Web Moves Blog

Just look at what’s been recently published on the Official Google Blog:

Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.

So, the Google staff claims to be excited about this news. Now should we be excited about it as well? I’m going to share with you some random thoughts (and predictions) on this subject: (more…)

Direct ad sales are among the best monetization methods that a blogger or webmaster can use. However, I’ve seen a certain mistake being made by numerous site owners. They don’t seem to realise how harmful this can be to their monetization strategy. But I won’t let you become one of them. I’m going to draw your attention to this problem and teach you some simple solutions to this.

What’s the main mistake made by webmasters and bloggers who sell ads on their pages?

No one will be getting too many interested advertisers while their site or blog isn’t popular. It’s only natural. Most advertisers are interested in either branding or direct traffic. The exception to this rule are link builders seeking for favourable Google rankings, but they’re out of this article’s scope. So let’s go on analysing only the typical ad buyer. (more…)

Everyone at some point or the other has been fascinated by how Google views their sites and decides the rankings. While one can only assume based on a few factors, Google Webmaster tools are the only solution with any to that effect. The tools help in diagnosing the errors if any on your site, in increasing its visibility in terms of rankings and also let the owner make preferences with regard to how his/her website is listed. It is a treasure house of tools indeed.

The first and foremost thing one requires to use Google webmaster tools is an active Google account. Once that’s done, the rest is almost done as well. (more…)

As briefly mentioned in my Statbrain review, many webmasters include competition monitoring in their overall strategy. I believe you’ll have a lot to gain if you do it too. Now, how can you identify sites and blogs that are truly worthy of your precious time?

Choosing the type of competitor you want to spy on

First of all, let me make one thing very clear: I’m not proposing that you engage in illegal activities. “Spy on” is just a fancy term in our case. I’m sure you get the idea.

That being said, let’s see the three types of competitor that you could/should be interested in: (more…)

If we go back and remember the early days of blogging, web logs were primarily considered as online journals which we could share with our friends. It has come a long way today, but it has essentially retained the classic layout that still fits the original purpose – sequential posts with the most recent on top in a wide column, and a narrower column or two for navigation. Of course, this simple layout will not work with all types of content, and if your needs are more specialized than what the typical blogging platform can offer, you may want to consider using Expression Engine. (more…)

I have previously written about the backlinks that really matter for Google: the ones which come from authority sites. However, many, many webmasters and bloggers claim that one should get all the backlinks they can, no matter where they come from. In their opinion, Google won’t ignore discounted links even when they aren’t as valuable as the authority ones.

What are discounted links anyway?

There are three basic ways to look at it:

1. A discounted link would be one that comes from dubious sources, i. e., obscure pages that don’t have a strong reputation among Internet users. (more…)

Optimizing their site is quite a challenge for most small business owners. More often than not, they find it quite an overwhelming task. If you are one of the many such website owners, here is a brief sum up of what you can do to improvise upon your site.

Most search engines nowadays tend to browse through the actual content of the page being searched for, instead of sticking to the tags. Offer quality content on your website, for that is what attracts traffic. More traffic translates to a more popular website. The mantra is that you can never have too much of relevant content. Keep updating the content. Old content did no one any good. The search engines actually look into how old your content is. Fresh rank ensures a higher priority and therefore, higher ranking. (more…)

As professional bloggers, there’s constant pressure to keep ourselves updated on the latest trends. Subscribing to the RSS feeds of the most important websites makes this so much more convenient and faster to do. Looking back, I don’t know how I ever did without it. Reading feeds every morning is a great way to start your day, because it gives you a lot of article ideas and interesting conversation pieces. Not yet into the habit? Here’s a few of RSS aggregators you can choose from. (more…)

Sometimes, what’s important is not what you do, but how you do it, and SquareSpace V5 is the perfect example of this philosophy. It’s by far the most polished-looking blogging platform I’ve seen, with a dashboard designed to let you blog in style. Kevin Rose of Digg described it as “like Typepad and WordPress on crack,” and after seeing what SquareSpace can do, I’d have to agree. (more…)

Many webmasters spend part of their time monitoring their competitors’ performance. One of the things that they usually do is to try to learn more about competitors’ traffic. But when stats aren’t publicly available on a given site, how can one find out how many visits it gets?

On the Internet you’ll find several tools that can help you estimate a site’s traffic. Today I’m going to review one of them: Statbrain. (more…)