Alexa ranking is a very important factor when you try to monetize your blog. If your blog is having good ranking, it will fetch more value as compared to other blogs in same niche with lower rank.

Webmaster tries to find out ways to improve Alexa ranking of their blog/website. I will here discuss few methods/tricks which can improve ranking of a blog in Alexa.

(Disclaimer: – Speaking honestly, these are not declared by Alexa. All these tricks are based on experience of bloggers and few common logic).

Increase Blog Traffic

First and the most important thing is traffic to your blog. As per Alexa declaration, they measure raking of a blog by number of visits. Hence simple logic is having a good traffic to your blog will bring good ranking to your blog.

Number of backlinks

If you look at siteinfo of any blog (TechSpacia), you can see that number of inbound links to that particular blog/website as Reputation. It again gives very clear indication that reputation is an important factor in determining Alexa rank of your blog. Hence work on link building. It will help you to improve Alexa ranking.

Review at Alexa

3^rd important factor is review of your website. Alexa is having an explicit mechanism where visitors can directly rate your website. Users can rate your websites in scale of 1 to 5. Of course a good rating from end user (visitors) tell that your website is good and worthy, which in turns improves your ranking.

Install Alexa Toolbar

Unlike Google Analytics, Alexa doesn’t ask you to embed traffic tracking code in your website. Alexa in fact uses its toolbar to measure/count visits. Installing alexa tool bar on your computer locally (and visiting your websites many times in a day ) will definitely improve your ranking. If you are able to influence your visitors to install Alexa toolbar, that will be an additional advantage for you.

Claim of your website in Alexa

Though I am not sure if claiming your websites can improve Alexa ranking of your blog, many webmasters suggest that it helps. My logic is we should not leave an stone unturned. There is no harm in claiming your websites on Alexa. In fact it helps Alexa visitors to know who the blog/websites belongs to.

Relevant Reading:- How to claim your websites in Alexa.

I hope you must have enjoyed reading this article. Do let me know your experience with Alexa ranking. First of all, do you believe on it? Has it helped to monetize your blog better?

Very recently Google has released 2^nd update of Pagerank in 2012. Google pagerank shows how popular your website is. I have seen 100s of post where blog master happily announce about their blog PR status after every pagerank update. And on the same post, discussion about how important pagerank is now. First of all, let’s try to understand what is a pagerank. And then discussion about its importance.

What is Google Pagerank?

In layman’s term, whenever you mention a url in you blog (which can be clicked. Also known as hyperlink), it is considered as a link. Suppose you run a website ABC and within a post or page you have mentioned another website XYZ (using a clickable link), then it is said that XYZ is having an inbound link from ABC. Now quality and quantity of this link is the criteria to determine pagerank.

Google pagerank scales a website from 0 to 10. Zero pagerank is the lowest whereas 10 is the highest.

Does Google Pagerank matter?

Entire Google Search algorithm is based on how popular your website by measuring quality/quantity of inbound links. It is a relative numerical weightage value of a website compared to rest of the websites on www.

A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. (Quote – Wikipedia).

I am having very straight forward logic. If Google is releasing their pagerank update so regularly (almost for last 10 years), it is definitely important. If it would have lost importance nowadays, Google surely must not have updated it on regular basis.

On the other hand, I have looked at some top notch blogger in our niche (technology). They feel proud to declare that their blog is having PR 4/5 or 6. Their blog is more popular than yours and of course they do it on full time basis to earn a living. Doesn’t it give you a clue how important is Google PR.

When I talk about monetizing your blog, Google Pagerank is again very important. Have a look at any of advertisement page (of a blog) at BuySellAds (leading portal for advertisement). You can clearly see importance of Google PR. Most of the time if you don’t have good PR, you are not going to be approved at buysellads. Do you see importance of Pagerank?

Let me tell you honestly. Most of the webmasters try secretly to improve pagerank of their blog. If you are not doing it, you will lose the game.

Quick guide: – How to improve Google Pagerank?

As I have discussed briefly, Google Pagerank depends on quality and quantity of backlinks (inbound links). If you have started recently, it will take time to become popular and get backlinks by the most natural way. Till then, you can use following to create inbound links for your websites:-

• Commenting on blogs which are having high pagerank and use commentluv/keywordluv for additional benefit.
• Guest post on same niche blogs.
• Create lenses/hubs on squidoo or hubpages or on similar websites.
• Forum posting. Asking questions and answering to someone else query.

Always remember, your link building campaign should be natural and not at all spamy. Even though Google takes time to penalize you for spam, I am sure that your fellow blogger will not think even twice to reject your comment and it will ultimately reduce your credibility in the circle.

The ultimate truth is that Google pagerank is definitely important, but not everything in this world. Besides working on pagerank, you should also consider several other things to improve standard of your blog and bring traffic.

