Archive for the ‘Internet’ category

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How to create a good proxy site with open source and earn money from it using google adsense

Most of the useful sites like gmail,yahoo,orkut are banned in my office. That is what prompted me to search for a proxy site. The first proxy site that I started to use was blogged at a good proxy for gmail. However the IT department was uncharecteristically fast to shut down this proxy site as well. So I continued my search and prepared a list of gmail proxy sites.

During this reseach I realized that one can create a proxy of his own, put in some advertisement with adsense and make good amount of money. In this post I list some open source code that can e used to create a good proxy site.

HTTP/FTP Proxy in a CGI Script
A Simple Http Proxy Server
Java FTP Proxy Server

A webmaster’s guide to Search Engine Optimization / SEO -I

There are too many really good SEO guides written by SEO experts. However as a webmaster I found myself lost while going through many of them. So this is an attempt by a webmaster to write a SEO guide that will be better undestandable by other webmasters. (Hopefully).

What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO:

Google defines SEO as follows
Search-engine optimization means adjusting the content of your site so it ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

Shoemoney asked the same question to some of the leading experts. You can read their definitions of SEO here.

Why is SEO important?

Traffic from Search engine is free traffic. More importantly these are the users who are actively looking for buying some product. Hence they are more likely to click on an advertisement or buy a product. So you can monetize them better. Free Traffic + Better Monetization. What more can you ask for?

I want to be successful without depending on Search Engines:

Good Luck. I am not asking you to depend entirely on search engine traffic. However according to google analytics Binaryday got 62% of its traffic last month from Search engines (58% from google alone). If you think that is because binaryday is a pathetic unpopular blog then take a look at the sources of traffic for Techcrunch. Even Techcrunch depends on Google for 40% of its Traffic.

SEO is important but how do I go about it?

A good place to start your SEO activity is to go through this list of important ranking factors. According to experts the top 10 positive ranking factors are

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

There are some negative ranking factors as well. The top 10 negative ranking factors are

1. Server is OftenInaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Keyword Use in Title Tag and Keyword Use in Body Text

Incorporate keyword phrases While making a post
Think about terms that a searcher is more likely to use to search for your post and use them in the title of your post. You can find popular keywords using the tool here. AOL had released around 20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months. That is a great repository for finding popular keywords.

Target longer phrases if they’re relevant Feel free to use longer titles. Google now supports 70 character long titles.Use this title tag plugin to be able to customize the titles of your pages and posts easily.

Use the keyword and some variations of the same in the body of the post. Include the important keywords inside h1 tag once, strong/bold tag once or twice and once or twice inside the post body. However take care not to overdo it else google may think that you are trying to spam.

It is a good idea to use a good quality image describing your post wherever possible. My own experience says it is comparatively easier to get some decent traffic from google image search. Make sure to keep the image on your own website and use relevant alt and title tags.

You can check how well your existing page is targeting a particular keyword using the Term Target Tool.

Write an Attractive Meta Description

I know I know, most modern search engines have stopped using meta description as a factor for ranking search results. Then what is it doing here? Well meta description will NOT help you improve your ranking in the SERP. However given a search ranking directly, it will help you improve your click through rate. Higher click through rate means higher traffic.

This is because google uses the meta description to create the search excerpt. See the example below. The underlined text is coming from the meta description of Mywalkin

”

Golden rule for writing a rocking meta description tag. Think like you are creating a 2 line advertisement for the post. Write complete sentences and try to limit your meta description tag to less than 150 characters.

Here is a wordpress plugin for you to add custom meta description tags to your posts.

Know when your site / blog is down with www.pingdom.com

A site or blog downtime is every webmaster’s / blogger’s biggest nightmare. Now we do not need to keep checking your site to know if it is working. Set up an alert on www.pingdom.com. It will let you know if your site goes down. I am already in love with this site. Try it out for yourself.

Some nice lessons for startups to learn

This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 startup school at Stanford by Ycombinator.

