ensure that you keep on track and put your efforts into the right areas.

Blogging

Search engine optimisation has changed, have you?

admin
December 19, 2012
34

Search engine optimisation has changed, have you?
Black hat White Hat

The search engines have gone through a lot of changes in the last 6 months which has completely shaken up the SEO industry. Even reputable companies that have always applied ‘white hat’ SEO practises are no longer safe and some big named sites were hit by Google penalties. So what’s changed?

For many years there has been a debate about what is black hat SEO – the frowned upon way to optimise a website, and what is white hat SEO – the best practises approach.

Although Google always said that you were not allowed to create links in order to manipulate the search results and any links built purely for the purpose of improving rankings were considered as web spam and black hat, most people believed that black hat was manually created links and provided they created links manually, they were safe from a penalty. Google Penguin proved just how wrong that was.

How it used to be
Up until 6 months ago, Google would ignore poor links going to a site and would only take into account good links. If you had some poor links going to your site, Google’s advice would be not to worry about it.

When building links, the best practises approach was always to put your keywords in the anchor text. This was because it made your links highly relevant to your keywords and therefore carried a significant amount of link juice. You are only able to manipulate anchor text though if you have built the links yourself. If people have naturally linked to your site, the chances are they would have used different anchors giving you huge anchor text diversity.

Poor links now count against you
In an attempt to cut down on web spam, Google started to penalise sites with poor anchor text diversity by introducing Google Penguin. This was a huge moment in the SEO world as now low quality links have a negative effect on sites.

What is a low quality link?
Low quality links are any links that do not appear to be naturally built. Google believes that links should be naturally created by people writing good quality content and others sharing that content. Any links built purely for the purpose of link building are considered as web spam.

Google Penguin

Google Penguin is an algorithmic penalty that works like a filter and only runs once a month and penalises sites that have unnatural link profiles. An unnatural link profile is one that has low anchor text diversity for the reasons mentioned earlier.

Google Penguin caused a huge shack up in the SEO world and marked the change of how links are built. Post Google Penguin, poor quality links have a negative effect on a site and can significantly alter sites rankings.

The difficulty with Google Penguin though is that it opened the door to negative SEO. Some savvy competitors will deliberately launch a negative SEO attack on sites in an attempt to lower their link diversity and trigger a penalty. On the plus side though, savvy SEOs can remove unwanted content which is great for online reputation campaigns!

Google Panda
Google Panda was first introduced in early 2011 with regular updates being released. In the last 6 months Google has really been clamping down on over optimisation and have been penalising over optimised sites through Google Panda.

Panda targets sites with duplicate content and pages that have been stuffed with keywords. Duplication issues are more prevalent in ecommerce sites as often products are filed under several categories causing duplicate pages. Also people get lazy and copy manufacturer descriptions rather than writing their own.

Effects on SEO
As a result of Google penguin, anchor texts are now much longer and a lot more varied. Google Panda has caused web masters to be very careful about the content on their sites. In years gone by web master would stuff keywords into their sites in a deliberate attempt to manipulate the search engines. Now though web masters are doing the opposite and are actually de-optimising their site making sure they have very low anchor text diversity.

Google Disavow tool
To protect against negative SEO, Google launched a disavow link tool in early October 2012 where users can submit links from their link profile that they wish to be ignored. It is essentially a crowd sourcing tool whereby webmasters do a lot of the spam filtering on behalf of Google. The difficulty with this though is that a lot of SEOs don’t know what they are doing and will simply disavow all of their links and start again. This is making Google believe that certain links are spam links when they are not.

Example
Imagine if you put together a really good link building campaign and saw some good movement in the search engine results pages but someone else built links to the same sites and didn’t diversify their links and then got hit with Google Penguin and so reports these links to Google causing these links then get taken down. There is nothing wrong with the sites that link to these sites, only the 2^nd person didn’t know what they were doing.

