This is a guest post written by Arun Garg, who loves to write about SEO, blogging and gadgets at Arunii. You can read more on him at about section.

Some SEO & blogging topics always catch your attention viz – link building, earning money online, inspirational blogger stories, etc. Dofollow links is also one of the hottest topic which always attracts my attention.

Many high page rank (PR) & authority sites have enabled dofollow links either in the comments section or in the top commentators widget placed in the sidebar; and some sites reward their valuable commentators at both places. These sites get returning visitors and traffic by implementing this idea.

Read another post on leaving a good & lasting impact through blog commenting.

Now the question comes is, do these commentators get some benefit in terms of page rank by leaving fresh, lengthy & meaningful comments ? Is it mere waste of time & effort ?

Note that there is no 'nofollow' tag in the rel field of the anchor

When Google’s last page rank update happened I noted that some sites take proper advantage of these do follow links on offer.

Brief Analysis – I observed that links from the top commentators plugin (widget) are more effective because these links will remain in the whole site whereas a link from the comment section will be restricted to that single post.

Lets check this approach’s advantages and disadvantages

Advantages of Dofollow Blog commenting

• Best for new blogs to get noticed and to gain quick authority in search engines‘ eyes, it will be an added advantage if your blog is related to technology or blogging niche-wise.
• It also helps in building relationship with other bloggers.
• Some bloggers announce the top commentator of the month award and provide a dofollow link or banner for the following month.

Disadvantages

• Top commentators Links in sidebar are temporary and will remain as long as you keep commenting & stay well ahead of others, hence requires a lot of your attention. Hiring a link builder just for this task can be a good option.
• Links in the comments section pass very little page rank and Google treats the bottom links differently as compared to top post links. Watch this video by Matt Cutts.
• I have seen many bloggers and webmaster who changed their do follow links to no follow; so your hard work goes in vain.

So what’s the conclusion ?

So it may be a nice idea to get some quick page rank specially for those who do not want to try guest posting or any other authority link building method. Go for it but side by side also build some permanent links.

What is your view on this matter?

Advantages & Disadvantages of Commenting on Dofollow Blogs is a post from: DailyBlogging

Productivity is the key in today’s day and age if you want to finish your task on/before time. A few days ago we listed out some productivity apps for web designers which will help enhance the work-rate.

Coming back to the topic, Google AdSense is something which every blogger or web publisher thrives upon to make a living. Some blog to get an approved AdSense account and others just publish quality content and earn handsomely via contextual ads.

Most bloggers check their AdSense account 2-3 times in a single day. For low bandwidth users this task would be very time consuming at times as the new AdSense interface is AJAX-ified.

AdSense Publisher toolbar

So rather than logging into your AdSense dashboard to check the money earned you have a new alternative in the form of an official Google Chrome extension.

Yes, you read it right. Google has developed a special chrome extension named AdSense Publisher toolbar for checking your AdSense earnings from the Chrome toolbar.

AdSense Publisher toolbar extension in action.

It’s just like any other extension which drops-down on a mouse click. On the first install you’ll be asked to grant access to your AdSense account and then the extension will start showing the data.

The UI of AdSense publisher toolbar is simple and shows almost everything you need including the earnings for today, yesterday, current month, last month, top performing channels & lifetime earnings.

AdSense Monitor – Firefox Alternative

We’ve talked a lot about the chrome extension and now it’s time to focus on the Firefox alternative i.e. AdSense Monitor. Remember this add-on is not developed by Google but is efficient enough to display what we require on our browser window.

Unlike the Publisher toolbar for Chrome, AdSense Monitor provides some good options to choose from viz – update time, scroll function, left-right click action, etc.

Also like a typical Firefox add-on this one also displays our AdSense earnings right at the bottom of the browser window, vert similar to the Alexa extension.

For IE users it’s a sad story (as always) as there is no specific extension for checking your AdSense earnings from within an IE window. So shift to Chrome or Firefox to take the productive advantage.

Did you find this AdSense extension useful by any means ?

