When it comes to link building, it’s very important to submit your website to high quality directories. After a little research, I found that Alive Web Directory gives great value for your submission fee. If you decide to submit your blog to their blog directory, your will benefit from a high PageRank listing on an established, trusted and well indexed directory. Standard and featured listings are available with yearly and permanent submission options. You can get your link listed starting from $29.95 per year, and considering their Alexa rank, Pagerank and heavy promotion, it’s definitely worth every cent!

So, you want to put your website online but don’t know where to start? Ideally, you should register domain name at the same place where you get your web hosting, as it saves time and hassle, and of course is the fastest and easiest way of putting your site online.

One of the places where you can get both deals at a relatively low price is triple.com - a reliable domain registration and hosting provider company who has been online since 2003. Registring a domain with them is ICANN accredited and you can get strong SSL certificates from just 10.00 per year. They offer both Lunix and Windows hosting, starting at 2,99$ a month and for this price you get:

• 99.9% uptime
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee
• Data Protection
• Best-of-breed routers, firewalls & servers
• Weekly Server Backups
• UPS Battery Backup
• Diesel Generator Power Backup
• 24/7 Network and uptime Monitoring

Sounds good? Indeed it is. It’s hard to find quality for such prices now-a-days, and good to see some companies provide it.

The fact is — most people don’t click affiliate links nor trust them. Just imagine, every time you enter a store, (this happens especially often in cosmetics / pharmacy stores) — you enter willing to buy Product A, face an assistance who has a badge on her chest saying “Product B”, who starts talking you over into buying the product she advocates. You know she gets a commission off every sale, and even if Product B is not that bad, you will not trust her “objective” opinion, right?

Same on the internet. If I will write a review about how fantastic product B is, but when reader rolls his mouse over the URL and sees it has a referral extension, he will instantly guess you are just trying to trick him into clicking and buying something that will put a few bucks in your porcelain piggy. So, how to play smart?

1. Use an iFrame to hide your links.

Basically, you are working with a cookie and when it comes to affiliate cookies, all you need to do is set it in your visitors computer. An iFrame allows you to embed another HTML page inside the current page you are displaying, so you load the affiliate page inside your current page using the iFrame, but the trick is to make the iFrame so tiny that the readers wouldn’t be able to see it.

<iframe src=”http://toptut.com/affiliate-URL” width=”1″ height=”1″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>

This code opens the targeted URL in a small (and invisible, due to the size) 1px*1px frame. The affiliate page is there, so the cookie gets set in visitors computer. Tricky enough?

Disadvantages: 1. Some affiliate programs do not allow such play with cookies and will BAN you for this, so you have to make sure it’s not forbidden before you start framing. 2. The visitor still has to visit the target URL and sign up / buy your advertised product.

2. Using php-based redirects.

This is slightly time consuming but I often use it myself and you only need to do the work once. For every affiliate link you promote, create a simple HTML file in your notepad:
Read More from "3 Ways to Hide Affiliate ID Links and Boost Sales"

Right from the oven, just launched my new Top Tut Directory and I want to invite my readers to submit your website(s) FREE. This is going to be a top class directory, dominated by submitted quality links, not banners or advertisements. The site has been online for less than 24 hours now and already has 160+ sites listed, so… you won’t be alone there!

No illegal content websites will be listed (e.g. adult material, cracked software, etc). Currently, until December 31st 2007, the listing is absolutely free for all, backlink is appreciated but not required and all the sites will be approved within maximum of 2 business days.

Benefits of submitting to Top Tut Directory:

1. The submission is fast and hassle-free, as no backlink is required.
2. The Directory is going to be aggressively promoted and going to gain a PageRank upon the next update.
3. Your link(s) will remain listed permanently after the directory will switch to paid submissions.
4. We use SEO-friendly URL’s for utmost benefit of the listed websites.

Thanks in advance for your submissions!

