Web Development With Seo In Mind

When a business owner decides to bring their business to the web, generally the last thing that they think about is search engine optimization. They assume that whomever they hire to do their web design will put up a site and then submit it to the search engines and the traffic will magically pour in. Unfortunately it takes more than that to drive search engine traffic to your site, and even more unfortunately most developers don’t program with SEO in mind, nor do they educate the client about the process involved in gaining traffic from search engines.

Whether it’s carelessness or a lack of knowledge, or a combination of the two, this often leads to a client that several months down the road doesn’t understand why their site doesn’t get any traffic and isn’t helping their business. A good designer will not only program with SEO in mind, but will also educate the client about the basic principles of SEO, whether they are the one who executes it or not.

Many times the clients I inherit have gone through this scenario and then face drastic on-site changes to get their site search engine friendly before we are even able to begin the arduous process of link building. Whether you are designing a site for yourself or for a client, following the simple steps below when programming will ultimately save the business time and money and result in a search engine friendly site that truly maximizes the online potential of the business.

Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn’t do that.

Optimize your images – search engine spiders can’t read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison (http://www.seo-playbook.com/image_example.php) of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Avoid canonical problems – believe it or not, search engines can see http://yoursite.com, http://www.yoursite.com, and http://www.yoursite.com/index.html as three different pages. A simple solution is to use a 301 redirect to point all of your pages to their “www” counterpart. You can also select the preferred domain that Google shows in the new Google Webmaster Tools console.

Get rid of Session IDs if you have a PHP site – have you ever seen a PHPSESSID variable added to the end a URL on a PHP page (it looks something like PHPSESSID=34908908)? This happens because PHP will add a unique PHPSESSID to URLs within your site if cookies aren’t available. This can be extremely problematic for your site’s search engine ranking. Google and Yahoo will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think that said page is a different page each time. At worst, this could be viewed as duplicate content and get your site banned, and at best it will reduce the perceived value of each page. One solution that I’ve used successfully is to utilize url_rewriter.tags.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files – nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts – the debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there’s no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn’t content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn’t content, the better. Check out www.searchenginefriendlylayouts.com for some free example layouts.

Validate your site – a site doesn’t have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) or install this handy Firefox extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/249/). Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

Make Money from Blogging: Some Myths And Realities

Since blogging as professional has picked up pace in last few years, we can see thousands of blogs sprouting almost every day with atarget to make money from blogging. Large amount of them die prematurely while others struggle to make a little earnings from their blogs. Very small percentage of these blogs are able to generate good money consistently. Let’s see what are the myths and realities associated with making money from blogging.

Myth #1: Making money blogging is very easy.

Wake up! It requires a lot of effort to start making decent money from blogging. If you will read biography of some famous bloggers who are making good money from blogging, you will notice something common in them. All of them blogged consistently and remained focused over these years to achieve what they are today.

Myth #2: It requires lot of money to start making money blogging.

Not at all. There are several free blog hosting services that can help you launch a new blog in no time. If you are going for a custom domain, you just require $10 to start a blog. It’s not the money but your time and effort that is needed more to create a successful blog.

Myth #3: A niche with low or almost no competition cannot generate money.

This is not always true and depends on several variable factors. A niche with no competition can be a boon for you to tap the untouched market. Capturing this closed set of audience will be much easier for you without facing any tough competition from non-existent seasoned players.

Myth #4: Unless my content does not rule the front page of SERP’s, I cannot make money blogging.

I know, I know you have heard 100 times from SEO gurus to rule the SERP results to get some business. But here all we need is a long tail, a massive archive of quality content. The more big is your archive, the more traffic you get. Forget about rankings and focus on creating large archive of good content.

Myth #5: Mr. Smart’s $19.99 eBook about ‘Make Money Blogging’ will give me secrets to get rich overnight.

This eBook will only make one person rich overnight – Mr Smart himself. Do I need to say anything else?

Myth #6: Only self-hosted WordPress blogs can earn money.

I’ve heard this many times from readers and some of my peers. Let me give you some examples of successful blogs hosted on blogger platform. Antonio Lupetti’s Woork and Amanda Fazani’s BloggerBuster are hosted on blogger and generate decent income through direct and indirect methods.

Myth #7: I need to be an expert, if I want to make money blogging.

Every successful blogger started from scratch. It’s a learning curve where you refine your skills with passage of time. Some climb the ladder quickly, while others may take some time. Nobody is perfect and if you are deferring your blogging plan in fear of imperfection, then you are doing a big mistake.

Myth #8: Advertising is the only way to make money blogging.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions among large number of newbies. Advertising is just one of the direct methods of generating money from your blog. The indirect methods can comparatively earn you much more money and that too much quickly. Selling your own products and services are two of the most popular indirect methods of generating income from your blog. For example, if you own a food blog, you may launch your own cooking eBook or your own courses about learning various cuisines.

Myth #9: I only need to work 1 hour/week to make money blogging.

Nothing comes without hard work. If you are serious about taking blogging as a profession, you must devote at least 2 to 3 hours daily on your blogging activities. There are several scam programs on Internet claiming to make you millionaire by blogging just 1 hour/week. It’s all junk and you must keep yourself away from all these scams.

Where is Remarkable Content?