Is this a useful tool or a recipe for disaster? I will let you make your own mind up…

How to protect against Google Penguin penalties
Google Penguin Update

Protecting against Google penalties is simply a case of knowing your link profile. You should be running regular live link reports that detail your exact match e.g. keyword, and broad match anchors e.g. keyword with extra text, of all of your indexed links.

There are no exact figures that you should be looking for as every niche is different but if any of your keywords have anchor text diversities of 30% or higher, you should be looking to reduce them by building links with generic anchors. A natural link profile will have a high percentage of branded anchor text (your company’s name) and a high level of naked URLs (www.yourdomain.com).

How to protect against Google Panda penalties
Protecting against Panda penalties should happen automatically if you have set up your website correctly. The important things to note are that your content is original and not copied and that you haven’t stuffed it with keywords. If you have written it yourself, you will know whether it is original or not. If you buy content, make sure you check it is original by running it through Copyscape before buying it. Really your content should have keyword densities of lower than 2.5%.

Identifying penalties
If you get hit with a penalty, it is very important to understand which penalty you have been hit by so that they can formulate a plan on how to recover. Often people assume they have been hit by a certain penalty simply because their rankings have dropped and there is a lot of discussion about that particular penalty in the forums. Before taking any action, you need to understand what penalty you were hit by so that you are able to take action otherwise you are likely to make the situation worse rather than better.

Google algorithm change history
SEOmoz have a page on their site that details all of the algorithm changes and the date at which they happened. This is a good place to start if your site suddenly tanks in the search engine result pages (SERPs) to see if there has been any algorithm changes recently. If there hasn’t, look at your website files to see if your site has been hacked and if you are hosting files that you shouldn’t be. Make sure you change the settings so that you can see hidden files!
If there have been algorithm changes at a similar time to when your website dropped in the SERPs then the next step is to understand what penalty you have been hit by.
SEO-moz chart

I analyse the different penalties using a tool called Chartelligence which allows you to overlay algorithm changes over your Google Analytics data or Quantcast data and identify which penalty you were affected by and when. It is a free Google Chrome plugin and really simple to use.
chartelligence chrome plugin

Once you know what penalty it was, you can set about fixing the problem.

Summary
The SEO world is ever changing and this was never truer than in the last 6 months. With the right approach, search engine optimisation delivers a huge amount of value to any business. You can easily protect against any penalties.

Let’s see what the next 6 months has installed!

Author Bio
Jack Willis is the Managing Director of Marketing Grin, an online marketing agency that provides search engine optimisation to a number of businesses of varying size and in a variety of different industries. Jack has over 5 years’ experience in online marketing and particularly enjoys getting stuck into online marketing campaigns where he can use all of his online knowledge. Jack also has a good level of experience in running Google AdWords campaigns, being an AdWords qualified professional, and of running social media optimisation campaigns.

Tutorials

Generating XML with CakePHP

admin
December 7, 2012
16

Generating XML with CakePHP
XML plays a pivotal role in transferring and storing data over the World Wide Web. It is a markup language, much like HTML, which is designed to carry data but not display it. If you need to carry out data transmission in any kind of web based application, you need to generate a XML file. The process of generating XML is a smooth sail, if you have the power of CakePHP with you. Let us take a tour of the various steps involved in generating XML using CakePHP development platform.

Steps Involved in XML Generation Via CakePHP:
1. First off, edit the routes.php file present within the config directory of your CakePHP application. You will need to add the following short code snippet to the routes.php file in order to enable XML extension parsing in CakePHP:
Router::parseExtensions('xml');
This snippet tells CakePHP to parse the XML extension. We are, now, ready to generate XML for our web application.

2. In this step, we will set up Controller action that will be helpful in dynamically generating XML file in CakePHP and fetch data from the application. Setting up Controller will result in an error-free and well-formatted XML file in CakePHP. We have the option of configuring the setting of Controller action in such a way that it gets activated only if the XML makes a request. This means, when we have .xml in the end. To facilitate this procedure, you can use the Request Handler component. You have the option of either declaring the Request Handler at the top of the Controller or including it in the AppController so that it can be utilized throughout the application.

