Kashif Blog dot Com » Webmaster Tools

April 2009 Google PageRank Update is Over

Kashif — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:28:00 +0000

At least for me it is over as I can see the new toolbar PageRank for my this and the rest of the sites. This update was expected to occur somewhere in the end of March 2009 but it started with the start of April 2009 when Google began updating PageRank of all pages in their database. So my prediction was close !

Not surprisingly, this blog dropped its PR by 1 and is now only PR 1. The reasons behind this drop in PR is what this post is all about.

I Didn’t Trade Text Links

Yes, that is absolutely right as I have never ever been involved in any kind of text link trading either buying or selling and I hardly make any link on this blog “Do follow” i.e search engine friendly. This is also not the reason why I lost my PageRank.

I Didn’t Do Sponsored Posts

Although I have thought of it several times but I have never seem to admire the idea of posting on my own blog on someone else’s will just for the sake of money. This is also not the reason for the drop in PageRank.

I Didn’t Post on This Blog Regularly

This can be one of the reasons as crawl rate decreases on sites that are not updated on regular basis. According to my posts archive, I have updated this blog only 12 times in the past 90 days which is way below the posting frequency that I had set for this blog i.e 1 post every 3rd day. But has the posting frequency got anything to do with PageRank ? I leave this question for those reading this post. Do comment below to share your thoughts.

I Almost Lost Over 1000 Back links

The main reason that resulted in the loss of PageRank is due to the removal huge number of incoming links to this blog. Those links were coming from a authority site (forum signature links) for a long time and I have removed them for the last 45 days which sent an alert to Google resulting in a lower PageRank.

What I have learned so far is that PageRank itself doesn’t hold much value if you are not getting enough traffic to your site. So stop worrying about PageRank and try to post some useful stuff for others as content is one of the most important traffic driving force that you will need all the time.

Google PageRank Update is coming…

Kashif — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:06:00 +0000

Google usually updates PageRank every two to three months. The most recent pagerank update took place last year on New Year’s eve.

So it has been over two and a half months and I have a feeling that now is the time when Google will be updateing pageranks. So keep your eyes open.

The only advatage I find in having a high Google PagaRank is that higher PR pages get crawled more frequently and more deeply by search engines.

So are you anxiously waiting for this PR update or not ? Share with us in your comments.

Keyword Selection : Finding Your Competition

Kashif — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Many starter SEOs and new webmasters make this mistake when selecting keywords for their websites. They start their keyword selection campaign by just typing their desired keyword into a search query and then analysing the results. Lets consider a little example by searching for the word puppy food in Google.

This keyword query returned over 5 milion results. Many webmasters will consider this number their exact competition for the keyword they typed in but this is partially true. The search results dislay all the pages that google has indexed in their database which have the keyword puppy food on their page in any order. It can be food for my puppy or I gave my puppy some food etc. For finding the exact competition for more specific keyword, we just have to enclose our keyword within ” ” and in our case it would be “puppy food”.

As you can see from the above screen shot, that this mehod will show the exact number of pages that contains the word puppy food in the same order. This is the actual number of pages that you want to beat if you have to rank #1 for keyword puppy food.

Keyword selection by this method comes in handy specially when you want to estimate how much effort you would require to rank well for a prticular keyword. It is not that difficult to beat 10,000 pages as compared to 15,000,000 pages.

Feel free to share and comment.

Track Clicks On Outgoing Links with Google Analytics

Kashif — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:58:00 +0000

Google analytics has been my one of the top website analysis tool that I often use to track not only my site(s) traffic but also find out how visitors are navigating through my content. I have been using it for over a year now and so far it has helped a lot in making my content placement even better. I can easily find out how many hits I get to a particluar page and various other stats.