Web content in all kind of form, audio or video, text,  is the driving force of millions of web sites and blogs. Content creation strategies have changed significantly with the pass of time. Whether you are writing for a niche blog or a enterprise blog, your readers are going to judge your products and services throughout your content. What are the traits of quality content? How does it differ from ordinary filler content?

Here are some of the characteristics of remarkable content that has the power to convincingly influence the readers.

Provides Immediate Value (Highly Relevant)

Good content always provides solutions to readers’ grievances. Every niche has a closed set of audience that has certain demands, questions and inquiries about the subject. Whatever is your niche, your readers almost always have some burning questions waiting to be answered. It’s all about anticipating readers’ expectations and delivering the goods accordingly.

Remember, it’s not meet most providing the solutions, but how easily and apace readers crapper apply those solutions to get the desired results. Quality content not only deliver the solution, but also present it in such a way that a layman as well as an expert, both crapper see and compel it with ease.

Unique Voice

If your blog niche is highly competitive, things can become more difficult as you may be rehashing the content. Uniqueness is another important element of quality content. If zillion other blogs are also talking about blogging tips, what different are you going to offer to your readers? The difference lies in your perspective and how you elaborate and interpret it. If a reader gets the feeling that he or she has already read this before somewhere else, your content is merely a replica of a topic already covered effectively by somebody else.

The freshness of content directly relates to the uniqueness associated with it. If 10 people are talking about remarkable content, more or less their points at macro level will be similar. Yet one of them may be able to impress his audience more than the others. That’s where the uniqueness of content plays a big role.

Appealing Presentation

The third most important element of quality content is the way it is packaged and presented to the readers. Visual appeal has the power to make an average piece of writing, a masterpiece. Use of typography, images, quotes, bullet lists and highlighted sections makes the content sticky and attractive.

Remember, it’s not meet about providing the solutions, but how easily and quickly readers can apply those solutions to get the desirable results. Quality content not only deliver the solution, but also present it in much a way that a layman as well as an expert, both can understand and implement it with ease.

Closely Connected (Engagement With Audience)

Passive writing is never welcomed by majority of readers. A great post directly relates the topic with the reader. This direct engagement makes a strong connection with the audience giving them the required confidence in relying on the provided solution. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of getting too much personal and informal while writing for a niche or company blog.

Tracking Social Media Traffic In Your Blog

Nowadays, visits from various social media sites contribute a large accumulate of total traffic received by a blog. We invest lot of our time in social media marketing without analyzing which social media platforms are giving the best results and where we should invest more of our energy to get the maximum benefits. Fortunately, Google Analytics provides some powerful options to monitor social media referrals.

There are several methods to view social media referrals via Google Analytics. Below are the 3 most common methods to see SM referral data. One of these methods requires Firefox add-on, while other one requires a simple filter to exclude traffic other than coming from social media sites.

Method – 1 (Analytics Referral Sites): The first method is the most easiest one. By deafult GA provides statistics for all the referral sites.

To see this data, go to your analytics dashboard. Select Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites from the side menu. The only extra work required is ignoring non-social media sites present in this report. Normally, social media sites are on top in this report and are easily spotted as shown above.

Method – 2 (Greasemonkey Social Media Analytics Plugin): The second method requires two Firefox add-ons. One of them is the popular Greasemonkey script that works as a driving engine for Analytics social media plugin.

To use this add-on, you must have new ga.js code installed on your blog. Once both these add-ons are installed in your Firefox browser, you can view various ethnic media balloting counts direct in Google Analytics reports as shown above. The developers are adding new ethnic media services with each new version of this add-on.

Method – 3 (Custom Segments): Third method uses regular expressions and custom segments to get traffic report of selective social media sites. You can either choose to group traffic from all social media sites in a single segment or you can create a separate segment for every social media site.

Combined traffic in a single segment – To create a segment that shows combined traffic coming from a group of social media sites, follow this simple procedure.

1. Create a new custom segment.
2. From ‘Dimensions’, expand ‘Traffic Sources’.
3. Drag the ‘Source’ statement to your custom segment.
4. Choose ‘Matches regular expression’ for ‘Condition’.
5. Write the following regular expression in field ‘Value’.

Separate each site name with a pipe symbol as shown above, prefixing backslash before every dot in the domain name. You can add as many social media sites to it separating each one with a pipe symbol. The only restriction is the length (256 characters) of regular expression allowed in Google Analytics. To accommodate more sites in your expression, you can group them into two parts and can create two custom segments.

Separate segment for single site – The procedure for creating a custom segment for single site is same as shown above. Only the regular expression will change.

Let’s suppose you want to create a separate custom segment to track all referral traffic from Facebook. Simply use this regular expression.

Make sure you have prefixed the backslash before the dot in the domain name. If you want, you can create custom segments for all major social media sites to get a clearer picture about their performance. Remember, if you create too many custom segments and apply all of them in your traffic reports, it may clutter your graph reports.

Once you have created all your custom segments, you can apply them to your regular reports.

This is how your reports will look after applying the custom segments. You can clearly see all the segregated data giving you a better and clearer picture of traffic trends on your blog. After analyzing this vital data, you can introduce necessary changes in your social media marketing strategy to get better results.

