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SEO: Demand your second click
One of the reasons why people often have high bouncing rate is because of the bad usability issues in the pages. Your blog’s bouncing rate is 90% means; ninety out of hundred people, who came to your blog, puked and went away.
Usually bouncers are considered a negative statistic: the blog failed to engage them enough to entice even a second page view.
Here few tips on how to improve usability of a blog, in order to reduce the bouncing rate. When a user comes to your blog for the first time, you must make him a loyal visitor. Unique visitors will stay in your blog and click through several links, only if you have good content as well as good usability throughout the blog.
Colour Scheme
Home page is the most visited single page in your blog. We need to give colourful but simple design. Colour scheme must match the theme of your blog. If you’re making a fan blog for ‘Twilight Movie’ then you can use dark colours, but no point of using dark colours for a business blog.
For an example have a look at Harry Potter official site and Virtusa Corporation’s site. You can differentiate the colour scheme they’ve used.
Meaningful Graphics only
Use meaningful graphics. Don’t just use some red roses around your blog unless your blog is a niche blog for Valentine’s Day.
Excessive use of Ads
Don’t use Ads excessively. Google AdSense is obviously the easiest way to harvest some money out of your blog, but if you use them excessively it’ll look bad on your blog. Visitor will get an impression that, this is a fake blog trying to rip off a click from me.
Search Box
When visitors find interesting articles in your blog, they tend to go for a search inside the blog. If you don’t have a search box then you’re losing your potential second click.
Related contents
One of the advantages when you make a blog for targeted audience or a niche blog is you’ll have related contents. If a visitor interested in one of your article then probably he’ll be interested in another article too. It is recommended that you’ve got a niche blog to have low bouncing rate, though it’s not always possible.
Be Proud and show your contents
You must be having good popular contents in your blog. Show those popular contents to your users. This is why most of the popular blogs such as Daily Blog Tips having a section in side bar for popular contents and recent contents. A pleased visitor will definitely click on a link.
Colour of the Link
Visitor will identify a link in seconds if we have blue underlined links. When you use different colour for your links, it may confuse your visitor and he’ll end up closing your page. But always remember it’ll not always true. There are some popular blogs using different colour links. Why give trouble to your user?
- Image by LollyKnit via Flickr
I can recommend you to have blue colour link.
I recommend you to try Google Analytics to check bouncing rate. If you’re using Google Analytics once you logged in, you can see the bouncing rate for your site.
Free WordPress Hosting – Limitted Offer!
Today Most of the bloggers are using WP.com or blogger.com. WP.com and Blogger.com has their own pros and cons. But having a self hosted WordPress blog is a real life changing experience for a blogger. Even MAYUonline.com is running on WordPress platform.
Have you ever dreamed of having your WordPress blog in your own domain??
If your answer is “YES”, continue to read the article. Others may check out my other articles 
Ravi is giving out 50MB hosting account with 500MB bandwidth for FREEEE!!!!, which is more than enough for a beginner. I started this blog with 10 MB hosting, therefore 50 MB is more than enough for a beginner. First year you’ll get a free account and from second year onwards you need to pay for the hosting.
He’s giving out accounts from HostGator reseller account so you’ll have a wonderful Control Panel. Since you’re getting a free hosting from Ravi, you need to link him back using blog roll or via a link in footer.
All you need to have is a domain name. These days you can get domains for such low prices such as $9, which is around 1000 LKR. You can register your domain in sites like namecheap.com or godaddy.com.
If you need any assistance in registering a domain, leave me a comment here. I’ll contact you promptly.
Terms and Conditions
- 50 MB yearly storage. 500 MB monthly bandwidth. No add-on / parked domains.
- Only 1 free space account per person.
- The home page should be a WordPress site / blog.
- Chargeable from the second year.
- Linking back to Ravidreams.com through footer / blogroll / hosting review article is mandatory.
Reliable??
Ravi is a known blogger and a WordPress freelancer (and SEO guru too). When something is free, first question coming to your mind is whether it’s reliable??. Honestly the question is reasonable. But I know Ravi for ages and pretty sure, he’ll not cheat on you . You can take my words.
Run Run.. Hurry
Why still waiting?? Go and grab your free WordPress hosting account from Ravidreams.com. Don’t miss the opportunity and regret later.
New Affiliate Opportunity for Lankans from E-Soft
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money online. Most of the affiliate products are focused towards U.S market. Especially for a site like MAYUonline, it’s very difficult to do affiliate marketing as most of the users of my site are from Sri Lanka.
Now, I have good news for Sri Lankan affiliate marketers. The premier IT education provider is now offering affiliate opportunities for Sri Lankans. E-Soft is a renowned IT institution in Sri Lanka. Even I did my BCS in E-Soft.
E-Soft is undoubtedly the NO #1 IT institute in Sri Lanka.
ESOFT has emerged as the Leader in Professional ICT Education. We specialise in conducting classes for the BCS and BIT Programmes in Sri Lanka and we are undoubtedly Sri Lanka’s #1.
When you sign up with their programme you’ll be given with a unique ID. Ask your friends to refer your ID when they are enrolling for courses in E-Soft. E-Soft will track your affiliate through this ID and will deposit money to your account. You can earn upto 2000 Rupees per referral.
In addition, you will also receive prizes for reaching milestones such as a T-Shirt for 5 registrations, a Flash Drive for 10 registrations, etc. going all the way upto a Return Air Ticket.
