We have all seen advertisements for other websites on Google and various search engines that work to consistently drive traffic to those sites. Unfortunately, many of us cannot afford to take out a major campaign to advertise our sites and so we must resort to other measures. There are plenty of examples of free advertising that any webmaster can do to increase the likelihood of someone discovering and browsing his or her site. These tricks outlined below will help to increase traffic, promote your PageRank and increase your site’s visibility over the short-term and long-term.

Join Online Forums

This is a great way to increase your traffic and visibility. There are many premium forums and discussion boards all across the internet that rank high in search results and have lots of members and visitors, and there is no better place to start your advertising binge. Make accounts with several forums (the higher the PR, the better) and gradually grow your reputation here. Over several weeks, try to plug your site whenever it is relevant and helpful. This is great for traffic and when posted on high PR sites, will earn you valuable backlinks. You can also earn backlinks from having your URL in your forum profile and signature.

Submit to Directories

There are tons of site directories out there that allow you to add any given site for free to its databanks, with many of these directories having high PR. What this means for you is added credibility in search engine rankings, which will increase your traffic even more. Some of the best directory sites out there include DMOZ (unique content required), Yahoo (non-commercial sites), and the WWW Virtual Library. This should be one of your first steps in optimizing your site for SEO and also a great way to increase your advertising potential.

Reciprocate

In your quest to rise to the top of search results, you will probably come across other like-minded sites that may be in the same boat. While in many cases these sites may be viewed as competition, you should be able to discover some sites that you can begin link building with in order to improve your traffic and number of backlinks. It never hurts to ask a fellow webmaster if they are interested in such an affiliation; just make sure that the sites in question are relevant to one another. Linking to other sites without discrimination can lead to other PR rankings due to penalties assigned by having a larger than necessary amount of irrelevant links on your site.

Hit Up Social Networks

Some of the best advertising in the world can be found on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. If just one person shares your link or story, you can instantly gain access to hundreds – if not thousands – more impressions and clicks. If you want to simplify your link and hide the full URL (perfect for sites like Twitter with character limits), then you may want to try the URL Shortener Tool from Pingler. It will consolidate your URL into a short string of characters that can then be used without losing all of your available typing space.

After having an email account for several years, you probably are used to checking your email each morning and finding dozens of emails from a variety of sources.  Many of these e-mails are a result of you signing up for accounts with other companies and websites, while some have obtained your email address by purchasing it so they can send you unrelenting amounts of spam.  Whether you have just created a new e-mail address or are trying to save your existing one from spam, these tips will go a long way in keeping your inbox free from junk.

Unsubscribe

If you are receiving an endless supply of junk in your inbox, try looking at the bottom of each email for unsubscribe options.  In most countries, the law requires that companies offer a way for you to unsubscribe from their email lists and to be freed from the daily and/or weekly barrage of emails.  Generally, there is a link at the bottom on which you can click.  You will be redirected to their website or that of the company that manages their email service.  From here, simply input your email address and you will be removed from these problems.  I managed to decrease my email load by 50% just through this one trick.

Avoid Unnecessary Checkboxes

Whenever we are filling out registration forms and the like, we may neglect to notice that there are “voluntary” checkboxes that will be automatically selected in order to have permission to blast us with tons of emails.  Always make sure to read over what each checkbox entails in order to avoid any new spam from making it into your inbox.  Checkboxes such as these can make the difference between getting one email per month from a company versus one email per day.  Anything such as “Can we contact you?”, “Would you like to receive offers every hour?” and the like are clear signs of this.

Create An Alternate Email Address

Many people simply keep more than one email address for the purpose of keeping their primary email address’ inbox clean and clear of spam.  Whenever you register for a new product, website or service, you can use the alternate email as a way to collect whatever information is necessary or to activate an account.  This will keep you protected while still having full accessibility.  Generally speaking, you can use an email account like this for all other things besides your personal correspondence, which would remain on your primary email.

Don’t Give Out Your Email

You would be surprised at how quickly someone can find your email address when posted online, in forum profiles or in other similar circumstances.  Never give out your email in its actual form: rather, use a tool such as Pingler’s Email to Image Converter to make sure that your email address cannot be simply copy and pasted by a bot or user into a list that they will then sell to spammers later on.  Doing this is perfect, especially for posting online advertisements on sites where bots are notorious at crawling the pages for email addresses.

