Once I start using Windows 7, I noticed that this features is there only in Desktop, not for other folders. I was keep looking for a solution to disable auto arrange and enable align to grid whenever I want it. Finally I found a way.

How It Works?

When you go to folder in Windows 7 you won’t be able to see the options ‘Auto Arrange’ and ‘Align to Grid’ in the right click menu. If you want those back you have to change the System Registry with some values.

That sounds too geeky. How can an average person going to enable those options in right click menu? Here we go with the solution.

• Download this file
• Save it in a known location of your computer
• Run the file by double clicking on it.
• It will give you the below pop up window.

• Say “Yes” to continue and of course this is a trusted file. It won’t cause any harm and you have nothing to worry about.
• Then it will give you below pop up confirmation

• Click “OK” and we are done.

Then you can go to a folder and right click. Under “View” you will be able to see the options “Auto Arrange” and “Align to Grid”. You can enable and disable them for any folder any time.

Tips

If these options won’t appear even after following these steps, you may try restarting your PC.

These options will be disabled for “List” and “Details”. If you are in such a viewing option change it to “Medium Icons” or may be “Large Icons” to enable those options.

Now you have total freedom to drag and re arrange the files in any folder the way you want. If you want to apply any specific configuration to entire folders, follow below steps.

Alt-> menu bar appears -> Tools -> Folder options -> View -> “Apply To Folders”

Ex: You disable “Auto Arrange” in current folder, then follow the above steps, auto arrange will be disable for the entire folder in your PC

But that doesn’t solve the problem completely. If you are not in front of your own PC and you want to check email, again you will run in to same problem. As a solution what you really need is an “Online Mail Client”. The best web application that can act as an Online Mail client is your Gmail account.

Background Preparation

In order to download emails to your mail client, mail account must have POP3. Make sure you enable it in every account that you want to connect with Gmail. In order to send emails you need SMTP, which has to be enabled, yet optional.

Any type of E mail service will give you configuration details to connect to email account using mail clients. That may include Username, Password, POP server, SMTP server and Port. Organize all those details before you start linking your mail accounts to Gmail.

Steps to Follow

Send Mail as Another Mail Account

Now you are good to go! As the first step, try to send email as any of your mail account in Gmail account. To access the configuration follow the below path.

Gmail -> Settings (Right Top Corner)-> Accounts and Imports -> Send Mail As

There you have to click “Add email address you own”.

Once you click on that, it will give you below pop-up.

There you have to fill your name and Email address that you want to send email as from Gmail. Then click next. Ti will take you to below window.

There you have 2 options. If you go for “Send through Gmail”, it’s very easier to configure, just one click away. But in that case, receiver will see something like “Sent through Gmail” depending on Email that he is using. In Technical terms, the mail actually is sent through Gmail, only the header information is changed to given email as sender.

The best way is “Send through SMTP server” which is actually sending the email using your remote mail server. There you will have to enter SMTP configuration details for that server. Once you click next, it will try to verify the configuration details entered. On success it will take you to the next level where you have to verify the ownership of the mail account. For that verification mail will be sent to remote mail account. Click on the verification link and you are done.

Now try to compose new mail. There you will see new drop down menu named “From”. Using that you can select what is the mail account that you need to send mail as.

Receive Mail from Another Mail Account

To configure Gmail to receipt of mail from multiple accounts you have to go to below configuration page.

Gmail -> Settings (Right Top Corner) -> Accounts and Imports -> Check mail using POP3

Then click on “Add POP3 Mail account you own” to get below configuration pop-up window.

There you have to enter the email address which you want to download email from. Then click next to proceed. It will take you to below window.

Here you have to enter POP3 Configuration details for the specific email account. You can easily get these configuration details from control panel of your mail account or from the help section.

Other than POP3 configuration there are 4 check boxes which are very important.

• If you check 1^st one, it will leave a copy of email in the original mail account as well. This will be good as a back-up. If you feel like you don’t need another due to limited space leave it un-checked.
• If you check the 2^nd one it will always use secured connection to connect to remote mail account. But mail account must support secured connection to enable it.
• 3^rd one is very important! It will let you label incoming mails which will be very useful to separate email that came from different mail addresses.
• Last check box is letting you to directly send the incoming mail from selected remote account to Archive. In that case those mails won’t appear in inbox, yet can access through the folder ‘archive’.

After the configuration Gmail will periodically download email from linked email accounts and they will appear in your Gmail inbox with the label if you assign any. Right there you can reply to those mails as same email account.

If you want to check mail now from any email account connected you can go to below configuration section.

Gmail -> Settings (Right Top Corner)-> Accounts and Imports -> Check mail using POP3

Then click “Check Mail Now” link which you can find in front of linked Email accounts.

Now you have an online email client, where you can check all your email accounts, send mail from any of your email account from anywhere in the world any time.

First of all let us understand the problem.It should be clearly understood that this is NOT an ‘Error’, but a ‘Notice’. A notice can be ignored if it’s not critical while an error must be fixed. You might have observed that even though a notice appears, rest of the output will be displayed on the browser.

Coming back to our topic, when the ‘Undefined index’ notice occurs, most of the time it is a good practice to fix this than ignoring.

How to Fix

One simple answer – isset() !

isset() function in PHP determines whether a variable is set and is not NULL. It returns a Boolean value, that is, if the variable is set it will return true and if the variable value is null it will return false.

More details on this function can be found in PHP Manual.

Example

Let us consider an example.

Below is the HTML code for a comment form in a blog.

