Private Domain Names – Why Get One?
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- One of the biggest hindrances for people who want to make a mark online is the fact that they fear about their own privacy. This is based on the fact that almost everything you put into the Internet could actually be accessed by other people, especially those with rude intentions of spamming us with emails. So is there a way you could start doing business with the Internet without having to expose your personal information? Yes, there are ways, one of which is registering a private domain name.
Simply put, private domain registration is a service provided by most of the domain registrars nowadays that enables you to register your own public domain (which everyone can see of course) while hiding or keeping your personal information hidden from registries and databases. As you can see, without this service, once you register your domain name, it goes into a public database that can be searched by anyone through WHOIS protocol. This is where miners go to collect your data and send you those annoying spam emails. Also, once you buy a domain, you enter more personal details other than your email address, such as your mailing address and phone numbers. This is in fact risky at times, as there are lots of cases of bullying and stalking in private homes being reported yearly, where information was also gathered using the domain search protocol.
Through private domain registration, you protect yourself from all of the above-mentioned, while giving you the full ability of creating your online presence through a website. However, this is an extra service that comes with a small fee added to your domain name registration charges. If you opt to this service, your domain name still appears on domain databases, but your name or other details won’t appear. Most of the time, the domain registrar company’s name and information appear throughout all databases, and you will no longer worry about people being able to find you personally.
In spite of the added charge, this is a worthy investment especially if you are planning to do business with the domain name industry or internet marketing. Imagine having multiple websites without having to worry about your personal information being all over the Internet. You can focus on your tasks and website improvement, rather than having to waste your precious time managing your emails. You also won’t have to worry about having to be wary of your own safety within your surroundings because someone got ahold of your address or phone number.
There are times though when having a private domain name registration can question your credibility, especially if you are a seller. There are still times when you should have the right details put in, preferably your company address if you are a big one, so as to reassure clients of your trustworthiness. Your need for this private registration will therefore depend on your needed level of privacy, and it will still be up to you to know what to share and what to keep in your own personal world.
Disqus Comment System – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Another common feature we see on most blogs is the Disqus comment system. Seeing it along many famous and well-marketed blogs can give us the impression of how useful it is.
Disqus (pronounced as discuss) is a separate comment blogging system that can be integrated in many different content managing system platforms, one of which is WordPress. It can be installed into WordPress via plugin but directly connects you into its own Disqus API site for configuration.
This system supports threaded comments and replies with indention differences. As we all know, WP does not support this by default, and all comments and or replies appear all as the same. This feature itself makes it better than WP’s own system.
Disqus also sends notifications of replies and comments via email to those person involved, and not only to the blog owner. This can be turned off too, if you don’t want to receive them. Or you can subscribe to the comments to stay updated on the discussion, creating a lively discussion for all your visitors. Gravatars are also supported like in WP, based on their email address.
Aside from your email address, Disqus can also connect to your identity via your Twitter ID, Facebook profile, OpenID, or other common profiles. This means that you can leave a comment even if you don’t have your own Disqus account.
While viewing comments, you can also choose how you would want to sort and filter the comments, either newest to oldest or the most popular comments placed above the list. Also, the whole comment box can be placed anywhere on the post or page, and design can be fully customized to fit your whole layout and theme.
However, the downsides of the Disqus comment system, first and foremost, is the fact that it overrides your existing plugins or comment configuration. Akismet, a spam comment detector, doesn’t work with Disqus, so you may have a harder time filtering the spam comments out of the good ones.
Also, if you don’t have a Disqus account, there would be no hotlinks on your name, unlike the traditional WP. There are also some bugs that happen with wrong names being connected to wrong IDs, which is not a good thing though.
And another thing, backing up your comments in Disqus is a separate job with backing up your WordPress, as the data are all stored within Disqus servers. In case the site goes down, people can still comment on WordPress, but it doesn’t add the comments to Disqus once it comes back.
Overall, Disqus is a good plugin, and we would be looking forward to future enhancements.
Please check out the Disqus Comment System by clicking here.
Spamming Sites Is Not Link Building
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- One of the major ways in order to do SEO is link building. This helps a lot in increasing our page ranks as well as keep up high in the search results page to generate more traffic. The more links you build through backlinks will help engines determine your level of relevance for the keywords being searched.
Remember that with the recent Google Panda Update, there had been new standards with link building and SEO. The old ways of doing this were already deemed unhelpful and waste of time. This is especially true with spam sites, which was once a tactic employed by many people to do their own SEO.
You may have remembered those sites which contains nothing really valuable but is going on top of Google results page. Now, with the new algorithm, these were removed and replaced by more valuable sites and pages. Also, backlinks are now being evaluated more by Google and the battle is now going on quality over quantity.