Some Reasons Why Digg Not Always Work For Your Blog

Social Media has completely changed the artefact traffic was pulled to the web sites. Today, even a period old blog can get thousands of visits from ethnic media sites on the prototypal period of its launch. This was same a dream a decennium back. Digg and StumbleUpon are two of the most successful ethnic media sites that beam tons of visitors in quick time.

Although Digg sends huge amount of traffic in a short span of time, it is comparatively hard to get success on Digg. It requires lot of time, strong network and right kind of content to be successful on Digg. Let’s see, why Digg might not be the right place for your SMM efforts.

Wrong Niche – Digg users are well known to pamper and promote specific type of content. This includes tech news, Apple, iPhone and breaking news. If you are blogging about a different topic that inherently does not go well on Digg, you are never going to taste the success of Digg front page. I’ve written a guide about (How To Create Digg-Friendly Content).

Inactive Digg Profile – If you want to succeed on Digg, you yourself should be an active digger. This ensures that you are well aware of latest happenings and the trends going-on on Digg.

Poor Digg Network – No matter how good is your content, unless you do not have a strong network of Digg users including some power users, you will not get consistent results with Digg.

Poor Hosting Plan – Did your site crashed when you first tasted success on Digg? Sometimes, a cheap hosting plan with heavily loaded shared server is overwhelmed by the traffic surge from Digg and eventually takes down your site temporarily. This is a very annoying situation since your hard work gets wasted. If you are serious about Digg, make sure you have a good hosting plan and your blog is well-optimized for speed through cache plugins and various other techniques.

Wrong Submission Time – This applies to almost every social bookmarking activity. Submit your content in peak hours to get the better results. Research has shown that Tue, Wed and Thu are the best days to submit your content on Digg. Time can be as flexible as morning office hours to late noon.

Self-Promotion – If you are consistently digging your own content for prolonged period, it will be buried by Digg system and eventually your domain may get banned for indefinite period. It’s better to play safe than wasting time in sending endless reconsideration requests to Digg.

Indulging in Digg Vote-Exchange – If you are aggressively asking for Digg votes in exchange for your votes on various media platforms, your content is destined to be buried on Digg. A little push by power users is acceptable. Except that, let the voting count inflate organically.

Junk-Promotion – Now this is quite obvious. Sell crap and you will get the same from the other end. Digg community is very sensitive to spammers. Do not submit your every single post to Digg just for the sake of submitting. Keep your pillar posts saved for mid-week publishing time and let your best content rule the Digg chart.

What’s your experience about Digg and the traffic you receive from it? Do you think alternate social media platforms are slowly replacing Digg?

An Effective Way To Pull Traffic And Create A Personal Brand on Video-Blogging

Text has always been the dominant communicating medium on Web and still continues to be so. With the introduction of new technologies, share of multimedia content has grown significantly. One such medium is video that has firmly established its roots in the world of blogging. Video blogging (vlogging) is getting popular nowadays with more and more bloggers coming out with their own vodcast series.

Vlogging not only helps attract readers much easily, but also has the power to create your personal brand. Many famous bloggers have used it successfully to reach new heights in their blogging journey. They have also used popular platforms like YouTube to market their blogs through informative and entertaining videos.

Getting Started with Video Blogging

Video blogging is simply using recording as noesis for your blog. Some bloggers use it occasionally mixed with their regular posts, patch others have dedicated recording blogs (vlogs) producing series of vodcasts. In either case, the posting and distribution mechanism is almost the same. Since it stimulates individual perception organs, the viral appeal of a recording post is extremely strong. Like every article is not a pillar post, similarly every recording post can’t be a cliffhanger. The success of

Requirements For Video Blogging

Presentation Skills – This is the most important pre-requisite to create appealing video posts. You must posses’ excellent presentation skills that includes clear pronunciation, flair to speak, understanding of tone changes, convincing power and above all your ability to record and edit the recordings. Some people are born with exceptional speaking and presentations skills. Others can master it with regular mock presentations. I’ll strongly advice you to defer your video post publication, until you do not get positive feedback about your test recordings from your close friends or some trusted fellow bloggers.

Hardware – If you want to post a high quality video, you would require a good quality camcorder or a powerful webcam. A camcorder will give you a slightly better picture quality than a webcam. If you are making the video indoors, correct lighting plays a big role in creating clear recordings. As a general rule of thumb, make sure light source is behind the webcam or camcorder with direct focus on your face. The distance and intensity of light source can be adjusted by doing some test recordings.

Software – There are several free and commercial video editing software. Normally, a video is recorded at higher bit rate to get a high quality picture, which is later compressed to reduce the size of the video. I personally found Camtasia Studio the best among all for creating videos for web publishing. Almost every commercial editing software supports easy creation of YouTube compatible video formats. It is the most preferred and widely used video format on web.

Server and Bandwidth – Since video eats up significant bandwidth, your web-hosting plan should be able to cater the needs of video blogging. Nowadays VPS hosting solutions comes at affordable rate and provides quite good service for high traffic sites. If you are planning to do regular series of vodcasts, I’ll recommend switching to VPS solution rather than sticking with a typical shared hosting plan.

Preparing a Video Post

An ideal video post addresses an issue that solves a critical problem of the intended audience. Generally, bloggers divide the topic into several sections and create a video series . Often these series are as long as 10-15 videos per series.