<form name=”myform” id=”myform” method=”post” action=”add_comment.php”>
<h2>Please leave a comment:</h2>
<input type=”text” id=”username” name=”username” value=”Enter Username” /><br />
<input type=”text” id=”email” name=”email” value=”Enter Email” /><br />
<textarea id=”comment” name=”comment”>Enter Comment</textarea><br />
<br /><br />
<input type=”checkbox” id=”notify_box” name=”notify_box” value=”Y”>
Notify me when a new post is published. <br />
<br />
<input type=”submit” value=”Post Comment”>
</form>

Here is the PHP file ‘add_comment.php’ which takes the data passed from the comment form.

<?php
$uName  = $_POST['username'];
$eMail  = $_POST['email'];
$comment= $_POST['comment'];
$notify = $_POST['notify_box'];
// send the data to the database
?>

What happens is, when the check-box is CHECKED, the code works fine. But when it is not, then I am getting the warning as mentioned above.

“Warning: Undefined index:”

So to fix this, let us make use of the magic function. Now the code appears like this.

<?php
$notify = “”;
$uName  = $_POST['username'];
$eMail  = $_POST['email'];
$comment= $_POST['comment'];
if(isset($_POST['notify_box'])){
$notify = $_POST['notify_box'];
}
// send the data to the database
?>

What happens here is, I am checking first whether the check box is CHECKED (or set) using a condition. And if the condition is true I am getting the value passed.

The same fix can be used for the above warning when working with $_SESSION, $_POST arrays.

But, there instances where harmless notices can be ignored.

For an example,

I have a page which can be accesses in below 3 ways.

www.someexample.com/comments.php

www.someexample.come/comments.php?action=add

www.someexample.com/comments.php?action=delete

All these URL’s go to the same page but each time performs a different task.

So when I try to access the page through the first URL, it will give me the ‘Undefined index’ notice since the parameter ‘action’ is not set.

We can fix this using the isset() function too. But on this instance, we can just ignore it by hiding the notices like this.

error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

You can also turn off error reporting in your php.ini file or .htaccess file, but it is not considered as a wise move if you are still in the testing stage.

This is another simple solution in PHP for a common complex problem. Hope it is useful.

The simplicity and text based nature of twitter opened many windows for surfers such as bloggers, researchers, and marketers and politicians. For a general user you can express yourself with short text message using web interface or may be using your mobile phone. Researchers can see what the hot topics are right now while politician used “tweets” to develop social behavioral models to support their campaigns.

If you plan to do massive online promotions using twitter, you came to the right place. But main thing is, before you proceed you have to have a considerable amount of “twitter followers” who are interested in what you are going to promote. Here I’m trying to give you a few tips on getting more targeted twitter followers to get the maximum benefit out of your online promotion.

Make Your Profile Visible

The main thing, everyone on internet should be able to see your twitter profile even before they sign in to twitter. It’s not only your profile your tweets also should be publicly visible. To get this thing done you can follow below path.

Twitter -> Settings -> Account -> Uncheck “Protect My Tweets”

Now your tweets are publicly visible. If you insert a appropriate “Username” it will further increase the search engines visibility. To make your profile looks cool, brand it with your logo or relevant content. For that you have to go to below settings page.

Twitter -> Settings -> Design -> Change background image ->Upload a custom branded background

Now you are ready to tweet.

Tweet Interestingly and More Frequently

After setting up the twitter profile correctly, you should start tweeting. When you tweet make sure you tweet interestingly to the target crowd with targeted keywords and with good frequency. Additionally, if you tweet in peak hours, there is a greater probability that many people will see your tweets in “Public time line” and through Searches.

If you have a blog you can setup automated tweeting of your blog posts using TwitterFeed. If your blog is running on WordPress platform, you can use the plug-in WordTwit.

Following Targeted and Relevant Twitter Profile

Now your twitter profile is filled with relevant, interesting tweets which will lead your target users towards interesting content. Then the main target is getting more twitter followers. Once you have followers your tweets will be visible in their home page.

Easiest way to get followers is to find the relevant twitter profile and follow them. There is a higher probability that they will follow you back since you have relevant and interesting tweets.

To find relevant twitter profiles you can try searching targeted keywords. In the search result, go to the profiles and follow them.

Follow Back Your Followers

After sometime, you will figure out that you are getting followed by people whom you are not following. Make sure you follow them back to return the favor and keep them as followers in the long run.

Sometimes they might not be the targeted crowd you need. But it would not cost you any to keep them in your profile as followers. More the followers you have more the value it will add to your profile.

Automated Profile Following

There is some software developed to automate the above mentioned steps. However you have to use them with the risk of getting banned from twitter. To minimize that risk avoid excessive usage of the particular software.

My suggestion for such software is TweetAdder. It automatically finds relevant twitter profile based on given criteria such as geographical location, bio, keywords in tweets etc. Then you can configure the application to automatically follow the profiles which you already listed. Further you can automatically un-follow the people who didn’t return the favor within a given period of time.

This software will help you to increase the number of followers drastically with in short period of time. Use it very carefully following the Software guidelines. If you use its default configuration, there will be a minimum risk of getting banned.

Paid Service to Get Twitter Followers

If you need to further speed up the growth of followership, you can go for a paid service and buy twitter followers. There are lots of services providing targeted guaranteed twitter followers to your account in a short period of time.

