The good thing about WordPress is its theme and plugin architectures that make it so versatile and powerful. That is precisely why I’m all into developing WordPress blogs for past years. Even when I need portal that works like a classifieds, or maybe a community site, auction site, Q&A or portfolio style, WordPress can easily be converted to one.

As I’m mostly developing WordPress blogs and portals these days, my focus is building up the effectiveness, especially in search engine perspective. To me, a blog or site must be developed to rank high in the search engines to reap maximum benefits. Thanks to many SEO WordPress plugins, this is an easy task.

So far, the best WordPress plugins for SEO purposes are :

SEO Smart Links – internal linking is an important SEO technique to impress the search engine spiders. This simple and yet effective plugin automatically self-link keywords and phrases to related posts, pages, categories and comments within your blog. This self-linking also entices human visitors to click through to other posts within your blog, increasing stickiness of your blog.

SEO Friendly Images – Other than webpages, images are another entity that can be indexed and ranked in the search engines. This plugin helps to make sure that your images are tagged with appropriate “alt” and “title” tags so that search engines can also index them accordingly.

SEO Slugs – With the permalink of your post following its respective post title, a post title like “What You Can Do To Make Your Website Rank Better” will have a slug like http://yourdomain.com/what-you-can-do-to-make-your-website-rank-better. Kindda long for a slug or keyword right? The SEO Slugs plugin will removes common words like “what”, “the”, “a” etc. (also known as stop words which the search engines will ignore) to be assigned as post slug, hence, making it more search engine friendly.

404 SEO Plugin – This is a simple “don’t-waste-your-traffic” plugin which gives you a smart customized 404 Page Not Found error message which automatically display relevant links to your posts and pages on your blog based on the words in the URL that was not found. With 404 SEO plugin, you’ll retain those traffic that will usually hit the “Back” button on the browser when they come across a page that is not found.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress plugin – As implied, if you have duplicate content on your site for some reason, this plugin allows you to select which version of a post the search engines should index while ignoring the others. With this, you’ll not have any worry of duplicate content penalty that might be imposed by the search engines.

Stay tuned and I’ll reveal to you more plugins power.

The web never fail to give me surprise. Just when I thought the free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop – Paint.NET and GIMP are good enough, I got to know another excellent alternative that I strongly endorsed.

Introducing http://pixlr.com – an online picture editor. It got 2 major advantages – it’s free and it’s online. It’s almost like web-based “Photoshop”. Once you click on pixlr editor, it’ll go into a workspace that is rather similar to that of Photoshop, though not as cluttered.

Those who have used Photoshop would surely love this free and convenient tool as you can easily edit picture – crop, resize etc. without launching the heavy-weight Photoshop.

Give it a try. I’m very sure you’ll love it.

If you ask me what is the next big thing to “learn to earn”, I’d say it’ll be apps development. More particularly, mobile apps development.

These days, everyone has a mobile phone at hand. I’m sure you see lotsa people carrying iPhone around with many owning the latest iPhone 4. Some may even own an iPad which is always a glance magnet.

Another popular mobile OS adored by many is the Android. Being an open source mobile OS, I somehow have a strong gut feeling that although iPhone caught the limelight now, in another couple of years, Android will definitely cut the chase and would probably be leading. Especially when many of the phone manufacturers will tend to lean towards the limitless Android.

While RIM and Win 7 Mobile are firing their engines, I can see that the 2 giants – iOS and Android are leading with a big gap.

So, how do you start developing apps? Learn iOS first or Android? Well, I’d suggest … go for Android for now.

Don’t know programming? Worry not. Google has just released a beta version of a WYSIWYG online apps creator with minimal (or no) programming knowledge required. It’s call the App Inventor. Do a search in Google.com on “app inventor” and you’ll realize it has just starting to accept applications.

It took me about 1 week to get approved. However, some of my friends and students who applied, even earlier than me, have no news on their App Inventor approval yet. Not too sure if it’s on a first come first serve basis. Anyway, go to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/ and complete the application form https://services.google.com/fb/forms/appinventorinterest/ to apply for early entry to use this fantastic web app.

With Google releasing such a wonderful tool, it makes our entry into mobile app development a piece of cake. Start using App Inventor to create simple apps. Once you get the hang of it, you can then explore the more sophisticated programming part of it.

Let’s learn together!

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At times, you might want your WordPress Page to link to a separate URL or website instead of a page from within your WordPress blog, this is where this handy WordPress plugin – Page Links To can accomplish easily.

If you see the top of this blog, you’ll find a newly added Support page. When you click on it, instead of opening up a page from within this blog, it’ll redirect to the support page. This would give an useful way to manipulate how you want the Page to work. For example, you can use this method to link directly to an affiliate link.

This is one cool WordPress plugin you must use.

Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat etc. are all very essential applications for web designing and development. All these are in the latest version of Adobe CS (Complete Suite) version 5.

One of the problems for obtaining these excellent applications is the cost. Well, here’s the good news. For those in Singapore and you are a student or (MOE and tertiary) teaching staff, you can get your hands on the educational version of Adobe CS5 (Web Premium) at a mere S$119 @ http://www.mine.com.sg. What’s the diff? You might ask. Well, it’s practically the same as the commerical version except, of course, it’s priced under “Educational Edition”.

So here you got it – cheapest genuine Adobe CS5 in Singapore, JB and Batam Best Buy Must Buy.

If you need an online survey form to gather your data, one of the best online survey creator is none other than SurveyMonkey.com.

However, there is a limitation to the free account of Survey Monkey – you can only see up to 100 responses. You’d to upgrade to the Pro account at $19.95 monthly in order to access to features like download survey responses, unlimited questions and up to 1000 responses per survey.

I’ve recently stumbled upon one online survey generator which is superb without all the limitations. Most importantly, it’s free! Check out one of the survey form I’ve created … click here.

It’s super easy to create online survey form with Google Docs Form and the built-in form templates allow you to create nice survey forms in a snap. And all the responses are collated in “Excel” spreadsheet style which allows easy export and printing. The form can be standalone or embedded into HTML page with iframe.

Hmmm, I’m not sure if Survey Monkey can still monkey around with a doc (Google Docs) around.

Email autoresponder is an essential tool in internet marketing.

“The money is in the list” – I’m pretty sure you have come across this statement. Is it true? Quick answer : Yes!

The more important question is – Which autoresponder should you go for?

Well, if you’re opened to paying a nominal monthly fee ie. $20/mth, the BEST autoresponder is none other than Aweber.

But for many newbies, a monthly fee of $20/mth is a huge entry barrier. Especially, when you’re just starting.

Nevertheless, it is still vital and essential that you have a good headstart with a good autoresponder.

The best choice by far now is, other than Aweber or GetResponse, MailChimp.

The good news, you can get a free account with MailChimp which allows you to gather up to 1000 subscriber emails!

Even if you need bigger subscriber list, MailChimp offers a handful of value-for-money plans.

So if you were to ask me which is the best email autoresponder to go for now? I’d say TRY THIS.

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