August, 2009

20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Everybody talks about optimizing the website as a whole, but it is of equal importance to optimize this single, most important page – HomePage (face of your website).

For almost all the websites, the most ranked and visited page is its homepage. So optimizing it makes a lot of sense. If you feel the same, then continue reading..

Here are some of the aspects that you can tweak, inorder to optimize your homepage:

1. Do not show full article on your homepage. If you are showing 10 full articles on your homepage, then it will take a lot of time to load.
And from users perspective, they may not have the patience to scroll down and digg your website looking for good content. Internet is full of information overload and they may just leave your website and go somewhere else.

On the downside, people need to do an extra click to get to the content, if you start showing post excerpts.

2. If you are showing only excerpts on your homepage, then try to limit it to 8 or 10 post excerpts. If you show 20 to 25 post excerpts on your homepage, then the user experience will again be bad.

3. Use less images on your homepage.: Images consume most of the bandwidth. Images can be used wisely to grab the attention, but if we do not take that extra care to optimize the image, then we will surely have to pay for that latter. It would be better to avoid more images on the homepage.

4. Use less advertisements on your homepage or no advertisement on your home page: The best example for this is Google. Google.com is the simplest and most used search engine in the world and still it doesn’t have a ad on its homepage. Get a clue from it.

5. Optimize all the images that you are showing on your homepage, using some image optimization tools.

6. As far as possible, try avoiding if-else programs on your homepage. Ex:- Showing one ad to facebook visitors and other for Search Engine visitors and another for people coming from Twitter!

7. Remove the widgets and badges from the homepage. Retain only the most important.

8. Avoid animated contents from your homepage, inorder to speedup the load time of your pages and to not divert the attention of your reader, from the beginning.

9. Choose a proper webhost, with good uptime, speed of servers and support.

10. Make use of custom Excerpt option in WordPress and make the excerpts on your homepage more meaningful. Create enthusiasm or the need to read more situation to someone who reads the excerpts on your homepage!

11. You can lessen the ads on the homepage and put link or banner to your own interesting articles or categories of articles. This will give the user more options to navigate. And you can engage your reader for more time, showcasing good articles.

12. Remove the digg, tweetmeme and other buttons from the article excerpts. Show them only on the full post, if necessary.

13. Use labels: Label all the things properly on your homepage. Ex: Recent articles, Popular posts etc, for better user experience. Visitors must not feel, as if they have landed in a wild forest!

14. Test your optimized homepage: Testing is the only way to go. Big internet companies like Google rely only on its continuous testing. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft has a lot of employees for testing. Now how can you do testing with your website/blog? Most of the times, owner of the blog gets blind to many components on the blog, like, the widgets, labeling, etc. So it is a good practice to arrange a party for your friends(who don’t know about your blog) and tell them to surf and give feed back about 2 or 3 websites(one of which is yours!). Keep doing it once in a while. Do not over do it. You may just endup in testing and may forget the main element of the blog, which is content.

15. Menu bar: Most surfers are used to the menu bar placed at the top, than on the sidebar. So it must be clearly placed in a prominent position and do not mix it with your categories and other stuffs.

16. Show navigation menu or main menu both in the header as well as in the footer.

17. Make sure to have “Popular Articles” or “Recommended Articles” list on the homepage. So that first time visitors know where to look at, for the best contents on your blog. And with the best content, they are more likely to stick to your blog.

18. Show your subscriber count or Twitter follower count as a social proof, if you have some significant numbers.

19. As far as possible avoid flash contents from homepage. You may annoy and drag your readers out of your blog even before they read any of your stuffs!

20. Make your website/blog logo clickable and link it to your homepage.

Please share your optimization tips with us. So that everyone of us can improve our website/blogs.

Do you want Premium quality content for FREE ?

Being a student I know how tight our budgets will be! I was in the same position a year back, before starting blogging. So I love to share about good quality, free content from trusted sources.
Yesterday I read a very good ebook and I recommend it to all bloggers who are stuck at some point in blogging and can’t afford to pay for an online course.

The name of the ebook is Make Money Blogging, by Daniel Scocco. The book is well structured and is worth reading.

make-money-blogging-premium-quality-content

Daniel Scocco has been involved in entrepreneurial projects on the Internet since 2005 and he knows his stuffs. His famous blog DailyBlogTips.com was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently it is ranked among the 500 most popular blogs in the world (according to Technorati) and among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world (according to AdvertisingAge).
Daniel has also provided consulting services for many companies and organizations (including the United States federal government), and he is the founder of the online marketing and business training program Online Profits.