How to Check AdSense Earnings from right inside your Browser is a post from: DailyBlogging

Recently Google took a blatant decision to promote Google+ where ever it could find white-space. Due to this, Google has been at the receiving end of a lot of flak from social media and marketing experts.

People are not annoyed with the intent to promote a company’s native social network on it’s own platform but the method employed by the company to do so.

Did you see the 'Google Wave' logo ? HAHA!

Excessive promotions help only if the product is worth it. Now it’s up to you to decide if Google+ is really worth all these eyeballs. Even though it’s a fact that G+ was the first social networking site to reach the highest number of user base within a few days.

But activity wise Google+ couldn’t compete with Facebook and Twitter. To sum it up; Google+ was innovative but not revolutionary. And today internet users demand change, not the same old concept presented in a different way.

Sign-up using the old Google Accounts form

This decision to promote G+ also brought in a revamp to the normally clean yet long Google sign-up form. Now if you try to sign up a new Google account you’ll be shown 3 steps.

It means that you no longer need to sign up differently for a GMail and a Google+ account. By sign up, I mean: having to fill extra fields when opening your G+ account.

Old Sign-up form

But for the time being you can escape those long steps by just navigating to the old form. A handful of Google products & services like calender, blogger, etc still present you with the old form.

The URLs of both forms can be deceptive as they start with the same sub-domain accounts. Both the URLs look like this,

New form link

https://accounts.google.com/SignUp

Old form link

https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount

Take full advantage of this old sign-up form as Google has already hinted that they’ll centralize registrations all across it’s products soon.

Don’t you think Google is over-promoting Google+ ?

Get back the Old Google Accounts Sign-up form and avoid Google+ is a post from: DailyBlogging

WordPress permalink structure is perhaps the most debated issue be it in WordPress specific forums or on other blogs. Earlier at DailyBlogging I had kept the permalink structure to /%year%/%month%/%date%/%postname%. But after a week or two I changed that to /%category%/%postname%/.

The reasons were pretty logical for this change. First: I seldom used to post daily because there was hardly any use of posting tons of post everyday when there is no one to read them. So having a date specific permalink was nothing short of a blogging suicide.

Second: I liked the inclusion of the category slug as it provides another keyword in addition to the post slug. I used to the Dean’s permalink migration plugin to setup a 301 redirect from the old permalink structure to the new one.

Now I’m on the verge of launching another blog, this time though specifically to cover Android related news and updates. So while setting up the blog I was again put into a fix by this permalink structure thing.

WordPress permalink structure(s)

The best WordPress permalink structure ?

To overcome this though scenario it was necessary to read what the experts are saying about an optimal WordPress permalink structure.

After going through some 4-5 posts from reputed SEO experts and bloggers I was left with 3 logical options.

1. Combination of post-id and post name.
2. Only post name.
3. Category name with the post slug.

I know you would argue on the exclusion of the popular permalink structure [/%year%/%month%/%date%/%postname%/]. The counter argument is really simple i.e. that particular permalink structure would just make you posts URLs that bit longer.

Also if you don’t post in bulk (daily) then this strurture if of hardly any use. Moreover it makes your old posts look literally OLD.

So which permalink structure would you choose ? SEO and performance wise all the three are equally optimal (as you’ll find them in the below sections). Lets go into the details and see if we could come up with a definite pick.

Performance issues with permalinks

There is a lot of talk about not using the /%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure just because it causes some performance issues. I must say that, all such talks are ridiculous. It would’ve made sense if you were using a WordPress version below 3.3.

The problem with the inclusion of category in post URLs was that our database used to query between the category slugs and the main pages (as both as text fields). For example if your post URL was yourblogname.com/privacy/some-post-name/ then the database would initiate a query to find out if the slug privacy is a category name or a page.

In WordPress 3.3 this issue no longer remains a definitive problem as they’ve added some special parameters to differentiate between page slugs and category names.