The task of a request handler is to detect and process requests. In the current scenario, it will allow us in detecting whether or not a particular request is XML. If the request is XML, we will deliver an XML file view and an empty layout. Otherwise, we will not perform any action. The following code snippet will help you in adding Request Handler to your application:
var$components= array('RequestHandler');
Here’s a preview of the controller action while generating XML file in CakePHP:

[php]
function xmlgen($id=null){
if ($this->RequestHandler->isXml())//check if xml request is made
{
$this->layout="empty";//empty layout for xml,create an empty layout in app/views/layouts/empty.ctp
// find playlist from provided id
$data=$this->Playlist->find("first",array("conditions"=>array("Playlist.id"=>$id));
$this->set(compact('data'));
}
Else
{
//don nothing if request is not xml ,or you can redirect somewhere.
}
}
[/php]

This action might look simple, just like any other action, but it will be operational only if the file is XML, otherwise it will not work.

3. In this step, we will set up the view of our XML file in accordance to the Controller Action that we created in the previous step. We will be creating an XMl view for the action xmlgen() that we just created. These views will be created and stored in the XML folder created under the views folder. This means the view xmlgen.ctp will be stored under the following location:
app/views/yourcontrollername/xml/xmlgen.ctp

Suppose the name of our controller is ‘Favorites’, then xmlgen.ctp will be created under the following path:
app/views/favorites/xml/xmlgen.ctp
This is how the view for XML generation in CakePHP will appear:
[php]
<?php
echo $this->Xml->header();//XML header
?>
<favorites version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/">
<title><?php echo $data['title']; ?></title>
<creator><?php echo $data['author']; ?></creator>
<link>www.eaxmple.com</link>
<trackList>
<?php foreach($data['Songs'] as $plist):?>
<track>
<location><?php echo$plist['Song']['loc']; ?></location>
<creator><?php echo$plist['Song']['a_name']; ?></creator>
<album><?php echo$plist['Song']['a_name']; ?></album>
<title><?php echo$plist['Song']['sname']; ?></title>
<duration><?php echo $data['Song']['Time']; ?></duration>
<link><?php echo$plist['Song']['loc']; ?></link>
</track>
<?php endforeach;?>
</trackList>
</ favorites >
[/php]

These were some of the essential steps involved in generating XML file using CakePHP framework. These steps show how CakePHP lets you create well-formatted XML file with minimum coding and least efforts.

Author Bio:- Steve Graham is a pro in PHP Web Development associated as a web writer with Xicom Technologies Ltd. A CMMI Level 3 firm, offering web based services to it's esteemed clientele worldwide.

Uncategorized

Windows 7 Certification-Mix it with the Best

admin
December 5, 2012
0

Windows 7 Certification-Mix it with the Best
Windows 7 certification gives a person the opportunity to help and construct the best structures of the Operating System. The OS has really been able to impress and give people an organized manner of data entry and handling. People are characterized to always desire to have the perfect system which can handle data and all the operations which involve the system. When a person is able to get the certification, they can be assured that they will have what it takes to operate and make the necessary amendments to the system which will then increase the efficiency and operational capacity.

Uncategorized

Increasing Social Shares � Complete Guide

tramsy
December 2, 2012
1

Any website owner or blogger would want to increase social shares in order to get more traffic. The mainstay of any blog lies in the traffic it can attract, hence devising ways and means to increase social shares and in turn diverting traffic is the ultimate goal of a blog. Social sharing is critical not only for the existence of a site but for its healthy growth and sustenance. Here are a few points to guide you to make your content the most sharable.

Blogging

5 Ways To Purchase The Latest Mobile Phone

admin
November 27, 2012
12

5 Ways To Purchase The Latest Mobile Phone
These days’ mobile phones have become part of everyone’s life. We see all ages of people using cell phones irrespective of their age and gender. Everyday market is flooded with latest mobile and there are many ways you can buy it, and here are 5 simple ways how you can buy latest mobile phone.

