To aid you in your pursuit of the perfect page, here are some top web development mistakes to avoid:

1. Forgetting to take care of the basics: As your company develops and your products and services gain more widespread popularity you may find that the amount of visitors to your website increases dramatically. Before you begin any web development ventures, it is therefore important to make sure that all elements of your website can be adjusted (graphic files that allow for compression in size and dynamic elements that can be replaced for example) to prevent your website crashing with increased traffic or producing slower load times with the addition of new content and applications.

2. Impenetrable information: As your site grows in the course of web development and begins to cover an increasing amount of topics and contain greater quantities of applications, it may become extremely difficult for visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. Including clear navigation and indexing systems as well as a search tool on your website will allow for easier navigation of pages in the first instance and help to filter information to customers in a way that is relevant and under their control.

3. Lapses in security: When your website begins to contain an increased amount of information and boasts a greater amount of daily traffic, security risks can also increase. To prevent hacking and unauthorised access to your customer databases and confidential company information, any web development plan must include the establishment and maintenance of secure operating systems and coding.

4. Immobility: As we progressively use our mobile phones and other portable wireless devices to access websites, it is absolutely imperative that any web developments you implement are compatible with all manner of mobile platforms. Nothing will frustrate your site visitors more than when they try to access information on the go and are constantly stalled by unsuitable display options.

5. Incompatibility: Another possible problem that must be taken into account with any new web development is a resulting incompatibility with some of the most popular web browsers. New web browsers are constantly introduced and the applications on your website must stay accordingly up-to-date. To make sure that your clients don’t become discouraged, make sure you rigorously test the functionality of your website for cross browser compatibility.

About the Author

John has been working as a freelance writer for Infinite IT Solutions, a Melbourne-based premium web development and online marketing company dedicated to providing personalised web services to ensure that your business stands out from the rest.

This is a guest post written by Paul Wallis of Webprofits.com.au, an online marketing agency based in Australia. Full Author Bio can be found at the end of the article.

There are two basic types of blogging- Productive and unproductive. A productive blog is properly targeted to its market. An unproductive blog misses its targets regularly. If you’re a typical commercial blogger, there’s no midpoint. You need to connect with your market effectively and constantly. That means you need to provide information which is useful to your audience and in touch with the most interesting and important issues on the market.

Blogging and Marketing Basics

There’s a basic concept in marketing which defines exactly what all blogs need, and it’s called “Positioning”. For blogs, this includes:

• Information type, value and quality
• SEO placement
• Currency of information
• “Brand identity”, the process of establishing a presence in your market

The positioning is the public face of your blog, and it’s also your primary point of sale for your commercial interests. It’s also the means of accessing your blog and an interest generator.

For example:

If your blog is about web design:

• Information type: Value and quality is critical to an audience which will be largely comprised of experts. Your position in this case has to be a source of good information, created to meet the standards and expectations of your demographic.
• SEO placement: Page rankings in a specialized field have to be earned, using good quality, relevant keywords, and good quality links.
• Currency of information: In a specialist field, your information must be current, not material the audience has already seen. Stale blogs tend to be ignored.
• Branding: “Brand identity” is the development of your positioning, establishing your own identity and enhancing the image of your blog.

The Big Don’ts of Marketing and Blogging

It must be noted at this point that blog positioning can go backwards, as well as forwards. There are some very serious “Don’ts” in blog marketing related to positioning:

• Don’t get repetitive. This is fatal, and simply turns off the audience.
• Don’t get stuck on a single line of information in your blog. Cover as many related fields as possible.
• Don’t use lower quality materials in your blog. Keep up your standards, and you’ll keep your audience. If you’re outsourcing materials, get them from the best suppliers and freelancers.
• Don’t assume your readers will read anything. They won’t. They’ve got the whole world to choose from. Your market position needs to be maintained, or it will inevitably deteriorate.

The Do’s of Marketing and Blogging

To develop and reinforce your blog:

• Maintain interest: Use new materials, new forms of presentation and new ideas.
• Ask for feedback: You need feedback to know what’s working and what’s not. Make sure you have a healthy interaction with your audience at all times.
• Be creative and innovative: If you’ve got a new idea you’d like to try, do it. This stops you going stale, too, and it will generate a lot of interest.