Scripts – If you are inexperienced, writing a rough script for each video can help you in making the recording process much easier. This script may not be like a film script, where you have to chant every single word as it is. A general outline with main points can do the work if you are comfortable in expanding those points on the fly. If you still struggle to do that, full script is the only solution.

Editing – Once your recording is completed, you have to do all the necessary edits. This includes removing unwanted frames, amplifying voice at selective places as per the requirements, adding captions and background music, adjusting the speed of frames at selective points and last but not the least compressing the video and making it YouTube compatible.

Publishing – Once your video is complete, it is ready to be published. There are two approaches to publish it. Either you upload it to services like YouTube and Viddler and get the embed code directly from the site or you upload the video to your own web server. Remember, if you are embedding the video directly from Youtube, it may not be visible to your feed readers and they have to actually visit the actual post to be able to watch it. Here’s an excellent tutorial about inserting multimedia content in a WordPress post.

If you are already doing video posts, what significant difference you noticed in readers’ engagement and reactions? Do you prefer to host your videos on third-party site or your own server?

How Contextual Linking (Internal) Can Improve Your Blog Rankings

Great content automatically attracts quality backlinks. The basic criterion for a web page to rank high in SERP’s is the number of backlinks pointing to it. Inbound links from other domains carry more weightage than internal links referring relevant content within the same domain. Keeping this in mind, normally we spend more of our energy in acquiring backlinks from external sources completely ignoring the power of internal contextual linking.

Here we are interested in getting more and more backlinks for weaker pages (non-performing content) in our archives. Since this content is average or below average, there are very little chances of getting quality backlinks (vote for exceptional content) organically.

A non-performing post doesn’t necessarily represent poor content. Sometimes, the overall structure and poor selection of keywords keeps the post way low in SERP’s.

If you have a large archive, a complete rewrite of all these pages will be a suicidal attempt to revive your blog rankings. So what other options are left…? Buying paid links? Desperate trading of social media votes? The former will make big daddy Google angry and the latter may get your domain banned on various social media sites. In either case, it will be a huge loss. Contextual linking is an ideal option that can give the much-required boost to these non-performing posts. It not only helps in elevating the SERP rankings but also helps spread the link juice evenly across your blog content. Let’s see how to do it.

Contextual Linking Fundamentals

The basic idea behind contextual linking is (in-text links) cross-linking your blog posts in a specific manner. This way you are going to increase the number of backlinks for every inter-linked post. Every time you link to a post this way, reciprocity is not a necessity. Successful and effective contextual linking involves careful selection of links crafted according to needs and requirements. There are two basic principles while creating a contextual link.

Right Anchor Text – The selection of anchor text plays a big role in creating a well-optimized contextual link. Since they are created within the normal flow of content, choosing the right keyphrase is extremely important. The chosen anchor text should clearly indicate the topic of content it is going to refer. Do not make it too long (ideally, 2-3 words), and at the same time make sure you have included primary keyword within the phrase.

Content Relevancy (Context) – The second important factor is relevancy of both web pages connected via this link. There should be a similarity or co-relation between the subjects of discussion. The most important area is the surrounding text of the link. The more it’s relevant to the referring page, the more is the SEO value of that link. Since your linked pages will be relevant, the probability of a reader clicking that link will also be high, helping in inflating your page views.

Contextual Linking Strategy

If you have not linked your posts earlier, you must do some preliminary analysis to figure out the right linking pattern. An ideal strategy is to link out to weaker pages from the top performing content. This way, you will be passing on link-juice from high-rank pages to weaker content giving them the required boost.

Let’s assume you have a popular post about blog monetization with PR4. This post appears on first page of SERP’s for several highly competitive keywords. Naturally, this post brings consistent organic traffic for you and will continue to do so for long time to time. Let’s further assume that you have two more posts on blog monetization. One of them talks about direct advertising, while other one is all about affiliate marketing. Both these posts receive almost negligible traffic with no presence in SERP’s.

Now you have a perfect situation where contextual linking can be used to spark some life in these dead posts. All you need to do is to link out to these two posts from your high-ranking post. Choose two relevant keyphrases from within the text of this post and create links to the weaker posts. This will not only give added backlinks from a high rank page, but will also divert traffic coming on that page.

Linking Patterns

There are severals ways you can link your blog posts. The two most common methods are:

Random Cross-Linking Approach – In this approach, you have to randomly pick all the related posts and link out wherever you feel a link will serve the purpose. Although this is a cumbersome process, especially if your archive is large, but gives very good results in boosting the rankings and traffic.

Top-Down Approach – The second approach is most widely used and preferred approach for majority of bloggers. I also use this approach. In this method, you normally do not touch your old posts. Whenever you write a new post, you create 2-3 contextual links to older posts in your archive. Here I must stress that just for sake of creating links, do not alter your original article or try to forcefully stuff any keyphrases. Just write your post in normal flow without thinking about any linkouts. Once your post is completed, almost every time you will automatically find scope of linking to older posts.

What’s Your Linking Strategy?

I’m sure you do link your blog posts on regular basis. If yes, what is your preferred approach while linking out? Have you experienced any boost in rankings after linking your posts?