So Daniel and his works are really worth to be followed, if you want to be a successful online entrepreneur or blogger.

Daniel has worked for about two months and has packed this ebook with all his experience and has made a really valuable ebook.

Many people, including bloggers want answer for this question — How to make money blogging?
This book also concentrates and explains other aspects of money making, that is generating quality content inorder to get the traffic and to gain authority(over time), and then the money aspects, which is exact inline with how things have worked out to many bloggers.
It contains some real suggestions and tips, which most online courses teach.

The ebook contains:

Introduction (which also contains very valuable information’s)
1. The Content: Know the 3 important things that make good content. Good info about Headline and about finding idea’s or inspiration for content creation.
This is the most important aspect for any blogger to know. You can just download the ebook, to read this one chapter, if you don’t have enough time.

2. Design and usability: This chapter contains some list of Usability Mistakes, which are worth noting down and correct them one by one, if your blog is making those mistakes.
Other things like call for action and the action priorities.

3. Networking: Contains some short email templates, that you can use for your networking purpose!, but I suggest get your own. Templates provided by Daniel are just an example. You can make yours more personal and catchy!
Small excerpt from this chapter:

In most professional fields, who you know is at least as important as what you know. Blogging is no exception.

4. Promotion: This is the chapter which I liked the most. It contains some really good information. It tells the importance of guest blogging, social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook and ways to promot your killer content.

5. Monetization: Which stresses about the creation of authority, before trying to make money. And gives 2 important tips for making money with Adsense. Also talks about direct advertising, CPM ads, Affiliate marketing, email marketing(“the money is in the list!”) etc.

In the introduction of the ebook, Daniel says – “If you already have a blog and know the basics, feel free to skip to chapter 1.” But out of curiosity, I read the introduction and I must say, Daniel has packed good info from the very beginning of the ebook.
Although the introduction was valuable, I feel that I had already read it on DailyBlogTips.com!

Introduction goes on with the inspiring revenue figures of TechCrunch, Mashable and Haffingtonpost etc, but at the same time warns not to get into “get rich quick” concept! Here is an excerpt from the ebook:

yes it is definitely possible to make money blogging. At this point many people ask: “but is it easy or quick?” Well, that is a completely different question, and unfortunately the answer here is a big “NO”.
Making money blogging is no different then making money with any other venture, be it online or offline. As such it will take time and require a heck lot of work.

Much like his News Letter(which is kind of personal, valuable and to the point), the ebook also doesn’t contain any fluff, you get the meat directly, so its time saving apart from being valuable.

Finally, if you are a blogger or somehow related to blogs, then you will find the ebook valuable. Do not miss to download, read and implement the tips in the ebook.
To download the ebook(which is Free), you will have to signup for his news letter here.

And also tweet about this ebook to all your friends, fans and followers, I am sure, many of them will find it helpful. And who knows you may even win a laptop! — yes, Daniel is holding a contest and is giving away two laptops to two lucky winners. Tweeting will get you one entry, and blogging about it will give you 5 entries. Nice trick to get the words out. Though I decided to write about the ebook, after reading it and finding some valuable info there. And more over, I always recommend Daniel’s work, as he is a brand built around trust.

Related: 5 Freebies Up For Grab

Interview with ReTweet.com

Differences, controversies (ReTweet.com v/s TweetMeme.com) apart, today we have Mesiab Labs Chief Operations Officer Tyson Quick. We thank Tyson for taking time for this interview.

For those who don’t know about ReTweet.com: As you might have already guessed by its name, it is a new service that shows popular links being shared(tweeted) and re-shared (retweeted) mainly across Twitter.

They surly have got a killer domain name ReTweet.com and a super URL shortner rt.nu.

Here is the interview:

1. Please tell our readers about yourself and ReTweet.com service.

Retweet is the official place to find real-time news on popular stories, images, and videos. We provide this service by scanning thousands of updates on the worlds most popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.com and with the help of users like you whom have added our retweet button to your blog. The word retweet has now become one of the most popular terms online and describes the action of repeating or sharing someones original tweet / story. We now live in a world where for the first time in history real-time news is possible thanks to modern web technologies and crowd sourced content creation, retweet is here to leverage this modern way of announcing and discovering news. We pride ourselves in providing “news for the people, by the people”.. meaning we do not decide what news finds it’s way to the home page of our site.

Retweet is still a baby ( thus the BETA ), expect to see many improvements over the next few months as we have great things in store. In the mean time, help us improve the service by adding our button to your blog.

2. Some history behind the service ReTweet.com

Retweet.com is a side-project, as our software products are priority. We purchased the Retweet.com domain name 4 months ago for a substantial amount of money knowing exactly what we were going to do with it. At this time tweetmeme ( our main competitor in this arena only had around 200k monthly visitors ).