The best blogs are fun, interesting and well positioned in their fields. Get your positioning right, and your blog will always be popular.

About the Author
Paul Wallis is an award winning professional freelance writer, and does a lot of writing in the SEO field. He works in the US, Canada, Australia and Belgium. He’s published 12 books on lulu.com and some of some of his other work can be found at Digital Journal.

And trust me, it not easy to find the right web host for you. I remember back in 2008, I was pretty active in the social media sites like – Digg, Reddit & Stumble Upon. I have got my website in the front page and got massive traffic from all these site over and over again. But the first time it happened, I was not ‘ready’ to handle all the traffic and my site went down within the first 10 mins. The host I was working with back then didn’t even want to admit that they just can’t handle this much traffic for the price I was paying.

But anyway, later I sort of got around that and tweaked my blog to make sure that such downtime won’t come again. But few days later it happened again…and then again! I was really frustrated as I was putting in a lot of effort at that time to get all these traffic, but every day I have a downtime of over 30-45 mins!

Thats when I switched to a new host – Hostgator (well they aren’t exactly new to me, I have done business with them since 2004), however I never really stuck with them because at that time their servers were a bit expensive for me. The projects I was running at that time required me to have a dedicated server and so I was always looking around for a more affordable solution. One lesson that i learnt is, if you trust a particular web host you should stick with them regardless of what their ratings/reviews say or how much they charge. Now I have a Reseller account with HG and I am running all my sites there without any problem.

Anyway, I am a bit off topic here, the main question on the table today is how do you know when your website goes down? You can’t obviously monitor in 24/7, right? So how do you know that your website is still up and running when you are asleep at 3 in the morning?

Monitor your Website for Free with Pingdom

After all my troubled experience with many web hosting companies, I heard about Pingdom from Yoast. They had a free 14 day trial, so I signed up and from that day onwards I never had to worry about my website’s downtime! Pingdom automatically checks my website every 1 min to see if my website is up and running. If it fails to access my site for any reason (e.g. site is down), Pingdom automatically sends an email and also an SMS to my mobile phone! Their online dashboard is rich with statistics and graphs which tells you exactly how long your site was down with detailed time stamps. So if your web host claims that they give you 99.9% uptime, you should use Pingdom to find out whether their claim is actually true or not.

Pingdom was not free and it was a paid service. However if your website is important to you, I don’t think you would mind paying that small fee. But many bloggers and small scale website would have found the price point a bit expensive. But guess what the good news is?!

Pingdom is Available for Free

Yes! Now you can Signup for a Free Pingdom account and monitor 1 website with 20 Free SMS Credit. It just takes 2 mins to signup and you are done! After you signup, Pingdom will start monitoring your website and will tell you everytime it goes down! And with the 20 Free SMS credit, you will be informed even when you are not in front of your PC.

And if you run out of that 20 SMS, then you need to seriously consider getting a new webhost! I’d seriously recommend you to go to Hostgator – They have awesome support and near 100% uptime.

You can signup for just 1 cent ($0.01) for the first month and try out their awesome service! Use the Coupon Code – “404PAGE”.

And don’t forget to Signup for a Free Piangdom Account and make sure that your website or blog is running 24/7!

Limitation of the Free Pingdom Account

There is actually no real limitation of the Free Pingdom Account. Its not some sort of trial offer, your account is completely free but you will only be able to monitor one website or server. So if you run one website/blog then this account is perfectly suitable for your needs. If you need to track more than one site, then you may want to signup for their paid service. For your free pingdom account to be kept alive you will need to log in to the Pingdom control panel at least once every 90 days.

How much can a Blogger Earn?

Currently Amazon is only giving 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber Amazon signs up. Its kind of low considering the fact that all mobile app developers traditionally gets to keep 70% or more of the revenues. But anyway, 30% of the subscription fee comes around 30c per Kindle subscriber per month. Even though it may seem like a very small amount but it at least widens the reach of your content.

How to Publish your blog in Amazon Kindle Store

Amazon has made it very simple for the bloggers to sign up for this program. All you need to do is make your blog’s feed available to the Kindle Store, and Amazon will do the rest, formatting your content for that special device. According to the email from Amazon, after a few easy steps, your blog should be up and ready to go in the Kindle Store within 12-48 hours of processing.