Nice and inspiring lessons if you are serious for starting a startup.

Speed up wordpress blog by using WP Super Cache

A really successful wordpress blog can consume a lot of server power as each page needs to be dynamically created for each user. Now you can remove the need for doing so by using WP Super Cache plugin.

This plugin generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog. Once the file is generated your webserver will serve the static html file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Advantages of WP Super Cache

  1. It saves server power. If your blog has become popular and you are yet to move to a dedicated server, then you should use this plugin.
  2. It will speed up your wordpress blog. That in turn makes the user experience of the blog readers much better. Also a faster blog/website is liked by most search engines, including Google.
  3. Static html pages are better than dynamic ones from SEO point of view

How to change the template on blogger

Many first time bloggers start out on blogger.com blog. As the blog becomes older, you may decide to go for a new layout for various reasons including better monetization. Here is a step by step guide on how to change the template for a blogger blog.

Log into your Blogger account

go to the dashboard at the upper right corner.

Click on “Template” link

Click “Pick New” Tab

Select a template of your choice and click on “üse this template” link

Select the template of your choice, and click the “Use This Template” button.

Google reaches all-time high in search market share

Hitwise has released the latest numbers for the search engine market. Google reaches an all time high with 67.25% market share. Microsoft and yahoo continue their downward movement. Ask.com was the only other major search engine to gain market share.

Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
www.ask.com 4.09% 4.16% 3.48%

The traffic data for video sites showed that youtube dominates the video makrte completely with 73% market share. If you add 4% market share enjoyed by google video then google has a 77% market share in video.

Link out to get Traffic !!

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog :) ) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

A seedfund for internet startups in India

If you have a good internet idea and you will like to get it funded then http://www.seedfund.in/ is a great place to try your luck. Unlike most of the other funds that do not look at any proposal less than a million dollar, seedfund aims to invest Rs. 1 to 5 crores in a startup company. It comes with a great team that comprises of Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob came from Infinity Venture and Mahesh Murthy from Passionfund.

They are located in Mumbai and Bangalore and will like to work with companies situated closer to these places. They’re looking mostly at internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays – and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.

Their existing portfolio consists of carwale, agencyfaq, redbus.in etc. Since they intend to invest in 15-20 companies, we can safely assume that they shall be funding another 10-15 companies soon.

Finf out more details here

Importance of retaining traffic

There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.

If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.

I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.

Strategies that we use to get more traffic

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.

DotGyan – There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste

I have been working on this idea of “There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste” for past few weekends.
What do we do when you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know or a term you want to know more about while reading a Charles Dicken’s or Shakespeare’s work or may be just a newspaper?
Most of us simply ignore it or think “I’ll lookup in a dictionary when I get up” and we never do that. There are a very chosen few of us who purposely keep a dictionary with us while reading.
Consider this scenario while reading on the web. It’s lot easier, right? just select the term, right click, copy, open a new window, open google, paste and then wait for result. Fast enough but also irritating enough to break your concentration.
I came up with a widget to try to solve this problem. As of now I call it “DotGyan”. It allows you to search a word/term there and then with least interference in your reading pleasure.

It works like this…
1. You see a word like lagniappe whose meaning you don’t know. The word can be there any where on the blog or webpage.
2. Select the word as you would do for cut/copy & paste.
3. You see a dot at the end of your selection.
4. Click this dot.
5. You get the options (on what I call a “GyanBox”) to search the term in Google, Wikipedia or Wiktionary.
6. Click on one of the three options.
7. Rest you will get it yourself.

TRY THIS OUT, RIGHT HERE ON BINARYDAY !

What if I don’t want to search the selected term? Simple, just ignore the dot. It will go away in 3 seconds.
What if I want to edit the selected text before searching? Well, just edit it in the text box you see on the GyanBox.

