How to use Google Alerts

How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked?
Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

Google doesn’t give you a warning when they see lots of links to black hat sites - they just stop sending traffic to the pages that contain them. If the hacker has only added the code to a few of your pages the traffic drop can be quite small and it becomes almost impossible to diagnose the problem.

Clearly what we need is some kind of easy to use method for site owners to get a notification as soon as these links are added. Because the hackers often hide the links from everybody apart from Google it’s clear that we need to leverage the Google spider to do the work for us.

Luckily Google Alerts allows us to create advanced search queries so we can set up an alert to monitor our websites for any terms that might appear when a hacker takes control. Of course we can’t monitor every term but it is a very good starting point.

To get started we need to think of a few likely spam terms that people might like to inject in our site and then use them to make up a search query:
it OR freaks OR zone OR anybadword site:itfreakszone.blogspot.com

Next simply go to Google Alerts and enter the query above into the “Create a Google Alert” box and you will get an email whenever Google spots one of your chosen spam words on your site.

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The benefits of google sitemap

Google Sitemaps enables Webmasters to Directly Alert Google to Changes and Additions on a Website. Telling search engines about new pages or new websites use to be what the submission process was all about.

Google has for a long time depended on external links from pages they already know about in order to find new websites. For webmasters and blogger Google Sitemaps is the most important development since RSS or Blog and Ping, to hit the Internet. Using RSS and Blog and Ping enabled webmasters to alert the search engines to new additions to their web pages even though that was not the primary purpose of these systems.

If you've ever waited weeks or months to get your web pages found and indexed you'll know how excited webmasters get when someone discovers a new way to get your web pages found quicker. Well that new way has just arrived in Google Sitemaps and it's a whole lot simpler than setting up an RSS feed or Blog and Ping. If you haven't heard of Blog and Ping it's a means by which it's possible to alert the search engines to crawl your new website content within a matter of hours.

If you're a webmaster or website owner Google Sitemaps is something you can't afford to ignore, even if you're also using RSS and/or Blog and Ping. The reason you should start using Google Sitemaps is that it's designed solely to alert and direct Google Search Engine crawlers to your web pages. RSS and Blog and Ping are indirect methods to alert search engines, but it's not their primary purpose. It works now, but like most things it's becoming abused. Search Engines will find ways to combat the abuse as they've done with every other form of abuse that's gone before. Abusing the search engines is a short term not a long term strategy and in some cases certain forms of abuse will get you banned from a search engines index.

You may also be thinking, don't we already have web page Meta tags that tell a search engine when to revisit a page. That's true, but the search engine spider still has to find the new page first, before it can read the Meta tag. Besides that Meta tags are out of favor with many search engines especially Google, because of abuse.

If talk of search engine spiders leaves you confused, they're nothing more than software programs that electronically scour the Internet visiting web sites looking for changes and new pages. How often the search engine spider alias robot, visits your website depends on how often your site content is updated, or you alert them to a change. Otherwise for a search engine like Google they may only visit a website once a month.

As the internet gets bigger every second of every day, the problem for search engines and webmasters is becoming evidently greater. For the search engines it's taking their search spiders longer to crawl the web for new sites or updates to existing ones.

For the webmaster it's taking longer and becoming more difficult to get web pages found and indexed by the search engines If you can't get web pages found and indexed by search engines, your pages will never be found in a search and you'll get no visitors from search engines to those pages.

The answer to this problem at least for Google is Google Sitemaps.

Google Sitemaps Benefits:

1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want
2. Your Website is crawled more Efficiently and Effectively
3. Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want
4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery
5. No Waiting and Guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages
6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines
7. The Google Sitemaps service is Free

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Avoid this blog title

Because your goal should be to different from other blogs that exists, you need to think past your initial instincts when it comes to naming your blog. Most people tend to come with similar names, and by avoiding those same traps, you start to set yourself apart from the mob.
The top ten names to avoid:

blog
news
weblog
world
life
thoughts
with
daily
from
journal

This does not mean that the use of these words will necessarily damage your brand, but rather that, if you find yourself back on the same keywords, you’re probably thinking fairly predictable. Break out, go crazy and creative with the name of your blog! Just like this blog :)

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Blog Maintenance

There are many things that all blogger must do on a regular basis to ensure that their blog remain useful and functional. Some of the tasks you should be performing are listed below.