Personal saving: It is one of the simple ways to purchase latest mobile phones. One of the very important things how you can afford buying latest gadgets is from your personal savings. Try to save what you can, it doesn’t matter how much you can and get into the habit of savings.

Developing the habit of savings can help you to put aside some money for your future purposes. If you want to experience the best and latest technology and when there is no other option to you buy a mobile phone, it must for you to do the saving from your incomes. Buying mobile phones from personal funds is best and wise choice when compared to any other methods.

Short term loans: There are lots of commercial organisations and banks which lend money for people, who cannot afford to buy gadgets or accessories for domestic purposes. Talk with different lenders who offer loans and compare the interest rates with other lenders and select the one who gives loans for the lowest rates. Also enquire about PPI claims with your lender for this particular loan and opt for these types of insurance claims if possible, which can be utilised when you are unable to pay off your debts due to misfortune situations like job loss, sickness or illness etc.

EMI: This is also one of type of loans where you pay some amount initially and the remaining amount will be paid by your financial supporter or banker. Many average salaried people will opt for these types of repayments. It is easy monthly instalment where you the payoff the amount based on your monthly incomes. Here the loan is sanctioned based on your monthly incomes and your payment history and one of other facility here is you can decide on your own how much amount you would like to pay per month. If your employer gives you the choice of an advance loan from your salary this can also be used for buying mobile phones.

Borrow money from people: You can discuss the matter with your friends and family that you want to latest mobile phone and also inform that you are short of money; require financial support to purchase mobile phone. You can also seek help from outside, search for different friends who are ready to give for money for your personal needs, for this you can tell them that you are ready to pay interest for borrowed money.

Online shopping: Many people prefer to buy products or gadgets online because you can compare products from different brands, you can check whether the price is in your budget or not and one of the main reasons is that you can also get latest mobile phones from online stores with reasonable prices. If you prefer to buy any product online check for site popularity and credibility in delivering the ordered goods, and also look for password protection while making payments through credit cards or debit cards.

Author Bio:
My name is Maria. I am a tech writer from Manchester. I am into Finance, Technology, Travel, and Health :). Catch me @financeport

Uncategorized

Pinterest Tips for B2B Promotion

admin
November 26, 2012
7

Pinterest is a newcomer in the social media industry and has already become popular fancying millions of visitors. Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest has attained great heights and has evolved into the third largest social media network in the United States. Comscore.com states that “Pinterest buyers spend more money frequently than any other social sites and based on Hitwise data, Pinterest drives more referral traffic to its customers when compared to sites like Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn.

These information make clear that consumer brands take great advantage out of this prosperous social site. Social media network analysts state that Pinterest is an effective tool for B2B experts. The marketing trend of today is more of interaction and nobody pays attention to faceless brands. So, if you are a B2B expert who likes to advertise personalized or customized services to business owners, retailers and wholesalers, Pinterest is best suggested. This visual sharing site with simple pictures does impact a considerable amount of traffic. The strategy here is to carefully build a B2B marketing plan which perfectly fits your business, product and service.

Pinterest is no more a restricted site, it is wide open for all and make the best use of it by following the below mentioned tips:

Customize Pinterest profile
As soon as you sign up with Pinterest, the primary thing that requires attention is the Pinterest profile. This is going to act as the index of your business mind; hence, the profile has to be crisp with interesting details. The “about” box in the profile has to be filled with a short and snappy description about your company. This description is what appears on the SERPs when a search is made for your page. Fill the profile with a sophisticated company image and make sure it matches with the profile in other social networking sites. Profile settings enable you to connect Pinterest with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Pin images of corporate functions
You can find that B2C companies pin their product price and attract new customers within seconds. Whereas, with B2B it does not work that way, the approach has to be entirely different. You can create a pinboard which has the trade fairs, events that your company participated and others along with the images. If you have loads of information to share about the event you can start a separate pinboard for each event. Photos which portray your engagement with clients, delegates, banners, speech and anything that happened in an event can be pinned.

