I don’t have too many blogs in my RSS reader, because I prefer to keep only about 20-30 and make sure to check out all the posts. I wouldn’t have time to check them out if I added more, so I prefer keeping only the ones I really enjoy reading. Now here are my top 5 favorites, along with the ones known by everybody, like Shoemoney or John Chow. I will list them, along with my opinion about them, their “about me” page and a few posts written by them [...]

Bounce rate is a very important factor for every webmaster, because it shows how many users leave the website after visiting the first page. Everyone wants to have a very low bounce rate and this isn’t always an easy task, but I have some really good tips for you that worked really great for me. One more reason the bounce rate is so important is that if you manage to increase it by 50%, you will literally have 50% more page views on your website and you all know that [...]

The URL shortening craze started once Twitter began using TinyUrl.com to shorten all the url in tweets. When people noticed there’s going to be a lot of traffic headed to the URL shorteners, everybody made one, because it’s extremely simple. Like always, the ones who provided better services, advertised better and had more connections earned a bigger piece of the market share, and Bit.ly even took TinyUrl.com’s place and became Twitter’s default URL shortener. Lately, some of the biggest websites out there set up URL shortening services for their own [...]

Google launched Image Search back in 2001 and since then it has been much easier for people to find all images that interest them. Now, Google has just launched the all-new Image Swirl, which is practically a Wonder Wheel for images. Thanks to the new feature, you can search an image that interests you and see 12 thumbs related to your search so you can find exactly what interests you much easier. Currently, Image Swirl only works for around 200,000 queries, but many more will be soon included. Fortunately, an [...]

Google has just added search suggestions to Image Search and it doesn’t seem to be the same as for the web version. They are trying to make suggestions relevant, but there are always issues, unfortunately, especially that they are based on users behavior. You might find adult or irrelevant suggestions, but if you want to get rid of them at all, go to preferences and check “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box.”

Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads. I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. [...]

Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that. From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are [...]

Google made an announcement that they opened the Adsense network to other third-party advertisers. This is good news for both publishers and third-party advertising network. Publishers have more monetization possibilities and advertising networks deliver more traffic to their advertisers. Currently, this only works for image ads, so you will see no change if you are opted out. If you are currently using or going to use image ads, then you have to update your privacy policy to let your visitors know about the third-party ads you’re serving. We’re happy to [...]

WordPress 2.5.1 was just released and includes over 70 security fixes. Visit the download page to get it, because it improves security and it’s very important for your blog. Here is some of what they improved: Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various usability improvements Layout fixes for IE

There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that I’ve seen offer almost no useful information and only general facts that can be found everywhere. Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool [...]