This post is all about how you can easily track clicks on your site outbound links i.e the links placed on your site that point to other sites. These can be any links for example ,text links within your web page body, blog roll links in sidebars, image banner links etc. By default Google analytics does not povide number of clicks on outgoing links so we have to add a little piece of JavaScript to the links that we want to track so that whenever those links are clicks, analytics is notified and it tracks that link. For example we want to track click(s) on text link which has the HTML code :

OutLink

After adding the tracking JavaScript code, the above link becomes this :

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

See the text (‘/Links/yourlink.com’) . This is your custom tracking text that you will later use to track the above link. For example the above link is in my blog roll so I make the text (‘/Outgoing/Blogroll-Link.com’). If you have various different locations that you want to track make sure you assign them names that you can remember easily. Now that you have added the code log in to your Google analytics account and the left menu click Content>Top Content. This will open that stats of you your top conetent pages. Now go to the bottom where it says Find page as shown in the image below :

In the search box enter the text ‘/Outgoing/Blogroll-Link.com‘ and it will show you stats on all the links that you have added the JavaScript code. Remember that Google analytics does not show realtime stats and stats are updated after 24 hours so you will be able to see the click report after a day or two.

Adsense Ads Back On Blogger|Blogspot Blogs

Kashif — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Yesterday when Blogger.com, one of the top free blogging service provider owened by Google, made some updates to their system it resulted in a temporary broken connection between Google Adsnese and Blogger. As a result of this glitch, almost all the blogs that were hosted on Blogger.com and have Adsense ads on them started showing only PSA(Public Service ADS) which unfortunately generates revenue neither for Google nor for Adsense publishers.

Immediately after this issue was spotted by publishers, they reported this in various forums and groups, including Official Adsense group, so that Adsense team could take immediate action and restore the ad serving to all Blogger blogs. And they did what was required. They fixed this problem and have now started serving Adsense ads back on all Blogger hosted blogs.

I just feel sorry for some bloggers who had lost some serious amount of revenue and were severly effected by this temperoray glicth.

Make contact form with Google Docs

Kashif — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:04:00 +0000

With Google Docs you can not only upload or edit documents and spreadsheets but you can also make highly customizable forms that you can email or even embed in your website so that user can input data directly into the form which will them aulomatically be loaded and saved to a spreadsheet that can easily be accessed via http://docs.google.com. Embedding custom forms on websites and blogs is a nice idea specially if you are have a tough time fighting email spam. In this way you will not have to make yoour email address availably publically and special automatic email harvesters will not be able to steal you precious and personal email addresses.

This quick tutorial will show you how easy it is to create a form with Google Docs. First use the above link to login to your Google acount. If you do not have an account then create one as it will not cost you a penny. Now I assume that you have registered, logged in and opened your Google Docs page. From the menubar select New>Form. This will open a new window with an untitled form that can be cutomized easily at your will. You can add many data input fields from that window. The fields currently being offered are:

- Text

- Paragraph Text

- Multiple Choice

- Check Boxes

- Choose From a List

- Scale (1-n) – Used for rating

Here is a sample Form created just to let you know how would the form look like after you have saved it. All the fields in the form are customizable with the exception of ‘Powered by Google Docs’ and ‘Google TOS’ links. Feel free to comment and play with the sample form

Extract URLs From WebPages in 1 Click

Kashif — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:10:00 +0000

‘Selected Links‘ is simple yet very effective link extractor by Mikos. It is a free link extractor which has the ability to extract hyperlinks from a web page. Just select the desired section of the page with the help of your mouse cursor and this tool will display the URLs and their respective anchor texts. Besides the ability to extract text link, it can also be used to extract image URL.

I have only tested this tool on Microsoft Internet Explorer. Here is how it works. Install this tool and restart your IE browser. Then select the text link or the entire text with your mouse and make sure it stays selected and highlighted like the way shown in the image below.

Now goto Tools menu in IE and click ‘Selected Links’. The following screen with all the links in the selected text and their respective anchor texts will appear.

Now you have all the URLs. You can copy individual link or click ‘Copy All’ to copy all the URLs to your computer by pasting them into a text file. You can also click ‘Open All’ which will open all the links that this tool has extracted. Though this is not a recommended action specially if it has lots of links to open. Your browser might slap you for doing that

Why the need of Text Link Extractor ?

As a part time SEO (for myself only) I find my self in situations in which it is required to save hundreds of links from a webpage. Those URLs are in web directories that contains huge listings. So I found this tool very simple and effective for manual links extraction. Remeber that it is not an automated link extarctor and you have to select text link or entire text manually and then fetch their links.

Want to give this tool a try. Dowload Selected Links.