3. What inspired for the creation of a service around Twitter.

I ( Tyson Quick – COO ) thought up the idea around the same time the plane crash happened in the Hudson river and it was first reported via TwitPic… real-time “crowd-sourced” news was being born. I was also a fan of DIGG.com at the time and saw how twitter could essentially be used the same exact way. Believe it or not, our team had this idea before we ever saw tweetmeme.. although they were obviously the first ones to jump on the bandwagon.

4. What are the long term business plan and business model for ReTweet.com?

I cannot expose our business plans for retweet.com at this time, although we do have a well planned business model ( note: this does not rely on us ever passing tweetmeme in traffic ) – Although this is one of our long-term goals.

5. What new features can we expect from ReTweet.com in coming days?

We will first be matching our competitors features 100% and then adding additional features we thought up ourselves. I also cannot release these details at this time. But, i’ll assure you our users will like them.

6. How big or small is ReTweet.com, as a company?

Retweet.com is run by Mesiab Labs: Mesiab Labs is an LLC established and registered in Boise, Idaho. The company was initially funded by the now dissolved software company Easy Ad, owned and operated by Kevin Mesiab. The executive team consists of Kevin Mesiab ( CEO ), Tyson Quick ( COO ), and Sean Boone ( Director of Design ). Mesiab Labs builds market leading software and web based applications in various markets. We have a total of 4 people on Staff. All our projects are self-funded, we have never accepted VC or outside funding.

7. How important do you think the numbers game in Twitter (I am talking about the follower count)? Do you think it matters?

If you are a Business, then numbers are extremely important. When it comes to marketing, businesses rely on how many potential customers they can reach.

8. What do you have to say about Twitter banning @retweet account.

We believe Twitter Banned our @retweet account because they are trying to trademark the term ( we have a pending trademark as well ) and because of their up-coming launch of their internal retweet function. From Twitter’s standpoint they might be worried about a 3rd party owning an account on their platform that is associated with the 2nd largest twitter term ( 2nd only to tweet )

9. What are your thoughts about Twitter getting the copyrights on Tweet and ReTweet?

Well the term tweet has already been denied and we believe the same will occur with the term retweet. We are confident that we will be granted it if anybody gets the trademark because of the related domain name and the fact that the domain has been registered for over two years before we purchased the rights to it.

10. How do you think, you stand out from your competitors?

Right now we have not added many features that differ from our competitors, we first have to play the catch-up game. We have many features planned that have yet to be implemented. Right now the main thing that stands out about our company is our brand power and our extensive experience in online marketing. We also own our own url shortner rt.nu that is being implemented with retweet, as well as checkretweet.com

11. If you want to tell something else to our readers, you can tell

Retweet.com will remain an extremely social site, holding monthly competitions, etc.

Its left to you which service you use on your blog, but its always good for bloggers to know the alternatives and its pros and cons. Take the interview positively, and we love to see a positive competition between ReTweet.com and TweetMeme.com, Wishing them best of luck. Hope you enjoyed the interview.

What You Need To Know | Matt Cutts WordCamp San Francisco 2009

This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope

This is a video + presentation from Matt Cutts at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.

Matt Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Video:

Please refresh and wait, until the video loads..
Presentation:

Matt Cutts blog is a number one source for many webmasters and SEO guys. Hope this video and presentation from Matt helps.

Source:Mutt Cutts blog

Assign Password to a Directory via cpanel

It is said that, no data online is safe. Someone can enter and see/use your online data. But we can always try our best to stay safe. Some of the things that we need to ensure is, a secure software (Ex:- like WordPress as a CSM) and a strong password. But at the end, backup of our website and database are the only hope for recovering the data(if some unfortunate things happen).

After receiving 3 to 4 emails with the same question, I thought of writing it on the blog. So here is the procedure for password protecting the directory through cpanel.

Log into your hosting account cpanel. Navigate to “Security” section. Click on the “Password Protect Directories” link.

Next a popup will appear, select the web root and click GO.

Select the directory that you want to password protect. This may be some what a puzzle! for first time user.

If you want to password protect a directory inside another directory, then click on the folder icon beside the link of main directory (see above image for better visualization).
Password-username-protect

Once you navigate to the directory that you want to password protect, click on the directory name and enter a name (any name), usename and password.

You can select and delete any of the older users by selecting the username and clicking on the Delete User button.

Why Password Protect ?
Password protect those folders which you want to secure.
For Example:- If you have a payment gateway, where you process your customers credit cards, then do not take chance or do not compromise with the security aspects. Its not your security, its your customers security, which is of prime importance!