Otto, one of the core contributors in the WordPress development team confirms it on his blog when he says:

In August 2011, thanks to highly valuable input from Andy Skelton which gave me a critical insight needed to make it work, and with Jon Cave and Mark Jaquith doing testing (read: breaking my patches over and over again), I was able to create a patch which fixed the problem (note: my final patch was slightly over-complicated, Jon Cave later patched it again to simplify some of the handling). This patch is now in WordPress 3.3.

Even if you feel there is a mild performance issue with certain permalink structures then install the W3 Total cache plugin and enable the Page cache feature.

The SEO factor

Now you would ask, why is the /%post_id%/%postname%/ permalink structure still used (so widely) on news breaking blogs & sites ? The simple answer is that, earlier Google’s algorithm demanded blog post URLs to have 3 numerics in it so as to feature them in Google News.

But now Google has provided an alternative in the form of News sitemaps to feature blogs & sites in their news section. The reason why popular blogs are not wiling to change the permalink structure now is because, some of them fear a temporary drop in search engine traffic.

So there is no SEO related issue with any of these permalink structures. If I was you I wouldn’t have chosen the /%post_id%/%postname%/ structure. What is the use of lengthening our post URLs when we know that a post-id provides nothing exceptional ?

A counter view on using the combination of category name & post name could be that, your posts are actually put inside a virtual directory (i.e. under the specific parent category) and then served. But again that is a popular myth as most search engines give equal priority to all the URLs present in your blog.

Matt Cutts view on WordPress permalink structures

Recommended articles on this topic

• Joost’s opinion on WordPress permalinks – Very nicely compiled article. He talks about the SEO benefits of various permalink structures and recommends the plain post name structure.
• AppThemes’ view – Another post which addresses mainly the performance issue.

So if I were to suggest a permalink structure then it would surely be one among-st, a plain post name [/%postname%/] or category slug with the post name [/%category%/%postname%/]. Notice the trailing slash.

Which permalink structure do you prefer on your blog(s) ?

The Best WordPress permalink structure for Optimal SEO and Performance is a post from: DailyBlogging

According to predictions by analysts, the first 3 months of 2012 will see 30 million iPhones being shipped. This will directly lead to a dramatic increase in the number of applications being downloaded. Irrespective of the model, iPhone users will look for new applications to upgrade their phones.

iPhone "bevel n emboss'd" Applications

[Image Credit]

So here are the top 5 iPhone applications to be downloaded in 2012 (if case you haven’t..yet)

Google Currents

Google has a new application called Currents. This application features news articles and blogs. It can be customized to include your preferred publishing bodies. Once you sign into your Google account, the application will automatically download news articles from predetermined sources like Fast Company and Daily Beast.

Your favorite publications can then be added. Article categories like entertainment, business, lifestyle and design can be chosen. A list of top stories are also available that can be looked through easily.

Stamped

Stamped is an application that eliminates excessive clutter to a certain extent. This app works on the principle that people are more likely to trust recommendations made by their friends. Once you download this iPhone app, you get a hundred stamps that you can place on things you like including restaurants, shops, movies and books.

These are virtual stamps that are visible to your friends through sites like Facebook, and you can follow what they stamp as well. You can also buy tickets and make reservations via this application. Users can earn points when someone likes their stamp.

Breakout Boost

Breakout Boost is a game for all those Blackberry lovers who now own an iPhone. This game powered by Atari is similar to the brick game found on Blackberry’s. Breakout boost is better in terms of graphics and game features like the ability to increase your level speed and also gives power to your ball. The first five levels of the game are free.

There are an additional 200 levels which are available for a price of 99 cents. The only thing missing is arcade music.

Wenzani

Wenzani is a travel guide that helps you find places to visit, shop and eat on your mobile. These suggestions are made based on recommendation by friends and experts like Lonely Planet.

This app also enables users to get real time recommendations from friends, which are then posted directly to your phone. The developers of this application state that soon the recommendations will be tailored according to specifications like weather and climate.

For instance, a recommendation will not be made if it is raining in that particular area.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a magazine that can be personalized to suit your tastes and preferences, and is a great resource if you’re an SEO writer by profession. You can choose categories that you like such as fashion or business for instance and the magazine will provide you with related links.