To make your job easier, each customer you send to ESOFT will receive a special discount upto Rs. 5,000 to encourage them to participate in the programme!
Once you reach 10, 000 they’ll send you a cheque to your home address. I have started 2 days back already got 3 referrals.
Good luck comrades…! Make use of this Sri Lankan affiliate programme
Google Friend Connect Now Available in Tamil and 47 Languages
Google Friend Connect is a service provided by Google to integrate Social Network feature into sites. You can see Google Friend Connect integrated with MAYUonline.com.
Google has once again shows their cabability in localisation. Now they’ve released Google Friend Connect in 47 languages, including Tamil. South Asian languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu are supported in this release.
Tamil Interface
It’s a good opportunity for web masters as they can easily reach their users in their native laguage. You can set languages for your site, so it’ll automatically show relevant langauge gadgets in your site.
If you use localised browsers then it’ll show Google Friend Connect gadget in same language. I’m using Tamil Google Chrome, when I visit my site (thought it’s English) it is showing the gadget in Tamil.
Friend Connect’s newly supported languages are: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnames.
Hot to go Google
Special thanks to Arabcrunch.com for updating me about this development.
Now you can upload files to Google Translate
Google Translate added a new option to upload documents you want to translate. Now you can upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, HTML and text files to translate.
By the way, Google gives you following warning too.
Unfortunately, Google converts your documents to HTML and then it translates the HTML file, so the translation doesn’t preserve the layout or the embedded images. You can upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, HTML and text files.
This is not exciting news for Sri Lankans as we don’t have translator for both Tamil and Sinhalese. The only South Asian language to be listed in Google Translate is Hindi.
Hope someone will make translator in our local languages. I’m sure community will come to help when someone initiates the project. We can’t rely on Google for their support as they’ll have proprietary rights over their products.
Another WP PLUGIN Week from Binny
You may wonder what the hell this guy is talking. Actually a LAMP specialist dedicated for WordPress made WordPress Plug-in last December for about a week.
Last time he made six WordPress plug-ins just for the WordPress community in just one week. Binny is good friend of mine and a regular reader of my blog.
Once again he has prepared to launch another WP Plug-in week. Actually he has released his first plug-in Weather Man.
You may ask me, what is weather Man?
Binny’s blog answers the question
Weather Man shows the weather as a widget in the sidebar. You can add the widget using the Widget page under Appearance. Or you can add it in a post using the [weather-man] shortcode anywhere in the post. It uses Yahoo’s Weather API.
Don’t just under estimate his work. Last time, his WP Plug-in week was featured in Blogging Tips.
Let’s download and test his Plug-in and encourage this young dynamic WP developer.
Vista and Office 2007 in Sinhala
Windows Vista in Sinhala
Microsoft has released Sinhala interface for both Windows Vista and Office 2007. This is the happy news for Sinhala windows users.
I think this is the first time Microsoft offering their products in Sinhala. This pack will help most of the rural area people. Those who don’t understand English, those who can understand only Sinhala can get the benefit out of this product.
Those who already adapted to English interface will have hard time adapting to this Sinhala interface.
PS: Windows XP, Vista and Office 2003, 2007 Tamil interfaces are already available online and users can download it.
Windows Live Messenger Sign in Problem???
Are you failed to login to Windows Live Messenger? Are you getting some garbage error codes when you try to sign in??? If so do the following stuffs.
- Restart your router/modem.
- Restart Windows Live Messenger
- Try pull-the-plug and re-plug routine, if software fails.
- Restart the computer (if you haven’t already done so a dozen times)
Error message is shown in Live Messenger
Hope it’ll work for you. You can check more about Windows Live Messenger Error codes on techarena.in
Google Chrome OS: Google’s New OS
It’s been rumoured for a long time that Google got an ambitious dream to dominate computer world as they’ve dominated World Wide Web.
As the first step, they’ve come up with desk top applications and on top of all; they’ve released “Google Chrome”. Google chrome is now being used by 30 Million people around the globe.
Now Google unveils its plan to launch an OS, named Google Chrome OS. Here is an excerpt from Google’s Blog.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Windows to Google Chrome
Success of the Google Chrome browser won by Speed, simplicity and security, therefore Google promises same features in Google Chrome OS too.
You can read more about Google’s New OS on their blog.
Attachment fails in Gmail???
When you upload attachments to Gmail, you may get error messages saying “failed to attach!”. If you come across such error message first thing you need to do is, installing latest Adobe flash player.
You can get latest Adobe flash player from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ . In given address you can check whether you’re having the latest version of the flash player. If you don’t have one, please install the latest version.
Google says this feature is not supported in Linux; therefore Linux users will have to wait some time.
If you’re already on latest version of Adobe Flash Player (as I’m writing this article, latest version of flash player available is version 10.0):
- Switch your attachment settings from ‘Advanced attachment features’ to ‘Basic attachment features’ (click Settings and select the General tab to change this setting). Save your changes and try to upload your attachment again.
- Try another browser: if you’re on IE then install Firefox or Chrome and check the feature on it.
- Disable your proxy: Most of our home users don’t use this feature, so don’t worry.
- If you continue to have trouble after following these suggestions, report it here.
PS: Now you can upload up to 25 MB to Gmail , but make sure your mail receiver also using Gmail, because if he can’t receive 25 MB attachment then no point of sending a mail with 25 MB.
Study Medecine
