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Google has tweaked its Adsense code so that the Adsense advertisements would not drag the publishers’ webpages. Acknowledging that its Adsense code could delay the loading of webpages by 12 percent on the average, Google has kept its promise and now the new Adsense code could help webpages load faster by half a second or more. This may help Adsense site rank better as Google uses site load times as one of its condition in ranking the site.

In the old Adsense code,  the AdSense javascript would load additional scripts to gather information from the web page where it resided, and send an ad request back to Google. This will delay the loading of the page a little bit.  Now, the new code  will start by creating an iFrame on the publisher’s Web site. The iFrame allows the code to work separately from the webpage, allowing the rest of the page to load without having to wait for the Google code to do its thing.

Google has done extensive testing to make sure that it would work well and easily without publishers having to make any changes. As a publisher, you don’t have to do anything as the change happens automatically.

Currently, the change is occurring globally on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. The company hopes to expand the list of supported browsers soon.

Google is trying out new feature, a new layout to their search results. The test was spotted by Patrick Altoft at Blogstorm. It gives a full page previews of the website with a blue background behind the search results when you hover over them. In the preview page, they are highlighting certain parts of the page in orange and provide a snippet of the information. This means to say that they know which part of the page a piece of the text is located.

This may or may not be a permanent feature in Google search. But if it does become a search feature in Google search, it also means that your website design plays an important part in getting clicks to your site. Website design will affect clickthroughs.

Google has recently introduced a new Google Search Option which gives users more control over their search results. This new search option allows users to “filter” their search results.

Users can select to view from a time frame of “anytime”, “recent results”, “the past 24 hours”, “the past week” or the “past year”. There is also an option to sort by date or relevance of the data, images from the page, more text  or just standard results.

Also available is the searches for related results in standard view or view in a more visual way called Wonder Wheel.

When a user performs a search on Google, there is a link under the search box which says “Show options”. When you click on this link, a left side navigation menu will appear which allows you to choose the options mentioned above.

With these new features, will SEO be affected? Is there another new algorithm to be looked into in order to get good ranking in the search results? Just to take some example, in order to get good ranking using video option, obviously you need to have video content in your page. To rank in forums searches, you have to have forum participation. And for reviews, you may have to get your products reviewed as often as possible by others or you may want to conduct reviews of other products on your site.

Well, these are just some strategies that may increase your chances. It is hard to know what Google is up to.

If you are an active internet user, you most probably have heard the name Twitter. Twitter is design with the purpose of helping friends, family, colleagues to keep in touch via the exchange of simple and frequent messages and answers to one simple question “What are you doing ?” The message is limited to only 140 characters which is short and effective enough to get the message through. Twitter helps you stay connected to your friends and always know what they are doing.

Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds lately. From business perspective,  Twitter is being used by many businesses to drive traffic to their sites or blogs. You just have to post a “tweet” whenever you have a new post on your blog and all your friends and followers will instantly be notified. When any of your followers reply to your tweet, their followers can see their reply and soon you will have a viral stream of traffic to your blog.

If you want to jump into the latest craze in the net and drives traffic to your blog, you may not want to give Twitter a miss. To make things easier, there is this plugin for Wordpress blog which enables you to tweet automatically every time you have  your blog updated. The good news is it is FREE of charge with no strings attached. You can sign up for it at Tweet My Blog. Once installed and activated, every time you post an update on your blog, Tweet My Blog plugin will automatically post a tweet with a complete full link back to your blog.  Not only that, you can activate a Tweet My Blog widget that will generate Twitter feed to your blog which will add updated content for your blog.

Google being the giant in the search business has kept its search ranking algorithm a well kept secret and even with that, users will try all ways to unveil the secret and cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate the search rankings.

Initially they were marginally successful and manage to make their newly created webpage rank quite well. But as time goes by, they have become very effective. A reporter has reported in one of his article that while researching for news story, all his five top results have led to fake pages.

It looks like Google’s top secret is no more a secret. At one time, manipulators can only guess how Google algorithm works. Now it seems that there is no more guessing games.

Very clearly, if Google fails to tackle this manipulation, users will lose trust and Google may soon see the end of its grand old days. A Googler has revealed that a ranking change is pending to put an end to spam of this kind.

Google’s famous algorithm has performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. But back then, the version of the Web was more static. The live Web presents some new challenges and lets see how Google can overcome this problem.

If you are monetizing your blog with Google Adsense, you may consider installing Adsense Deluxe plugin for Wordpress blogs. Adsense Deluxe is a very convenient plugin and easy to use. It allows you to insert Google Adsense in any part of your blog by just inserting a code in the place where you want Google Adsense to appear. It is useful especially where you want to play around with the ad format as it has an ad preview tool for you to preview the ad that will appear on your post. By just changing the ad code in the plugin, all your Google Adsense ad in your blog will change automatically. You can get the Adsense Deluxe here.