Some may argue that we already have such softwares. True but almost all of them are available as browser plugins and how many of us actually know about such plugins and even if we know how many of us install them? Also plugins are browser dependent. DotGyan is browser independent and it shifts the installation trouble from user to web-master.

I have installed DotGyan on BinaryDay. Go ahead, Try it out Please! (Just select any word or phrase and click the dot)
DotGyan is right now in a very initial phase. Please give your valuable comments and suggestions as comments to this post or mail me at vineet7kumar@gmail.com.
Your comments and suggestions can pertain to anything from looks & colors to any new feature you would like to have. Also suggest some good names for the widget.

Team BinaryDay will be more than happy to hear from you :)

PS: If you are a blogger or a webmaster and would like to install DotGyan on your blog or page please drop me a mail at vineet7kumar@gmail.com … I will love to have DotGyan on your Blog or page.

PS: Currently safari browser and Internet explorer less that IE7 are not supported.

A good gmail proxy

 if your favorite proxy for gmail has been blocked by administrator then try this detailed list of 15 gmail proxy sites

Searchme … a new and nice search engine

Just happened to come across this new seach engine called searchme It’s a very new search engine with right now, just an index of 1 billion and is still in beta. But the best thing about it is its user interface and graphics. …yeah not just the graphics but the UI is also nice. Have you seen the cover-flow design on itunes? searchme uses the same beautiful cover-flow for its search results unlike the text only results in Google. (It has text only results also if you want that).
Searchme is backed by Sequoia capital.
As I said right now it’s in beta so u can’t use it directly . However you can register on it by giving your mail id .

Happy surfing :)

The increased importance of image search engine optimization

They say you can never understand women. I think for us webmasters that translates to you can never understand google. I thought I knew quite a lot about SEO (Search engine Optimization). However I was pleasantly reminded by google that there is just too much that I do not know even after 3 years of trying to understand it.

While Binaryday has managed to get a pagerank of 4, our sister blog adoholik has a pagerank of 2 only. Binaryday has a lot more text rich pages compared to adoholik. Hence I was quite confident that binaryday would receive a lot more traffic from search engines than adoholik. Boy, can I be more wrong? In the last 15 days of march, while binaryday has got little less than 500 visitors from google, adoholik has managed to get more than 2000 visitors.

Where did I go wrong? Well I seem to have underestimated the popularity of google image search. If my experience with the SEO world is anything to go by, then the entire SEO community commits the same mistake. Here is a screenshot of search engine traffic of adoholik to convince you that image search can indeed send you some serious traffic. Search engine traffic from google image search for adoholik

The 2,000 visitors may not look great but when you consider that it is for a website with pagerank 2, in a competitive field like advertisement that number starts looking quite impressive.

How image search became so important?
There is a reason why the seo community by large seems to avoid optimizing for image search. Not so long ago, very few people used it. However some timeback google introduced universal search. Basically universal search brought search results from different verticals like image and video and showed them up on the main Google SERP. I think that was the turning point in the history of image search.

Why you must concentrate on image search engine optimization?
As I have established with the above data image search represents significant opportunity to get search traffic. More importantly you should do it because not many others are doing it. The text search engine optimization is such a widely studied subject that everyone is doing it and if you are targeting a popular term, you have hardly any chance of ranking higher. However image search represents an opportunity to rank higher with comparatively less effort.

How to do search engine optimization for image search?
I am yet to find out myself. Over the next 15 days I shall be doing some serious research myself and using them on binaryday. I intend to keep writing about my experience here. So stay tuned in for more updates.

P.S: If you are a webmaster and you are interested in image search engine optimization then please leave a comment below with your mail id. I shall like to talk to you on the topic.

Get a pagerank 4 without any external link !!!

At the beginning of this blog, I had planned to keep writing about my SEO efforts. There were only 2 posts (here and here). There were no more posts after that because I got busy with content creation and with another venture of mine. I had forgotten all about SEO till I happened to install google toolbar on my browser and surprisingly I have a pagerank 4 for binaryday. I was surprised because I have not tried to get any external link till now.