Flipboard can be connected with your Facebook or Twitter account in order to share what you read instantly. The app considers your history and as time passes it makes recommendations to suit your interests. The layout is aesthetically pleasing making it one of the most frequently downloaded applications.

It was launched last year, initially on the iPad before becoming popular on the iPhone and now has more than 1 million users.

Any other popular iPhone app which you are aware of ?

5 iPhone Applications that will create Waves in 2012 is a post from: DailyBlogging

As a web designer one has to think out-of-box in each and every design. And thinking requires a lot of time. So why waste time when you’ve loads of time-saving productivity apps around you. Rather we can utilize that time in thinking only about the design.

That is exactly what we are going to achieve using these productivity apps. Wikipedia aptly puts the term productivity this way:

Productivity is a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it.

So today I’ll be listing out some of the productivity apps which I as a designer normally (not every app every time though) use while designing any site. As the title suggests it consists of both desktop apps and online tools (plus browser extensions).

Productivity...

[Image Credit]

#1 Instant Eyedropper

Every time a designer looks at a good gradient or color one feels the need to quickly grab the hex code of that particular area. Instant Eyedropper does exactly that. It’s basically a small desktop app which remains in the minimized-to-task bar state on start-up.

You just have to click the task bar icon and mouse over any part of the visible screen space to grab it’s color.

#2 Re-sizing browser windows (Resolution test)

Testing out your newly designed website or page on different resolutions is very important. It gives you a fair idea of how the site will look in low or high resolutions. Yes, you can manually re-size browser windows but you won’t be able to achieve the exact value of the width and height.

And when we have ready made extensions and addon-ons we must make the most of it. A simple chrome extension named Resolution Test is made available for this very purpose. It comes with 13 default resolution sets based on the Google browser size project.

An alternative for Firefox is the Yet Another Window Resizer add-on. It is a context based add-on rather than a pop-down or menu one.

So test your site’s design before making it live on the most popular lower resolution set (which ideally is 1024×768 px). Also, make sure that none of your site’s elements are set to auto-hide on . Let the scroll bar do it’s job.

#3 MeasureIt!

To start with I would like to say that this is the app I use the most, it’s one of those apps which I find the most productive. MeasureIt! does what it’s named after i.e. to measure visible areas and tell you the width & height values. This extension is specific to Chrome and works on a single click principle.

Just click the icon in the menu bar and you’ll notice that the visible area on your browser gets faded and becomes selective. So select the area you want to measure and get the values readily.

I particularly use MeasureIt! to check alignment of various elements. So the border of the selected area can act an effective horizontal/vertical ruler.

• Firefox Alternative - MeasureIt

#4 Ditto

Whether you are a designer or a developer, you involve in a tedious process of cut-copy-paste. By this I don’t mean that you copy the code of the design you just liked into your site’s source code.

This cut-copy-paste process takes place when we decide to experiment with different set of codes on a particular element of our design. Yes, single or multi-line comments can be used in CSS to preserve your codes. But that isn’t productive enough and involves addition of the comments syntax and removal of it once we’ve tested the codes.

Is there a better way to deal with this thing and save time ? Yes, there is a small tool named Ditto which solves our problem. It is basically a clipboard application which stores the recently cut or copied information.

So the next time you want to backup a piece of code just run Ditto on start-up and press Ctrl + c.

#5 Colorzilla CSS Gradient generator

A good design normally comprises of elegant gradients and textures. Okay, it’s understand-able that we need to use background images for textures but what about the former ? Are we still living in the 2000-age ?

With technology improving day-by-day it’s necessary that as designers we adopt new and efficient tactics to save HTTP queries and in turn reduce the loading time of the site’s we design.

Colorzilla CSS Gradient generator's Interface

The best away to achieve that is to reduce the usage of background images or use CSS sprites where ever necessary. Considering that you are not well versed with the sprites technique the next best option is to use CSS3 gradients.