Character and Word Count Tool

Kashif — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:45:00 +0000

Word Count Plus is a free word counter add-on created by Mozdev that you can add/install to your FireFox browser and leave the counting to this tool. With this extension installed, you can count any number of words on a web page. No need to download any other word count software for this purpose or visit any of those free online word counters because you can count words simply by selecting them inside your browser.

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.

Increasing Link Popularity : OFF-Page Optimization Strategy

Kashif — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 05:20:00 +0000

One of the most important ways to increase link popularity is to gain quality one way links and get a high Google PageRank. Once you stop your link building campaign, your link popularity will be lowered comparatively. When your site is ranking high on search engine result page (SERP), it gets more exposure and lots of targeted traffic for free.

For any website to appear high in search engine rankings, it is required that it has a decent tract of both ON-Page and OFF-Page website optimization in the eyes of search engines. Off page optimization is done by getting backward links or simply backlinks. The higher the quality and relevancy of those inward links, the better it is for higher ranking in search engines.

Below is a list of ten directories where you can submit your blogs, sites and get free one way links that will help you increase link popularity of your websites.

UPDATED : 10/4/09

(Copy – Paste URLs in Browser)

http://www.dramba.com/

http://www.indiabusinessdirectory.info/

http://www.rox3n.net/

http://www.doubledirectory.com/

http://litedirectory.com/

http://www.bahiacar.com/

http://www.gulqro.com

http://www.mercury-directory.info/

http://www.info-listings.com/

http://www.ilushkin.com/

The above web directories do not require you to link back to them so these will be genuine one way links for you. If you want your sites to be displayed in top of these listings, then you have to select the option of ‘Sponsored links‘ or ‘Premium Links‘. These are paid listings and only select these when you are willing to pay for your site inclusion.

Entrecard is a Waste of Time

Kashif — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:08:00 +0000

This might sound a bit harsh but the fact is that I did not found Entrecard to be very effective. I joined their network in May’08 so for the past 7 months, I have got up to 700 hits from entrecard site with an average bounce rate of over 85% and according to my Google analytics stats, the average time these 700 visitor spent on this blog was not even 20 seconds. This is even worse than traffic from social bookmarking networks but when I went deep into the stats I found what was the real culprit behind this.

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 !

6 FireFox Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins for Developers

Kashif — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:45:00 +0000

Got tired of hitting the browser refresh button each time to preview the updated page or to see how the changes look like to a web page that is being developed by you. The problem with most of the WYSIWYG web page editors is that they usually stuck most of the time and they do not give you the real or exact picture of what a web page would really look like when viewed in a browser. There are various auto refresher tool available that will do the job for you but they cost too much for a very simple yet tedious task. To get an auto refresh tool for free I use Firefox web browser which gives me the ability to install third party add-ons for performing various tasks, one of them is to automate the refreshing of a web page. I have been suing FireFox for a long time now and the only reason for using it on the first place was that it provided tabbed browsing experience which was not available in other web browsers at that time. The tabs allow me to work more efficiently without messing up my desktop with dozens of browser windows.

Coming back to automating the reloading of a web page, below is a list of few of the best FireFox plugins that will perform this task for you. Get any of the one that meets your requirements.

	Hacking Firefox: More Than 150 Hacks, Mods, and Customizations (ExtremeTech) (Paperback)
	Firefox Hacks: Tips & Tools for Next-Generation Web Browsing [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

List of Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins

1. Tab Mix Plus [download plugin]

This is one of the top FireFox plugins that has lots of features with which you can do a variety of things in your FireFox browser tabs. One of them is to set the reload time of any or all tabs in your browser window. Then after the selected time ends, the selected tab(s) automatically refreshes and loads the updated page.

2. ReloadEvery [download plugin]

In this plugin, you can select the auto reload time anywhere from 5 seconds to 15 minutes or you can add your own refresh time. Very handy tool when you want to view a web page that has data which changes very often(for example stock rates, live scoreboards etc).

3. Lathe2 [download plugin]

This one is very simple and straight forward. Just select the time interval and the page will reload automatically after that time.

4. XRefersh [download plugin]

This plugin has not been very popular but it works as good as any other listed on this page. This tool automatically detects any changes on a web page and then reloads the updated page. This tool is very handy for web developers since they can easily preview real time changes that they make to the code of a web page.