Some of the services ask for your username and password which they need for following and follow back in order to get more twitter followers to your account. In that case make sure you go for a trustworthy service. “BuyTwitterFollowers.org” would be a good choice if you need to pay to get more twitter followers in a short time.

Additionally there is another service who doesn’t ask for your twitter account password, yet they take a long time to give the expected results.

Through this post I am providing an organized set of techniques to acquire more Twitter followers in both less time consuming and more time consuming, yet secured ways. It is now your call to make a good use of it according to your business requirement.

This piece of software lets you backup your uncommon drivers, which doesn’t come with Windows 7, in one place and restore them easily. In case if you don’t know what driver to install, it again comes to your help. In some rare cases, drivers give trouble when you try to uninstall them. This software could solve that as well. Take a look at the below sections to use this software effectively.

After the installation you can open Driver Magician using the desktop icon or through start menu. It will open the main window of the software.

Configuration

Before you start using the Drive Magician, I recommend you to configure it perfectly. This is going to be a one-time configuration and you never even have to look in to this.

Click on the options button in the toolbar or go to Tools -> Options from the menu. Then it will take you to Options pane.

Here you have four options, yet I prefer auto-setup package as it allows you to restore the drivers even without the Driver Magician Software installed. You can back up the drivers to a folder or a compressed file. Still it will be a one click process to restore drivers through this software.

In Driver restoration options, remain the default configuration. Default settings that come with the software works fine. After all you can select these options when you restore drivers. There are two check boxes to show alerts and restart computer after the driver restoration. You can opt them in as you need.

After these configurations you are good to go with driver back-up.

Driver Backup

You can access Driver backup from the tool bar and the menu as well. There are two options for you. Search all drivers and search non-Microsoft drivers. The best thing that you can do is backup non-Microsoft drivers since others will automatically come with Windows 7. Once you are done with the search, list of drivers will be displayed in the window. You can check-in the drivers which need to be backed up. Red highlighted items are non Microsoft drivers, which are highly recommended to include in the backup.

After selecting required drivers, click on the button “Start Backup”. It will ask you the location to save the backup file and it will be in the format you selected in the options before.

Driver Restore

To access driver restore, same as backup you can use the tool bar or the menu. Once you click on restore it will ask you the location of Backup file. This could be a folder or a compressed file. Once you select that it will display the list of drivers in the main window. Click the “Start Restore” button to proceed, and then you are done.

If you backup the drivers as auto-setup package, you won’t have to go through this. All you have to do is double click on the .exe file and it will do all the work for you, even without the Driver Magician installed. 

Update Driver Database

Update driver section let you to search for the latest updates of the installed drivers and update them automatically. In some cases automatic installation won’t work and you will have to do it manually. After manual installation, back up a fresh copy of all drivers, then next time it will be a once click process. 

Tools

Uninstall Drivers

In some cases when you try to uninstall drivers through “Driver Manager” in Windows, it doesn’t work properly. Here you have a solution for that in Driver Magician. Go to Tools -> Uninstall Drivers.

Select the unwanted drivers and just click “Uninstall” button, Driver Magician will do the rest. 

Detect Unknown Drivers

If you have no idea what the unknown drivers are, you can let the Driver Magician to find those for you. Go to Tools -> Detect Unknown Devices.

By clicking on each device you can see a description which includes relevant information for you to find the driver and install it. 

More Backup and Restoration

If you want Driver Magician to backup your Online Favorites in IE, Registry, Desktop and My Documents, it’s even possible. Go to Tools -> More Backup and Restoration.

The process work the same way as the driver backup and restoration. In back up select what you need and Driver Magician will use the backup option to select the format for backup file. In restore section you can locate the backup file and restore it with one click.

The software comes handy when you format your computer. With one click you can restore your drivers, not only that My Documents, desktop and registry as well. It comes with multi language too. Hope this valuable piece of software will make your life easier.

What are RAW Files?

Normally point and shoot type digital cameras produces JPEG files which can be open in any personal computer. But when the camera converts its images sensor data in to JPEG file, it has to reduce significant amount of data to fit in to its compression. Further if camera applies any color correction to JPEG file, it’s irreversible. It’s ok to use day to day photography, but not good enough to get a professional quality result. Professionals need what the image sensor actually captures without any data loss or correction. At the same time they need the camera configuration also to be saved with the file for accurate editing. Therefore most of the professional and semi-professional cameras allow shooting in RAW formats.

RAW file is the collection of data which captured by the image sensor in the camera, without any data loss. This is also called as pixel dump. Some cameras provide feature to use uncompress, lossless compressed and compressed raw files. In above three types first two are containing total amount of data captured by the image sensor and compressed format reduce details of image according to the configuration. Other than the pixel dump, a RAW file will contain lots of information about the shooting conditions including the type of camera, type of lens, focal length, ISO, aperture, shutter speed. If camera is configure to automatically apply any color correction to image like white balancing, selective color or saturation that information also will be attached to the RAW file as parameters in a non-destructive way.

Most of the camera manufactures have their own RAW file formats specially designed to cater the specific features and functionalities of each camera types. Below list contain some of the camera manufactures and their RAW file types.

• Nikon: .NEF
• Canon: .CRW
• Kodak: .CDK
• Epson: .ERF
• Olympus: .ORF
• Pentax: .PRF
• Samsung: .SRW

.DNG also called a Digital negative format could be identified as a universal RAW format those there are no international agreement saying everyone should comply with that. So when you shoot in different cameras you will still get different file formats. In Camera RAW there will be separate profiles to handle camera types and their different lenses.