1. People expect your blog homepage changing. If your blog is static and unchanging there is no reason for someone to come back again - after all, they've already seen it so why return? One major way to get them to come back is to change the content constantly and to be sure that your visitors know it is changing.

2. Occasionally review your blog. When you look over a page, check your grammar, spelling and accuracy.

3. Subscribe to a service which monitor your blog on a regular basis. This is important, as if your blog is constantly "bouncing" you will find it being removed from search engines and your visitor levels will drop.

4. Learn as much as you can about internet security, and ensure that, to the best of your abilities and knowledge, that your blog is secure. This ensures that your visitors information remains confidential and safe. It also protects you and your blog host from harm.

5. Promote your blog constantly. Every single day you should do something, anything, which attempts to get people to your blog. This is extraordinarily critical in order to ensure that people continue to visit your blog day after day. You can leave a comment on another blog or use any advertising programs like adsense, adbrite, etc, to increase your blog visitors.

6. Another task that must be performed on a regular basis is checking for a "broken link". It is most common with external links (sites move, are abandoned or are modified all of the time) but can occur occasionally with internal links.

7. You need to stay up-to-date on new technologies which can use to improve your blog. In addition, getting certified, joining community is essential to staying current and active.

8. A task you should be performing on a regular basis is to review your statistics. At a minimum, you should check your page counts to be sure that your blog is being viewed. At best, you need to know where people are coming from, which browsers they are using and what they visited while they were at your blog.

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Silly mistakes that you can make with text

Even in today's world of Flash animation, animated GIFs, sound files, and other special effects, the basic reason why people surf the internet is to read. Yes, the pictures and the animations are wonderful, but what people really care about is what you've got to say. That being said, it's so very important that you don't destroy your message by presenting your text in ways that discourage people from reading.

One of the most classic mistakes is to make your text very small. After all, you've got a lot to say and you want it to fit on one screen, right? So why not make it as small as you can?

There are times when you want to make a small text. A link at the bottom of your page to your privacy policy is a good example. If someone wants to see this they will find it. Otherwise, it's just something that you have to put there.

On the other hand, a very common problem is to make your text a similar color to your background. If I run into a page with everything like this I hit the back button fast.

Another mistake is to type all word in upper case. People soon learn that all caps does not mean "give me your attention" on the web - it means shout in your face. It's also a good way to get people to hit the back key on their browser.

Sometimes I see a sites which use non-standard fonts. I know that the special font which you paid a hundred dollars for is awesome, but believe me I'm not going to pay a hundred dollars just to see your web site display correctly. You can use downloadable fonts, but be aware that browser support and standards are spotty at best. Even if you do include downloadable fonts, be sure and specify alternates in your tags just in case the browser did not processing it.

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Plan Your Blog Navigation

Good navigation is the good way to keep your visitors coming back or staying very long on their first visit. You must provide a way for your visitors to find out what you've got. It's no use if no one can see it.

You want to make it difficult for your blog to succeed? Then make your navigational system difficult to understand and use. Bury your hyperlinks in a complex image map that's not obvious to the user. That's a great way to stop people from looking around your blog.

Some other things you can do to prevent users from enjoying your site:
* Put your menus only at the bottom of every page
* Scatter your links all over the page haphazardly
* Make the hyperlinks the same color as the rest of the text
* Make the menu actually move around the screen
* Make the text very, very small or in a strange font

Another huge mistake that many webmasters forgot to linking every page back to their home page. It's important to remember that search engines typically spider your entire site. This means that visitors can land literally anywhere in your site. If you are smart you will accept this fact and place a link back to the home page. And remember, this is a good way to increase your home page pagerank.

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Why your blog showing Public Service Ads?

Why your blog showing Public Service Ads?