Pin Photos of company officials
Pinning photos of your employees in a separate Pinboard creates a good impact in the customers mind. Testimonials from colleagues or a brief description of an employee can also be pinned on the board. These can in turn be linked with their respective LinkedIn profile which depicts that your company is legitimate. The culture of your company and dress code can also be mentioned if you like to.

Generate new visual contents
Social networking sites are becoming increasingly popular and the visual content is paid much attention. It is essential to pin fresh contents to impress a customer. If you have pictures of the old building of your company, pin them and win the hearts of hundreds of followers. Once you have sufficient followers it is vital to sustain them and also prompt them to build their business relationship with the company. Creativity plays an important role to compete in Pinterest. You can enhance your B2B profile by posting videos, infographics and e-books.

Monitor Traffic
To become increasingly popular in Pinterest perform a complete research and find the areas of interest. Look for websites that draw leading number of conversations and analyze what they do different. Now, analyze your traffic and site so that you can work on the areas that you need to improve. You can easily find out what customers expect from you.
Pinterest has a special place in B2B marketing and potential with creativity can do wonders for your business. Get inspired by looking at the company profiles of giant companies and get geared. If you are already using Pinterest, implement these steps and draw more from it.

This is a guest post is brought to you by Samantha Kirk, a writer for Centurylink Internet. Samantha provides up to date content and information for high-speed internet, phone services, bundles and other Centurylink offers.

Image Source: http://www.techcrunch.com

Uncategorized

Jelly Bean Update for Samsung Galaxy S2: an overview

admin
October 29, 2012
26

Jelly Bean Update for Samsung Galaxy S2: an overview
‘Jelly Bean Update’ is the latest version of Android for Samsung Galaxy S2 also termed as Android 4.1. It hits the Galaxy S2 this October. It’s the most awaited update for S2 users as it resolves the Touchwiz UI issues being faced by the users of Ice-cream sandwich or Android 4.0. Apart from that, this latest OS take along the new-fangled features and brings a few Samsung’s specific enrichments with high security constraints. Also, reviews state that this OS doesn’t provide any leeway for jail breaking.

This update offers a number of enhancements which gratifies the android users in all aspects. It recovers the performance and makes the interface more eye-catching and smoother with ‘Project Butter’, the newest innovation in this update for making the UI more fluid and rapid fast.
The two home screen modes namely, the user-friendly widgets for favourites and most used applications for easy mode of operation; manageable galleria, expandable notification bar and a sizeable pop-up display with modernised controls are few additional takes of this android 4.1. ‘Siri’ is the personal voice-aide of this update.

Google, apart from its various services like Search, Gmail, Google play, and etc. it introduces ‘Google Now’ which automatically updates the real-time sports news, transit info when you are on a journey, provides local assistances like restaurants, hotels, and all other means you look for to this captivating device. It’s very convenient to carry in one hand and use. Its design is very sophisticated among other doodah. It’s the utmost thinnest piece loaded with vast technology.

Other add-ons include excellences in camera and introduction of app encoding i.e. commencing this update, all the paid apps will be provided with a device-defined key and smart apps notifications will also be a part of Jelly Bean, to facilitate you without re-downloading the entire app for regular updates. The picture quality is simply striking. It gives the lively view of videos and movies also with worth exploring 3D effect.

The interesting apps make you mesmerised. They organise, schedule and remind you the stratagems, make your work much simpler, gives clues and advises you in managing your finances, keeps a track of record of all your expenses, keeps you notified with the latest status chatters, you can share, tag, like, tweet, pin and comment on your friends and others status, create albums, edit videos and upload to your networking sites, bid & shop online, know the up-to-date feed, play staggering games, revel in music and mixes, watch HD videos and films, have unlimited fun with photo morphing, just tap to know scores & share market news and so forth.