Getting Started

Once you figure out that you need to use Camera RAW and install it successfully, you have to do some configuration in Photoshop to make it work well. To do that configuration you should follow the below path in Photoshop menu

Edit -> Preferences -> Camera RAW

This will give you below window.

Adobe Camera RAW - Preferences

Generally you need not to do any changes in here. In general section you can change the ‘save images settings in’ to camera raw database. In that case the entire configuration will be saved in centralized database. With this setting ‘sidecar .xmp files’ it will create a configuration file where the original image is, which could be the best configuration. Camera RAW allows you to edit JPEG and TIFF files as well. If you need Camera RAW to be open when you open such a file you can change the setting in the section ‘JPED and TIFF handing’.

Main Window

After you install and configure the Camera RAW plug-in you can open RAW file in Photoshop, you may drag and drop the file in to Photoshop window. Once you do that it will open the below window.

Adobe Camera RAW - Main Window

This is the Camera RAW main window. At the top of the window it provides you basic image manipulation tools like white balance, crop, straighten, spot removal, red eye reduction etc. If you tick ‘Preview’ it will reflect the changes that you will be doing to the image real-time. There is a button to make the window full screen too.

Right below the manipulation tools, you can see the preview of the image inserted. You can select the amount of zoom below the image. I prefer ‘Fit in view’. There is a button for you to save the edited RAW image as a JPEG or any other common image format. The blue color link will take you to work flow options which contain color space and other details.

In the right hand side you have variety of controllers to edit your image. At the top you can see the color histogram separated in to color channels. It will reflect the changes you will do with the controller real time. In the histogram there are two arrow heads in both ends. You can use them to identify detail loss in black areas and detail loss in white areas due to over expose. Below the histogram you can see the shooting configuration of the image automatically identified by Camera RAW by reading Meta data in RAW file.

Below that there is a tabbed pane where you can access the image editing controllers. The detailed explanation of each part will be there in the next section.

Image Editing Tools

Basics

Adobe Camera RAW - Basic

The first section ‘Basics’ allow you to do an accurate light correction to your image. First 2 sliders are for white balancing. If you have set your camera to auto white balancing, those configuration will be reflected with the values of slides, yet totally reversible. Then you can change the Exposure which controls the amount of whites as you need. You can use Recovery slider to re gain the details of over exposed areas up to certain level. If you feel like your image background is too dark using Fill light slider you can increase it. Blacks slider controls the black area and it’s commonly used to remove the haze in images. Brightness and contrast works the usual way. If you need to blur or sharpen your photo, you can use the Clarity slider for that. Finally you can enhance the color levels of photo using Vibrance and Saturation.

If you have done a good job with the camera, this basic controller would be enough for you come up with exceptional photograph.

Tone Curve

Adobe Camera RAW - Tone Curve

In this section you can alter the color curve and change the light of the photo. Parametric curve could be changed using different sliders and Point curve could be change using any number of points that you can introduce to the curve using mouse click on it. If you are using parametric curve it will be same as Exposure, Recovery, Fill light and Blacks in the ‘Basic’ section. If you are using point curve you have fine control over different rage of light with much flexibility.

 Detail

Adobe Camera RAW - Detail

Using this section you can manipulate you image to make to little bit blur or sharp. In order to get this done you can use the sliders in the Sharpening section. After controlling, radius, detail and Masking levels you can blend the effect with the image with the amount slider.

If your digital camera is producing noisy images, especially in low light conditions, using Noise reduction section you can remove noise in to certain level. Mainly there are two options, luminance and color. In order to see the actual change will happen to the image you have to set the preview size to 100% and this message is displayed there in the window.

HSL/ Grayscale

Adobe Camera RAW - HSL/Grascale

If you need to change the characteristic of each color channel you can do that in this section. There are you three main section, hue, saturation and Luminance. You can change the each attribute for each color channel using the given slider.

There can be creative usage in this section. You may de saturate one color, or de saturates all the colors, except one to make out standing photographs.

Split Toning

Adobe Camera RAW - Split Toning

This section allows you to change the hue and saturation separately in highlights and shadows. To define the difference between shadow and highlight you can use the balance slider. I have rarely used this section, yet there can be creative usage depending on your photograph.

Lens Correction

Adobe Camera RAW - Lens Correction

This is a very important section in Camera RAW. Sometimes, when you are shooting with different lenses, they cause problems to your photograph. If your lens profile is there in Camera RAW, it will automatically fix those errors that come from the lens. If camera RAW doesn’t have your lens profile you can always use the manual controllers.

Transform section deal with the different tilting of images in all direction. Distortion slider could be use to control the effect of fish eye lenses and sometime you may use to make a image looks like fish eye using that.

If you have different unusual color chrome around the edges of your images, you can use chromatic aberration to correct those.

Lens vignetting is very important especially when you dealing with high power telephoto lenses. They might make the corners of your images slightly darker. You can correct those errors using amount and midpoint sliders.

Effects

Adobe Camera RAW - Effects

In this section you can introduce grain to you photograph to give it a old look and feel. At the same time you can add different effects to corners of the photo using post crop vignetting. I have rarely used this section as well. Never feel like using it for my photographs.

Camera Collaboration

Adobe Camera RAW - Camera Collaboration

This section fine tunes the color interpretation of Camera RAW for different types of cameras. However, most of the cases default configuration will work. If default configuration is not good enough you can calibrate your camera manually using this panel. If you required manual calibration you can use color calibration chart. Here you can find specific instruction to calibrate your camera with camera RAW.

