From: The Google Blog

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Here’s what’s happening this week in search:

Site speed in web search ranking
We made an announcement today about site speed and how it effects our search ranking algorithms. Check out the Webmaster Central blog for more information, including a number of free tools that you can use to increase the speed of your website.

Stars in mobile search
In early March, we announced stars in search, a feature that helps you mark and rediscover great content on the web. Recently, we extended this functionality to your mobile phone, so that you’re able to view that same favorite content on the go. So, if you’d previously starred sites for [cheesecake recipe] when planning a meal at home, searching for [cheesecake recipe] on your phone in the supermarket will help you rediscover the recipe search results that looked enticing — no need to make a grocery list. Stars work both ways, so if you mark a search result while on your phone, you’ll be able to see it later when you get to your desktop. This feature is currently supported on Android phones, iPhones/iPods and Palm WebOS devices in the U.S., and you need to be logged into your Google account for it to work.

Updates to Google Quick Scroll
In December we launched Google Quick Scroll, an extension for Chrome which uses Google’s search capabilities to help you jump directly to the portion of the page that’s relevant to your search query. Since December, we’ve brought Quick Scroll to all the languages and domains where Chrome extensions are available. We’ve also continued to make constant improvements to the tool, and recently we debuted a new version with a few useful updates.

Since Quick Scroll is all about getting you to information fast, it’s important that it appear quickly. So we’ve reduced the time it takes for the tool to pop up so you don’t have to wait as long. Also, if you’ve been using Quick Scroll for a while, you know that it doesn’t appear for every result — just when Google detects that only a portion of the page is relevant to your query. Now, even if Quick Scroll doesn’t appear after you click on a search result, an icon will show up in the address bar. Clicking on the icon will pop up the Quick Scroll box with an explanation of why it didn’t trigger on that page.

Here’s what it looks like:

Help for those who need it
A few months ago, we introduced a search feature that displays the toll-free U.S. poison control number when you search for related information. This got us thinking about other ways we can help people get clear information from Google search in times of crisis or distress. So we recently launched a feature that displays the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. We hope this quick access to information helps people in emotional distress who may benefit from calling a suicide prevention hotline.

Stay tuned for more updates next week.

From: The google Blog

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I would like to tell those who don’t feel niche bloggers can’t earn decent advertising revenue, they couldn’t be more wrong.

“Make money online” bloggers are always pimping affiliate links. Niche bloggers can’t necessarily do this. Our readers don’t want to receive pitches every day. Moreover, not all niche blog readers are buyers. For example, selling high end products via a frugal living blog probably isn’t the best idea. The same with my freelance writing blog; one thing I learned over the years is that writers don’t open their wallets for the next big thing. If they’re buying products through an affiliate link, it has to provide tremendous value. When I have sold it’s with conferences, books, ebooks, courses and other teaching products. The bulk of my income doesn’t come from affiliate links, however. They come from private ad sales and Adsense.

So, niche bloggers, here is my advice to you:

1. Traffic and community come first: To truly earn money through advertising revenue on a niche blog, you have to build trust within your community. Sure, you can place ads on your blog from the very beginning, but they probably won’t earn. Don’t focus on monetization right off the bat. Take the time to build traffic and community. Establish trust among your readers. Once you have an active community and regular traffic with a pattern you can rely on, then you can deal with traffic.
2. Know your readers: Before you sell anything, you have to know your market. Tech blogs and “make money online” blogs can enjoy a more diverse income stream because their readers will respond to a variety of products and services. Not so much with nichier topics. Knowing your community’s habits is essential to monetizing narrow niches. For example, my community is made up of clickers, not buyers. As mentioned above, when they do buy, they choose items that teach. They don’t invest in gadgets but they will invest in materials to help them further their careers.  I learned what they like by playing with the various revenue streams and also by conducting polls and reading every single one of their comments and emails.
3. It won’t happen overnight: Don’t be frustrated if you don’t begin earning as soon as you place ads. It doesn’t happen overnight. Your community wants to trust you – and your advertisers.  Give each ad some time to earn, but if you don’t see any response at all after a month or two, explore other advertising possibilities.
4. Good content continues to earn over time: Timeless or “evergreen” content has the ability to earn for a lifetime. Try posting advice that will be relevant five years from now. In addition to current news and events, discuss topics that will always appeal to web searchers.
5. Find other forms of passive income: Advertising isn’t the only way you can earn through your blog. As Darren has proved here, you can also sell ebooks, courses, work books, webinars and even a membership forum.
6. Don’t wait for advertisers to find you: For me, private ad sales are the most lucrative. Other than Adsense, my highest payers are advertisers who didn’t come from a particular advertising agency. I found many of them on my own. Advertisers won’t reach out to you if they don’t know about you. If you have enough traffic coming in, create a press kit. List stats such as bounce rate, pageviews, traffic and more. Market your blog much in the same way traditional media market to their advertisers. See if you can convince potential advertisers to come on board.
7. Don’t rest on your laurels: OK, so you have a few ads. I can tell you now, it won’t last. You can’t expect every advertiser to stick with you for years. They come, advertise for a while, and go on their merry way after sales start to lag a bit. Always be on the lookout for new sponsors and advertising opportunities to ensure there are no dry periods.