The downside of the program is that you have no control over the amount of subscription fee that amazon sets for your blog, most blogs on Kindle are currently available for a monthly subscription fee of $.99 to $1.99 and your share of revenue is fixed at 30%. So even if you want to make it free, you can’t!

So what are you waiting for? Publish your blog in Amazon Kindle Store Now!

Personally I like the idea of breaking the blog rank into different segments in accordance to the different blog audience market. However, Having said that – I was hoping if someone could actually come up with a blog ranking based on “country” rather than the language of the blog.

Because a Language like English is so widely spoken that its used as one of the primary language of many blogs regardless of their origin. So the main problem of the current blog rank system is, even if a blogger is from India, he is actually competing with the blogs in the US (Because his language is English).

If the ranking was based on country of origin, then a lot of bloggers from the different parts of the world would get the local recognition that they deserve. And It will also help the users as users are often interested to find out what other blogs are out there from their own local community.

Anyway, Twingly has released a list of Top 100 blog today which is of course very similar to the Technorati Top 100. When someone asked twingly on twitter, how they are actually ranking the sites, they mentioned that they are currently looking at links and Social votes (e.g. Likes).

I tried the Twingly search and I must say that they have done a pretty good job overall. They have a nice little bar on the top which lets you sort the result according to Date, Rank, Links. You can also sort your search result page based on when the blogs were last updated and so on. However, I noticed that Twingly doesn’t show the URL of the blog or the post in their result page. But I believe displaying the URL as necessary as it can help the user to filter out the results more easily.

So if you have a blog and you want people to find you via Twingly, Don’t forget to ping Twingly!

What is Oxite?

Oxite is blogging flavored CMS platform that is currently available under the Microsoft Public License. Its target user base is not ‘end users’ but developers who perhaps use Microsoft’s platform to make a custom CMS or a large-scale multi user blog network. So if your small-medium business is looking to build a blog platform or CMS from scratch, your IT team may well consider making Oxite as their base platform.

Features of Oxite

Some of the major features of this new open source CMS are – Gravatars, pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS feeds, commenting, and the MetaWebLog API (which will allow your favorite blogging client to post to your Oxide blog directly).

Downside of Oxite

Oxite is based on ASP.net (Front End) and MS SQL (back end), thus when we are talking about cost of Hosting we are already looking at a major disadvantage. The reason WordPress, Drupal & other CMS are so popular because they are all written in PHP and backed up by mySQL – thus can run on any cheap linux server.

My Two Cents

Well its always great to see any ‘open-source’ product coming out from Microsoft. But Oxite will disappoint a lot of users who doesn’t want the hassle of setting up a windows server and Microsoft SQL Server for running this CMS. But for big companies or start ups who wants to create a multi user blog network, Oxite might just be be an ideal choice.

Channel 9 has a short interview with the developers of Oxite that describes some more of the software’s features and the history of its development.

What is Technorati Engage?

Technorati Engage is a Advertising Network owned by Technorati that matches bloggers and social media creators with advertisers who want to reach their audiences. Technorati was founded back in 2003 as the first blog search engine and since then they have manged to gather enormous amount of popularity in the blogosphere. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Who will benefit from Technorati Engage?

Basically bloggers who are actively participating in the blogosphere will find this service great as it provides another source of monetization.

Advertisers who are looking to promote their Online or Off-line Businesses will find this service pretty lubricative, as Technorati Engage Marketplace will connect advertisers to the top notch high profile bloggers to the raising star bloggers of the blogosphere.

What are the Notable Features of Technorati Engage?

• Multiple Types of Ads: Technorati Engage Ad Network offers different kinds of ads of different size. Current Ad Formats are 125 x 125 ad units, plain text ads and also a new type of ad called “PhoText” – which can nicely combine text & image together. They come in four sizes (25, 50, 100, and 200 pixels in width).



• Flexibility: The blogger can decide how much they want to charge the advertisers. They can also choose what categories of advertisers that they wish to be shown on their blog.
• Moderation: The blogger can approve or reject an Advertisement before it goes live in the blog.
• Alternative Monetization Option: If Technorati can’t serve an ad and there’s an empty ad unit Technorati will serve CPC ads to the ad position.
• Automatic Ad-Rotation: Technorati has built in ‘ad rotation’ feature where you can serve ads from a variety of advertisers in a single ad box.
• Easy Payment Technorati currently offers payment to publishers is via PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer.
• Big Revenue Share: Whatever money that your blog earns, Technorati will share it in 60:40 ratio. Thus you can keep 60% of the ad sales.