Special Tips

Configure Camera to Shoot RAW

Most of the latest digital SLR cameras support RAW file formats, yet they have their own proprietary version as I mentioned below. When you shoot with the camera you should capture the image with maximum possible quality. As the first step you should change the file format in your camera to RAW. Then the camera will offer you options as below.

• Uncompressed RAW
• Lossless compress RAW
• Compressed RAW

Down the list quality will get reduced. However out of first two options both will hold the same quality, so you may go for 2^nd option to save the space. If your camera offers bit depth to select go for the highest. Additionally your camera may offer you to save a JPEG file also as a preview.

Handle RAW file in Windows Platform

Once you copy pasted your RAW file in to windows PC you have no way to open it in any application before you drag and drop in to Camera RAW in PS. This will give you problem of previewing and take lots of time to get the actually image you needed. As a solution, above mentioned JPEG preview could be use, which will be placed next to the RAW file, yet it consumes more storage space. The best solution I came up for this is install a RAW file encoder in to your Windows PC, then it will be able to handle RAW files same as any common image format. There are several RAW encoders and none comes for free. Depending on your requirement you may purchase one.

Finalizing

After you have done with your editing in Camera RAW you have two options. You can open the image in Photoshop to continue with further manipulation. For that you can just click on ‘Open Image’ button. If you have many images, first you can select the desired images and click ‘open images’. By pressing ‘delete’ you can remove the unwanted images.

If you are happy with the edit you can simply save the RAW file in ant common file format By clicking on ‘Save image button’ without going in to Photoshop.

Getting started

In order to use Google Webmaster tools you have to have a Google account. If you have one you can visit Google Web Master Central and Sign in to Google web master tools. Once you sign in it will take you to Google Web master tools home. In there you can add your web site by simply clicking the ‘Add a site’ button and enter the URL. Once you add the site it will appear in the list below. And as the next step you have to verify the ownership of the web site. It provides various ways to do it including META tag, HTML file of DNS record. Simply follow the steps and you might take a look at the example there, finally click verify. Till you very ownership you won’t be able to access any further information about the web site. Now from the Web master tools home you can access the tools for web site by clicking it name in the list. In addition using the list you can add remove owners of the web site and at the top messages sent by Google Web master tools will be displays. These messages might contain details about security threats.

Features

Dashboard

When you click on the name of the web site out of the list it will take you to the Dashboard. It will contain the summary of all the details about your website. That will include Search queries, incoming links, crawl errors, keywords detected and site map status. By clicking on more links in each section you can go to a details view. Furthermore you can add these gadgets to iGoogle home page as well.

Site Configuration

Site configuration is one of the most important sections in Web master tools. As the first section it will allow you to add a site map of your web site. It will make it easy for Google to crawl in to the pages. Once you add a site map it will take some time to access it and after that it will display number of pages indexed and various other details. In the section crawler access you can see the status of robot.txt in your hosting space which you can use to restrict Google bot by accessing some part of the web site. There is a feature to text your pages against the current robot.txt and where various Google bots can access it. Furthermore it provides facility to generate new robot.txt according to your special requirement and remove unwanted indexed URLs. Site link section will display auto generated links which may appear in the search result, just below the main link. Change of address section provides facility to change the domain name of your web site in proper way. Finally the settings section allows you to set geographical target, select preferred domain and set a custom crawl rate if its required.

Your Site on the Web

This section displays information gathered by Google bot over a period of time. Search queries display the number of search queries which your site was on, click through rate and many other useful information to optimize your pages even better for search engines. Links to your site displays number of incoming links you have for your web site and its pages. It provides details about number of links, anchor text and originated pages. Keywords section displays keywords in your web site according to its significance. Internal link section provide information about the links between pages in your web site while subscribe state displays number of users subscribed to your RSS feeds using a Google product.

Diagnostic

Diagnostic is a very important section for web masters to identify the errors and security threats to the web site. The first section ‘Malware’ will display if there are any illegal activities in your web site may without knowing. If such a case this information will be important to remove the malware and make your site safer again. If there are such threats a message also will be generated and it will be displayed web master tools home. Crawl errors section displays any identified errors in your web site by Google bot. By correcting those you can expect a better crawling efficiency in your web site. Crawl status displays a chart about the number of pages crawled per day, bandwidth used etc. This information can be used to fine tune your hosting environment properties. HTML suggestions section gives ideas to further improve SEO factors in your web site including Title, URL and duplicate content etc.

Labs

This section contains relatively new features to Google Web master Tools which are still in experimental stage. Fetch as Google bot gives idea how the Google bot see your page. Normally what we see is Browsers interpretation of the HTML code. But What Google bot sees is raw HTML code. Using this you can identify how it is and fine tune it to gain better search engine appearance. Side wiki is a newly introduced feature which mainly comes with Google Tool bar which provide platform to write comment about the web pages by users. Those wiki notes would be a highly accurate factor to measure the quality of the web page. In here it provides facility to enter the page owner’s wiki note about the main page of the web site. Recently Google has improved the ranking algorithm to identify most useful pages to its users. During that process ‘Performance’ of the web page also considered as a quality factor. In this section ‘Site performance’ you can figure out the performance level of your web site and improve it accordingly.