10 Reasons Why I Will Not Visit or Subscribe To Your Blog

Despite posting consistently and doing your best to promote the blog, are you experiencing stagnant subscriber count with no growth in traffic? Are you worried about your low conversion rate? Well, here are some of the reasons that may repel the visitors leading to almost nil conversions.

Low Quality Content – It is one of the primary reasons why people won’t pay a second visit to your blog. What’s your primary goal? Just to get tons of traffic? Or to retain good percentage of visitors (high conversions) from whatever traffic you receive? It’s not the volume of traffic but your conversion rate that decides how fast your blog will expand its reach. And the primary ingredient for high conversions is quality content. Give me some real stuff and I’ll be more than happy to be a regular visitor.

Awful Sidebar – Once a reader finishes the article, he looks at the sidebar for more information. I’ve seen many sidebars littered with large number of fancy widgets to attract the visitors. Please remove those useless (countless) widgets and give me something useful (best content, latest posts, how-to’s, tutorials) to click on.

Partial Feed – There’s a lot of debate on providing partial RSS feed or full feed to blog subscribers. If we concentrate the juice of these debates, full feed option comes out as the clear winner. Partial feed is of the biggest reason why people may not consider subscribing. Majority of readers prefer full feed in their inbox. If you are distributing partial feed, I won’t subscribe at all.

No Response – People come to your blog to gain some information. In the process, they share their views and ask questions. Unless you are not getting tons of comments, you must reply every single one of them. If it’s one-sided conversation, your repeating visitors will dry up quickly.

Sluggish Navigation – Who doesn’t love web sites and blogs with fast download time? In social media era, the traffic is very sensitive towards slow web sites. They’re impatient and want quick access to information. Keep your blog code optimized for lowest possible download time. I won’t stay on your blog if it makes me wait more than 15-20 seconds.

Poor Theme – Sometimes great content remain unnoticed due to extremely poor choice of theme. If you aren’t a techie, hire a person to design a custom theme for you or DIY (do-it-yourself). A custom theme gives a unique voice to your blog and aids in attracting the first time visitors.

Ads, Ads and More Ads – I know you want to make money blogging, but where is the content? I can only see ads stuffed in almost every corner of your theme. Too much aggressive monetization will drive away all your visitors including me.

Too Much Self-Promotion – It’s good to share your knowledge and expertise, but sometimes you may fall into trap of inadvertently over-selling yourself. The most successful bloggers are the most humble and down-to-earth people. Follow their footsteps and you will see more engagement of your readers.

Pop-Ups – Yet another annoying feature that prevents visitors to come to your blog. It’s like twisting my wrist and asking me to subscribe. If your content is great, they’ll subscribe automatically. Get rid of that pop-up and check your statistics after few weeks.

No Link-Outs – Yes, yes, I want links to some great resources whenever you pick any such topic, which has the scope of highlighting the best work on other blogs. Be generous and please do link to some extra-ordinary stuff of other bloggers. Trust me you won’t lose me. In fact, I will be grateful to you for sharing relevant quality content with me.

Image Credit: Chesi – Fotos CC

Micro-Blogging: 26 Twitter Desktop Clients For Mac

Since twitter has gone mainstream, the supporting applications and services are sprouting up like wildfire on Internet. Prominent among these applications are twitter desktop clients available for almost every platform. These handy applications help you manage your twitter activities in a much easier way than managing via web interface. Here’s a list of select twitter clients for Mac platform.

Some of these clients have cross-platform compatibility and also works on Windows and Linux. The list is arranged in alphabetical order and in no way represent their popularity based on their position in the list.

Airmailr – A fully featured twitter client for OS X Dashboard. View different timelines (DM’s , @replies, friends) and send tweets, replies and DM’s. It also supports profile views with complete bio of the user within the widget window. You can also perform twitter search to watch selective tweets. The results are shown as a separate tab via scrollable list. Integrated URL shortening support (is.gd) and easy resizing option makes it quite flexible in usage. It has full growl integration and updates itself automatically. Airmailr uses the twitter’s new OAuth standard for better timeline management with minimum delay in updates.

AlertThingy – This excellent application mashes up various social media services into a single application including twitter. Apart from twitter updates, you can also access Facebook, flickr, tumblr and many more such services. AlertThingy runs on Adobe AIR and is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Business users can also access Yammer, Basecamp and Huddle from this desktop client. AlertThingy is light on system resources and has impressive interface. If you have multiple accounts on these services, AlertThingy can make your life easy with single point of access to keep you updated of all happenings across multiple social media accounts.

Blogo – As the name implies, Blogo is not just a twitter client but a full-fledged blogging and social media application. Blogo supports twitter and Ping.fm updates. Currently it’s only available for Mac platform. Apart from twitter access, you can also post to WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, and Expression Engine. It has a built-in rich text post editor. Not only this, you can set automatic updates to twitter and Ping.fm accounts whenever you post fresh content on any of the supported web publishing system. You can re-size it freely and can even switch it to full-screen mode as per your convenience.

Canary – It is one of the promising twitter clients with multiple timeline support. It suports multiple twitter accounts and also recognizes hashtags. Full growl support for immediate notifications. Full URL shortening (Adjix, Bit.ly, Cli.gs, is.gd, Snipurl, TinyURL, tr.im and urlBorg) support makes it an ideal client to share your favorite content. Filters support lets you view selective twitter streams in a separate tab. Canary also supports TwitPic for sharing your pictures and iTunes integration to let your followers know which track you are listening. You can also add, remove, block and unblock twitter users at your will.