If you are an entrepreneur that suddenly has found his or herself having to take care of dozens of niche sites, it can be overwhelming at times to keep all of them optimized and full of up-to-date content. While each site’s needs are not particularly time consuming individually, the cumulative effort needed to keep large numbers of sites running can be more than a full time job, especially if you are creating all of the content. In order to be successful at managing an array of websites, you must have a game plan for dealing with each specific niche. All of the ideas presented here today will help you begin sorting through your situation and help you get your website management ordeal under control.

Consolidate Hosting, Use Website-Friendly Providers

One of the easiest ways to reduce the amount of time you will spend maintaining each site is to consolidate all of your sites onto one server or hosting plan. While many people may already do this, there are tons of webmasters out there that have acquired sites over time and have left them on various servers. Some people argue that having sites spread out prevents the likelihood of all of your sites being down at once, but you can also easily determine whether there is a server issue or a website issue based on whether one or all sites are affected by any given issue. There are also great hosts out there that provide an array of benefits; some plans offers automatic upgrades to all WordPress sites, which is one less thing to have to do.

Hire Third Parties

While some sites are not profitable enough to place in the hands of another person, you may be able to limit some of the work you have to do if you have some profitable sites in your portfolio. For example, a blog that requires an update once per week could have its content written by a firm for as less as $20 per month; if you are generating $50 or more per month from the blog in question, it may make sense to outsource the content or entire management to another individual or company. Content is by far the main time consumer of maintaining multiple websites, so it makes sense to trade off some of the profit in exchange for less money with less work.

Use Multiple Site Tools

For sites running on the same platform, you can push updates and changes to them all at once by using any number of tools available for things such as site updates, content publishing and link updates. Any information or content that is the same for multiple sites is a great candidate for tools such as these. There are also tools that can fetch information for you about multiple sites, with Pingler’s Multi-Rank Checker Tool being one of them. With this, you can input the URLs of up to ten websites at once and fetch both the Google PageRank and Alexa ratings for each URL. This helps save you time and lets you check on many websites at once instead of checking each URL individually.

After being in the search engine optimization game for a bit and making your first big bucks designing, creating and marketing your website, you may be ready to embark upon buying up starter websites that already are earning sums of money. Many better-off SEO enthusiasts will pay a nominal amount for a functional website with some revenue stream and then proceed to either allow that site to continue to generate income or improve its ranking and content in order to gain even more. There are many tempting offers out there regarding website sales, but not all are created equally. By following these tips, you will avoid the pitfalls of being scammed or ripped off when buying a website.

Show Me The Money

If you are attempting to buy a website from its current webmaster with the promise that this site generates revenue, then do not be afraid to ask for login credentials – not screenshots – of the accounts where money is being generated by the site. There is absolutely no reason why a seller would not provide this as he or she has total access to his or her account and can gain access back to it in the event someone (you) were to try to “run off with it”. By seeing the revenue generated directly from sales, leads or conversions, you can verify the claims of the seller.

Inspect the Site’s Setup

It is not too much to ask for the login credentials for the site as well, in order to inspect how the site is setup and what search engine optimization tactics are being used. You do not want to buy a “fresh site” that is using black hat SEO tactics to gain traffic; this will only end in your site being flagged by Google and other search engines later on and will spell the end for your potentially profitable venture. You also want to make sure that you are familiar and capable of managing the site; not all sites are designed with the same suite of software.

Get A Second Opinion

If you do not know all the ins and outs of website construction and search engine optimization, it may be a good idea to reach out to a SEO-proficient company and allow them to inspect the site in question. They will be able to tell you whether or not the site will be profitable in the short and long term and which specific SEO methods are being used to build the site’s brand. Of course, you are free to change this as you go and tweak it however you wish, but having a SEO company inspect the site prior to purchase should reduce any possible issues you may have later down the road.

Verify The Site’s Standing

There are plenty of tricks that site scammers use to trick naïve buyers into purchasing a “lame” website. One of the most common methods they use is replacing the actual site’s header with information that is relayed from another more popular site. Whenever you check the site on major rankers, it may show up with a better PageRank than it actually has. In order to eliminate this possibility, try Pingler’s Fake Rank Checker Tool. This will let you know whether the information being displayed about the website in question actually belongs to the website or is being redirected from elsewhere.

