One important thing to consider if you’d like to blog professionally is the platform you’ll use. There are many free and paid options out there, but for a number of years now, WordPress has been the platform of choice for professional bloggers. Six Apart is trying to change that with the recent release of it’s very own Movable Type Pro, which mixes blogging, content management and social networking. And did I mention that it’s free?

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There’s one thing you must admit if you want to have a stickier blog or site: most people don’t have the patience to read large blocks of text.

Pay attention to your own online reading habits. How do you react when you see long paragraphs? Don’t you feel discouraged to read on? Don’t you prefer reading shorter paragraphs? Even if you do feel comfortable reading long blocks of text, keep in mind that you’re the exception. The general Internet audience has different tastes. An in order to succeed as a webmaster or blogger, you must take into consideration the browsing and reading preferences of your visitors.

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Have you realised that a good, eye-catching site design can be a great ally in your link building efforts? Let me show you how to go about this.

Why you could use a beautiful design for link building

People just love beauty. It’s a fact. Not that you should feel miserable if your site doesn’t look that good. Content still matters and always will. However, when you have a truly good-looking site or blog, many people will want to share its link with others regardless of the content’s quality. Besides, there are many sites which specialise in linking to beautiful pieces of web design.

A beautiful design will certainly create backlink opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

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I bet you have read several articles on how to build links by leaving comments on do-follow blogs. But you must know that the vast majority of blogs have the “no-follow” attribute appended to all links left in their comment areas, hence hindering them from passing link juice.

Should all those blogs be ignored by you? Of course not! There’s a way to use them in your link building campaigns and I’m going to tell you what it is: leave several good comments on several no-follow blogs to get noticed by the bloggers and their readers.

Yes, it’s that obvious. And if you don’t have any spamming tendencies, you’ll find it very easy as well.

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It may sound like a phrase taken out of Stephen Hawking’s books, but “infinite space” on the web is simply defined as “very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index.” Needless to say, it’s a bad thing, and can lead to bandwidth congestion issues, or worse - Googlebot may not be able to index your site’s content completely.

A good example are calendars, which usually have a “Next Month” link. Since time is (almost) infinite, it’s possible to crawl through these links successively, onto a faraway future date, without much usuable content getting indexed. In effect, the search spider got trapped in “infinite space” instead of getting on to index your other content-filled pages. Now, Googlebot is smart, but apparently not smart enough just yet. It can figure out some of these types of URLs on its own, but it has its limits, and therefore needs human intervention some of the time.

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It all boils down to convenience, and for some people, picking up their hard-earned AdSense earnings thru Western Union Quick Cash is the way to go. No more waiting for checks in the mail or for bank clearance. Now, Google has added even more countries for this payment method, including Bulgaria, Egypt, Lithuania, Morocco, and Taiwan, bringing the total number to 14. If you’re interested, here’s the full list of countries currently in the program:

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The date range operator is one of those great yet little-known, rarely used Google search strings. As a webmaster/blogger, you shouldn’t ignore it though.

How does Google’s date range search operator look like?

Here it is:

desired search term daterange:2007 january-2008 june

Of course, you must replace the phrases and dates by the ones you want to research. For instance, if you want to search for SEO tips published between Jan/2005 and Dec/2006, type the following on Google’s search box:

seo tips daterange:2005 january-2006 december

Now choose a topic and try it for yourself.

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People are spending more and more time on the Internet, and yet most companies are slow to spend their advertising dollars online. As the undisputed leader in the industry, Google is trying to find ways to lure more ad spending on their network by improving their product offerings. After acquiring DoubleClick and retiring its referral ads program, Google made another announcement about its advertising arm. In a bid to enhance the functionality and quality of their ads, the following features are going to be made available in the coming months:

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All over the Internet you can find guides and tutorials that will teach you how to make money by creating and selling eBooks. This looks like a good idea indeed. However, what I’m going to suggest is that you create a good eBook and… give it away. Yes, it means you won’t make money immediately. No, it doesn’t mean you won’t make money later.

Why should I offer my eBooks for free when I could be selling them?

There’s a good reason for this: by giving high-quality info away you’ll generate backlinks for your site or blog.

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Preserving your site or blog’s credibility is much easier than you may think. I’m going to illustrate this with two personal examples:

1. After writing my recent article on StumbleUpon traffic, I took the time to review it and compare it to the sources of information it was based on. I thanked myself for doing this: I quickly spotted some inaccuracies in my post. All I had to do afterwards was to correct the wrong bits of info, rebuild some sentences and add a few others. Of course, I took these simples measures before hitting the “publish” button. Then I reread everything again and compared the fixed article to my sources one more time. I only published the post after making sure that there wasn’t a single piece of info in it that I couldn’t claim to be true to the best of my knowledge.

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