Datadial.net – Your One Stop Web Development Service

For all of you webmasters and bloggers alike who want to needs someone to design your website, to manage your reputation, develop your ecommerce site or web applications, then I would like to recommend Datadial.net – the one stop web development service.

Why Datadial.net? Well, Datadial.net has 10 years of experience in web design, web apps development and online marketing, having been online since the year 1998. A company with that amount of experience is seriously invaluable to you, as they would know how to deal with nearly everything that you can throw at them. The other advantage of Datadial.net besides it’s experience is that all it’s services are provided under one roof, ensuring the quality and speed of work as they do not need to outsource anything.

Out of the many services that Datadial.net provides, there are 2 services in particular that I would want to highlight to you, and that is internet marketing service and search engine optimisation service.

Datadial.net is one the first UK companies (Datadial.net is based in UK) to offer online marketing services – long before Google was born, which is surely saying something. Datadial.net lets you easily implement an online marketing campaign of your site, service or brand which returns benchmarked results, helping you increase sales and awareness of your brand.

Datadial.net recently added the new reputation management tool into it’s portfolio. The reputation management tool allows you to not only be able to manage but also to maintain your online reputation. With this tool, you are able to keep track of the latest rumors and the general attitude of the blogosphere towards your brand.

Search engine optimisation is one of the most important components of a successful website. Datadial.net which has 9 years of experience in the search engine optimisation area would be able to provide you with invaluable consultancy and services to help you optimise your site for search engines. Datadial.net’s search engine optimisation service covers literally everything there is to tweak for search engines, from keyword research to content creation, and even to website redevelopment.

Datadial.net search engine optimisation services are one of the few search engine optimisation services around that do not use black-hat or unethical search engine optimisation methods, making it an extremely good and popular choice among many webmasters and bloggers.

If you have any web development needs, I highly recommend Datadial.net as they are a trusted and proven company. To find out more about them, do check out their about us page.

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More Web Host Review Sites

Recently I was introduced to 2 web hosting review websites: hosting geek reviews and web hosting break. Both websites provide some really insightful articles, web host reviews and user ratings and comments and while their list of top 10 web hosts differ, I believe that by comparing the list you’ll be able to find the best host for your site.

Webhostingbreak.com has an extremely clean and well designed theme, making it really easy to navigate around the huge amounts of useful content there and one of the best designed web hosting reviews site on the internet.

The one thing I love most about Webhostingbreak.com is that it has a hosting uptime comparison chart which shows the uptime and reliability of the various web hosts. It shows you the approximate time when the host is down and the overall uptime of the host. This is really useful for those of you who really value uptime as you can easily see which host will be the best choice for you.

Web hosting pad uptime chart.

The other thing I like about Webhostingbreak.com is that it clearly tells you how it rates the various web host on the internet. Sure, anyone can compile their own top 10 list, but to compile a really good list, you need to have a really comprehensive way of rating the web hosts – something which Webhostingbreak.com has. Webhostingbreak.com doesn’t simply compile their top 10 list, rather they always test their web hosts in many ways, such as testing on the inside, frequent checks and things like that.

Webhostinggeeks.com is the other web host review site that I was introduced too. The one thing that I feel makes it stand out from other web host review sites is that it also has a list of web hosts which has won awards in certain categories. For example. the best budget hosting last year was Dot5Hosting.com. This is extremely useful if you want to find out which web host is the best in a particular category.

Web hosting awards winners.

These 2 web host review sites really do complement each other nicely. By comparing and reading the reviews of these 2 review sites, I highly believe that anyone will be able to choose the perfect web host for their needs. If you need to get a new host, I suggest you check out these 2 sites .

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This Is How You Should Deal With Trackback Spam

Trackbacks are extremely useful for bloggers and webmasters alike when it’s used properly. When used properly, trackbacks can help facilitate communication between blogs and notify bloggers when and who has written about their content. When it’s used in bad ways, it then becomes trackback spam – on par with that of comment spam.

What Are Trackbacks?

Trackbacks basically are a linkback to someone’s else content who has linked to yours. It is used to let the blogger who receives the trackback that someone else is referencing his post and mentioning his site. Trackbacks usually appear in your comments section of your blog (it depends on what type of blogging platform you use and the theme you are using).

Trackbacks look like this:

To see a live example, check out my post here and scroll to the bottom. Note: I deleted the link in the trackback. A trackback without it’s link deleted links back to the website that links to you.

Trackback Spam?

We’ve all heard about comment spam. It’s one of the things that every single blogger would most probably know about. Comment spams usually contain lots of hyperlinks to websites that have questionable content. Comments that do not contain any sort of hyperlinks but are not related to the topic or the post are also usually looked upon as spam and thus gets moderated by the administrator (This happens at Drett)

As comment spam filters are getting increasingly complex and effective, the spammers are getting more and more desperate to find new ways to spam a site, and thus trackbacks spam is born. A person with a website with questionable content links to your post, a trackback then appears on your post which links back to his website. Thus giving him the backlink he wants and also entirely bypassing comment spam filters. Don’t mix up legitimate trackbacks with spammy tackbacks. The spammy trackbacks are where the post in which the person links to you has entirely no relation to the content in which you are writing about while the legitimate trackbacks are where the the content is related.