Chirp – Currently, only available for Mac platform. It is very light on system resources and supports twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Identi.ca. Chirp supports multiple twitter timelines (replies, DM’s and public timeline). It also supports instant search for all services with caching feature for offline use of your search results. Chirp comes with 6 different themes to suit your taste. I particularly liked the tooltip feature. that will show you the followers count of any user on hovering the mouse on this name. Chrip updates itself automatically with a small size binary making the whole update procedure lightning fast.

EventBox – As the name suggests, it supports multiple social media services (twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr, RSS, Reddit). Currently, this application is only available for Mac platform. EventBox has stunning interface that fully utilizes your graphic card capabilities making it one of the best looking twitter client. You can freely re-size its fluid interface. EventBox also supports instant notification of all new updates for each of the supported services. You can enable or disable notifications for selective services via settings option. EventBox future versions will also support del.icio.us, Last.fm and Orkut.

feedalizr – Yet another twitter client supporting multiple social media services. Apart from reguar twitter access, you can also update your Facebook status and send replies to your Facebook friends. feedalizr also has TwitPic support for sharing images with your followers. You can also access and update your Freindfeed account making it all-in-one solution for all your social media activities. The interface is quite impressive with multiple tab support for each stream. The hot topic bar lets you see whats currently hot on twitter. It is almost similar to twitscoop service. feedalizr is light on system resources and updates itself automatically.

Mac Lounge – This excellent twitter client is available both for Mac OS X and iPhone. The first thing that you will notice is the excellent interface which is very soothing to eyes. At present, this application is in public beta phase. It supports multiple twitter accounts and twitter search options. You can easily view different timelines (replies, DM’s and public timeline) making things easy to manage and update. The search filtering option lets you create a separate section of selective tweets. This impressive client is not a resource hog and has promising future once it comes out of beta stage. The iPhone version is equally rich in features as its desktop version.

NatsuLion – It is only available for Mac platform (Leopard (10.5)). NatsuLion has different tabs for public timeline, replies, DM’s, sent and unread messages. The interface is extremely good and the application is light on system resources. Growl notifications are tightly integrated with this twitter client. Your own tweets are highlighted with different color scheme to easily filter out remaining tweets. This application is ideal for light and casual tweeting giving you enough options to keep in touch with your followers. It is also available for iPhone covering all the features in the desktop version.

Nambu – It is one of the popular twitter clients for Mac platform. Nambu supports multiple twitter accounts and has a good interface. It also supports multi-column view for selective twitter streams. Apart from twitter is also supports FriendFeed and Identi.ca account updates. Groups, filters and twitter search makes it an ideal twitter client for novice as well as power users. It is light on system resources and updates itself automatically. You can open separate tab for every new search for all supported social media services. It shows you actual web site names of shared links via tweets. I’d highly recommend trying this twitter client.

P3:PeraperaPrv – Purely written in Java, this twitter client can run on Mac, Windows and Linux. It supports multiple tabs for viewing different timelines with auto-refresh for each stream. You can customize the appearance (color schemes) of different tweets (replies, DM’s). Filtering support allows you to view selective tweets in a separate tab. It also supports URL shortening (tinyURL) to help you share your favorite links. You can also change the application and tweet font size making it ideal for people having vision problems. You can also search and favorite selective tweets from the timeline cache and can group them in a separate tab.

Pwytter – It’s a light weight feature packed twitter client written in Python. You can switch to different timelines with a click of a button. Pwytter supports up to 14 different languages and has full unicode support. Timelines are cached for faster response in case of multiple search queries. Pwytter updates itself automatically and have the option of updating timelines either manually or automatically. It is one of the lightest and resource efficient twitter client ideal for low configuration systems. You can use it on Mac, Windows and Linux. It also supports viewing of separate lists of your followers and friends in a scrollable format.

Seesmic DESKTOP – I’m using this excellent twitter client. Still in private beta stage, it is destined to give Tweetdeck a run for its money. The interface is stunning giving Mac effect on every platform. Seesmic Desktop is not a resource hog at all even if several panes are opened at once. Multi-column views, search panes, custom groups makes it an ideal application for twitter power users. It also supports URL shortening, hashtags detection and automatic updates. It is freely re-sizable with option to switch to single or multi-column views. You can also hide and unhide selective panes at your will. I started with twhirl, then Tweetdeck and now I’m hooked to this wonderful twitter client.

Snitter – This twitter client works on both Mac and Windows. The Linux version is still in developmental alpha stage. It comprises all the features of a typical twitter desktop client. If you know CSS, you can easily customize the appearance (color, font size, avatars, shadow) of Snitter. You can also create a separate tab for favorite tweets. Snitter supports keyboard shortcuts to access each opened panel. Window resize, audible alerts and minimizing to system tray are some other features of this handy application. Snitter is light on system resources and is ideal for twitter users having limited following.