I have recently installed the plugin in one of my blog, Light And Easy, but unfortunately after activating, it reported “Cannot load adsense-deluxe.php” when I tried to add new ad block. If you have faced the same problem, here is how you can solve the problem. When you copy the plugin to your server, don’t copy the whole adsense-deluxe_wp_plugin_v0.8 folder to your wp-content or wp-content/plugin,  depends on which location you use. Instead copy the content of the adsense-deluxe_wp_plugin_v0.8 ie the 4 individual files “Optional_WordPress_2.0_Items” folder + adsense-deluxe.php + license.txt + ReadMe.txt files “. This will solve the problem easily.

Affiliate marketing is a fanstastic way to make money from your blog. After all, affiliate marketing comes with zero-risk, high margin monetization model especially if you’re promoting digital goods like e-books, software or even themes and templates. There is no need for customer support emails to answer and if done correctly it can be totally hands-free, putting passive income in your pocket in the future years to come.

However, there are a few important things you need to know when trying to promote affiliate products from your blog. These things are important to make ensure you don’t burn a hole in your pocket.

(1) Which Products Do You Promote?

You’ll notice that almost all products have an affiliate program that you can participate (mostly for free), and start promoting online from your blog. Depending on the type of product, your commissions varies from 2% to 8% (physical goods) or even up to 75% for digital goods. There are many  products to choose from, but that doesn’t mean that you should go out all the way to promote all the products you can get hold on!

Not all products are the same - some are better that others. Not all affiliate opportunities are created equal either. Just because a product is excellent, it doesn’t mean that it will sell. The “conversion rate” of a product depends entirely on a few things out of your control, for example the sales copy, the overall sales process and the available market for the product.

However, learning how to recognize good products to promote is something totally in your control. When you learn to recognize a few important clues, you’ll be able to tell if an affiliate product will sell from your blog, or if it will just waste precious pages of your blog.

(2) Getting Traffic to Your Blog

Content is important, but traffic is even more important. Without enough traffic to be making a few affiliate sales a month, you’ll eventually give up on blogging altogether. Great content on the other hand, gets better appreciation when you learn how to get traffic to your blog.

While the normal methods work, there are a few things you can do to drive more traffic. For starters, you can easily get cheap banner advertising on other related blogs who can divert tons of traffic to you. By creating a good banner and ensuring startegic placement, you can start getting fresh and quality new traffic everyday.

Another effective but more sophisticated way of getting traffic is using PPC or Pay Per Click advertising. Google AdWords is probably the most popular PPC advertising service, but there are other alternatives as well. However, remember that when you’re paying for every click to your website, you’ll want maximize your returns by creating a “landing page” on your blog.

(3) Tracking Your Affiliate Links

If you’re just promoting a handful of affiliate links on a few of your pages, you can easily keep track of what’s going on. However if you start to venture further and try to put your affiliate links on many pages and on different blogs, you’re looking at a lot of work when it comes to managing and tracking those links.

Any experienced affiliate marketer would invest in some sort of link cloaking / tracking software that at the click of a button, will give you the “big picture” of what’s happening with your affiliate marketing campaign. This will tell you which affiliate links are being clicked on, and which ones aren’t seeing any action. How else can you determine which products aren’t selling well, and which ones are working great for your particular blog?

Affiliate marketing is easy, simple and fun. But to break the barriers and start making a five-figure monthly income from your blog, you’ll need to think and act like a “Super Affiliate” These guys aren’t any smarter than you or me; they just do the right things at the right time.

Are you a blogger and wish to become a pro and get paid for blogging? Do you know that there are companies looking to hire bloggers to write for them? What are the qualities a blogger must have to qualify for the job? What do the companies want? According to Jim Turner of One By One Media, companies looking to hire a blogger want to see someone who is (1) active in a community and (2) uses social media tools to enhance his/her message. Get more tips from Jim Turner in the WebProNews video.

So you have started a blog and you are excited about it and immediately you sat down to write your articles. After a period of time, you found yourself unable to write any more articles as you have run out of ideas. You faced a mental block. You felt like giving up your blog altogether.

If you are facing the problem described above, cheer up! I have found a new service called Article Marketing Automation. Still in “Beta” it has done quite well, it has already secured 2,000 websites in its network.

By signing up for Article Marketing Automation, you can submit your articles and your articles will be published in other members’ blogs. This will create a lot of one-way links back to your blog. This will definitely give your Pagerank a boost because Google loves one-way links. This service is only available to paid members.

Alternatively, you can just sign up as a free member. To sign up as a free member, fill up the form and submit but do not pay when you are asked to. Being a free member, you can get free articles for your blog. This will save you the trouble to write your own articles. You have a choice of the topics that you want to be published in your blog. Choose only those topics that is relevant to your blog. You can have a choice whether to allow the system to automatically update your blog or personally approve the articles. You can decide how many articles you want to receive a day and also you are allowed to edit the articles as long as you don’t remove the links.

Article Marketing Automation helps you grow your blog organically and helps you grow your blog even though you have run out of ideas and mental block on what to write. But the only disadvantage is that you will have a lot of one-way links out of your blog which will affect your Pagerank. But on the bright side, it is still better than to have a stagnant blog.