Thanks again for participating in this giveaway at TechSpacia. I am happy to announce the winner of this contest. Winner of this contest is Prashant Jethwa.

Congratulations Prashant Jethwa!

I have captured my desktop screen while I was selecting the winner and have kept video at youtube/screenr. In case you are interested, please have a look at it.

(Hey. Sorry for audio quality. I forgot to mute while screen recording. In the background, you can hear my wife and my 7 months old son )

Thank you all again and again for spending some time at TechSpacia. I am working hard to make it a better blog and raise the overall standard. I will keep organizing such giveaway at regular intervals.

Prashant! I will contact you via email and ‘Transcend Pen Drive 16 GB USB 3.0’ shipped to you in a day or two.

Ritesh

When gmail was launched in year 2004, it was offering 1GB quota in inbox. And even 1GB was considered a big one during those days. As always, Google will not make a full stop at 10GB, but it will keep growing (and counting). As per official blog of gmail, this bump to 10GB from 7.5GB is to celebrate launch of Google Drive.

Other options to go for a paid subscription for higher storage, is still in place. Consumers are having an option to buy more storage from Google with plans starting from 25GB for $2.49 per month.

Based on my personal experience I can say that 10GB space is going to be proved more than sufficient for your personal need. Nowadays it has really become tough to consume all the space of gmail unless you stuff your inbox with photo and songs. From the day I started using gmail, I never ran out of space in my mailbox.
I am very sure that Hotmail/Yahoo/Rediffmail will have to come up with new attractions soon; else they are going to lose their customers to Gmail.

Hope you like this article and information. What is your opinion about gmail space increase? Do you believe that 10GB gmail space is okay for you or do you need more?

After months of waiting, Google finally announced Google Drive yesterday. Google has definitely made a very bold move to enter into cloud storage market. Legacy application of online document-sharing service Google Docs, has now been expanded to Google drive.

Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Like every other cloud storage, Google Drive also gives you online storage where you can store your files (photo, document, pdf, etc). Once your file get a space in could, it can be then shared with other parties, your friends and family also.

For last couple of months, Google Drive is one of the hottest topic of discussion on various technology blogs. People were expecting it to become live soon. As announced on Google official blog on Tuesday 24th Apr yesterday, Google Drive is introduced with Google Docs and you get a free space of 5GB to store your files.

Other than static storage of files into Google Drive, you can also work in real time with documents, spreadsheets and presentations using Google Docs. Google Drive client can be installed on your computer and android phone/tablet for easy share. Again, like any other file storage or drive, Google drive also gives you facility to search files in cloud using keyword, owner, file type and many more. The best thing about Google Drive that it can even recognize text in your scanned document and can perform a search on the same!

Storage in Google Drive 

As announced yesterday, Google Drive gives you 5GB storage absolutely free. I am sure that 5GB space will be sufficient for your personal need in most of the cases. In case you need more space, you need to go for a paid account. 25GB space can be purchased at the rate of $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. The beauty of this paid subscription is that when you go for a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

It will be now very interesting to see how and where this cloud war will go. Having a very strong presence in cloud, I am sure that Dropbox and box.net will definitely improve their services further and will provide even better experience to the user. On the other hand, Microsoft is already in the battle field with Sky drive. So be ready to see lots of new thing in cloud. Competition has become just tough now for everyone.

Let me know your thoughts about Google Drive. Do you think 5GB is sufficient for you or do you want Google to increase free space? Do you plan to shift from Dropbox or box.net to Google Drive? We are eagerly waiting to hear you.

As people/companies do believe on Alexa, it is always good to improve Alexa ranking of your blog. There are few steps which improve Alexa ranking. One of them is to claim your blog in Alexa.

Today only, I have claimed TechSpacia in Alexa and I am going to describe the process about how to claim your blog in Alexa.

How to Claim your blog in Alexa?

First of all, sign up with Alexa at http://www.alexa.com/register. You can also use your Facebook credentials to log into Alexa.

Once you create account, verify your email address.

Now go to http://www.alexa.com/siteowners/claim to claim your website in Alexa.

After your enter your website url and say “Claim your site”, you will be redirected to plan page. Just to Claim your blog in Alexa, ‘Free’ plan will work. Proceed with ‘Free’ sign up.

Now you will be presented with two options to claim your website in Alexa:- (1) Download a given file at Alexa and upload it to root directory (public_html) of your blog or, (2) Create a meta tag in your blog/website with Alexa validation information.

Once you verify your blog by either of these two methods, Alexa will show the message that site/blog has been claimed successfully.

Now in next screen, you will be having an option to enter additional details about website/blog, like:- Site title, Site description, contact information, etc. Logo is reserved for paid subscription.

Bingo! Your website/blog has been now submitted to Alexa. And hopefully it will improve Alexa ranking too.

