<a href=”http://www.outlink.com” onClick=”javascript: 

pageTracker._trackPageview(’/Links/outlink.com’);”>OutLink</a>

Just select the text (words/lines/paragraphs/headings etc) with your mouse cursor and this tool does the following for you:

- Count words
- Count Characters (Hovering the cursor on counted words yield characters count)
- Add the counted words to other counts (Yes it will do the addition for you)

Words count is shown in the status bar of your browser just like the way shown in the image below:

Counting words and characters come in handy on lots of occasions specially when writing and checking specific length articles. This tool will also come in handy if you are an SEO because a lot of times you would be writing meta tags, page titles and other such tags in which length of words/characters is an important aspect.

Entrecard was supposed to be an advertising network for bloggers which allows bloggers to advertise on other blogs and gain few extra traffic from other blogs but the only traffic one gets is from entrecard site and that also from other entrecard users having a quick look at your blog before sending an advertisement request.

One Day Advertising : Not Very Useful

This is the most sick part which I never liked about entrecard. The entrecard ad that is placed on other blogs is only displayed for one day and after your time is over the next ad in the queue will replace your ad so you have to send in another request to advertise on that blog. This requires your precious time in visiting entrecard website on regular basis and sending advertising requests to other blogs so that your ad can be spread across as many blogs as you want or at least that is what most of the entrecard users think.

What I Gained From Entrecard

In contrast to this bad experience with entrecard I gained some good relationships with very interesting and talented bloggers and I got the chance to view some really cool and exciting blogs for which I will definitely visit entrecard website in future.

Conclusion

If you have a very new blog that you just set up few day ago then Entrecard might benefit you a little for gaining some exposure but for a person like me that keeps evaluating services on regular basis, entrecard does not deserve to be on my blog anymore as the time I spent on Entrecard could have been used to further optimize my blog and focusing a bit more on increasing link popularity of this blog but I lost some valuable time and have learned my lesson. So good bye Entrecard !

The results are displayed in the same way with a short preview of each video.

You can also customize YouTube videos for your website or blog in a variety of manner by modifying its dimensions and adding different color borders. Click here for more details.

If you have a new website then the chances are that you get little to no traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc. The only way a new site will receive search engine traffic is when it has links (or simply backlinks), pointing to it from other sites on the web. This way search engine crawlers will come to know about new websites by following their backlinks. So the more links a site has, chances are that it will be receiving more traffic from search engines. Links are only one of the factors that search engines consider when they rank sites in search engine result pages (SERPs). So for a new website to increase its link popularity, the website owner needs to have a proper and solid link building strategy which along with clever promotion and marketing tactics can boost the traffic to his site in just few months.

How And From Where to Get Backlinks ?

One of the easiest methods to increase link popularity and to get easy backlinks is to submit your site to web directories that offer free One way links (links that point back to your site without linking back to the page containing your link). There are thousands of web directories on the web that you can submit your site and get free one way links. Some of the directories that offer free submissions are listed below. You can go ahead and submit your sites/blogs/forums etc to the following list of directories :

1. http://www.fat64.net
2. http://directory.softensive.de
3. http://www.dndirectory.net
4. http://www.add2us.com
5. http://www.canlinks.net
6. http://www.linksguru.net
7. http://www.gainweb.org
8. http://www.directorycampus.com
9. http://www.sc3m.com
10. http://www.free-website-directory.com

The above web directories will give you free one way links and you will not have to pay a single penny for that. You do not even require to link back to them (leave the reciprocal link field blank during submission). Hopefully Your submitted links will be approved any where from 1 to 30 days. Feel free to share the above list with others.

Take screen shots of any web page that is online by just feeding the URL of the page to Thumbalizr.com and it will generate screen shot of that web page in just few seconds . It captures screen shot in 150 , 320 , 640 , 800 , 1024 and 1280 pixels wide PNG image .

New Look

So what you think about this new template ? Or you think the previous template was better . Feel free to leave your opinions and suggestions .

photo credit : Pearsonified

Today I will list down few of the top FREE photo sharing / hosting tools that you will always find handy for your blog . Images are a great source for attracting readers and getting more hits to your blog but if you find your self short of hosting bandwidth for your blog then it is always a nice idea to host your site images elsewhere . There are various free image hosting services but I am listing down few of the top ones that offer reliable services with lots of monthly bandwidth ( in some cases unlimited ) .