5. Page Update Checker [download plugin]

This one works in a slightly different way. It checks a web page for changes and if it finds that a web page has changed, it notifies the user via a sound or a small icon. You can set the monitoring time so that it automatically checks the web page for updates after regular intervals.

6. Check4Change [download plugin]

This one works the same way the Page Update Checker works but you can specify certain portions of a web page that you want to monitor changes /updates. Select the section of the web page that you want to monitor for any change and simply select the time interval for this plugin to check for updates and if it occurs, it is indicated by a variety of ways.

Hope some of these plugins will really can in handy in your web development tasks. Feel free to share these with others.

New Improved YouTube Search Bar

Kashif — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:47:00 +0000

Update : This new enhancement made by YouTube team seems to have raised a lot of objection and has annoyed most of the people who are embedding YouTube videos on their websites and blogs. YouTube staff has noticed this immediately and have slightly modified the way this search bar appears and it will not be on top of the embedded video all the time instead it will only appear when the mouse cursor is hovered over the video and will disappear immediately when the cursor is taken away from the video.

I don’t know whether this new enhancement made in YouTube videos is getting any attention or not but it seems like a very nice addition to any YouTube video that is being used on any website other than Youtube.com itself. In the past webmasters need to place a custom designed search box (shown above) on their sites so that their visitors can search for YouTube videos from that site but this is no longer required as any YouTube video that is placed on any other site now has its own search b ar as pointed in the image below.

This search bar is displayed before the video starts, disappears while the video is playing and re-appears when ever the video is paused or it ends. This is the same search that is provided on Youtube website and by typing in any search terms you get the same results that you get from Youtube.com !

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.

Increased website traffic from Social Bookmarking sites

Kashif — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:11:00 +0000

The great part of getting website traffic from social bookmarking sites (like Digg , Yahoo buzz , Technorati , Stumbleupon , Delicious etc) is that you do not need to wait for your web pages to get crawled , indexed and climb high in SERP (search engine result page) . With very little effort , your website can get thousands of free hits from social bookmarking sites in very short amount of time . But this is not the case most of the time . Spammers exploit such fast growing Social bookmark sites for their spammy sites due to which policies of such sites are getting revised quickly and above all users are also getting very touchy when they view a new site that looks a bit fishy and they will only vote in favor of it if they feel that it is worth sharing with others . The point here is that quality content never gets wasted but to expose that content and make sure that it is spread in a manner it was meant to be , one needs to strive just a little more harder .

To attract more website traffic many webmasters are placing social bookmark icons on web pages that are easily accessible by their visitors . So if a visitor enjoyed reading that page then it is more likely that he or she will click on one of those icons to bookmark that web page and share it with other people in the same interest group and thus increasing traffic to that page .Many webmasters particularly bloggers are very effectively utilizing social bookmaking sites to get more traffic but there are still many new bloggers those are not aware of the fact that if they generate quality content and get it listed on social media networks then social bookmarking traffic can make a huge difference .

Few weeks ago I did a small experiment and placed a provocative image at the end of each of my blog posts . The image contained icons of some of the most popular social bookmarking sites and it said “Enjoyed reading do me a favor share with your friends before you leave” . I kept this custom bookmark image for few weeks and the results were very promising . I used to get few bookmarks in a month from my blog visitors but this custom image increased blog traffic and bookmark count by almost 10 times . Currently I am using default bookmark image and it is also working fine for me since after I changed my blog template I have less wider post area . Maybe some day I will design another custom image to fit into my posts .

The best part of using the above bookmark icons / links is that you only need to write quality content and then your website visitors will do the rest by sharing your quality pages with others . It is also not a bad idea to ask your visitors for a bookmark and it works most of the time .

If yo do not currently use those icons then you can get them for your blog for absolutely free . Here are few of the sites that can provide different designs of social bookmark buttons that will fit well in any web page .

If you enjoyed reading this page then feel free to share it with your friends .