Hope you must have enjoyed reading this article. We are waiting to hear from you if you have already claimed your blog in Alexa or if you have plan to do it.

It is very likely that you are familiar with the causes, but I’ll mention a few:

- the presence of viruses or other malicious software (spyware, bloatware, crapware);
- registers loaded with useless information;
- numerous applications in start-up;
- temporary files scattered on your hard disk and files browser cache.

And we all know that these problems won’t solve by themselves, because Windows does not integrate another "authority" to cleanse the system automatically and especially effective. And tools provided (e.g. Disk Cleaner) are also not too obsolete.

There are some applications that are very good at cleaning a hard disk, freeing up unnecessary occupied space and deleting unnecessary registry data. Some also resolve a number of malwares and Trojans. Here are three of the best:-

Piriform CCleaner

CCleaner has become a very popular application for its simplicity and effectiveness. Furthermore, is free.

The “loose” interface provides us with some effective weapons that can operate with a single click: cleaning temporary files, cache, cookies and other specific browser elements, cleaning registry, startup configuration and uninstalling applications.

For a thorough control of information which must be deleted, you can check or uncheck the boxes associated to integral part of various sections (browser, explorer, system registry). If you do not want to risk deleting certain data, you can opt for a back-up before the application to execute tasks.

IObit Advanced SystemCare

On the operability part, IObit also solved certain issues related to malware, while having a seemingly simplistic interface it hides a lot of options dedicated to users who are more experienced with Windows. And yet, we recommend using with trust the setting "default" and the scan button, simply because the application does its job very well without user intervention regarding the advanced options.

IObit Advanced SystemCare is a free system optimizer. It doesn’t contain advertisements, links and recommendations to the various boxes of software.

TuneUp Utilities

TuneUp Utilities is the largest and at the same time the most well-known optimizing application. Includes the top FTA "one click maintenance" (solves problems with a single click) and advanced customization options.

The application allows debris removal and temporary files left behind by uninstalled applications, and disables Windows components that are not absolutely necessary, thus improving performance by reducing memory consumption.

In addition to IObit and CCleaner, TuneUp comes with a range of options aimed at the Windows interface, including the login screen.

The biggest disadvantage, so to speak, is the price we must pay – about $ 50. If you would like to see what it is capable of, you may try a 15 days free trial.

Finally, I will point out that I limited myself to these three applications simply because they are tested and recognized as safe. Obviously, there are more such applications out there, and only if you know others do not hesitate to tell us. But keep in mind that Internet hosts hundreds of software "traps" as a recommended system utility.

I am happy to tell you that TechSpacia is a dofollow blog now. Thanks to Atish of TechTricksWorld for this wonderful suggestion.

In addition to make TechSpasia a dofollow, KeywordLuv Plugin has also been installed. CommenLuv and Top Commentator (in Footer) Plugins are already present.

On the top of all these benefit, I am going to introduce the Top Commentators Award again here at TechSpacia (with small modification). Every month-end, I will try (in fact, I will do my best) to capture Top 10 commentators using ‘Top Commentator plugin’ and will give them a link in right-sidebar.

As you have observed, I am not very regular in maintaining this blog, I don’t want to commit about Top Commentators award that I would be able to announce and maintain it, however I will do my best to keep it alive. Important to note that I am discontinuing 468×60 header banner award.

So when you comment at TechSpacia, here is what you get:-

• A dofollow link from comments
• CommentLuv advantage
• KeywordLuv advantage
• As long as you are in top 10, a link from Top Commentators plugin.
• If you are in top 10 for a given month, a link at right sidebar for entire month (next).

So what are you waiting for. Come and join me at TechSpacia and keep the discussion going.

Soluto is a software which removes unnecessary application from your PC boot up and hence reduce time which your PC takes to start.

My Computer takes hours to start. Whats the Solution?

Your computer loads several programs/software during boot up. Some of them are necessary whereas others are not necessary to load during boot up. The software which are not necessary, can be either paused (stopped completed and don’t start them) or can be delayed (means let the computer boot up first and then start them one by one).

Say as for example, I am using built-in Windows7 software ‘Sticky Notes’.  I use this software to place some notes. Now I don’t really need this software immediately after computer starts. Hence I have delayed it. Once my computer starts, ‘Sticky Notes’ gets launched after a minute or two.

So the idea is simple. If we reduce the number of software/programs which are triggered during computer start up, definitely your computer will take considerably less time to boot up.

Now the question is how can we know which programs are necessary and which can be delayed/paused. And how easily we can stop or delay them. Thats the point, where Soluto comes to our rescue.

