A lot of webmasters work hard on their websites, especially in the beginning, and if their website succeeds and becomes more popular, they work even harder to maintain this success, however to succeed you must always know where you stand against your competition but in our case, where you rank!

In order for your website to succeed it needs traffic, and even though there are many ways to get traffic, the best one is still through search engines.

The higher you are on search engines when someone types certain keywords the better your chance at getting high traffic flowing into your website, but how do you know where you rank on the search results of a search engine?

One way is to type different keywords and see if your site shows up, the problem is that your site can show up in later pages and you have no way of knowing where unless you check those pages too and that can take a lot of time especially if you have more than one website you need to check, or more than one combination of keywords.

Since I have more than one website I always like to keep an eye on where they rank on search engine results, especially Google so here are some tools I use to help me find out:

Tools4Google: This website contains a tool that allows you to enter your domain name and then try any combination of keywords with it to try and find out where you rank on Google.

One of the best features of this tool is that it allows you to choose how big a search you want it to be ranging from 250 to 1000 which gives you a very good chance to find out exactly where your site is listed on Google search results.

Another tool I use is:

ArizonaWebDevelopment: This tool is similar to the one above however this one allows you to search in other Google search engines such as the Canadian Google.ca and UK Google version Google.co.uk which can be extremely helpful sometimes to identify where the majority of your traffic is coming from.

There are other tools similar to those but I find them inaccurate, these 2 are by far the most accurate ones I’ve come across so far and they are very fast on returning results.

I hope you found this article helpful and if you use different tools than the ones above and you feel they deserve to be mentioned please don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll be happy to add them.

In previous years partial vs exact match anchor text didn’t matter that much, if you wanted to rank on Google, you had to make sure you have authority websites linking to you using your keywords. This means that if you wanted to rank for the keywords “online income”, you needed to get as many anchor texts as you can with the phrase “online income” leading to your website.

You also know that these links had to be of high quality, you can’t have low rank unpopular websites linking to you and expect to rank high on Google, your links need to be trusted and valued by Google.

If you have been practicing SEO for a long time, you’ll notice that the above method no longer works as good as it used to be, with the updates Google is performing, having too many exact match anchor texts could actually hurt your website.

There are many other signals Google uses to determine the rank of your website including social network signals but we want to focus today on link building.

Partial VS Exact Match Anchor Text

Exact Match

If you want to rank for “online income”, an exact match anchor text would be “online income”, but research (Check out the video below) shows that having too many exact matches can affect your website negatively, so what you want to do is mix your links a bit by adding partial matches to the mix.

Partial Match

A partial match for “online income” is “make online income” or “easy income online”.

You can define a partial match as any anchor text that contains at least one of your keyword phrases. This type of link building is considered the best so far and it does weight more in terms of ranking than exact match.

Here is a video explaining the whole thing by the Pros from SEOMOZ, hope you enjoy.

Partial VS Exact Match Anchor Text is very important to think about when it comes to creating high quality authority links.

Well, installing a Facebook comment system on your blog is not hard but it can get a bit confusing for those who don’t usually get their hands dirty by coding all day…which is why I have put this simple tutorial that would allow anyone to install Facebook comments on a WordPress blog without any need for any coding knowledge.

There are a few plugins out there regarding this but most of them either don’t work or unstable, so here’s how I did this on one of my other WordPress enabled blogs.

Installing Facebook Comments On WordPress Blog In 10 Easy Steps

Step 1:

Download Facebook Comments Plugin.

Step 2:

Install the plugin like you do any other plugin by either uploading the extracted folder using FTP or uploading the zip file through WordPress’s Dashboard.

Step 3:

Visit the settings page for the plugin from within your “Settings” >>> “Facebook Comments” tab.

Step 4:

If you scroll down on plugin’s page you will see a field called “App ID”, you will need to create something called an APP within your Facebook account and then take key it generates and insert it into the plugin’s settings page. To create your APP make sure you are logged into Facebook and visit APPS.

Step 5:

If you look on the top right you will find a button called “+ Create New App” such as the following image:

Step 6:

After clicking on the above button you will be required to enter an App Name, enter the App Name in the field provided and hit continue, after that you will see something called “App ID/API Key” and a number right beside it, copy that in your clipboard.