1. Photobucket
Photobucket offers 1GB of free web space for storing your images, photos and videos as well . Plus all your hosted media gets 25GB of free monthly bandwidth which is more than enough for a low / medium traffic site .

2. Flickr
This one is run by Yahoo can you can upload 100MB of images each month . That makes it 1200MB per year and it never ends . The counter is reset when the next month starts and you get 100MB of more bandwidth for adding photos to your Flickr account .

3. Picasa
Picasa Web albums is run by Google itself so you can always rely on them for maximum up time and lots of free bandwidth . You get 1024 MB = 1 GB of free web space for storing your images . Plus it has many other features beside offering free image hosting and sharing .

4. Webshots
This one offers numbers rather than space . Being a free member you can upload 1000 photos plus you get additional photo slots ( up to 100 ) each month .

5. Tinypic
Tinypic is just like Photobucket .In fact it is run my Photobucket and the great part is that they do not have any limits on the number of photos you upload to your account . The maximum resolution allowed is 1600 pixel either width or height . Images larger than this will be automatically re sized .

6. Imageshack
There is only one restriction on this site and it is on the size of image you upload . There is no limit on the number of images you upload to your account so this one offers unlimited storage and bandwidth for your photos .

It is up to you which one you join but I will advise you to go through their Terms of Service before you joining any .This will give you an idea about what kind of images you can upload to these free image hosts and another piece of advice is to always create a free account and then upload your images because if you upload without registering then there is no guarantee that you images will be kept in their database for ever.

There might be other HTML attributes withing IMG tag but the one that we will be working on is the ‘alt‘ or ‘alternate text‘ attribute . The alternate text of the image in the above example is ‘My childhood photo‘ which is a short description about that image . This short description will not only contain SEO value but will also serve the following purposes :

• For users having low speed internet connections, who may opt not to load graphics
• For users who are using a pay per transferred data connection
• For people using hand held devices etc

So whenever an image is not shown , its alternate text will be shown . It is not necessary that you add the alternate text to all the images on your site . In some cases where images are just used for decoration purpose ( part of your site template / layout ), the alt tag can be left blank like this alt=’ ‘ or you need not to worry about it because it is left blank by default .

lets do a little experiment by searching for images using an image search engine . In my case I only use Google image search . My search term is ‘smilies for your blog‘ and here is what I get in my search results :

As you can see the image search results indicate three important ingredients

• Image thumbnail
• Short description ( this is Not the description used in alt tags )
• URL of the site which contains the image ( Not the URL of the page containing the image )

You can see in the above image that the thumbnail shows smileys image which I used in one of my previous blog post which was about adding smileys to your blogger blogs . The alt tag or the alternate tag used for that image was ‘Smilies for your blog‘ which is exactly what we searched using Google image search . The short description shown along with the thumbnail is the title of the page containing that image . So if you use alt tags and page titles effectively then you can easily optimize all the images on your site and in return you will be getting extra hits to your sites only for images .

Almost every website has a contact page with either a contact form or contact details ( email) . If these contact details are not wisely encrypted by the webmaster then they can easily be misused by spam bots as they continuously scam websites  ( specially new ones )  for email addresses which they add to their mailing lists and  then later sell it to spammers . Thats why bloggers not only receive spam in comments but also get a daily  dosage of free spam emails and that also on frequent basis . 

The problem which exists is that FeedBurner still has not taken any measures to fix this bug and stop people from exploiting this loophole . Lets hope they get it fixed because then everyone will be using this hack to get thousands of RSS subscribers which will urge the advertisers to stop considering the Feed count before any purchase . Sponsored and paid postings will also suffer from this .

Yes Google has started updating the Page Rank and they have started to reflect on Google toolbar . I was notified from Digital Point forum . There is a buzz still there about this recent Google Page Rank update . Many websites have increased their Page Ranks but some showed a decrease and the rest showed no change at all .

The previous Page Rank update took place at the end of April 2008 and exactly after 3 months Google has updated them again . So if I am not wrong one more update for Page Rank still to follow this year .

Many webmasters do not worry about Pare Ranks , instead they show more concern over their search engine rankings and rightly so . I will not be happy if I had a PR5 site and it only gets 100 daily visits from search engines . On the other hand I would be more than happy if I had a PR2 site which gets over 3000 daily visits from search engines .