Spaz – It is available for OS X, Windows and Linux platform. Packed with powerful twitter search feature, it filters out selective twitter streams as per your needs. Spaz also has built-in support for URL shortening (is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com) to share your favorite content with your twitter network. It has multiple themes and also gives you the flexibility to create your own theme via CSS overrides. Spaz is written in pure JavaScript , XHTML and CSS making it completely customizable by users. Audible alerts and separate listing of friends and followers makes it an ideal twitter client for every serious twitter user.

Syrinx – This twitter client is only available for Leopard (OS X 10.5+). Bookmarking (marking selective tweets) and integrated search feature are some important features on Syrinx. Growl notifications are tight integrated with this twitter client. It is light on system resources with neat and clean interface. Extensive keyboard shortcuts helps you manage your twitter updates fast and quick. Syrinx allows you to customize the colors as well as sound (audible alerts) that suits your taste. You can also customize the auto-updating frequency and scrolling behavior. You can also pause all the twitter updates and can resume it later with a click of a button.

Tweetr – This light weight twitter client is available for Mac and Windows. You can send files of size up to 10MB via tweetr. Just drag the files in tweetr window. It will automatically upload the file and will provide you a short URL to share it with your friends. tweetr has in-built URL shortening (hurl.ws) support. You can freely resize and drag the window to any part of the desktop. It also supports system tray integration on Windows platform. It also lets you share snaps from your webcam with your twitter followers. The file sending option and webcam support makes it stand apart from the rest. TweetIdeal for twitter users who regularly send and receive files from their twitter network.

TweetDeck – It is one of the most popular twitter clients with large user-base. Multi-column twitter timelines, powerful twitter search and custom groups makes it an ideal twitter client for power users. It has a rich URL shortening support. You can also update your Facebook account via Tweetdeck. You can also use the TwitScoop cloud to keep you updated about what’s hot on twitter. Tweetdeck updates itself automatically and has various customization options including custom colors. The only issue that is frequently raised by users is the memory usage. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux platform.

Tototl – Currently, Tototl is only available for Mac platform. It supports 3 languages (English, Japanese and Spanish). It is one of the fastest and light weight twitter desktop client. Since it uses SSL for connection encryption, it keeps your twitter login credentials absolutely safe from hackers. The future versions may also support custom themes which will be highly customizable by users and native plugins support. Soon its Windows and Linux versions are also coming out. Tototl is ideal for casual twitter users who does not have large number of active followers. It also uses DSA signed updates for maximum security of your twitter conversation.

Twibble – This excellent twitter client is available for Mac and Windows. It supports multiple twitter accounts that can be managed as separate tabs. It has in-built location awareness support and can tell the exact location of any twitter follower via Google maps. It also understands GPS positioning sent via twibble mobile. Twibble updates itself automatically and supports keyboard shortcuts for fast and easy account management. On windows platform it can minimize to system tray. It’s light weight and impressively fast with equally attractive interface. Tweets are highlighted in different colors depending on their type for easy readability. You can customize various options via its rich custom settings option.

Twidget – Currently, it is only available for Mac platform. This light weight twitter client is ideal for casual users who doesn’t have large network of active followers. Some of the features include auto-updating timelines, alerts for new tweets, new version availability alert, links to DM’s and twitter contacts and much more. You can also favorite selective tweets directly from within the refreshing timeline. Twidget also allows you to collapse and expand the timeline window at will. Future versions will have Growl notifications, audible notifications, URL shortening support, multiple language support and flexible resizing option.

twhirl – This was the first twitter client used by me. twhirl is the second most popular desktop client after Tweetdeck and offers tons of options for every serious twitter user. Custom themes, URL shortening (digg.com, bit.ly, snurl, twurl or is.gd), flexible resizing, audible alerts are some of the features of twhirl. You can do profile as well as keyword search with twhirl. It updates itself automatically and is available for Mac and Windows platform. It can also cross-post your tweets to Jaiku and Ping.fm. You can also tweak twitter API settings according to your activity. It supports multiple languages and several themes. Here’s a basic twhirl guide for beginners.

Twitter Thingy – You can use Twitter Thingy on Mac, Windows and Linux. It supports custom groups and twitter search. You can type in your search queries is an expandable search bar at the bottom of the window. It is light on system resources and has quite attractive interface making it an ideal choice for an average twitter user. You can update your public timeline with a single click and can also favorite selective tweets. You can also delete your own tweets directly from within the timeline. Twitter Thingy caches your twitter timeline for fast response to search and updates. Automatic updates are not supported by Twitter Thingy.

Twitterrific – This twitter client has stunning interface and is light on system resources. It supports multiple twitter accounts and provides access to user profile pages with a single click. It supports audible alerts and keyboard shortcuts. You can also set custom hotkey for showing and hiding tweets. twitterrific also supports deletion of your own tweets and has customizable timeline auto-refresh intervals. Replies and direct messages are displayed inline highlighted with different colors for easy readability. Through custom settings you can also set window auto-hiding. There are two more variants of twitterrific for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Twitter Studio – It is only available for Mac platform. Growl notifications has been tightly integrated with this impressive twitter client. Twitter Studio updates itself automatically and supports profile lookups displaying user information within the application window. You can also set custom notification settings and custom twitter API settings. It also displays refresh rate limit indicator to help you set the optimum refresh rate. Future versions will support Twitpic integration, custom color schemes, tweet deletion support, custom groups, search functionality, menu bar quick access icon, iTunes plugin and much more. Twitter Studio comes with impressive interface and is not a resource hog.