Further Usage

The idea behind this tool is Google want to index more pages as possible. They don’t want to index lesser pages or omit any pages from index. At the same time they need to deliver the most useful pages to their users and that’s why they continuously improve the algorithm with various quality factors. All the web masters can use Google web master tools and identify the weaknesses in their website and help to make the World Wide Web a better place by improving those. In addition if you have Videos in your web pages you can prepare a video site map and submit it to Google web master tool. If that be the case your pages will be listed in Video search results. You can identify the popular search queries to your web site and improve the click through rate by fine tuning titles, description etc. Finally you can use the information given by this tool to come up with innovative ideas and take the competitive advantage in World Wide Web.

Technology

The Technology behind Google Analytics is simple yet powerful. It gives the webmaster to a JavaScript code to place it in the every page of the web site. Once it place it loads with every page. It can gather user information and many other parameters and send them to Google analytics. Then it will generate complete analytical report out of the raw data gathered from your web site. In order to send web page and user data it is using various technologies including UTM tags. However this process will consume some amount of data and processing power of your web server than normal load of web page since it has to do some extra work behind the screen.

Getting Started

Register

The First step of using Google analytics is registering your Google account with it. If you don’t have Google account you have to create one first. Visit Google analytics while you logged in to Google Account. There will be a noticeable blue button with text ‘Access Analytics’. If you are using Google analytics for the first time it will ask you further information about you and your web site including web site URL and Account name. You can proceed after you fill the information in those forms and it will take you to the section ‘tracking code’.

Tracking Code

Tracking code is a JavaScript which is used to send the page and visitor details to Google Analytics. When you proceed after filling your data Google Analytics will give you the tracking code as a part of registration process. It has to be place in every page of your web site. When you are placing it most preferred way it to place just above you close the Body tag. If you place it at the top of body tag it might slow down the loading and rendering of your web page. After you place the code at the end of every page you are done with configuration and your site will be tracked by Google Analytics. You can always access Google Analytics and it will show the list of your web site. You can access a specific report from the drop down menu at the top or by clicking view report in the table displayed in the body of page.

Features

Dashboard

Once you access the report of a registered web site it will take you to the Dashboard. Its giving basic details of your web site including visits, unique visits, countries visitors came from, traffic sources and most visited pages. At the top there is a graph and the content of the graph can be changed by the drop down menu at the top left corner by selecting various details you want to analyse including visits, page views and average time on site. At the right side corner you can choose the time duration for the Graph. In addition there is a important feature which is Grouping. Most of the cases the traffic graphs are full of spikes etc. Using that you won’t be able to get a clear idea about the traffic trends. But if you group them by ‘weekly traffic’ or ‘Monthly traffic’ you might be able to get better idea and for that you can use this ‘Group By’ feature provided. Map overlay displays a heat map of the visiting countries while traffic sources display a pie chart. Each section has a link to ‘View report’ which will take you to the sub section with details information about specific area. Furthermore you can drag and reorganize the sections in the dashboard as you want.

Intelligence

This is relatively new feature introduced to Google Analytics which creates automatic alerts whenever something important happen in your web sites traffic. Due to that you don’t have to do all the analysis by yourself manually. Furthermore you can group Alerts by week or Month as you want. When an automated alert is created it will give you some information about what is special about that incident. By clicking on the alert you can go to the specific traffic details and see it yourself. You can select the alert sensitivity to filter out them according to significance. Other than Automatic alerts you can create your own custom alerts based on your own requirement. In that case you will be able to get an E mail notification once it occurs so you don’t have to visit Google Analytics Frequently. This feature has made the web masters life even easy by doing large part of work by itself, and those alerts could be used to strategic decision making process very effectively.

Visitors

From the left side menu you can access visitors section which will display information about the visitors of your website. This will be important information to measure the quality of your website and take decision for future content. In provides map overlay to identify visitors originating country, new vs. returning visitors and visitor’s languages. Most importantly it give you details about visitor trending and loyalty based on the factors time spent on the website, depth of visit and length of visit. In addition to that it give you details about visitors browser capabilities and network properties which might be able to further optimize your web pages to give the user a better browsing experience.

Traffic Source

Next section in the left menu is Traffic sources which is really important. It gives you details about where the traffic came from including referrals, search engines and direct traffic. In each section it displays a graph for related information. Furthermore you can breakdown the higher-level traffic sources to specific sources. This might be useful to identify the most active traffic sources and stimulate that trend while you improve the less active traffic sources. In addition there is a section to display information about your AdWords campaigns and other traffic generated from promotional campaigns.

Content

The next section is Content which gives you information about each and individual page in your web site and its traffic trends. Using this section you will be able to identify Top content, landing pages and exit pages. Site overlay is one of the interesting features in here which shows you the click on your web site using its own web interface. In navigation summery section you can analyse the patterns of visits and how did they navigate through the site structure. Furthermore it gives you information about top landing pages, top exit pages and entrance keywords. This information can be used to further optimize your web site and its structure. Most importantly you can measure the AdSense performance in here as long as you have connected your AdSense account to Google Analytics. Unlike in Google AdSense report here you can see clicks generated from each page of your web site along with the revenue generated.

Disadvantages

Though Google Analytics provides highly advance set of features to web masters to analyse web traffic there are significant disadvantages too. Most significant factor is accuracy. Sometimes visitor leaves the page before the JavaScript loads. If that be the case that page view won’t be counted. If you compare your server log it will show you greater number of visits than in Google Analytics. And as long as there is a JavaScript loading in every page it can be performance hit at the same time resource consuming. This will resulting in increased page load time and increased server resource consuming including processing power and bandwidth. Due to above reasons you have to use it very carefully. If you feel like the effect is significant you can always use the server log to measure your web traffic, but it won’t be user-friendly as Google Analytics.