When conducting business or personal interaction on the internet, email is traditionally the primary form of communication.  As a result, gaining access to an individual’s email can be quite lucrative and you can bet that there are plenty of people out there just waiting – and maybe even actively trying – to gain access to your account and in the process, access to your banking information, sensitive personal data and personal correspondence.  There are plenty of reasons for somebody to break into your email, but there are no excuses for letting it happen. These tips will give you a better idea of what actions to take in order to protect your identity and email account.

Flavor Up Your Password

One of the easiest ways that email accounts are compromised is by users using a password that is easy to guess or similar to their email address.  Programs designed to break into email accounts through rapid password guessing can also break many easy to guess passwords in just a few seconds.  Protect yourself against this scenario by making sure that your password contains numbers, letters and even variations on capitalization.  It is also a good rule of thumb to never use the same password for your email and any other account; if that account is compromised, they may try the same password on your email account as well.

Use PGP Encryption

Whenever working with other businesses or individuals on certain tasks, it is a good idea to encrypt your emails so nobody else can read them. PGP encryption allows you to generate a key that is used to identify the person to which the email is being sent. Only that person – with their key and their own password – can open the email from you. Likewise, you must have your key and password to open any email from them. This prevents any sensitive information from being in limbo or vulnerable while in transit and also while stored on your email account.

Send Anonymous Emails

If you are needing to communicate with someone whom you would like to hide your email address from, then Pingler’s Anonymous Email Tool can be a lifesaver. Simply input the email address of the person you are sending it to, an email address from which it appears to come from, a subject and the content of the message. You can send an email to anyone without using your name or email address. We can easily think of many good reasons for using this tool and we’re sure you can, too.

Employ Common Sense

Finally, there are plenty of old school tactics that you can use to minimize the threat of someone invading your email. Never open an attachment from a source you do not recognize, never give out your email password and avoid giving out your email address to everybody. Many people keep two accounts: one for personal use and one for use with accounts and junk mail. Remember: the fewer people and entities that are aware of your email address, the fewer people who will potentially have access to it.

There comes a time in every webmaster’s life where he or she realizes that the site they designed is now either out of date or lacking in aesthetics and functionality. It’s a careful balancing act to make sure that the site in question is fully featured without crossing the line and making it seem like a cluttered mess. Particularly the case if you are coding your site from the ground up, you are 100% responsible for having everything in the right place. When considering a revamped site design for your new, existing or upcoming website, please keep these ideas in mind as ways to add a little something extra without going over the top.

Social Buttons

While most content management systems now have social networking functionality built in, you will need to add these manually if you are in charge of the maintenance of the site and have built it through your own hard work. There are examples of social buttons all over the web and they are used for everything from Facebook to Google+ and LinkedIn. For sites that have been built from the ground up, these buttons will help add an extra layer of functionality and sharing options that may otherwise be lacking from your online presence.

Web Widgets

Web widgets are great for adding specific content to your site that may be relevant to what your site already offers. For example, if your site is a major relay of news and opinion, you may find widgets released by CBS News and CNN to be of value. Likewise, sites dealing with sports may wish to use a widget available from ESPN or USA Today Sports. There also are tools such as Widgetbox and WordPress plug-ins that allow you to make your own widget boxes; making your own widget gives you total customization control and you can mix and match any and all topics of your choosing.

Date/Time Feature

While such a simple feature, having the time and date on your site can come in handy for your visitors for a number of reasons. One example of this utility is if your customers are logging on to respond to a last-minute sale and want to make sure that they haven’t missed the cutoff, they can refer to the site time to verify whether or not they can still take part in your sale. Using UNIX for this is ideal, and Pingler offers a Date to Timestamp tool that allows you to input the date and time on your website using a constant, standard method.

JavaScript

Last but not least, JavaScript is an important tool and should already be incorporated into your site’s design.  While some forms of JavaScript can cause issues for your site with search engine ranking systems, the versatility of JavaScript by and large can be used without worry. Some of the key functions of JavaScript include navigation assistance, user prompts and other client side selections. This is great for running stores and other dynamic, interactive pages as you can relay your customers/visitors through various portals on your site as needed.

Despite concerns that the nofollow tag that accompanies Twitter links means that PageRank and other algorithms are not changed by links posted to Twitter, the reality is that Twitter’s social links have essentially canceled out this issue, giving you the ability to build both your presence and backlinks through Twitter.  Since social links now work the same as backlinks, you can use Twitter just like any other website for posting links to: since Twitter is a high-quality, authority site, this makes posting on Twitter smart and necessary in building an extensive backlink presence.  Here are some guidelines to consider when building your backlinks on this social networking platform.