Password protecting such sensitive directories is crucial. Customers would never feel comfortable to be your guest, if you are not serious about their security!

Technotip.org Guest Post Guidelines

After a year of blogging, I feel that it would be great idea to allow guest blogging on this blog. To learn from you guys. I have learnt a lot with the comment section, now its time to give you the main platform to share your knowledge. And to have a lot more conversation and build a great community around, helping each other.
We know the frustration of getting a first link to a new blog. To show others that you exist. And it’s a great boost for search engine ranking, if you can get a link from a trusted website.

Guest articles will mostly be published on Wednesday and Thursday. All other days(most of the days) we will be writing on this blog, as always.

Guest blogging is a great tool to show your presence, skills and to kick start your online business or to boost your already existing one.

What kind of content do we accept?
Write things that provide value. Solve some problems.
1. How-to articles.
2. WordPress and designing.
3. Strategies.
4. Web2.0
5. System related.
6. Mobile tips and tricks.
7. Social Media.
8. Own blogging experiences.
9. List posts
10. Tutorials etc.

Must follow, strict policy:
The article must be original. It must not be published anywhere else….online or offline(news paper, magazine etc). You will be held responsible for any dispute that may rise later.

What type of content is a No NO?
1. Hate stuffs – Abusing some company or product.
2. Product reviews.
3. Article with irrelevant links!
A link with in the article must support the article that is published on the blog and should not be another post that you are referring to readers to go and read.

Some personal guidelines:
Guest blogging is an opportunity to show your authority over a topic to a wider audience or new audience. So you need to make it as professional as possible, and not to include as many links as possible to drive the traffic. Its about spreading your brand recognition, showing your ability and willingness to be one among the community. Before submitting a guest article, make sure you do proper research about the topic, so that you can satisfy the readers and their comments.
Don’t view guest blogging as purely an opportunity for you to get new readers and promote yourself. Try to add value to the blog where you are writing the guest post. Take the opportunity to build the authority. People reading the article will surly visit you and be your loyal readers if they like the content and find that you are genuine, then they are more likely to stay with you, following your blog. Create good impression, leave with a positive impact.

For more info or for any further clarification, contact us.

Note: A small bio will be added at the end of the article with a link to your blog and a link to your Twitter profile (optional).

Setup your blog/website in minutes: Install WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blog publishing application and content management system. We can build a website and take it live in a matter of minutes. WordPress has made all the process so easy. Its simple interface and huge developer community adds to its beauty.

Both automatic and manual installation methods has been explained in this post. You can directly scroll down and follow the one that suits your requirement.

Many people have asked me about setting up a blog. They think that, they do not have any programing knowledge, so they can’t build and maintain a blog. That was right some years ago, but with WordPress its all made easy, to setup and maintain. I think, having just a bit of common sense is enough to setup and maintain a website/blog, that is powered by WordPress.

Many newbies get confused with wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

WordPress.org: is a place where you can download latest version of the software and install it on to your server (read on to know how to install it). So at first place, you must have purchased a web hosting account with FTP, database access or cpanel with Fantastico [Don’t worry of these terms now, you can contact us for any suggestion on choosing a hosting provider].
We recommend using Doreo Host, for its reliability and customers care.

WordPress.com: However easy-to-use is the open source package, there is still a barrier in that, it requires a hosting account, a database, FTP, etc making normal people like you and me dizzy. To bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience Automattic (company which owns WordPress.com) created WordPress.com, a hosted version of the open source package where you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge.
But the main dis-advantage for many people is that, you will not get a personal URL. You need to compromise with the http://www.yourwebsitename.wordpress.com and you can not put ads on your hosted blog/website. And more importantly, you can not get 100% control over your blog/website.

Using the open source WordPress software, you can create a static as well as dynamic website using WordPress. We have seen college websites, company sites, government websites to popular blogs built using WordPress.

There is yet another WordPress software called WordPressMU, for multi-author blogs and we will talk about it in some other posts.

So self hosted WordPress is the way to go. And we are here to help you with the installation process.

So here is how you install WordPress:

Automatic Installation of WordPress, through cpanel of your web-hosting a/c

I. Fantastico: If you have cpanel, log into it. And see the Software/services section, for Fantastico De Luxe or simply Fantastico. Click on it.

Next see for the link to WordPress installation in the sidebar, click on it.

Click on the New Installation.
Fantastico-new-installation

Install in directory, Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain
(access example: http://yourdomainname.com).
Enter only the directory name to install in a directory
(for http://yourdomainname.com/foldername Enter flodername only in the install in directory field). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created.