Step 7:

Make sure to copy that number and paste it into your plugin’s setting page inside the field “App ID”.

Step 8:

Go back to your Facebook account and choose the App you created earlier and click on “Edit Settings” then scroll a little bit down, click on “Website with Facebook Login” and enter “Your Website’s URL” (Note: You might not need to do this step, but if you experience problems such as the comments not showing up, then try entering your website’s URL and see if this helps).

Step 9:

If you would like to leave the original WordPress comments system you can, and you will have both, otherwise if you want only Facebook to show up then go to “Discussion” in your WordPress sidebar and Untick the option saying “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.

Step 10:

If you experience any problems or comments not showing up try ticking and unticking some of the options in the settings page until the comments show up, also make sure to wait a little if you are checking if the comments are working or not, it’s not like WordPress where comments are instant, it takes time to post comments using Facebook, so if you are checking in a different browser then give it sometime. If you want to moderate your comments you can do so by visiting Here.

If you would like to see a more technical guide by the plugin developer himself then visit Here.

At first I thought it was a plugin, and so I started searching for plugins that creates image gallerias within WordPress posts, but I couldn’t find any that gives me the same look this website had.

a few searches later and I discovered that WordPress has a built in gallery that you can use within each one of your posts, and it looks pretty good too.

Creating A WordPress Image Gallery

Step1:

Login to your WordPress blog and go to Posts > Add New.

Step2:

After you finish writing your post, click the “Add an image” button within the post (Don’t upload using the Media > Library section) and upload the images that you want to display within the gallery.

Step3:

As soon as the uploads are done make sure to click “Save all changes”.

Step4:

You will then be automatically taken to the gallery tab (Note: When you first try to upload, the gallery tab will not be shown, it will only appear after you upload at least 2 images AND click “Save all changes”).

Step4:

You should now be able to display the settings for your gallery from within the “Gallery” tab, adjust the setting you need then click “Insert Gallery”.

That’s it! You’re done, you now have an image gallery inside your post completely built-in by WordPress.

I just thought I’d share this quick post with you guys because I have been using WordPress for a little over 2 years now and I had no idea about the gallery option…lol.

Take Care.

Among those things is creating a Favicon for your blog/static site.

What Is A Favicon?

A favicon is a small 16px X 16px icon that is displayed the moment a user starts to load your website/blog.

It is located in the tab your browser creates when you open a website, for example take a look at the tab in your browser this post you are reading right now is displayed in.

Do you see the small image right beside the title of the page? That is a Favicon!

Why Is A Favicon Important?

When a user bookmarks your website or whenever they open their browser address bar and your site shows up there, having a favicon displayed there will remind them of your website and makes them more familiar with your website especially if you designed a favicon that stands out.

What Should My Favicon Look Like?

Anything you want really, the possibilities are endless, however most people, especially businesses and companies create their favicon based on their logo.

In other words their favicon is a mini-version of their logo, this is the case for my blog as well, if you noticed my logo you will see it’s the same as my favicon. You can change the background of the favicon to make it display a bit more clear in the browser tab if you want but still maintain the same logo look.

What Is The Format Of A Favicon?

You can’t use any 16px X 16px image and expect your browser to show it as your favicon, it has to be one of the extensions .ICO or PNG.

If you use another image format, it might not work and even if it does work in 1 browser it won’t work for the others, so just to be safe, use either PNG or ICO extensions.

Which Extension Format Should I Use, PNG Or ICO?

It’s really up to you, however the advantages of using a PNG is that by default it is a transparent image which might work better in browsers with different color themes.

On the other hand if a user have a custom theme installed for their browser and let’s say that theme is dark in color, if you use PNG then your image might not appear clear enough because of a dark background color, thus using ICO with a predefined background color in this case solves this problem.

2 Ways To Create A Favicon

a) Create A Favicon Manually:

This is fun and simple, if you already have an image (such as your logo for example) and would like to turn it into a favicon, you can simply open it in “Photoshop” or if you don’t have Photoshop then you can use “Windows Paint” and simply re-size the image to match 16px X 16px and then save it in either of the extensions above: PNG or ICO.

b) Use An Online Generator:

There are many online generators that you can use to create a custom favicon based on any design you like.