When you install Soluto at your computer and run it (after a reboot), it presents all the programs/software which were loaded during start up in three categories:-

1. No-brainer (remove from boot)
2. Potentially removable (advanced users)
3. Cannot be removed with Soluto (yet…)

Now it will also give you number of applications for each category and time taken by them all together during start up. “No-brainer” programs can simply be paused or delayed without giving further thought. Most of the programs in ‘Potentially removable’ category can also be paused/delayed. However before taking action on ‘Potentially removable’ programs, it is advised that you should understand what is program is being used for. Last category is ‘Cannot be removed with Soluto’. You will not be able to take action on these programs using Soluto. Better to not to touch them even out of Soluto.

Once you chop up the list of software which are in boot, definitely your computer is going to take less time to start up.

Other Features of Soluto

(1) Other than reduce boot up time, Soluto Client also presents you list of extensions/plugins which can be potentially removed from browser.

(2) When you login to Soluto at their web interface, Soluto suggests you ‘Useful apps to install’ in Apps category.

(3) It gives you information about your default browser, add-ons, dsl, firewall, antivirus status, etc.

(4) Soluto also presents status/health of your PC hardware. It provides information about CPU, RAM, Motherboard, Graphics, Hard drive. Most important, it lets you know “Battery Health”.

Once Soluto Client has required information about your computer boot up, action can also be taken at web interface also. You simply pause/delay the programs by logging into Solutio web and it will be reflected to your local machine.

Now help your friends and family!

You must be having several friends or family member who are not as proficient as you are when it comes to computer. Its your turn now to help them to reduce their PC start up time. And that too by sitting in front of your computer. No matter how far they are or if you don’t have physical access to their machine, with the help of Soluto magic feature you will be able to help them provided their computer is having internet connectivity. Even though their computer is off, you can take action at your end and once they switch on their computer, your action will be synced with their local machine.

Soluto gives you 5 Slots absolutely free. It means for one Soluto account, you can install Soluto Client at 5 computers and can improve boot time of 5 computers.

Simply click on “Add Someone” and enter their mail id. Your friend will receive an email invitation to install Soluto. Once they install Soluto and restart their machine, all the required information will flow from their computer to your Soluto account. And finally, you can take action to pause/delay program from their computer.

Simple enough! Isn’t it? And once you are done with a computer, you can remove them from your account in Solutio to free up the space and utilize Soluto to help others.

Interesting software. I am fully dependent on Soluto to reduce and monitor my laptop start up time. How do you do it with your computer. Share your thoughts.

In today’s world, a computer file is not just a piece of computer programming, but it stores memories and emotions.

Have you ever thought to protect them? What if your laptop hard-disk suddenly crashes? A study shows that more than 50% of hard-disk crashes within 5 years! And ultimate truth is that your laptop (or hard-disk) is not immortal. What if your laptop is stolen? There will be a fine (not so fine though) day, when your hard-disk is going to be crashed for sure. So what’s the solution? How to protect data in your laptop?

Here comes the concept of backup. You can either take a backup on a physical device by your own or you can chose to subscribe for online service like I-Drive. Taking backup on a physical device is not very simple and you need to do it manually (unless you have a dedicated machine for it). Whereas Online backup services can be easily configured on schedule.

I have seen that a couple of online backup services give you free storage. But that it limited to just a couple of GBs. Here I am going to talk about I-Drive which can give you 65 GB of Free Online space.

When it comes to online backup, I-drive is my favourite. Definitely it provides very good user experience through its client software, I am more impressed with space which is available to you under free plan.

Even IDrive gives you just 5GB of free space. But you can easily make it 65GB!

And Yes, absolutely free! Let me guide you how can you claim this 65 GB of space.

Step1:- Sign up for I-drive here and opt for “Try IDrive – 5 GB Free”.

(Please click on below link to join IDrive. It is referral link for my account.)

Sign up for IDrive. Click Here.

Step2:- Once you are signed up for IDrive, search for “Refer and get more space” link at top right area. Click on it.

Step3:- Once you click on above link, it will redirect you to referral page. Invite your friend by email (Gmail/AOL/Hotmail/Yahoo etc) and your free quota will be increased from 5GB to 15GB.

Once you invite your contacts using email address book, you will be having 15GB space (yes… absolutely free) in your pocket.

Now IDrive referral page will also present referral link for your account. Share it to Facebook/Twitter/Blog or whatever means you can use. For every sign up through your referral link, you will be given 1GB space. And this referral is limited up to 50 signups. Hence you can also claim additional space of 50 GB through your referrals.

Once you are able to invite 50 people to IDrive, your storage limit becomes 15GB + 50GB = 65GB!

And I am sure that if you are not storing movies, 65GB of space will be sufficient. And the most important, you are not spending even a single penny to use this 65GB.

Hope you must have enjoyed reading this informative article. Join IDrive through my referral link so that I can enjoy those 50GB of additional space and make my bucket of 65GB for free.

Let me know your strategy for backup. Do you use physical device or Idrive or any other online services?