About the Author:
This guest post is written by Alicia who is a specialist in financial blogging from Manchester. Apart from blogging, she does research on loans for bad debt. Reach her at financeport

10 Ways Photoshop Can Help You in Web designing

admin
October 17, 2012
17

10 Ways Photoshop Can Help You in Web designing
web designing using photoshop

When it comes to developing images for webdesign, no tool is more versatile than Photoshop. Although Illustrator may be better suited for creating graphics from scratch, Photoshop has an abundance of tools including basic creation. It's the other tools for images that makes Photoshop such a powerful asset. What can be done with this popular program?

1. Resolutions – The first thing you should know is that producing images for the Internet only needs to be 72 pixels. While you can use images that are larger in resolution, the will become larger in file size taking a computer longer to render it.

2. Buttons – Creating buttons in Photoshop is relatively easy. Thanks to the Bevel and Emboss tool, you can put an outer bevel on a simple square image and give it a 3D protruded look as if you were looking at a real button. Through the use of CSS rollover image commands, you can have this button one color while changing to a different color once the mouse moves across it.

3. Gradients – Photoshop has the ability to place gradients in your text, images, backgrounds, and more using any number of colors you wish. You could easily create a an effect of the entire spectrum of the rainbow in any selected layer. There are hundreds of ways that the gradient ability can be used in regards to designing stunning effects for anything you are making.

4. Shadows – In the layer commands, Photoshop can create drop shadows for the image. This is great for assisting in simulating 3D effects that seem to rise up off of the screen.

5. Outer Glow – The outer glow ability can make your selected image stand out. This creates an aura around the image of any color and size you like. This works great for getting attention to your text.

6. Product Collage – By selecting individual products from multiple images, you can drag them into a single image to create a collage. For instance, dragging multiple automobiles into a single header image would work great for a car dealership or seller website.

7. Be anywhere – Much like create a collage, you can select yourself and become super-imposed on a background of your choosing. This method has created a lot of controversy since the early days of Photoshop for it allows anyone with the skills to fake nearly any image imaginable. You could put the Titanic sinking on Mars, if you felt the inspiration to do so.

8. Backgrounds – For webdesigns, using imagery for the background can be created in Photoshop as well. The background is a good place to test out gradient controls, and these types of images only need to be about three pixels wide. Backgrounds will cycle the image repeatedly on the Internet and creating a gradient look doesn't take much.

9. Appearance Enhancement – Did you know that you could make the text of your website look like it was written on 2,000 year old parchment? You can create the look in Photoshop and use the image as a background in a table or CSS command.

10. Banner Creation – To make your own banners, they need to be 468 x 60 as a common configuration. You can put any image or images into a banner to make it an attractive advertisement. However, putting too much pizazz in a banner could make it too large of a file and could possible cause issues trying to upload it to your server or a banner exchange program.

From banners to text, Photoshop has the ability to do it all. Since the mid '90s, this program has been the forerunner for the graphic designer coupled with Illustrator. It's a tool that can make any image more or less than it really is.

Author Bio:
Jason Miner plays a vital role for www.blogcarnival.com. He is an expert in writing topics of different categories. He is helping the carnival team to grow & working on making this an even better place for bloggers.

Image Source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Internet_g170-Hand_Writing_Web_Design_On_Board_p72741.html

Blogging

Google Presents Autopilot

admin
October 16, 2012
0

Google Presents Autopilot
The program by developed Google allows a "driver" to check email and talk on a cell phone on the go, without being a fender-bender: the car drives on autopilot. But still sleeping is not allowed: ??the system warns you when the situation should be taken under a human control.

The correspondent of The Wall Street Journal ran through a 101 Route with Chris Urmson, a Google programmer-developer of the autopilot. The Lexus braked when it was undercut by the Audi, passed it back and continued his way clear of the reckless driver. Lexus was driven by robot. Urmson did not even touch the wheel: "It’s surprisingly natural".