With proper use of CSS3 gradients we will be able to achieve the same effect as that of a gradient (in the form of an image). But as you know CSS3 is supported by most modern browser except IE (err, is it modern yet ?). So to make our CSS gradients compatible across all browsers we need to apply some 5-6 lines of code.

Colorzilla’s CSS gradient generator will present you with the CSS code once you enter the hex codes of the start-end colors in their color palette.

#6 CSS3 Please!

CSS3 Please!, as the name suggests gives you a chunk of code which is compatible with most browsers around. Remember that each engine has a different way of executing CSS3 elements. So a webkit engine-based browser like Chrome or Safari will display a box-shadow only if you enter a specific piece of code like -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 0.5em #eee;.

So with CSS3 Please! all you need to do is to enter the values of the CSS3 elements and you’ll get the desired code which will work in most browsers. This site also has the background gradients property but without a color palette. It’s basically a cross-browser solution.

Hence we suggest you to use Colorzilla’s gradient generator separately.

#7 Image Optimizer

Re-sizing images can be difficult at times, specially if you are on a low end graphics machine but running on a resource consuming operating system like Mac OS or Windows 7. You cannot take the liberty to open your graphics editor every single time you need to re-size images.

It’s better off to use specific apps like Image Optimizer to get our job done. Image Optimizer is an online tool but it also offers a desktop app for offline usage.

Optimized image

Choose the right amount of optimization and size and hit the button. Within seconds you’ll get the optimized version of the image you uploaded. It’s another pretty productive tool for a web designer.

If you only want to re-size images without loosing their quality then you can go for this app – Image Resizer.

#8 IE Tester

Web Designers usually give their best finishing touches at the end of the core design, don’t they ? Similarly we’d reserved the most productive app for the very end. Here is the best IE Tester app you ever would find to test your designs on different Internet explorer versions.

As designers we often neglect IE (IMO we should), but what if your client wants an IE 8+ compatible site ? You’ve simply got no choice. With IE Tester you won’t be facing this dilemma of ‘how my design would look on IE 6, 7..9‘.

It is a nicely tabbed desktop app which comes with a debugger tool to help you inspect the browser specific codes.

These 8 apps/tools are seriously must-haves, so if you are a designer don’t neglect them at all.

Any online tool or desktop app you find more productive than these; for designing purposes ?

8 Must-have Productivity Tools & Apps for Web Designers is a post from: DailyBlogging

This is a guest post by Kuldeep who blogs at CoolTricks & TechBlogging.

Blogging is the best source to share our knowledge worldwide. For Bloggers, it’s like updating their blogs with new & quality content. But here arises the important question: What’s Better? Quantity or Quality ?? It’s just like an inconclusive debate.

One of the major factor involved in this process is the level of posting. But blogging is all about updating your readers, isn’t it ? Still we wonder which aspect of posting comes first: Quantity or Quality.

It depends upon the circumstances and each blogger has his own opinion on this. So suitability is a bigger factor here.

Well, to build a successful blog being regular is the most important thing. But what suits your blog? It depends upon the niche you have chosen or regardless of that? Well, lets find out the answers to these critical questions in the paragraphs below.

Quality vs Quantity...the debate goes on..

Quality

Your blogging career won’t be successful until & unless you are trying to do better content farming. Remember, when we purchase vegetables we take the good ones and throw out the rotten ones. So the same applies with your blog. Readers will like to get some fresh and quality content and neglect the useless articles.

The thing is quality content takes a lot of time and hard work. It’s not an easy job. You need to give it every bit of focus & effort. For some multi-author blogs, it might be an easy task because they have the arsenal (in the form of writers) and a broader niche that can cover various topics.

So you need to do a lot of research in order to present something productive to your readers.

For instance, Some successful blogs that receive good amount of organic traffic may not post in bulk. Some may even adopt the post once a week strategy. But the key to the success of such blogs is the amount of traffic they get on non-posting days.

Their reader-base is ready to wait for awesome content even once in a week. That’s the effectiveness of Quality. But posting less can even have severe drawbacks. You may even loose readers.

