Posts

In my perspective, bounce rate (BR) is one of the major search engine ranking signals for a blog. If it’s below 70, search engines like Bing, Google will love your site, and they’ll rank it higher than low-quality sites. If your site’s BR is high (above 90), it will rank low in search engines. If you’re an owner of such website, use the below strategies to reduce bounce rate. Add a search widget in sidebar Believe it or not guys! The search bar is one of the most important elements on a blog. All top blogs in the world will have a search utility. When a visitor lands on your website and doesn’t find a relevant article, he/she will use the search utility to find a relevant article. If your blog navigation is not good, the search bar will come in rescue. If your site doesn’t have it, add a search bar immediately. You can create one for your blog with Google CSE. ...

Drupal can be installed on any number of environments, but since it was developed primarily to run on an Apache server with PHP and MySQL database, it makes sense to mimic this environment as much as possible in a development sandbox. There are LAMP applications for both Windows (WAMP / XAMP) and Mac OS (MAMP) which can serve as a Linux replacement, however recent innovations with Virtual Machines and Vagrant means that we can re-create a more native environment for development quickly and easily. Below I will describe how you can setup Drupal using some of these tools in less than 10 minutes. The Vagrant setup used here is Scotch Box. The objective is to setup a Drupal development environment with full LAMP stack capabilities including command line access and Drush integration using the native Linux file system for speed and compatibility. ...

Lately I’ve been carrying out some work involving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). There is tons of information about FOIA on the web including on the official foia.gov website, however I decided to summarize the main points of this law in an easy to read / digestible format. This article is broken down into three main parts, a brief intro, the main areas covered in the law, and concludes with the exemptions. ...

Commentluv is a powerful WordPress plugin that comes in 2 versions – free & paid. The free version can be found in WordPress.org directory, and it has limited features. The premium or paid variant of CommentLuv offers many interesting and useful utilities that help a webmaster in many ways. When paid or free version of this plugin is active on a blog, visitors will be able to add any of the ten latest posts in the comments. Commentluv premium plugin maintains the number of clicks on a link generated by it. ...

Have a blog and want to start making money online with it? We’ve shortlisted the most widely used website monetization strategies through this article. Many bloggers around the world use these monetization methods and they have been successful so far. To execute these strategies successfully, make sure that your website gets minimum unique 200 visitors every day through search engines or social networks. If you don’t have a blog, go through this article Blogger vs WordPress and read our review of Hostgator and A small orange. You’ll get an idea of what online career and blogging is all about. Here are the 4 most widely used methods to monetize a blog. ...

I recently migrated this site to Media Temple’s managed Wordpress hosting plan. For a number of years I had been running a dedicated server through CoreNetworks, which I have been extremely happy with. More recently however I have come to realize I no longer have the need for dedicated server and began researching cheaper managed hosting alternatives, which brought me to Media Temple. Over the years I have heard a lot of good things about this company so when I found out about their WordPress plans, I decided to make the plunge and migrate carnaghan.com to its new home. So far my experiences have been relatively positive. ...

For a while now I have been using WAMP as my daily driver for Drupal development on my Windows 8 machine. For anyone who is a Drupal developer and uses WAMP (or a variation LAMP stack on Windows) has probably felt the pain it brings in terms of sluggishness, incompatibility with native Linux applications (Drush anyone?), and a headache administer PHP modules. I won’t even get into the problems I’ve had in the past getting cURL to work properly in Windows. I decided it was finally time for me to explore Vagrant as I had heard a lot about it but had never taken the time to do any amount of research. ...

I am often interested in hearing about how people within the software development community keep up with the latest changes in tools, technologies and programming languages. It seems that every few months there is a new framework or better way of doing something in an entirely new tool-set or language. For me personally, I don’t have much time during the day to spend reading the latest industry blogs and online development new outlets, so to help supplement this I routinely listen to a number of podcasts on my commute to and from the office. ...

A Blog’s income directly depends on the number of visitors your site gets from search engines. In AdSense terms and conditions, it is clearly stated that a user should avoid all fake methods of generating traffic. Affiliate marketing doesn’t have strict terms and conditions. My blog’s traffic was down several times but I never gave up. When I started with blogging, for the first 6 to 7 months, there were just 500 to 600 visitors/month to my site. When it was affected by a penalty, the traffic dropped to 100 or 200 visitors. These stats were not enough to generate a decent income nor was I eligible for AdSense program. Now the traffic has increased more than 10 times, 50 percent of my online income is from Adsense and the rest comes from four affiliate programs. Before the year 2016 ends, I expect my blog traffic to increase over 10000 UV/day. Here are the techniques I used to improve traffic to my blog. ...

When it comes to blogging and search engine optimization, no other on-page element is as important as title and meta descriptions. According to Google webmaster guidelines, every page on a WordPress blog must have unique meta description and title. If you don’t follow this guideline, your site won’t rank well in search engines, and if you’ve verified your blog with Google Webmaster tools, you’ll see duplicate tag warning in HTML improvements section of your GWT account. Meta description is one of the most important on-page elements as it is the first thing that a search engine users see (if your site appears in the search results) when they search for some information. If you’ve not added relevant keyword and a useful short information in this tag, the user will not visit your blog. Meta description length should not be less or more than 170 characters, and it shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords. ...