Recheck your Adsense code was inserted properly on your webpage. Do no attempt to modify the code in any way, as it is against their terms of service. Adsense gives enough options to costumize ad colours and sizes to suit your site. USe only the official code available from their site.

There may not be any ads configured to show in your region. Lets say that these ads may be working in United States, but maybe showing PSA is Zambia. This is because Google Adwords payers can select regions where to display their ads, where they believe their target surfers are. After all why should an eye surgeon in US want to promote his service in Zambia? Try using the Google Adsense Preview Tool which helps to determine probable ads in different regions.

Your site maybe using a robots.txt file, which will may not be properly set up and prevent the AdSense crawler from crawling your web pages. Add the following two lines to the top of your robots.txt file:User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow:

Your page may contain objectionable content. This may be against Google Adsense policies. If you feel your page has no such content, then look for any objectionable keywords or phrases which may be present accidentaly. Removing such content can cause PSA’s to dissapear.

Frames may occasionaly cause difficult in indexing your page. Always remember to tick the Framed page checkbox from the Ad layout code page when generating your ad code. Similarly IFRAME’s also prevent effective indexing and cause PSA’s

Reduce your filter blocked urls. This feature is in place to allow you to block competitors ads from showing on your pages. If you block too many such urls, there may not be any advertisers left to display ads.

Remove session ID’s from urls - they changes every time a different user views a page, and the URL will not be in the indexed everytime.

Google may take time to crawl your site. Although most of the times the ads show immediately, at times it takes upto 48-72 hours for google to assess the content of newly created webpage. This usually occurs if your site has not been indexed before by Google. The time is reduced on newer pages of a site already running adsense. Google claims the ads will get better and more focussed to your pages with time.

Related articles: How to avoid Adsense PSA

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10 Firefox Add-Ons for Bloggers

ScribeFire Blog Editor
There are a number of offline blog editors that work with the major blogging platforms, but if you’re looking for a blog editor to use from inside Firefox, give ScribeFire a try.
“ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.”

TimeTracker
Running a successful blog requires efficient use of your time. The TimeTracker add-on will make it easy to see how much time your spending in your browser.
“Do you spend too much time on Firefox? Do you open tabs faster than you can close them? Cannot get things done? Keep track of how much you browse with TimeTracker.”

Sage
While there are plenty of choices when deciding on an RSS reader, Sage will function from within Firefox and integrates with its bookmark system.
“Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.”

LinkChecker
Many bloggers use a lot of links withing their posts, but testing the validity of those links can be tedious and time consumer. With the LinkChecker add-on you can quickly and easily find dead links in your posts.
“Check the validity of links on any webpage.”

Rank Checker
Rank Checker is one of my favorite add-ons because of its potential and its ease of use. Aaron Wall created rank checker and he even provides a brief video that will show you everything you need to know about using it.
“Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.”

SEO Link Analysis
For doing some research and analysis on your own website/blog or on a competitor, SEO Link Analysis will provide you with plenty of information quickly.
“Link data in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal is pretty static, they give you the pages a site has links on, and let you do all the analysis with other tools. That sucks if you want to do a quick analysis of a site, or want to get a quick overview of inbound anchor texts for a site. This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening such pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.”

Link Diagnosis
Another excellent add-on for link analysis, Link Diagnosis will give you some of the same information as SEO Link Analysis. Try them out and see which one works best for your purposes.
“This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more.
* see Google Pagerank of every backlink* see Anchor text of every backlink* see if links are no-follow* see most popular anchor texts* see charts with breakdown of pagerank and link types* CSV exports* Firefox 3 support”

Zemanta
Depending on the type of blogging you do and the content that you produce, Zemanta may be a fun and efficient tool for improving your process.
“Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.”

Clipmarks
Clipmarks is part bookmarking, part social sharing. If you do a lot of surfing, like most bloggers do, this could be a handy resource to keep track of things that you find and to share the best with your friends.
“Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment.”

Copy as HTML Link
If your use a lot of links in your posts, Copy as HTML Link could give you a nice boost in efficiency.
“Creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text and copies it (into the clipboard) for pasting into other applications.”

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