Develop A Solid Profile

One of the best and cheapest ways to expand your presence on Twitter is by building up your own account(s) that can be used to push your links to others.  Not only will this expand your presence through backlinks (thanks to your established Twitter profile) but others who see you message may end up passing it along, adding even more backlinks and traffic to your site.  Twitter profiles that are established typically have lots of followers, a low follower to following ratio and lots of incoming links to the profile page.  While you are working on establishing your own authority Twitter profiles, you may want to consider the next option as a short-term solution for boosting backlinks and traffic.

Hire A Twitter Pro

While Twitter remains relatively demonetized by its owners, those in search engine optimization and advertising have learned how to make money helping others with their own endeavors. There are plenty of “Twitter services” on the web that offer everything from established Twitter accounts (typically very pricey) to backlinks on a per-mention basis. The best and cheapest short-term route is to pay a Twitter user to post your link to their followers several times over a period of a few days. This approach is very effective and will give you backlinks and traffic.

Communicate With Others

Twitter is a large community but many personal connections can be built by reaching out to other users. When someone needs help, answer their questions. When you are polite, friendly and approachable, you will find that many people will want to follow you and as a result, you will build authority on your Twitter accounts. You will also be amazed at how many people will voluntarily re-tweet your links for you if you are simply nice to them. Communication is everything – it’s obviously the essence of Twitter – and you will achieve great results by using this approach.

Track Your Progress

After using Twitter for some time, it can become more difficult to track back all of your backlinks manually. Thankfully, there is no need as you can track everything by using Pingler’s Twitter Links Finder as a way to see where you’ve got backlinks and how you are proceeding with saturating the platform with your offerings. You can check each page simply by typing in the URL; results of the number of backlinks on Twitter for the page in question will then be displayed for you to record.

Being able to validate the HTML that is displayed on your pages is a basic component of being a good webmaster.  In our search across various big name sites, we found that many do not have validated HTML in their pages, meaning that their websites are inconsistent with W3C standards.  HTML validation is a result of these standards, which aim to gradually unite all browsers and versions under one uniform set of HTML guidelines and will eliminate the need for different site versions based on browser or the differences in the same web page noticed from various computers.  While these standards may not be at the top of your worry list, here are some reasons why you should want to validate your site’s HTML code.

Future Compatibility

With each browser version release, the uniform adoption of W3C HTML Validation comes even closer.  While not necessarily an imminent reason to upgrade your site, you will ultimately need to make these changes.  There are benefits to doing this: for starters, all future browsers and versions will support the same standard HTML protocols and will therefore display your pages identically across all platforms.  This has been a major issue for many webmasters, especially with multiple popular browsers on the market. Those who are truly concerned with avoiding the display problems always validate their HTML.

Current Compatibility

This is a more pressing issue for webmasters: making sure that their current code isn’t causing conflicts with visitors’ browsers that leads to them not using the site in the future.  Sometimes, coders will use specific HTML that is only used in one browser.  This is not considered validated HTML and can in some instances cause problems for people using other browsers.  In nearly every instance, there is a standard HTML command that will work across all browsers, even if the function currently is confined only to one browser.  If your site is several years old, it is time to consider revamping the code and standardizing it.

Problem Elimination

Finally, you may find that unresolved issues with your current site may magically disappear after engaging in HTML validation and correcting any discovered errors.  Since errors are obviously not considered to be standardized HTML, any validation tool should find these errors and point them out to you immediately.  While some problems will be simply with the code itself, you are also likely to find fragmented tags and unnecessary script located within the pages that can be removed as well.  This will make your pages load quicker, take up less space and use less bandwidth as well as make your website a professional piece of work – inside and out.

Online HTML Validation Tool

A great tool to use for validating HTML is Pingler’s HTML Markup Validator. This works for pages that are already online; simply provide the URL of the page in question and let Pingler’s validator tell you where to begin to make your site fully compliant with all future browsers. The code is automatically compared against the latest W3C standards so you will always be able to determine whether or not your site is up to date.