The reason I am posting it here is because the pagerank goes against all conventional SEO theory I have read till now.

    The domain is not old. It is less than 6 months old.
    I write about diverse topics. I have never thought about SEO while writing an article. So you will not find any keyword concentration on my page
    Most importantly the blog does not have absolutely any external links to it. There are a couple of linkbacks from comments I had left on other blogs like techcrunch, but I am sure google must be heavily discounting those links.

Then what explains this sudden jump in my google pagerank? I am not sure. If any SEO expert happens to read this post, then will request to let me know what is it that I am doing right.

Understanding Web 2.0


slideshare id=5316&doc=web-20-5316-25603&w=425

Some famous web browsers compared

March 1, 2008 was a historical day in the history of web browsing. Official support for all Netscape client products was removed .

Also another big current news in the browser world is that Firefox has crossed the 500 million downloads milestone. Read below and you will know why…

Recently I have been working on some javascript codes and for testing I tried six common browsers. Here I would like to present a comparison of these five browsers. The browsers I tested are

1. Mozilla-Firefox 2.0 (Windows and Linux (It’s called Iceweasel on Debian))
2. Opera 9.26(Linux)
3. Netscape 9(Windows and Linux)
4. Flock 1.1 (Linux)
5.1. Internet Explorer 5 (Windows)
5.2. Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
6. Epiphany (Linux)

PS: The list misses Apple’s Safari browser. I don’t have a Mac yet and Safari for Windows sucks so much that I did not even bother to test it. (Sorry, Apple fanboys)

Internet Explorer 5 is now a stone age browser. It doesn’t support .png images and has limited support for javascript … In simple terms you cannot get those beautiful, translucent images and cool animated effects (which are now so much a part of any website). It does not have tabbed browsing and is really slow. For all of you who are still on IE5 I beg you to please switch over to firefox or atleast IE7.

Next in line IE7. Well it’s somewhat better than IE5 but practically again a nuisance. No doubt it is fast, has tabbed browsing, Support for various image formats (transparency included), better support for javascript BUT the problem lies in its security. It is too secure to use … won’t open anything you use Internet for, mostly . You can compare its security to a building without a boundary wall but a big gate with a big lock !!! And yes, there are still issues with javascript … Mr. Ballmer please understand that not all coders work for MS and if not support Open Source atleast live in harmony with it.

Opera is a good browser (for Linux users) if you are able to install it. I use Debian etch . I downloaded the debian package , installed it, ran it and booooom …. My CPU fan started shouting at me… had to kill the opera process. Then I downloaded the source code and ran the script without installing (installing from the source code was also useless) … it worked fine but your PWD must be the directory where the script is present . I had to tweak the script a bit to get it working from anywhere. Once you get Opera working you will love it .

Epiphany … Don’t even think about it … It’s a counterpart for IE5 ….OK, a little better.

Flock is a young browser … I did not play much with it but it is recommended by our old experienced , late Netscape so I trust it is good .

Netscape is awesome but unfortunately there is no more official support for it … so it’s not the browser of the future. Now the Netscape users are recommended to use Firefox or Flock.

Finally, Mozilla-Firefox is a clear winner… With a huge community support and so many useful plugins (more than 2000) and such a good support for almost anything there is no doubt that it is the best.

Happy browsing !

Give yourself a hike

Imagine your boss telling you, you will get a 200$ or 10,000 Rupees per month increament after 6 months if you work for 2 more hours everyday. The best part is you get to choose the work you want to do in these 2 hours. Will you say no?? Then you will be surprised to know that everyday this deal is being offered to you and you keep saying no !!!