Analyse your blog worth with dnScoop

Kashif — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:53:00 +0000

Do you have a blog which has a decent Google page rank , lots of backlinks , high Alexa rank and is some what popular ? Or you have a new site with almost no backlinks , no page rank and a very low Alexa traffic rank . Doesn’t matter if its new or old because you can get the value ( estimated ) of your site from a free website value estimation tool called dnscoop.com

It gives an estimated value of any domain based on some of the following factors :

- Age of domain
- Google Pagerank
- Alexa rank
- Number of inbound link ( or simply backlinks )

Based on the above factors , it generates an estimated value of any site. According to this tool , Kashifblog.com has a worth of $900 . Google.com having over 900 billion backlinks has a value of over $1.7 billion . I think that is pretty low from big G standards .

So how much your site worths ?

Google alerts now for Feeds

Kashif — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Previous Google alerts were only sent via email as updates but recently Google has made it available via feeds as well . You will no longer have to worry about your mail box filling up with email messages from Google . As now you can set as many alerts as you like ( keeping in mind that there is a limit up to 1000 alerts per email address ) .

When you sign in to your Google alerts account and edit or create an alert , you will now see that when you click on the delivery option , you are provided with an option between email and feed .

I personally feel this is a cool feature and as said by google officials , a highly requested feature as well .

Take screen shots of any website

Kashif — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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 .

Free image hosting Services for your blog

Kashif — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:27:00 +0000

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.

Are you tagging images on your site ?

Kashif — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:32:00 +0000

photo credit : Customtrophiesinc

If your answer is No , then you might me missing some extra traffic as there is a huge quantity of internet users that use image search engines ( like Google image search ) to search images on the web . If you use images that are relevant to the content of your site then chances are that those images will bring many targeted visitors to your site which is only possible if you have tagged your images wisely . Continue reading to find out how to do this .

If you look into the HTML code of your image then you will find something like this :

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 .

Google Page rank update : September 2008

Kashif — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:49:00 +0000

It seems like Google again has been busy in updating page rank of websites on the web .

My prediction for this current page rank update didn’t quite went the way I wanted as Google tends to be updating page ranks very often these days . The previous Google page rank update took place just two months a go and I was expecting this PR update to occur some where in the end of October 2008 .

But who cares about page rank these days ? Higher positions in SERPs is what most of the webmasters target these days .

Manage and remix your photos with Picasa

Kashif — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:43:00 +0000

Picasa is a freeware PC software by Google which lets you organize photos on your pc . In fact it is more than just a photo manageemnt tool and some of its highlighted features include :

-Photo Slideshows creation

-Photo collage maker

-Making movies by ading audio yo your slideshows

-Ability to add text to your images

-Edit photos by adding various photo effects

-Making slideshows of photos on your hard drive is very simple with Picasa . You just select the photos and Picasa does the rest . It has variety of build-in effects for image slide shows and you can select the one that meets your requirement.

-You can also make photo collage and can set your results as desktop wallpaper or can also share your creativity on the web with your friends.

-The ability to add audio to slideshows is something new for a photo editor and Picasa does it quite well . You can make professional looking movies with this simple yet powerful software by incorporating background audio to your slideshows.

-You can add text in any style and format to your images.This lets you create effective presentations and this comes in handy when making movies , slideshows or tutorials .

- Picasa is also a very effective photo editor . It has many photo editing features that you will find in editors like PhotoShop . You can crop images , automatically adjust images with red-eye defect , apply soft focus to images and many other easy to use phot editing tools.

So what are you waiting for , go get your free copy of Picasa .

Protect your email IDs from spam bots and automatic email extractors !

Kashif — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:07:00 +0000

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 .

There are many ways we can disguise our email addresses . We can use the term “at” instead of “@” and “dot” in place of “.” . So your email of sample@email.com becomes :

sample [ at] email [ dot ] com

This can be sometimes confusing and diffcult to pick by some of your site visitors but it works well and is completely hidden from any sort of spam bot .

The other method is to use email address in images like the ones shown below :

You can use any photo editor to create your own custom email image or if you are running short of time then I suggest you try this free service offererd by Nexodyne . The above images have also been created by this free tool and uptil now it has delived over 7 million free email icons to users across the globe .

But using email image icons , automatic email extractor tools and other spam bots see these as images and your email is safeguarded by this simple yet effective method .

NOTE : None of the email addresss used in above images belong to me .

Google Alerts : How to use it ?