Click on Install WordPress, to get the details of the automatically created database. And the directory where you have chosen to install WordPress. We recommend you to install your blog in the root, if you’re main focus is on the blog.

Notedown the username and the password for logging into your WordPress admin area. You can even save this details in your email.

If you have installed WordPress in the root directory, then your blog will be accessible at http://yourblogurl.com or if you have installed it in a folder by name blog, then your blog is accessible at http://yourblogurl.com/blog. You can log into your WordPress admin area at http://yourblogurl.com/wp-admin or http://yourblogurl.com/blog/wp-admin depending upon your installation.

Manual installation of WordPress:

II. Through FTP:
1. Download and unzip the latest WordPress package, if you haven’t already.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.
Log into your cpanel (Ex: http://yoursitename.com/cpanel ) and click on the “MySql Wizard” in Databases section.

Enter any name for your new database:

Create a new user for the database. Chose a strong password.

Now assign all the privileges to the newly created user. Click on ALL PRIVILEGES. Note down the username and the database name provided at this point.

That’s it, your new database is ready.
user-database-name

3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php, in the downloaded WordPress package.

4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and fill in your database details that you noted down while creating the database(in step 2).

Replace the underlined info with your database name, database user name and database password(that you previously noted down).
Leave the ‘localhost’ as it is. Most of the time, it will be localhost itself.

5. Go to https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ to generate secret-key. Now replace the “Put Your Unique Phrase Here” in the wp-config.php with the one generated at
https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ (Each time your installation fails or you want to reinstall, you need to generate new secret key).

6. Save wp-config.php and upload all the unzipped WordPress files to either root directory or the directory of your choice.

7. Now open your web browser, and visit http://yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/install.php (if installed in root directory) or http://yourwebsitename.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php (if installed in foldername folder).

8. Follow the simple steps, enter your blog name, URL and email ID etc and complete the installation.

9. Log into http://yourwebsitename.com/wp-admin/ or http://example.com/foldername/wp-admin/ for your WordPress admin area.

10. You are done! Congrats. Play around for some time or some days to get used to WordPress. You may feel uncomfortable in the beginning, but it will be walk in the breeze experience, after you are used to it.

III. You can always send a support ticket to your hosting company and most of the time, they can help you with this.

IV. We can help you install it.

If you do not have cpanel and hence fantastico and you even do not have the FTP with your hosting account, then you must think of moving your website or blog to some other good web hosting provider.

5 Freebies Up For Grab

These are some of the free resources from most credible people. They are experienced and they know their stuffs. if you are a blogger, then these resources are a must read to get your blog to the next level or atleast to enhance your blogging experience.

1. How I got 100,000 subscribers in Two Years by Leo Babauta: Leo Babauta of Zen Habits(which has 130,000+ subscribers) has released a report on how he achieved 100,000 subscribers in 2 years time. Its a small ebook and can be read with in 25 minutes(I read it in 25min). You need to go through a email subscription process. I have subscribed and I am getting lot more freebie info in the emails too. And you will also get some podcasts by Leo. Worth subscribing and reading the free info. “Get Leo Babauta’s FREE Report and Podcasts!”

2. Authority Rules: The 10 Rock Solid Elements of Effective Online Marketing by Brian Clark(copyblogger): You can read it in PDF format or on the web. Its completely free and there is not even a opt-in(subscription).Check out Authority Rules here.

3. The Winning Way by Gyutae: The ebook is free, but you will have to subscribe to his email newsletter to be able to download it. Contains short tips. The ebook consists of 118 pages and it covers 500 different Internet marketing strategies and tips. Grab the ebook at The Winning Way.

4. Twitter Guide Book by Mashable: The Twitter Guide Book, a one-stop shop for getting up to speed with everything Twitter, from managing your Twitter stream to promoting a business. You can download the presentation by signing up at slideshare.net.

5. How to Build a High Traffic Blog by Tim Ferriss: This is a must watch video about Building Traffic to your Blog. It is a 50 minutes video and covers topics like posting frequency to blogging tools and community building strategies.

Updated:[Adding some more valuable freebies]
6. 102 Proven Social Media Headline Formulas by Chris Garrett: In order to get more stumbles, diggs, bookmarks and tweets, writing a killer headline is a must. As the title of the ebook says, it has 102 headline formula. It contains 102 fill-in-the-blanks titles/headings. It hardly takes 15 minutes to go through it and lot more time to practice and implement it in writing our own killer titles. No opt-in required to download the ebook. You can download it at socialmediaworkbook.com.

Please share some of the free professional online information products.