My favorite website for creating a favicon is: http://www.favicon.cc/. This tool gives you so much control over the design, it’s just awesome.

Installing A Favicon On A Static Site

To install a favicon on a static site, all you have to do is paste the following code inside your header tags, but make sure to change the location of the favicon to the one you use.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" />

Installing A Favicon On A WordPress Blog

This is even easier than on a static site, all you have to do is use the plugin that I use and insert inside its settings page the link to your favicon image on your server or choose 1 of the many favicons it already provides for free and it will take care of the rest automatically.

The plugin I use is: Favicons.

Favicons are a great way to familiarize the user with your website, I highly recommend using them, especially that they’re too easy to create and install.

Don’t rely on search engines visiting your site and crawling it on their own, create your sitemap and submit it to any directories you find and to all major search engines such as Google!

What Is A Sitemap?

A Sitemap is a page on your website that contains links to all other pages/posts found on your site. When a search engine bot (such as Google Bot) visits your website, it tries to crawl all the pages on your website through the links you have on there so that it can index your pages into its database, that way when people perform a search on something related to your post/page if your website is indexed, it will show up in the search results.

The problem is that search engines are not humans, so they might sometimes run into trouble when crawling your pages if for example:

• Your pages aren’t properly linked.
• You have pages created using Flash or Ajax.
• Your pages are poorly linked to each other or contains no links to other pages.

Therefore providing a sitemap containing your links is very useful to search engines and helps in indexing your pages faster and more accurately since sometimes a sitemap can contain meta data about your links that explain to search engines how important is that link compared to your other pages by showing how often the page with that link gets updated.

Sitemaps can be submitted as text files but the preferred file type by search engines (such as Google) is XML format.

Do I Have To Use A Sitemap?

Well, you don’t really have to, but it is always better to make it easy on search engines to crawl your pages by using a sitemap and listing to them the exact links your website contains.

It also depends on the type of pages you use on your website, for example if you use the normal html/php pages then in this case it is up to you whether to use a sitemap or not, but if you create a website using flash, or if you have a flash menu for example, then it will be very difficult for search engines to index your pages without the help of a sitemap.

A Sitemap’s main function is to make your pages/posts easily searchable by providing information about each page linked to search engines so that they can better discover and understand the importance of each page on your website.

Create A Sitemap For A Static Site

There are 2 ways you can use to create a sitemap, you can either:

• Create a sitemap manually.
• Create a sitemap using a free an online generator.

a) Creating a Sitemap Manually:

You need to follow the proper coding structure in creating a sitemap.

The following is a basic layout for a sitemap that you can use, just make sure to follow the same structure and add more pages between the <url> and <loc> tags such as below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
      http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

 <url>
  <loc>http://www.YOUR-SITE.com/</loc> 
 </url>
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.YOUR-SITE.com/index.html/</loc> 
 </url>
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.YOUR-SITE.com/ANOTHER-PAGE.php/</loc> 
 </url>
</urlset>

b) Creating a Sitemap Via Online Generators:

This is my favorite method due to its simplicity and speed, all you have to do is enter the root domain of your website or blog into one of these services and in a few minutes (depending on how many pages your site contains) it will release a sitemap file for you with a XML extension.

The websites I use to generate my XML Sitemaps are:

• XML-Sitemaps.COM
• MakeASitemap.COM

I usually use the first one because it’s a little faster, and also contains lots of options on what format you want your file to be produced with, however both work just fine.

Create A Sitemap For A Blog

The best plugin for this job is Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin not only automatically generates a sitemap for your blog, but whenever you update your blog, it updates your sitemap and notifies search engines such as Google, Bing, etc…Check out the screenshot below!

This plugin contains tons of other features regarding sitemaps, I urge you to download it and give it a try, it’s completely free and its one of the best plugins for creating a sitemap.

If you have any suggestions or tips regarding sitemaps or just wanna say hello, please feel free to comment below, if you need help configuring your sitemap don’t hesitate to let me know.

It’s a problem that anyone about to start a new website always faces, you just never know if the hosting provider you choose is a good hosting provider or not.

If you are new at this and do not have enough information about the different types of hosts out there and how to differentiate between a good hosting provider and a bad one, this could be a very annoying process, yet it is perhaps the most important step you’ll take towards building your website since everything depends on having a good hosting provider.