For those of us who host our own websites, we know how much of an ungrateful task it can be.  Nobody says anything when the site is up and running just fine, but the second it experiences a problem, we all know where to look for the complaints (i.e.: your inbox).  It ends up resulting in lost customers/viewers and a decreased sense of reliability by those who consistently view your website.  If you want to take action to prevent some of the biggest issues from arising and wreaking havoc, then please consider the following tips that will help you maximize your website’s uptime and prevent unnecessary crashes.

Remove the Troublemakers

Two of the biggest problems for individuals hosting their own websites are email and DNS services.  These services are (sometimes) integral to your site’s success and can be easy to setup and get running, but to keep them up and manage them effectively may cause recurring problems for the server they’re on and hence, your website.  By outsourcing these tasks to another server, you can eliminate the chance of these services interfering with your site’s performance and uptime.  Rackspace works wonders for email hosting and sites like Verisign and easyDNS will give you help with your DNS needs.

Monitor the Status

One of the biggest contributors to downtime on many websites is the lack of being aware of the situation.  There are plenty of programs that can be setup on your server that will send out alerts to your email whenever an outage occurs, which will help minimize the amount of time your website is offline.  If you have part of your site hosted on your own server and other parts through a hosting company (as suggested above), there may be tools available on the hosting company’s end that will automatically alert you at no extra cost.

Hire An Expert

If you manage multiple sites and need constant, professional monitoring and service, then you may want to consider contracting with a professional to make sure that uptime is maximized.  Even if you are notified of an outage, if you are nowhere near a computer or applicable device, you will not be able to do anything about it.  You can hire someone who will maintain your site in times of outages for a very small fee and have peace of mind in the process.  Always be sure to verify beforehand whether or not the company in question is worth the price.  There are many review sites and forums on the web that will help you determine this.

When There’s an Outage

Often times, we can tell what specifically is causing the problem by examining the affected ports on the server.  Pingler offers a tool known as the Website Status Checker that will tell you which specific ports are responding, giving you the knowledge to figure out what services are currently down on your website.  It scans all of the types of ports that you typically check during a site outage (HTTP, FTP, POP3, Secure Shell, DNS, WHOIS), and many more.  It’s free to use and makes figuring out what’s going on a lot easier.

CSS – on the surface – is a very simple web-based language that uses common syntax and phrases that make it simple to customize elements in a variety of aspects.  Digging deeper into the language, however, can reveal lots of formatting issues, redundancies and code errors that can cause your CSS to not perform as well as it should and this is what will separate the CSS professionals from the novices.  Here is a list of several of the most common big mistakes that can appear in CSS code along with some solutions for replacing the errors and making sure your end result checks out.

Use Hexadecimal, Not Names

Being lazy is not an admirable trait in CSS and can lead to code incompatibilities and inconsistencies.  For example, each browser may read your color codes differently when using “red” or “blue” than when using “FF0000” or “G5Y7F3”.  In order to guarantee the colors displayed through your CSS scripts are being displayed exactly how you wish, use a color sheet or hexadecimal generator that gives each color a specific, uniform definition.  Using traditional color names can add extra code that increases the overall file size of the script, which is another reason to avoid its use.

Avoid Redundant Properties

To give an example, let’s say we have the following two elements: #element-1 and #element-2.  Both elements have the same attributes (font-style, color, margin, padding) but in a poorly written example of CSS, we may still see these elements separately.  By combining the elements into something like this: #element-1, #element-2, followed by the common code, you can give both elements the same attributes with roughly half of the code, which simplifies the code’s readability and decreases overall file size.  This comes in handy when having to make changes and will save you tons of time in the long run.

Eliminate White Space

For clarity and ease of use to the human eye, many coders will leave chunks of white space separating important elements so that quick changes can be made and errors can be spotted easily.  After the code has been finalized, however, you will want to eliminate these white spaces in order to have successfully reduced the file size to the smallest amount possible.  Yes, even these spaces take up valuable file space and when speed is everything, you want to have your CSS code as compacted and minimized as possible.

Use Validation Tools

Finally, once you have made all of the optimizations and corrections you can see and think of, locate a CSS validation tool to confirm whether or not your code is properly written and executed prior to deployment.  One of the ways you can check this is by using Pingler’s CSS Validator Tool, which will let you know whether or not your code meets the validation standards set forth by the W3C.  Simply upload the code to the web, direct the CSS Validator tool to the URL of the code and it will inform you whether or not said code is up to par.  It doesn’t get much easier than that.