Page Ranks has its importance if you want to sell advertisements and do paid reviews . This is where your blog Page Rank comes into play and the higher ( with PR10 being the highest ) it is the more amount you can earn from advertisers and paid postings and reviews .

My this blog gained a PR1 from no PR . According to the stats shown my SEOpro , Kashifblog.com has over 1700 backlinks and still it was only awarded a PR1 .

My other blog which is about food recipes also gained PR1 and that also had no PR before . This blog has over 450 backlinks and many of them are from PR3-5 pages on the web .

So Google is playing some mind games here I can sense them .

On the other hand ‘Spam in Blogs’ is in the form of comments which are made just for the purpose of gaining backlinks to any other site . The comments can be of different types and one can easily identify them and get rid of those spam comments very easily . Here is how most of the spam comments will look like :

1. “Hey nice post keep up the good work“
2. “Thanks nice info”
3. “I agree”

These type of spam comments are made within few seconds and the person (Spammer) making these comments makes sure that he generates plenty of such useless comments on as many blog as he can in order to get plenty of easy backlinks . Remember that comments also contain link to the person’s site who has made the comment and that link might carry some link juice which these spammers know very well how to exploit .

HOW TO DEAL WITH SPAM COMMENTS ?

First I want to make it clear that I believe in no spam policy . So I make sure that by blog remains spam free in terms of comments . So for this purpose I have taken the following steps :

- Manually approve comments : This will take some of your precious time but in this way you make sure that your comment section is free from stupid , pointless and spammy content .

- Make the comments No-Follow : By making the comments No-follow you will not be giving any link juice to the spammer as the link in his comment will not carry any search engine love and this will also cut down the number of daily spam that your blog receives . If you use a Blogger blog then you need not to worry as all the comments are no-follow by default .

I will not recommend to use any spam filtering plug ins because that might block some of the comments from your loyal readers and friends so I advise you do it manually . If you are still not sure about which comment to approve then first go through the comment and make sure it does not fulfil any of the following :

- The comment says nothing about your blog or the blog post .
- The comment says me I our and we only .
- Comment points ( URL ) to an advertisement page .
- Comment contains affiliate links .
- Comment contains many links in text .
- Repeated comment

I follow the above rule when moderating comments with little to no exception for my friends and regular readers . I hope you have enjoyed reading this post . Feel free to share this with your friends .

For those of you who do not know what BlogRush is I will put it straight forward . BlogRush is a widget for blogs that shows post titles of other blogs in BlogRush network . If you place their widget on your blog then you earn credits whenever your blog receives traffic and then those credits are utilized in syndicating your blog posts on other blogs in BlogRush network .

The idea of free traffic seems good in the beginning but then it was all gone as after placing the widget there is very little to no traffic that one gets . There are many factors that are responsible for a very poor traffic from BlogRush network . One of them might be the layout of the widget which seems more like an advert and this results in a very low CTR ( click through rate ) and hence low traffic .

I do not find any reason to keep BlogRush widget on this blog since the stats that are shown at my BlogRush dashboard indicates that out of 22,000 syndications I didn’t even received 30 visitors ( in over 3 months ) .

The other reason for removing BlogRush widget is the space it occupies on a blog can be utilized for some other purpose that will get you something in return ( $$ ) which blog rush failed to deliver .

So I do not have much to say other than just Good bye BlogRush.

The following photo shows the number of bookmarks this blog got during this little experiment .

As you can see that the highest number of bookmarks came from stumbleupon users who kind of enjoy reading Kashifblog.com. So the point here is that if you modify and do little effort you can also get extra bookmarks for your blog which will bring extra traffic to your blog .

So the first thing you better do is design an eye catching bookmark image , NO . The first and the most important thing you should always be concentrating on should be writing interesting blog posts that others might find worth reading and then if they think it really deserves a bookmark then they no doubt will look at your image and say ok this is a really nice post and it deserves a bookmark and here it is . So this is the way you better be planning on getting more bookmarks and hence more traffic to your blog .

Drop me a comment on what you think about my little experiemnt and what else you think can be done to further increase the number of bookmarks . I am always open to interesting sugestions and opoinions .