So if you are a publisher, don’t wait up – Signup with Technorati Engage now! If you wish to learn more about their service, read the Publisher FAQ section.

My Two Cents

This is indeed a great news for bloggers, and I’ll definitely try them out. So what do you think about Technorati Engage? Share in comments!

Yes, Its Thanksgiving! I thought it would be cool to list down few things that all bloggers should be thankful for! The list may not necessarily apply to only bloggers, as I’m sure many webmasters who have been in the web for a while has taken benefits of the services that I’m about to mention here. These are the top 7 things that have enabled the bloggers to be what they are:

1. WordPress – Blogging Platform

WordPress is the Open-Source blogging platform that is used to power thousands of blogs that are out on the web. Its a completely free but priceless at the same time. WordPress has enabled people with no-knowledge of any web technology or language such as – html, to put up their blog and make a history on the web. WordPress was developed in early 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and the name “WordPress” was suggested by Matt’s friend – Christine Selleck. WordPress is now a common platform for any blogs on the web, including the popular media blogs like – New York Times, CNN, ZDnet etc.

2. Firefox – Web Browser

Firefox – a open source web browser by Mozilla Corporation is the preferred browser of many bloggers. Mainly because of its stability,speed & its open source support – blogging without Firefox is just unthinkable. There are hundreds of free Firefox Addons available for bloggers that makes blogging a lot easier. Firefox has gained massive popularity worldwide with a 19.97% of usage share as of October 2008, making it the second-most popular browser after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The firefox community is so active that you just can’t get enough of this browser. After booting up the PC, all a user needs is a Firefox as a user can get everything inside – there is an addon for everything.

3. Google – Search Engine

Google – A search engine that was only supposed to be a Masters research project of two Stanford students turned out to be the most popular search engine with over 60% of the world’s search market share. Google produces the most fresh & relevant search results that a blogger finds useful while doing research. They also have some useful services like Google News, Google Blog Search & Google Alerts that enables bloggers to get all the latest buzz on their fingertips.

4. Google Adsense – Blog Monetization

Google Adsense is the most popular contextual-advertising platform made by Google that is now being used to monetize thousands of websites that are on the Internet. Google has made really easy for the bloggers to Signup for an Adsense account and Start earning money right away by displaying ‘content-related’ text/image advertisements that are comes from the advertiser inventory of Google Adwords Content Network. Because of it’s plain & simple installation (copying a piece of code) and hassle free use, bloggers are more motivated to blog as it has opened a new source of income for them. Bloggers don’t need to maintain their own advertisers inventory nor they need to go and look for advertisers who are interested to advertise on their blog. Google Adsense is the answer to all.

5. Social Media  – Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious & Twitter

The Social Sites like – Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious & Twitter has really helped the bloggers to get their content out there right in front of the community. Digg has been a Pioneer in Social News for years. Everyday over 800,000 people visits Digg to get the user voted fresh news on Technology, Politics, Lifestyle and more. StubmleUpon currently has over 6465000 active users who are constantly finding out new stuffs on the internet and helping others to find it. These two sites alone drives substantial amount of traffic for blogs to have a sustainable lifecycle and also helps to grow a quality reader base over time. Bloggers often need to bookmark a lot of pages that they come across and that makes an awesome bookmarking service like delicious.com a blogger’s perfect companion. Twitter, a macro blogging platform is very popular among bloggers as it has made it very easy to bring interactivity in a static blog by communicating with the blog readers & other bloggers on the network.

5. Flickr – Photo Sharing

Flickr.com – A premium photo sharing service by Yahoo! is a Photo Blogger’s best friend! Flickr makes it very easy to upload, Organize and Tag Photos. As of November 2008, Flickr currently hosts more than 3 billion images. Flickr provides many ready-made widgets for blogs, that bloggers can use to show off their photo albums or sets in their blog. The Free account at Flickr allows a user to upload upto 100 MB of photos each month, users with a lot of photos can opt in for a Pro account (US$24.95/year) which allows unlimited photo & video storage.