Quantity

It’s obvious that if you want to make big money, then you need to have a big blog. A huge number of posts will grow your blog and help you to earn more. But if your posts lack in quality, then you cannot make even a few bucks.

Posting frequency may be less or more even depends upon the niche or circumstances. Like a niche in which you need not post everyday or even once a week. And circumstances means like you started a new blog, there’s no one to view/read it. So posting less may work there.

How to Choose the Right Posting Frequency ?

We’ve heard this old cliche “Content is the King”; but that’s not all. Producing quality content with proper measure of quantity is the key to success in blogging.

Creating a lot of pages (in the form of posts) on your blog will surely give more search referrals, but that does not mean that you should keep on publishing useless content every now and then. Make sure that you are able to bring out something really good every time you hit in the publish button.

So at the end of the day quality is just one side of the coin, you also need to consider the other side that comprises of quantity.

What’s your view on this ?

Blog posting style : Quality vs Quantity is a post from: DailyBlogging

This is a guest post by Mark who is very much involved in this concept of A/B testing and also offers various methods to perform this test effectively.

Designers know the feeling of having art directors, copywriters, and their bosses scrutinize every last detail of their work. And while constructive criticism is part of the design process, there’s more efficient ways your business can make a difference in your marketing efforts that relying on pure opinion.

This is why many are jumping on the A/B testing bandwagon.

A/B testing pits one design against another in determining the best strategies in terms of marketing. You test everything from search ads to sales emails and text copy in this formulaic method that almost guarantees an increase in subscriptions, sign-ups, and sales.

While this success won’t happen overnight, in this article I covered a few aspects of successful A/B testing to conduct over a period of time to ensure successful marketing.

This is how A/B design testings are done. Stick to the basics

[Image Credit]

Small changes make a Big difference

This can apply to all aspects of your blog or offline marketing effort such as emails, but this is not more true for call to actions. Your goal with the call to action is to make it sound friendly and exciting enough to elicit an immediate response from the user.

Visitors are more discerning than they were in the past, and they don’t want to commit to something they don’t feel safe and secure about.

Constantly test your call to actions to see what words get people to try it the most often. You may find “Sign up Now” or “30 Days Free” either sound like a big commitment or has the user focusing on the bill at the end. Alternative options may be:

• Immediate Download
• Watch Our Tutorial
• Donate Today
• Find Out More
• Get a Free Quote Today
• See It In Action
• Limited Availability

Whatever the case, be sure to include action phrases to inspire the need to act in the user’s mind.

Test often

The only way to see significant results in you’re a/b testing efforts is to test frequently. You’ll either have no result, a negative result, or a positive result as the outcome of your tests. They key to reaching the results you’re looking for is to test regularly in achieving increased sales and/or conversions.

If you’ve just launched your site, it’s a good idea to get started testing as early as possible as the results you receive form these tests can prevent you from losing sales in going forward.

When Am I Finished?

It’s not the easiest to determine when to stop a split test – you don’t want to terminate the test too early and lose meaningful results you would have received by waiting longer.

Testing too long could also mean the loss of sales had you switched to the new design element earlier. To determine how long to test, use a calculator like this one.

This number will vary greatly from site to site. If you run a high-customer volume store you should test until you receive around 70 conversions for one variant. Conversely, if you have a low-volume store with high-value items, it’s best to aim for 20 conversions.

Of course, If your blog receives an upwards of 1 million visitors per month, you can switch to multivariate testing.

Conclusion

You should never underestimate the skills of the designer and the strong, unified design vision they come up with. A/B testing can be used as a single data point to affirm that want you are using is making the most out of your marketing efforts.

If the design is making the client money, you know your mission has been accomplished. An A/B Testing software can make these tasks a lot easier as well. This article was meant to detail the areas you should address in making this achievable.

If you use A/B testing, how long do you conduct tests for and how often do you run them? Let us know in the comments!

Try A/B Testing on your Blog’s Design is a post from: DailyBlogging