Many niche blogs are difficult to monetize, but they don’t have to be. If you study your community and traffic patterns, you can find some profitable solutions. You might have to think outside the box or sell your own stuff, but once your blog hits, the sales will soar

From: ProBlogger

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02. 14 security tips for your WordPress installation
Practical tips to secure your WordPress installation.

03. How to protect WordPress from spam?
Tutorial which give you useful tips to stop spam on your wordpress blog

04. 20+ Awesome Non-Blogging Websites Using WordPress as CMS
Examples of websites which are using WordPress as a CMS, very cool!

05. How to Create Multiple Dynamic Sidebars for WordPress Widgets
Tutorial which allows you to create multiple synamic sidebard for WordPress widgets.

06. Use jQuery 1.4 by default on your WordPress blog
Great WordPress hack to enable jQuery by default on your site.

07. Tips and hacks for creating your own WordPress theme
Great tips and tricks for all theme designers, and those who want to tweak their theme!

08. How To Add Gravatars For The Post Author in WordPress
Now that Gravatar support is part of the WordPress core adding them into your WordPress theme is easy. Adding them to your comments has been documented. How about adding them to your post titles to highlight the comment author? Within the loop? That’s fairly easy too.

09. How to add videos to your WordPress sidebar
YouTube has become a bit of a phenomenon on the Internet, and everyone’s rushing to embed videos into their blogs. This is actually a fairly neat thing, especially if you blog a lot about videos or have videos that will emphasize the importance of your posts.

10. How to Get Short Branded Urls with WordPress
With social media marketing on its peak, and URL shortening service at it’s highest demand, bloggers are turning to services like tr.im, bit.ly, or even ekey.us. There are two disadvantages of using these services. First they are not brandable, and second they are not reliable as tr.im said they will be closing down. Much thanks to a powerful script like WordPress, we can now use it to create short URLs and have our brand in it.

11. Automatically resize pictures on your WordPress blog
While it is very cool to add pictures to your blog posts, dealing with image sizes can be a bit tricky sometimes, especially if you have no skills about image resizing. The solution to this problem is to use Timthumb and WordPress shortcode API. Just read on to find out!

12. How to List Recent Posts from One Category
Wordpress hack which give you the power to list recent posts from one category

How to Separate Comments and Trackbacks
Most wordpress themes out there (by default) combine both comments and trackbacks / pingbacks together and display under the same list. But why bother separating them? Simply to make things looks more organize so your blog commenters have a clearer picture what are the comments, what’s not. Doing it is not hard, but you need toe be using independentWordpress blog (not the wordpress.com), provided with access to change comments.php. Prepare your favorite editor, and here we go.

13. Protect your WordPress blog using .htaccess
The .htaccess file have lots of possibilities. Today, let’s see how we can protect our WordPress blog from scripts injection, and unwanted modification of _REQUEST and/or GLOBALS.

14. A to Z of WordPress .htaccess Hacks
The .htaccess file allows you to easily improve your blog’s security, reduce bandwith and increase usability. In this post we’re going to look at 26 .htaccess hacks, from A to Z.

15. 4 Contact Form Solutions For WordPress
The contact form is a simple thing and often overlooked both in adding one and styling it. This post will address that with a number of options for creating a contact form that can be added to a WordPress blog site.

16. Best Practices for Creating Unique Blog Posts
Some golden rules you should follow when creating blog posts.

17. Hide Individual WordPress Pages
If you’ve downloaded a WordPress theme that has been made available to the general public, it is likely that, by default, it has some code that automatically inserts your WordPress pages directly into your theme without any manual coding.  This is a really great feature most of the time, but sometimes there are certain pages you’d like to not display in your menu or not display at all (search results page comes to mind).

18. How To Add Bio Info To Your WordPress Blog Posts
Add your blog Bio info to your blogposts.

19. How To Set Up a Sideblog
Great article about creating your own side blog.

20. How to Create a WordPress Login Form Overlay
WordPress is more than just a blogging tool. It can be used as a Content Management System (CMS) for many different purposes. It has a built in system for most things you would have to code yourself, or pay for an expensive custom application. With a little creativity, you can use basic features to power almost anything you want.

21. Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress
Everyone knows that WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, popular blogging systems on the internet today. With its out of the box features, plugins, and great theming community, its no wonder WordPress has been accepted as today’s standard. However, sometimes you just want to add a little more.

22. Page Sensitive Multi-Level Navigation
While most sites don’t need incredibly deep page navigation there are situations that justify a hierarchy beyond the typical 2 – 3 levels.  Unfortunately that can be cumbersome for top navigation drop-downs (more than 1 level of drop down is too much IMHO) so another solution needs to be found.