Here is a list of things you can do to accept that offer

  • Get paid to Code There are many websites where you can get paid for writing code. Topcoder is one. http://www.getacoder.com/ , http://www.project4hire.com and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.
  • Get paid for finding bugs Programmers always had the option of freeleance programming. However the options for testers was rather less. However utest has started compesating the programmers for finding bugs.
  • Start a blog If you are passionate about a topic and do not mind typing, then you will love this option. Write about the topic that you love, do some search engine optimization, paste some adsense ads, get some initial users and voom..you have your raise.
  • Start a forum : If you have lot of knowledge about a topic like some programming language or mba colleges in india etc, then start a forum. The advantage with a forum is that you do not have to think about what to write next. The users will tell you what to write by asking you particulr questions.
  • Start a website If you do not mind a little bit of coding then you should start a website solving some particular problem of users. Look at some of the solutions in US and try to create a similar solution for India.
  • Get paid to contribute Many sites like ximmy and indianpad will pay you for contributing content to their site. This is the least favorite method with me but still check if it may be appealing to you.

    • Trust me earning money through these options are easier than you think. However make sure that you are ready to work for those 2 extra hours everyday. If you are interested in blogging but do not want to handle the problem of marketing it, then please leave a comment with your contact details. We will like to talk to you.

    How Google Became the No 1 Search engine

    Google is perhaps the most inspiring story for most of us davids trying to take on the Goliaths. There is a lot that I have learnt from the rise of Google. Thought of sharing some of those points with you.

    Most of us believe that Google became the no1 search engine because of its superior algorithm. Google did not win because of its superior technology. I know you will not take my word for it. So watch this video. This is a presentation by Seth Godin to the employees of Google. And he tells them that Google did not win because of its algorithm. A study in early 2000 found that users could not distinguish between results of yahoo and that of google, without the branding.

    Then how did Google become the no 1 Search engine. I will say there are 2 important points that made google win and those 2 points apply to every startup trying to become the next Google.

    Take the less obvious and more risky path
    Google won because it concentrated on a solution that was not considered important by the established players. When Google started working on search, search was not hot. Email and instant messengers were the hot themes of that season. Consider this, till February 2004 Yahoo did not have a search engine of its own. Yahoo search was powered by Google search engine. and till end of January 2005, microsoft search was powered by yahoo search. This meant that Google had close to 10 years to develop its product, perfect it and get users addicted to it before yahoo and microsoft started to compete with it. Actually microsoft and yahoo helped google make a better search engine by using it on their search page. Just imagine what would have happened if microsoft had thrown its best engineers onto search way back in 1998. May be google would have won but there is a very good chance that it would not have.

    As a startup the most risky project is the most obvious and least risky one. Because if it is obvious that there is money to make in a particular domain, then all the big guys will be already there. I will rather work on idea that will be a winner 2 years down the line so that when the big guys realize its importance, I will have a headstart to support myself.

    Make it easy for your users to spread the word
    If Google’s search was not significantly better than yahoo (They were powered by the same engine actually), then why did more people use Google? Let us say you are a first time internet user trying to find some material for your project and you do not know either yahoo or google. What do you do? You call up one of your more geeky freind and ask him for help. He tells you that you can easily find the information with the help of a search engine. You ask him which search engine. What will he say? Let us say he likes yahoo and so he suggests yahoo. You go to yahoo.com. There are too many other things on the page apart from search. You being a new user, get completely lost. You call up your freind and start bugging him with 100 questions. So what does he do when another person calls him with the same doubt? He suggests google. Because on google’s page, what the user needs to do is obvious.

    So make it as easy as possible for your users to spread word about you. Put a email this link. ask him to input the bare minimum information necessary to send out the message. (The email id of his freind) Asking him to fill in 10 fields while he is doing a favor to you is too much. Pre fill the body of the mail, with a description of your website. An occasional thank you mail may not be out of the order either. I am yet to start doing the thank you piece though :(

    These 2 points apply to most of the startups that have made it big. Think facebook, youtube, del.ic.ious or flickr. When they started, the domain was not hot. They went ahead and made it hot. What are you doing? Starting another social network?? Do yourself a favor and give it a second thought.