6. Youtube – Video Sharing

Youtube – A online video sharing website has totally started the trend of Vblogging. Millions of viewers come to Youtube everyday to watch user-generated videos along with videos made by the professional production house & media companies. Whenever any blogger has any video, screen cast to share – Youtube is often the best choice due to its ease of use & embedding capability and having a free & straight forward distribution among viewers.

7. Mint – Web Analytics

It is essential for a blogger to keep track of his visitors, source of traffic and many other important statistical information that can help the blogger to understand the current ‘health’ of the blog. Mint is an excellent tool that basically works as a self-hosted web site analytics program. It can track Visits, referrers, popular pages, search keywords and many more that can really help a blogger to do some quantitative analysis.

Certainly there are a lot more things a blogger should be thankful for and if we were to put them all in one place, its likely that the list will be endless! There are new tools & softwares developed everyday that is helping the bloggers in every step of the way.

So what are some of your favorite tools? What are you thankful for? Share in comments!

And now It looks like Google has came up with another Guide for Bloggers, unfortunately its not a PDF this time but instead its a new document inside the Google Webmaster Help archive. So in this small guide, the Google Webmaster Central team has offered some basic but useful tips on how bloggers can improve their blogs. They have divided the document in 3 parts – Creating great content, Making the content Crawler & user friendly & lastly use of Google Webmaster tools for your blog.

I have created a small summary of what the guide talks about. So here goes:

Creating Great Content

• Write Good content & Write as Frequently as possible — As you may already know, Content is King but do you know that writing more ‘frequently’ can encourage your readers to come back to your site more often? But obviously you need to take into account that the subject of your writing should be the same as what your readers expect from your blog. A very good quality post once a week is better than many low-quality content published daily.Tip: — Perform a search in Google for a subject of interest on your niche. If you can’t find a good answer, simply create a blog post about that particular subject – chances are that other people are also searching for the same thing.
• Always follow the Webmasters Guideline and try do things naturally. Try not to get involved in shady practices like this.
• Organize your content to make your Blog more User-friendly! Use categories, tags & labels appropriately so that your content are easy to find.
• Host your blog in your own domain and link it from your Home page so that the users & search crawlers can easily find your content
• Always create original content & content that are primarily for users and not the search engines. If you are promoting a affiliate product, DON’T use the content that they provide which has probably been used in tons of other places and are just duplicates. Always write unique & original content that you feel will be useful for the reader (e.g. Product reviews, How-tos etc.)
• Stop Comment Spam – Comments are Good but SPAMs are not. Read more about how to stop comment spam.

Making your Blog Crawler & User Friendly

• Always use Descriptive Titles for each your posts – Think of words that people may use to search for that particular post and include them in your title. Write Unique Titles so that it doesn’t get mixed up with another post of yours in your blog.
• Engage in your community, participate in discussion and interact with the readers who leaves a comment in your blog
• Publish a FULL feed of your content rather than a partial Feed. Full feeds can make users happy because they can view your content with a lot less effort. Even though it might result in a short-term decline in visits to your actual blog, but it has long-term benefits for you

Webmaster Tools For Your Blog

• Add your blog in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
• Verify yourself as the owner of your blog in the Google Webmaster Tools to get access to all the advanced features
• Create a Sitemap and Submit it via the Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps are a good way to let Google know which page needs to be indexed.

Thats all! Pretty basic isn’t it? If you were expecting more “advanced” stuffs I invite you to read some of the following:

Bloggers Guide to SEO by Aaron Wall & Giovanna Wall – SEOBook.com

WordPress SEO – Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog by Joost de Valk – Yoost.com

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Darren Rowse – Problogger.net

Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers by Matt Cutts – Mattcutts.com/blog/

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic by Rank Fishkin – SEOmoz.org

Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds by Ross Dunn – SearchEngineGuide.com

Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Guide by Lorelle – Lorelle.Wordpress.com

SEO For WordPress – The Complete Guide by Jim Westergren – JimWestergren.com

Did I miss any great resources? Please Include it in comments or notify me via twitter (@saadkamal).

Update: I forgot to add my very own post that I wrote particularly for Bloggers titled: How to Rank Your Blog High in Search Engines. Check it out and I’m sure you will be able to take some useful pieces from it.