I faced this problem when I first started making websites back in 2009, I  picked a hosting provider based only on price, thinking that it wouldn’t matter that much, had I known what I know now back then, there is no way I would’ve went for the cheapest host.

When Choosing a Good Hosting Provider, Don’t Go For The Cheapest!

That awful cheap hosting provider was “FatCow”, not only was my website down almost every 2-3 days for sometimes an hour, their customer service support is almost non existent, and when you do reach them after the long que, they tell you they will escalate the problem to their “Technical Team” since they can not solve it on the spot, and it was very basic and simple problems that they should be able to solve on the spot, but it seems that the people that they hired to answer your live chat have no idea about anything else except sending your problem to someone else.

So to make this post shorter I left “FatCow” after spending 1 year with them and started to look for a new good hosting provider, only now I know what to look for.

What Do You Need To Know When Choosing A Good Hosting Provider?

Here is a list to help you in your search for a good hosting provider:

1) Customer Service:
The reason this is number 1 is because by contacting customer support you will be able to tell a lot of things about the company!

• Any good hosting provider have an online live support.
• Make sure you are easily able to find them on the homepage and check to see what happens when you contact them, if they take a long time to answer or don’t answer at all, then they are not a good hosting provider.
• Check to see how long it takes for them to respond to your requests and answer your questions, also check to see if they are friendly or not. A good hosting provider hires people that are not only experts at their fields but are also capable of being friendly to others, especially to their clients.

2) Reliability and Speed:
To be considered a good hosting provider they must have a reliable service and acceptable loading times for the websites of their clients. You cant have people waiting 10 seconds to load your page. Also make sure the listed up time is at least 99.9% Sometimes they will state 99% but that is actually too low and means that they might go down a few times per week. A hosting company with a 99.9% of up time might go down but not very often, and only for a brief moment, so a host with 99.9% up time is considered a good hosting provider.

3) Data Transfer (Bandwidth):
Whenever a visitor visits your website, the amount of bytes transferred from your website onto the visitors computer, is called Bandwidth Usage. What this means is that every time someone visits your site, they are loading files that you put on there, and also using your bandwidth to display your site on their computer. You are only allowed a certain amount of bandwidth per month and if you have a lot of visitors and run out of bandwidth your website will simply not load anymore.

Solution: If you have a new website you don’t have to worry very much about bandwidth simply because you don’t have much traffic yet, so just to be safe, choose web hosts that offer “Unlimited Bandwidth”. Of course this doesn’t mean that it really is unlimited, everything has a limit, but at least it will be enough for a new website. Later on when you start to get heavy traffic you should consider getting dedicated hosting, which costs more but you pay according to what you use.

In all cases though, a good hosting provider will always state that they have unlimited bandwidth, otherwise don’t even bother looking at the rest of their website.

4) Disk Space:
This refers to the amount space your have to put your files on. Normally a new website will not need to take more than 10mb unless of course you’re going to upload lots of files on there with a large size such as video files and software. When a web host states “Unlimited Space” means you have a lot of space but it’s not really unlimited, there is a limit and you can find out about it by contacting them. For a new website choosing a host with unlimited space should be enough to get you started.

Why I Choose HostGator As My Hosting Provider, And Why Do I consider It A Good Hosting Provider?

I tried a few other hosting companies after FatCow and I found that HostGator is by far the best one I have come across.
HostGator gives you all the above features, but the best thing I love about them is their customer support.
Their Customer Support Offers:

• Fast-Response Customer Support.
• 24/7 Support anytime you need.
• True professionals handle any problem you may have and as fast as possible.

This blog is currently hosted on HostGator, and it has never went down. Their up time is 99.9% and it never up to now went down once.
I highly recommend choosing Host Gator for your web hosting needs.

If you know of another good hosting provider or would like to share your experience with HostGator please feel free to do so in the comments below.

Let Search Engines “SEE” Your Images By Using An Image Alt Tag

When a search engine such as Google looks at your site, it can only read the text you have written but it can not “see” any of your images and therefore can not understand what your image is about, but you can easily fix this by adding an image ALT tag.

Every blogger knows that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important, and by adding an image ALT tag to your images, you are helping your SEO because you can add targeted keywords inside your “ALT” field to help your SEO.