So many times, on the pages of this blog, I mentioned the importance of quality, and relevant backlinks. These days when Google PageRank is updating, and some of us experience unpleasant results, we realize we need to take the link building in our hands and start working hard towards better traffic from top notch sites and improving our SERP’s, as well as ranking. From my experience, links exchange has a lot of value, but the downside of the process is that links exchange consumes a lot of time, seeking partners for links exchange with relevant websites can take weeks, and overall is not easy.

Today, I found a revolutionary tool — LinksManager Toolbar. Our sponsors from  linksmanager.com kindly provided me with an account so I had time to test it in real time and see all the advantages of this software.

What does it do? Basically it is a small toolbar, that saves you ALL the time and hassle, as you request link exchanges directly to your LinksManager Account from your browser window! No need to search miscellaneous forums for doubtful partners, let alone waste time seeking relevant websites. Since it’s “just” toolbar — it runs without slowing down your system (mine was not slowed down at all). Since everything s monitored, a special checker finds and flags dead links listed on your links pages and temporarily removes them until they become available again.

Search Engine Benefits: The best aspect of Editor Based LinksManager.com  is that the generated pages are static HTML and are W3C valid, with full CSS support. Fully conforms to the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) and, moreover, editor-based design makes it technically impossible to use LinksManager for spamming, email harvesting or auto-linking.

You can download a 30 days trial version of the toolbar and see for yourself how  incredibly useful LinksManager Link Exchange Toolbar is, no upfront payments or obligations required. If you decide to keep using it after the trial period is over, LinksManager will cost you $19.95 a month, or, alternatively — get one month free service for each user you refer. Managed to refer 12 users? You got one year free.

Platform Limitations: The Toolbar is currently only supported on Internet Explorer and FireFox, running Windows XP or 2000. Vista and Safari are not yet supported, so the minorities would have to wait a bit for now.
Bottom line, it’s a great innovation and I am sure soon will become a popular method for high quality links exchange. Anyone who is willing to invest minimum time in SEO and get maximum benefits and results should definitely consider  LinksManager Toolbar. You can even get help directly from your toolbar!

Today the guys behind WordPress.org (Matt, with a little help from Alex and Benjamin, to be precise) revealed two security-related releases, for users of both 2.2 and 2.0 branches. As Matt says in the official WordPress Blog, these releases only include security and minor bug fixes, therefore they should not cause any plug-in or theme compatibility issues, so, as he says, you have no excuse but to upgrade to the latest version.

On their Trac you can see the bugs closed for 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 to get more details about the problems fixed. With a little more Trac magic you can see all the changed files for 2.2.2 or 2.0.11.

Of course I’d still recommend to back up your database, and deactivate the plug-ins prior to the upgrade, none of us wants to see Matt being wrong about the compatibility part, right?

Several times I had an idea of starting an e-commerce website, where I could offer something or resell, but every time this idea got crashed, only because I had no proper ecommerce software. While I’d not mind paying for it, within reasonable limits, I’d want to have a god control over the sales and get access to comprehensive statistics, which most, so to speak “reasonably priced” e-commerce shopping carts do not provide. After a long search, the only software I really liked was the Australian AShop.

First of all, they offer a free trial for 10 days, secondly they are relatively (very) cheap and thirdly — they offer more features then you could ever hope for. This includes Google Checkout integration and CVC (Security Code) support, so basically this piece of software does all the work for you. As a part of their promotion, if you purchase their shopping chat software, they will provide you with absolutely free (customized) design for your newly opened eCommerce site. Of all the sites I checked, no one offered this much for such a low price, so I should think you get a great value for every dollar you invest in it.

This review contains sponsored links.

We all want our blog to look fresh and sleek, and therefore we either need to design it ourselves, or download a brand mew Web 2.0 WP theme. Here is a list of 10 most beautiful (in my humble opinion) Web 2.0 themes, currently available for download.

1. WordPress theme by Web2Themes. Demo | Download

Read More from "Top 10: Fresh Web 2.0 Free WordPress Themes"