23. Add a favicon to your WordPress blog using a hook

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From: WordPress Development Blog

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This is our 284th post of the year, which is 13% more than in 2008. In addition to more posts, we have more readers now — 79% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 7.7 million last year to 13.7 million in 2009.

We posted about new products, the evolution of our social features, a slew of live streamed events and much more, but what generated the most buzz was What You Watched and Searched for on YouTube in 2009, a listing of the year’s Most Watched videos and fastest-rising search terms, and announcements regarding the launches of 1080p and Shows & Movies. New Channels Coming Soon, another much-read item, topped our record for number of comments on any YouTube blog post — over 50K.

We introduced several new series this year, including Release Notes, a periodic rundown of changes to the site; Curator showcases, highlighting people with a knack for finding great videos; and Video Volunteers, which is about mobilizing the talents of the YouTube community to help those in need. We used the blog to showcase your impressive achievements — things like raising money to build wells in Africa, launching a label for YouTube musicians, and the historical milestone of the first user hitting 1 million subscribers — as well as shed light on how YouTube is being used as a tool for free expression in Iran.. We took you behind the scenes to offer insight into the thought that goes into product development here, and we shared some stats that were hard even for us to wrap our heads around. Maybe we did a little trash talking, too.

We also launched three new blogs this year: the Biz Blog for partners and advertisers, a Spanish-language blog, and the Creator’s Corner blog for anyone who makes videos. And we finally moved onto to the Blogger platform, bringing us into the 21st century when it comes to blog technology.

Whew. It was a busy year but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Have a very happy New Year, thanks for reading, and see you in 2010!

From: youTube Blog

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What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:

1. Introducing the Google Chrome OS – 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year’s total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
2. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave – 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
3. Here comes Google Voice – 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
4. “This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?! – 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
5. Email in Indian languages – 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
6. Releasing the Chromium OS open source project – 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
7. Now you see it, now you don’t – 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
8. Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) – 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail’s case, after five years!).
9. Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! – 155,196. A “small” change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
10. Introducing Google Public DNS – 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

We also developed a few different series of posts this year: one on the power of measurement, for people who want to improve the performance of their websites; a weekly series focused on search; and another on the latest in the world of Google Apps.

As always, we had some fun in 2009, with grass-mowing goats and a panda-obsessed Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) on April Fools’ Day. Our curiosity was piqued by Atlantis (or not) under the sea, constellations in Google Sky Map and a fresnel lens somewhere in between.

Finally, the Google Blog network continues to grow. This year, we welcomed blogs dedicated to Google Wave, Google New Zealand, Data Liberation, Google Voice, Google Arabia, Google Thailand, European Public Policy and Google Chrome — among others — to our blogging family.

Beyond the blogs, in February we jumped head-first into the Twitterverse, starting our @google account with a geeky tweet. Since then, we’ve tweeted more than 1,000 times, and are grateful to have gathered two million or so followers. That puts us in the company of @algore and @ashsimpsonwentz, and (today, at least) just 65,000 or so followers behind a certain @ladygaga (although we’re pretty sure that gap is only going to grow — no way we can compete with her outfits). Around 75 other Google entities and teams have gotten into the Twitter act this year as well, so we built a directory to help you keep up with all the action. Twitter also was our biggest non-Google referrer to the blog in 2009, a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.

Thanks for sticking with us through all of our goings-on over the past 12 months. We look forward to having you back for more in 2010. In the meantime, happy New Year!

From: The Official Google Blog

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Our Google Apps Deployment team has assisted hundreds of organizations — large and small — make the switch to Google Apps. To ensure that your implementation is a success, we’ve developed step-by-step tools to guide you through the process, and best practices to make your transition as smooth and easy as possible. Here are some of the resources you can explore when going Google:

Sign up for a Deployment Training Webinar. In this live session, a deployment specialist will walk you through the deployment planning steps and use cases.

Take advantage of our deployment guides, which include creative examples and templates, to help with your technical and marketing rollout:

• For enterprises
• For small/medium businesses
• For schools

Recently, we also launched two learning sites to jump start your transition to Google Apps: the customizable Google Enterprise Launch Site for large enterprises and the Apps Learning Center for small businesses. You can find out more about these Google site templates in the Enterprise Deployment Site.

To find answers to your technical questions about Google Apps, visit the Administrator Help Center. We also provide overviews and videos for integration and migration tools, including Microsoft Outlook Sync, Google Blackberry Enterprise Server Connector and Lotus Notes Migration.

We hope these resources help with your move to Google Apps, and we can’t wait to welcome you to the Google Apps family.

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I’ve decided to put a few on a row:

SEO Friendly Images | Plugin homepage
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Google XML Sitemaps | Plugin homepage
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin | Plugin homepage
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

WP-DB-Backup | Plugin homepage
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

FD Feedburner Plugin | Plugin homepage
Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this seamlessly without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed. All existing feeds simply become Feedburner feeds seamlessly and transparently for all users. Just tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done.

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