Now I must tell you that in the past, using keywords in an image ALT tag was very more important for search engines than it is now, and this is due to webmasters abusing this feature by flooding their image ALT tag with keywords, but it is still considered very important, so it is best to use it.

Google Believes In Using an Image ALT Tag Within All Your Posted Images!

Google advised using an image ALT tag in their Webmaster Tools Tips whenever you post a picture, here is what they said:

“Images: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.”

Here is the source link.

On top of all this, note that visually impaired people who are using text readers will also be able to understand what your images are about using an image ALT tag.

How Do I Define An Image ALT Tag In My Photos?

Normally, to publish an image on your blog or static site, you write something like this:

<img src=”blueSky.jpg” width=”200″ height=”200″>

Now to add an image AL” tag, all you have to add is:

<img src=”blueSky.jpg” width=”200″ height=”200″ ALT=”Blue Sky”>

Adding an image ALT tag to your images requires no coding knowledge and it’s very fast to apply, so why not? even if it helps your SEO by 1% can you afford not to do it?

 When I first started this blog I read about how important it is to build and maintain a good healthy mailing list and how that can increase traffic to your website.

The best free tool to use at the time was FeedBruner, so I made an account and set up my gadget so that people can enter their email in the box on the side menu and whenever I post any new posts they will get notified.After that I never remembered to play around with FeedBurner again…until today!

All this time I thought that when I post a new post FeedBurner sends an email to my subscribers and notifies them of my new post so they can come over to my blog and read it, but instead, while I was logging in on an old email account that I used a long time ago to subscribe to my own feed in order to see what others were getting and how my posts were displayed to my readers, I found that my recent post was completely messed up.

The image was in the center of the text and there was no indentation, alignment or even a proper line break at all, the display was simply awful, and to make it worse, it displayed my FULL post in the email. You can check it Here.

Now, if my full post is sent to my readers to their emails why in the world would they visit my site to read it? which defeats the whole purpose of using FeedBurner and getting people to come over to my blog.

All I wanted FeedBurner to do was to send a summary of my post just to make my readers interested and to ask them to come over to ready the full post on my blog, but how do I do that?

To display only a summary of your posts to your readers follow these steps:

1) Log in to your FeedBurner account Here.

2) Click on the “Optimize” tab.

3) Scroll all the way down to “Summary Burner”.

4) Enter the number of characters you want your summary to contain and enter the message you want your readers to get in order to continue reading on your blog (You can leave it as the default message by FeedBurner).

5) After that make sure you click “Activate” and if you do any changes click “Save”.

This service will not work until you click activate. Once activated click on “Your Feed” and you will see a summary of all your posts followed by the message you specified.

What is the lesson Learned?

Always have an active email subscribed to your feeds in order to see what your readers are getting every time you post something new, that way if any errors occur you can catch them early, otherwise your posts will look unprofessional which will result in people unsubscribing from your mailing list.

Adbrite is an advertisement company that allows advertisers post advertisement about their sites or products using publishers available websites, you must have a valid website to apply for Adbrite.

Adbrite is not very strict about your website design/traffic like Adsnese, this doesn’t mean that you can design a 2 min blog and submit for approval, no! you have to put the time and effort in it and best to get some traffic first before you submit.They are just not as strict as Adsense is all.

Is Adbrite Similar To Adsense?

Adbrite follows the same procedure as Adsense, it allows you to create banners with different sizes to best match the location you’re going to install it on your website/blog. However Adbrite is not as targeted as Adsense, meaning Adsense is better at showing relevant Ads to your website content that way your readers would be more interested into clicking on your Ads.

Adbrite’s Method of Payment?

Right now, AdBrite  pays by check only, they will mail you a check monthly once you reach your minimum amount, the currency is in US dollars.

As for the minimum payout they offer, you can set it yourself and you can go as low as $5 dollars, however setting it this low might not be a good idea since some foreign banks have a high deposit fee for depositing checks in US currency.

Adbrite, An Alternative To Adsense?

Adbrite is a great alternative to Adsense, I suggest you open an account even if you have Adsense and installing Adbrite on some of your smaller websites just to keep the account active, you never know when you might switch to them permanently.