Twittia – This light weight twitter client is only available for Mac platform. Growl notifications are integrated with this excellent and simple-to-use twitter client. You can view your public timeline, DM’s and replies in different tabs. Twittia also allows you to set custom refresh intervals with desired volume of audible alerts. It also supports Twitpic to share pictures with your twitter network. The interface is clean and attractive making it an ideal choice for an average twitter user. It also supports twitter search for displaying selective tweets containing the keywords you are looking for. You can open multiple search tabs at a given time giving you custom twitter streams containing the keywords that are under your watch.

StumbleUpon Guide For Bloggers: Building Traffic – The Right Way

Social media has completely changed the way traffic was pulled to blogs and websites. The core long-term traffic building concepts still remain the same (organic traffic from SE’s), which are now supplemented by social media marketing to get the desired results at a much faster pace. StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social media services that have the capability to bring loads of traffic to your blog. Let’s see how to use it correctly to its full potential.

Preparing For The Avalanche

Pulling traffic from StumbleUpon and leveraging the incoming traffic effectively are two different things. Before we dive into stumbling, we must prepare our blog to increase the conversions.

Decent theme and clean navigation – StumbleUpon traffic tends to exhibit impatient behavior and high bounce rate in certain conditions. They are known to immediately leave the poorly designed sites topped with cluttered navigation. So the first step is to fix these two things.

Don’t make them wait – It’s not just about the appearance and clean navigation. A sluggish theme is the best way to repel StumbleUpon visitors. Tweak your theme and practice speed optimization techniques to make your blog a flyer.

Give some meat to stay – Since SU traffic is volatile in nature, you must have a healthy archive to give them a reason to stay. Highlight your best work close to the main content to increase the probability of a highly engaged visit.

Call for action – Place subscription box and freebie offerings at targeted places. Make them loud to attract the attention of the visitor.

Stumbling All The Way

To get the maximum benefit from StumbleUpon you need to avoid certain mistakes that you may do inadvertently.

When we submit a web page to SU, it goes into main database and may or may not get queued to spread across StumbleUpon community. I’ll explain later in a section when your content may not get queued and may get buried forever.

Knit a large net (Tag Wisely) – Generally, we concentrate more on the number of votes a submission may get. Our main concern is to get maximum number of reviews and votes for a submission. Have you ever experienced a submission getting almost no traffic despite getting decent votes? One of the reasons that may dry up the traffic can be – wrong way of tagging. Let’s take an example to understand it clearly. Suppose you have written a post about designing a blog header. You happily got it submitted via your friend who tagged it with the following tag (header-deign).

The more you narrow down your tags, the more you limit its reach. Every StumbleUpon user has a set of preferences that suggests the type of content he/she may prefer to receive. Tagging with more broader and generic terms opens the possibility of capturing a larger audience. While delivering the web page, SU algorithm examines the tags a submission has received. Once your submission starts getting reviews and votes, generic tags helps in disseminating your content to larger user-base. Here are some guidelines to tag your submissions properly.

1. Use generic tags.
2. Use multiple tags separated by comma.
3. Do not use more than 2 words in a single tag.
4. Do not give more than 5 tags.
5. Keep them short, clear and unambiguous.

How to make your submission dead – Here’s how you can make your submission dead even before it gets its second vote. Open the web page that has not been discovered yet. Now without discovering/stumbling it, use the ‘Send to’ feature on SU toolbar and ask your friend to discover it. As soon as he obeys you – Boom! This submission will remain in the main database but may not go into queue at all. So the rule of the thumb is – Never ever send any web page using the ‘Send to’ feature that has not been discovered. Try it once and see the results.

StumbleUpon authority – Needless to say, a stumble from a power-user can bring tons of traffic. Interestingly, if he is not the part of your network and stumble your submission organically, you will receive much more traffic than the other way round. How to build your StumbleUpon authority and how to identify a power user on SU? That’s very simple. Look for a profile getting large number of testimonials (Good meaningful testimonials). Now look for his stumbling activity and his reviews. A power user writes descriptive reviews and doesn’t limit himself to few chosen topics.

SU Power User = (Large Number of Testimonials + Descriptive Reviews)

Ready to network with some top stumblers? Here’s a list of most active stumblers that have earned the status of a power user.

Avoid closed user groups – It is common for people to form a voting group and then vote for each other. When web pages from a domain receive stumbles (first few stumbles) from a group of users over long period of time, gradually the traffic subsides down with each new submission and such voting activity. A time comes when votes from this group has no effect on the submission. SU algorithm is smart enough to detect this phenomenon and to track any such activity.

Reviews are like blog comments – As I mentioned before, writing meaningful and descriptive reviews does help in making the submission go viral. If you are helping your friend then take some pain to write an original descriptive review instead of copy pasting the text from the post.

Timing matters – And last but not the least is the time of submission. This applies to almost any social bookmarking activity. Choose the peak hours to get your post submitted on StumbleUpon. The morning hours of mid-week is the best time to submit content to various social bookmarking sites.

I generally try to avoid stumbling my own content and would advice the same to you. Be an active stumbler, generously submit others’ content and give meaningful reviews. They will eventually RECIPROCATE giving you the required spikes in traffic.