Before, link building was done in simple, and some unacceptable, ways. With the old system, the more backlinks you get, the more Google reads your page as relevant. So you can be making a lot of spam sites and create backlinks to each and one of those and Google will consider your main site relevant. It was also considered that doing guest posts, even without the right quality and unique content, within popular sites will increase page rank as well as build up your link. So, this way again, spam sites will just create guest posts in pages like EzineArticles and get backlinks, and they worked. This was true in the old system, but not anymore.
Have you also seen sites which were advertised randomly in strangely written comments in high-ranked posts and pages? Most likely these pages are spam sites, and they thought that the more their site gets exposed in the Internet, the higher relevance it would get in the engines.
Now the problem is, you also have to be wary of these spam sites linking to you. Again, with the Google Panda update, sites linking to many spam sites were also removed from the list and considered spam. Thus, less traffic for you. That was true with EzineArticles. The traffic it was getting dramatically decreased because it contained posts backlinking to many of those spam sites removed by Google. So now, if you are still considering doing link exchanges with everyone you see on the Internet (or grant anyone who asks you to link them), think again. You now have to check each and every site if they are worthy of being linked, otherwise, you suffer the consequences.
As you can see, whether it is in us or with the pages that we interact with, spamming sites are a no-no if we are focusing on building our links up. Now, Google looks upon a page’s quality and usefulness, and not on the fact that you have thousands of outbound or inbound links on you. It means more effort now, but think of the good side, you will now get what you deserve for all that hard work.
Tweet Meme Retweet Button – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Obviously, Twitter is becoming very popular nowadays in sharing posts or anything interesting in the WWW. That’s why it is fairly essential for your blog to have a Retweet Button. A cool plugin that can do that function for you is the TweetMeme Retweet Button.
With this plugin installed, it lets you add a retweet button within your blog posts that visitors can click to share to their followers as easy as a click of the mouse. This button is fairly very easy to add to the blog’s pages and posts, and it can go along well with most themes and most blogging platforms and applications. In WordPress, it can be easily customized to go alongside every post you blog about so that your readers can immediately share the post as soon as their mind decides to do such. No more having to go through the unnecessary steps of copying links and pasting them on the Twitter dashboard to tweet to their followers.
This plugin can also let you add the Retweet Button not only on the main blog posts and pages but also on your RSS feeds. This is particularly useful for more exposure. Attach it on your emails or in other websites you have, it is really compatible with most sites. Like other social networking plugins, the retweet button also shows you how many times people have retweeted the link to your blog post, for a more informed popularity show off.
While this button is very useful in marketing your online presence, it is not as useful as Digg Digg or Social Slider or other plugins that also offer other sites to connect with. Apparently, this plugin only connects with Twitter and it is only where it goes to share the links. Also, having no customization whether you want the number of retweets to be displayed or not, you have no way of controlling it in case you would not want to display it. Having a huge number of retweets boosts the author’s spirit, but it can do otherwise to those who only have a few or even no retweets.
Another thing that one can find as a flaw in this plugin is the fact that you cannot revise the text you will be tweeting. Yes, it means there will only be that one specific pattern of text that will be retweeted throughout the WWW.
Overall, this Retweet button is a really useful button if you are also into the twitter world. But in case you would not want the statistics published, this is not the app for you.
Learn more about the Tweet Meme WordPress plugin here.
Social Slider – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service )-Another cool plugin that is used for social bookmarking and sharing is the Social Slider. I see this fairly frequently on many sites, and you might have too. This is the box floating on the sides of the screen, mostly on the left side, that contains social networking buttons that also slides along with the page as you scroll it down.
Sounds familiar? Yes, apparently, it is currently one of the most common plugins for social sharing used by most bloggers today, alongside Digg Digg. Like the latter, Social Slider plugin can also connect with different sites such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Buzz, Tumblr, LinkedIn, NetworkedBlogs, MySpace, Orkut, FriendConnect, Digg, Picasa, Flickr, Youtube, Last.fm, Delicious, and much more. It also has a Newsletter and RSS buttons for that easy bookmarking and subscription. Also, like Digg Digg, it is fairly customizable too in different areas.
Layout and theme-wise, it can be customized to match the rest of the website theme. You can choose whether it can be displayed full, compact, or with only minimal icons. You can also customize on the position, height, color, and transparency of the box. Color schemes can be either dark or light, depending on how your website looks overall. You can also control the movement of the box when it expands, how fast or how slow it goes upon hoovering. You can also disable this plugin when your page is viewed on a mobile device, so as not to interfere with the small resources used in mobile display.
The default position of the sliding box is on the left of the page and you can keep it unchanged if you see it fit. Where the page opens after a click on the button can also be changed to either the same window or another tab, depending on how you think your visitors will benefit on it. At this moment, the default installation file of this plugin is available in three languages English, Polish, and Spanish.
Social Slider is free to use, however there is also a paid version, the Social Slider Pro which of course has more features than the standard one. A licensed Pro version though can only be used in only one blog for as long as you like, however, it is highly customizable to go along your whole website for that cool visitor experience and quick sharing through the most visited sites.
To check out the Social Slider Plugin please click here.
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