So What Should I Do about Trackback Spam?

When receiving a spammy trackback, you can do a few things. The first choice would be to delete the trackback, keeping your comments area clean and spamless. The second choice would be to leave it there, giving the spammer the linkback he wants while lowering your reputation and respect as you link to sites with questionable content. The third option is what I’m recommending for you to do, and that is to delete edit the trackback and delete the link, but leave the trackback there. (Example here). This gives you content in your comments as sometimes even spammy trackbacks are related in very small ways while also lightening up your comments area, but at the same time taking away the linkback to the spammy site. Thus saving you reputation and reputation from going down the drain.

Every blogger and webmaster loves content and activity within the comments of a post, but hate giving out links to spammers in the comments area.  The third method I suggested is the best way to deal with trackback spam. It gives you all the advantages of a legitimate trackback while neutralizing it’s disadvantages.

Word of advice, only use the 3rd method which I highlighted above when the trackback is not complete spam. As even the method above won’t help you if the trackback is complete spam. Also, you can use the method which I shared to edit even legitimate trackbacks to stop your pagerank from leaking – yes, it might seem cruel but people do do this .

So from now on, do yourself a favour and instead of totally deleting the trackback, edit the track and remove it’s hyperlink. What do you guys think about trackback spam and the method of which I shared on how to deal with it?

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How To Highlight Author Comments In Wordpress Without Using Plugins

You’ve seen blogs where the author’s comments are highlighted, and I bet you would have thought that it was pretty cool. Besides the cool factor, highlighting your (authors) comments can be extremely useful as it helps you build your authority factor and helps first time visitors know who the administrator is.

Having seen how useful highlighted author comments were in other blogs, I set out in search for the solution that will let me do the same. Yes, I found many plugins to do the job, however, I don’t like installing Wordpress plugins for unnecessary things like this which can be hard coded into the template.

After looking around a bit I found Matt Cutt’s post really clued me in on what to do. Matt Cutt’s version works, however I think the way I did it below is easier to understand. What I did was to insert a php code into the comments template that checked every comment to see whether the author ID was 1 (It is 1 for me as my author ID is 1, most blogs should leave it at 1) and if it were to print the words authorcomment, if it wasn’t it would print visitorcomment.

Note: I check the comment to the author ID, so if your author ID is not 1, please change the number to your own author ID. Also, this method is not the only method by which you can hard code author highlighting into the template, but this is one of the simplest.

First of all, open your comments.php template, then look for the block of code below. It won’t be exactly the same for different themes, but it should be close enough though.

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li>
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

After that look for the <li> before the start of your comments and replace it with:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">

The end result should be below:

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

OK, now with that done, all you need to do is to assign a style via css to style up all comments with the class “authorcomment”. Open up style.css template, then insert this line:

li.authorcomment{background:#000000;color:#ffffff;}

The line above gives a black background and white text to all of the your comments. If you want to change it, just change the code in between the 2 curly brackets and you’ll be fine.

Go change your theme now to get these cool highlighted author comments . Do you guys do it differently? Any suggestions?

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Directory Submission Made Easy - SubmitterBot

Everyone knows how important backlinks are if you need to increase your PageRank. Everyone also knows that one of the easiest way to get quality backlinks is by submitting to web and blog directories as submissions are usually free or are relatively cheap. Everyone also knows that submitting your website to multiple directories is not only time consuming but also boring. Now here’s something not everyone knows – an easier way to submit your site to many directories in a short period of time by using SubmitterBot.

SubmitterBot is a semi-automatic directory submitter which really speeds up the process of submitting your site to multiple directories. All you need to do is to is submit your URL (All accounts get 1 free credit, which can be used to submit 1 URL) to SubmitterBot, and then start submitting your site to the many directories on the internet. The process of submitting your site to the directories only consists of typing in the verification code to verify that you are human and pick the category in which you want your site to be listed. The process is a really an easy one and is something you can do whilst doing other things. For example, I’m submitting my sites while at the same time writing this post

Once you have finished submitting your site and once you are approved by the directories, you will receive confirmation emails. And once you have received them, your job is finished. Something which might otherwise take a long time to finish can be finished in about half an hour. And now that your site is listed by so many directories you’ll reap the benefits of having such a high amount of backlinks to your website .

One more thing that might interests you is that SubmitterBot does not only do directory submissions, they also do article submissions and social bookmarking services. I for one will be exploring how I can use SubmitterBot’s services to further promote Drett, as after a few minutes of exploring the site I can see that SubmitterBot might be an invaluable and useful service after all.

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