Kashif — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:52:00 +0000

Google alerts are automatic email alerts of latest and relevant search results sent to your inbox by none other than Google itself . Google search engine crawlers continuously crawl content from sources such as news , blogs , web , videos , groups etc and when they find anything that mathces your defined-alert criteria , they will send you can email alert with a link to that page that contains your search term .

See the following image . It is Google alert for the search term “http://onlineearningguide.blogspot.com“ . I have set the alert for my blog previous URL ( you can feed in any term you want , just consider this as an advanced search query for which the result will be emailed to you ) . When Google found new pages that contained my search term , they sent me the following email along with the link to the page containg my search term .

Lets keep it simple If you want to track whose talking about you on blogs, groups etc then you can set an alert of your name as search term and if some one uses your name and google catches that , they will send you and alert immediately ( depends upon your alert settings ) . By using Google alerts you can keep track of latest stories , news and can even keep an eye on your competitor . It is entirely up to you

You can set up as many as 1000 alerts per email address (only Gmail address accepted) .

Where are your blog readers coming from ?

Kashif — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:42:00 +0000

If your answer is I don’t know then I am afraid that you are missing a very basic ingredient for tracking your blog traffic . If you are not so much tech savvy and do not care much about who visited your blog , then it is fine . But if you are really into traffic building , SEO , SERPs , referrals and all that info then you at least need a decent traffic analytic tool for your site .

There are many traffic analytic tools available that will do the job for you and it only takes few minutes to install one on your site . From time to time I have used various different kinds of such tools and have listed few of them below . Installing such tool involved placing small piece of code on your site . The traffic will then be automatically be tracked and data will be recorded by those tools.

There are different kind of data that these tools record for your analysis . Some of the data will be :

- Total number of hits : This will show you the total number of visitors to your site .
- Total number of page views : This will show you the total number of pages visited .
- Referral pages : This will show you all URLs from where visitors came to your site .
- Keywords : If your sites receives traffic from search engines that this section will show you those keywords that were typed in by the visitor in a search engine ( e.g Google ) to reach your site .
- User Data : This section will give you various info about your visitor ( e.g Operating System , Browser , Screen resolution , Location etc )

I have presented the above data in its simplest forms .There are various other terminologies used by such tools which I will discuss later some other day . Below I have listed few of such traffic counters / trackers that you can install and start analyzing your traffic very easily .

	http://www.google.com/analytics/
	http://www.sitemeter.com
	http://www.statcounter.com
	http://www.countomat.com
	http://www.gostats.com

How to check Page Rank of internel pages…

Kashif — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:43:00 +0000

After the recent Google PR update , I was thinking whether my internal pages have been ranked by Google or not . Then I stared viewing them one by one ( I only use Google toolbar to view page rank ) . After viewing few of the pages I stopped and said to myself ” What the heck am I doing ? ” , this is going to take ages to find page rank of all the pages of this blog . There has to be a better way of finding out the Page Rank of all the internal pages . Then I did some research and in the end came up with the following two methods that will give be pageranks of my internal pages as well as home page.

Method 1 : Using Firefox Browser and SeoQuake Plug-in

Open your web browser (Firefox is required) and in Google search type this command :

site:www.sitename.com

What this command in Google does is that it displays all the indexed pages of the site (www.sitename.com) just like the way it displays search results . But this is not the magic ingredient. A FireFox plug-in called SeoQuake displays the page rank of every page in this result . This is the easiest way of viewing page rank of all the internal pages of a site indexed in Google. So get this plug-in as it has a lot more to offer than just PR info.

Method 2 : Use A Free Online Internal PR Checker Tool

[ Note : For some unknown reasons this tool is no longer active and you will get error when you visit its page. You can use method 1 described above for finding pagerank of all your website pages indexed in Google ]

The other method is even better than this one . You do not require any specific browser or any additional plug-in. This method requires using a free service provided by LivePR, to check the page rank of all the internal pages. The results are displayed on a single page and this tool also provides an option to sort the pages in the order of increasing or decreasing PageRank . This is by any means the best online tool available for checking internal PR of any site. The only drawback with this tool is that you can use it to find the internal PR of only one web site per hour .

So it is up to you which method you use. I will first start with the LivePR checker tool then use the SeoQuake manual method.