Getting Started

Install

Google Toolbar is proving highly user-friendly installation process which is totally automated. Visit this URL using your Firefox browser to install the Google Toolbar. In order to install you have to have Firefox 2+ version and Windows XP Service pack 2+ version. Click the button ‘Install Google Toolbar’ to proceed with the installation process. In the next page click ‘Agree and Install’. As a security measure Firefox blocks third party installation script. Due to that you might have to ‘Allow’ the installation explicitly. In the next pop-up window click install and then Firefox will do the rest for you. Finally click ‘Restart Firefox’ to make the Google toolbar activated.

Configure

After you restart Firefox Google tool bar will be displayed just below the bookmark toolbar with default configuration. To get the maximum result out of the plug-in you can do some configurations. In order to do that, you can click on the ‘Adjust Google Toolbar Options’ button in the right side of the Toolbar. In the ‘Google Toolbar Options’ window you can do various changes. Most importantly you can select from where your search suggestions should come from in search tab. In the same tab you can select Gmail as your default search engine if you like. In the tab ‘Tools’ you can select what you need to appear on the toolbar according to your requirement. Google PageRank and Google bookmarks would be a good selection in here. In the sharing tab you can select the social networks where you share content while you can add quick access buttons in the next tab ‘Buttons’. The tab ‘Layout’ is giving you an option how Google toolbar should appear in Firefox. In here ‘replace Firefox search box’ would be a appropriate selection. Next tab is very important why there you can add your personal information to work with the AutoFill functionality.

Features

Search

You can sign in to Google by clicking the ‘Sign in’ button at the right side of the Google Tool bar. They you can access your configured semantic search by typing your desired keyword in the search box at the right side of the Firefox main tool bar (Assuming you selected the option ’Replace Firefox search box’). When you are typing keywords it will give you suggestions according to the geographical target you gave in the configurations. In addition to that it will give you your frequently search results from your web history and Google personalized suggestions for you according to your search interests. You can clear your search history by clicking ‘Clear Search history’ in the dropdown menu in search box. In the case you need to change the default search engine you can click the drop down button next to search box and select desired search engine out of that list. Once you enter the search query the result will appear in the Firefox tab. The list of keywords entered will be displayed on the toolbar and by clicking on them you can highlight them one by one. There is a toggle highlighting button to highlight all the keywords in the page.

Tools

In the left side of the tool bar there are set of buttons which will help you to access important web resources with just one click. You can always configure the behaviour of those buttons by accessing ‘Google toolbar options’ or directly by clicking ‘Add Buttons and Widgets’. The icon of Gmail will show you whether you have any new emails if you are logged in to Google. Using the share button you can submit the currently browsing content to your Social network or Social Bookmarking site. The list of social network can be edited by clicking ‘settings’ at the end of dropdown menu. The next button is SideWiki. It’s an interesting feature introduced by Google where users can writer wiki entries about the currently browsing page and every one will be able to read those. This will be helpful to get a idea about the quality of the page. Additionally there is a space to display ‘Google PageRank’ of the currently browsing page which is a also a page content quality rank.

Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmark is a very easy way to manage your Bookmarks and access them from anywhere in the globe. Previously there was no way to add a Google bookmark without accessing its web interface. But with Google toolbar you can bookmark currently browsing page with just one click on the button ‘Bookmark this page’ and as long as you are logged in to your Google account. By clicking the dropdown button ‘Bookmark’ you can access all your bookmarks. In the same dropdown menu you can access and manage your bookmarks in Google bookmarks web interface by clicking ‘Manage all’. In addition to that it provides facility to bookmark all the tabs with one click. If you feel like your bookmarks are not updated try clicking ‘Refresh’

Google Translate

Google translate is a exceptional web based service provided by Google. You can enter a phrase to the web interface and get it translated to various languages with one click. In order to make the process even easier Google toolbar has a translation component which can translate the currently browsing page with one click right on the same page. In order to proceed with this you can click on ‘Translate button’ and it will give dropdown message. Once you click translate in there you can select the desired language and get the page translated within few seconds. You can go back to original by clicking the button ‘Show original’. This is one of the most important and interesting feature in Google Toolbar.

AutoFill

While you browsing web there are so many data entry forms to fill specially in registrations. You can fill those forms with one click using this feature AutoFill. In order to do that you have to enter your personal details in the form in AutoFill section Google Toolbar Options. In addition you can find this from the dropdown menu in AutoFill button. In the case you need to manage different sets of information you can use profiles for that. Most importantly you can save your credit card details also in here. In order to provide security to your financial details you can add a password for that.

Additional Notes

Google toolbar is providing wonderful combination of features and facilities in order to give a wonderful browsing experience to the user. However there is no official release of Google toolbar for Google developed browser Chrome. Google chrome is the fastest browser and lots of internet users are waiting to use Google toolbar on Chrome. Let’s have a hope that Google will develop their Toolbar for Chrome as well. The Google toolbar having frequent updates and they will be notified to the user by Firefox. The updating process is totally automated and it only requires user’s conformation. Install Google toolbar now and have a nice browsing experience.

On-Page Optimizing

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are queries you type in when you search on any search engine. In general, people call a collection of words also as “keyword” instead of telling ‘keywords’. When doing the on page keyword optimization, the developers have to consider mainly on 3 factors. They are:

Keyword Density: Too much keyword usage in your site make the search engine feels you as a spammer.  The less amount of usage let the search engine ignore your site. So it is recommended to use at least three times and not more than 5 percent of the content text on your page.

Keyword Variation: The developer can use several variations of the keywords such as plurals, misspellings or changing the order of the available keywords. Misspellings may make the page look not that professional. But it works as an optimization technique.

Keyword Similarity: Providing similar keywords such like ‘single’ for ‘one’ is a good optimization technique that can catch search engine’s eye on your site.

Domain

There is no doubt that keyword rich domain names perform much better in the search engine rankings than the domains without keywords in the domain. The difference cannot be seen that much as each site has its own way of doing optimizing. If you compare one site having keyword in its domain and other not having keyword in domain, you will definitely find a difference after a few months you have host the site.

URL

Having a URL that includes the keyword alone does not help, but it helps when other sites link to another. A lot of people link to others by their URL, thus the anchor text will use the keyword.

Title Tags

Many developers use their site name as the title of the page. It is true that it displays that in the title bar of the browser. But, it is a very easy and efficient way to present keywords rather than displaying site name. Optimized title tags give several advantages on applying SEO to the sites.

• The phrase you were looking for and the title tag both are same. So search results will be highlighted.
• Increase rankings on search engines.
• Helps engines distinguish between pages that might look similar.

Meta Tags

Using Meta-tags are very common thing that developers use. For example;

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Self Storage,self storage containers,business storage,mobile storage,storage centre,storage facility” />

<meta name=”description” content=”this is article about search engine optimizing in Notes Of genius ” />

Header Tags

The header tags only do not catch the user’s attention on the page. It is a great way to let the search engines know what is the subject of your page is. If there is a need to control the size of those tags, you can easily use CSS for that. It is a bad practice that some developers use CSS to control font size other than using the header tags. Any webpage should include single H1 tag and the hierarchy of H2 and H3 tags.

Bold, Italic And Oblique Tags

The same scenario which I described earlier applies to the Bold, Italic and Oblique tags also as they let the search engine have much more attention on them. If the keywords of the websites are shown in using those tags, it will be a great way to do the optimization.

Remove Duplicate Content

In some cases, the duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered at the time of serving of results by search engines. It cannot be guaranteed that this page will be shown and this page will not. Sometimes the content will be removed from the index also.

Off-Page Optimizing

As it says in the name, Off-Page SEO techniques are not applied inside the particular website. Developers can apply them in some other websites.  Some of the most popular techniques are listed as follows.

Create Back Links

There are a number of ways to get create back links.Submiting articles to article directories (such as ezinearticles), and adding the site’s URL to web directories, pay per click and social sites will be effective.

Social Bookmarking

This is much inexpensive than having advertisements, because most of the Social sites provide free service of letting people to have links. Even they charge, the fare is reasonable. Search engines travel around the websites through the links available. Google Robot is the link traveler of the Google search engine. When providing the links to the sites even in advertisements or some other publications, it is good to look to use keywords as the available anchor text.

What Is Google Page Rank

The Page Rank is patented process of Google. This is a good method that overcame the early days search engine ranking that were based only on the content and the Meta tags of the page. Google gives every page a numerical value between 1- 10. This numerical value is called the Google Page Rank of that site and that is updated once in a 3 months. After seeing the accuracy of Google, other search engines also added a page ranking mechanism to their search algorithm.

How To Get Page Ranking In To The website?

The best and easiest way to get the page ranking to a website is to get a link from a highly ranked page. For example getting a link from a page with the rank of 5 can make your site rank as 4 if the site is trusted and if it has less amounts of links like that. It is not that worth getting links from low ranking pages. A page can be ranked 0 if it is punished by Google.

Nofollow Flags

In some of the pages like Facebook and MySpace they have added nofollow flags. After adding a nofollow flag, those back link won’t add any page rank for the target page, in other words it’s not a ‘vote’.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

There are several SEO tools that can be used to optimize the web site easily. There are categorized on each task as follows.

Keyword Discovery

There are several keyword discovery tools that tell us on what topic do people mostly search on the web. You can find them mostly free.

• Google Adwords.
• Trellian Keyword Discovery
• AdCenter keyword Group Detection

Keyword Volume

It shows how many people monthly search for that keyword.

• Google Adwords External Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Backlink Tracker

They help to find how many links available for the site from the other sites and how many links available in your site.

• Site Explorer
• Digitalpoint’s Keyword Ranking

Benefits

There are number of benefits of applying SEO to the websites. It can be commercial or social. Most important thing is that designers do not need to pay continuously.

• Perspective
• Targeted Traffic
• Increase Visibility
• High ROI
• Long Term Positioning
• Cost-Effective

Summary

Search engine techniques do not remain same for months. They changes. Some of the very basic techniques of optimizing are listed below. Mostly the Search Engine Optimizers’ task is to build the traffic and give a higher rank to the web site.  Sometimes what they do is not acceptable as good by the search engines. Then the search engines make changes in their algorithms or their techniques. Therefore this is like a battle between search engines and the Optimizers. So the most important thing is to be updated.

References

• Google Optimization. (n.d.). Retrieved 04 03, 2010, from SEO Chat: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
• SEO for beginers. (n.d.). Retrieved from TIZAG: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
• SEO Questions and Answers. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 03, 2010, from SEO Forums: http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/
• Edgware SEO Company | MiddleSex SEO Company. (2009, December). Retrieved May 2010, from seoarena.wordpress.com: http://seoarena.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/search-engine-optimization.jpg