How to increase google page Rank

The first rule of Increasing Your Google Page Rank is Not to Talk About Increasing Your Google Page Rank.
Let me back up.
I have a lot of websites I dabble on/manage/own/open to grin at. I have a passive life goal to increase my google page rank on such sites. Alas, I do absolutely nothing to reach such goal. In fact, I actually do active things to disrupt this goal, like linking to dumb articles and other internet nonsense.
Even so, on rare occasion I’ll be looking at one of my websites and I’ll realize that my Google Page Rank has…(wait for it)…INCREASED!
This provokes an immediate happy dance, the likes of which I will not replicate for anyone, ever.
Shortly after said happy dance, my levels of serotonin return to their normal base and I become accustomed to my new page rank for that particular website, feeling I thoroughly and completely deserve it, it is my birth-order-determined RIGHT and I should have had it for years.
Then, the Google Page Rank gods have at me again. A day might have passed, or maybe a month, or maybe even a year. But surely, without warning, the Google Page Rank gods rip the new page rank away from me in a way not unlike taking off bandaids from open wounds that have not yet scarred. These rips — each and every one – damage a piece of me. Not to mention my websites, whose newly lowered page ranks reflect the scars.
Why am I talking about this?
If you haven’t deduced from my cryptic hints, the Google Page Rank gods have struck again in my life. Although there were some minor let-downs in the process (one site I have went from a 4 to a 3 — sad day) the biggest boon (read: GOOD THING!) has occurred here at ClaireDiazOrtiz.com, where the page rank gods have upped my rank to…(wait for it)…a 6!
Yes!

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

Try Opentracker for free

Get Smart, Get Started

Benefit from professional analytics
Essential for website traffic measurement

PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

Try Opentracker for free

Get Smart, Get Started

Benefit from professional analytics
Essential for website traffic measurement

PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

Try Opentracker for free

Get Smart, Get Started

Benefit from professional analytics
Essential for website traffic measurement

PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

Try Opentracker for free

Get Smart, Get Started

Benefit from professional analytics
Essential for website traffic measurement

PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

Try Opentracker for free

Get Smart, Get Started

Benefit from professional analytics
Essential for website traffic measurement

PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

Google is your friend

At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com, alltheweb.com, etc.) through its acquisition of Overture. Bing is the 3rd player, and reported to be developing their own search engine that will produce independent results.
The Google engine and indexes are used by numerous big players like Yahoo, Hotbot, AOL, and Netscape.
Google has a unique way of determining where to place sites in result listings, from top to bottom. They use a technology called PageRank:

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PageRank

PageRank is a system for ranking web pages
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."
Links from any page (internal or external) to your site (primarily your homepage) are called backlinks.
Additionally, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or backlinks, a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.
Thus, "important, high-quality sites have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."
"Google goes far beyond the number of times a search term appears on a page and examines numerous aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it), to determine if it's a good match for your query. "
To find out what your site’s PageRank is, you can download a tool that does this. To check your backlinks, try typing 'link:www.yoursite.com' (without the ' marks) in the search box.
The above excerpts are taken from an article that was posted by Google, which provides additional background information on PageRank.
Meanwhile the page has been removed, so here are some other links to relevant info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank​
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section1

How to improve your site listings in Google

Getting Started
Check if your site is in the Google database.
If your site is new or you are still building the site, add your site as soon as possible. It can take up to a month to see your site turn up in Google. This is a rough estimate, as the time period is steadily diminishing. You will turn up much quicker if you are linked to a site which is frequently ‘spidered’ by Googlebots; little robot-scripts that index the internet page-by-page. These robots, which search engines send out, are variously called ‘spiders’, ‘bots’, ‘crawlers’, etc.
Google spiders in particular are called Googlebots. There are different types of bots. A freshbot, for example, visits you on a regular basis if you make frequent updates. The advantage of being visited by freshbots is that your updates can appear in Google on a daily basis: something of a positive version of catch-22. The more content you add, the more often you are visited. This leads to the importance of adding content. This is discussed in detail below.
If you have a link from a site that is often visited by a googlebot, then you can appear in Google within 24 hours.
To determine if your site has recently been visited by a freshbot, do a search on Google for your site URL. Freshtags, which indicate the recent passage of a freshbot, will appear in the search results as a recent date (shown just below the single line of site description). They are not rare, however, like clouds, on some days there are none in the sky.
Find link-exchange partners and check their PageRank, a link from a site with a high PageRank is better than one with an low PageRank. The case has been made that linking to a site that has no PageRank will keep your rank down. This is called linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Optimizing your pages for Google

If you have established one or more links from other indexed sites to yours, your site will be visited by Googlebots.
Googlebots scan the content of your pages mainly by looking at the following items:

• Page title
• Meta description
• All text on your page(s)
• Links to other pages

All these items are of great importance because they should contain your important search keywords.
This is an important conceptual hurdle. The entire internet revolves around the choice of individual words. This process is constantly being refined. It is essential that you are Spartan and accurate whenever choosing your descriptive terminology: words. Try and put yourself in the minds of the people who will be looking for your site. What are the one or two words that they will focus on?

Page title

Make sure your title contains your most important search keywords. Do not make your titles longer than 80 characters (more can be considered as spamming).

Meta description

Google does not index your meta ‘keywords' tag but it does index your meta 'description' tag. Make sure your description contains your most important search keywords.

All text on your page(s)

Make sure your text contains your most important search keywords. More importantly, the pages should focus on your subject, service, product, or area of interest. Put your most important keywords once in your headers, a couple of times in your paragraphs, once in bold once in italic, in your image alt tags, your image names, your url's, etc.

Links to your other pages

Make sure the Googlebot can find its way through your site. One thing Googlebots find hard to follow is framesets. So if you use frames, make sure you have a <noframes> or hidden section where your text and links are located. Adding a sitemap can do wonders for letting Google index your entire site.

Tip: if you have a button on your website that takes you back to the homepage, link it to your domain name (www.yoursite.com) instead of a page called home.html or index.html. Google doesn’t recognize the difference between outbound or inbound backlinks.

Content: update your content as frequently as possible.

The more often you update your content, the more often you will be visited by freshbots. Try to add a page a day if possible. The content you generate should be of high quality. Try to find every angle from which you can discuss or describe the subject your site is about. The point is not to generate poor quality or duplicate material. Duplicate pages will lead to penalization. The point is that Google, for example, loves content. It is a question of scale. Think of the old adage ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’. In this case it can be revised: ‘a page a day will send Google your way’. More content, more spider visits, more human visitors, more readers, more pages, etc.

All this will contribute towards strengthening your PageRank and realising a higher position in Google search results. This will lead to more traffic.

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How to increase google AdRevenue

1. 

   
   
   

    It is just copy from a site ...for more Go through Digital point 

   Although this is only one page website. But the CTR is 20~30% consistently.

   
   Before we even get into any specifics you should understand that the most important thing that will affect your CTR is your NICHE and your keywords you are getting traffic for.
   
   You want to target niches with motivated traffic. Fanatic hobbyists, career seekers, people looking to cure an ailment, people that are insane for a certain product, people that want to improve their body; these are motivated people. The sites you make should target these motivated people and you will be setting yourself up for better CTRs right out of the gate.
   
   If your niche is not motivated and hungry for what the ads offer, you will always struggle to get any kind of high CTR.
   
   
   1) Blend in your adsense ads and match the color of your website background color. Make your background color and border color the same as your website background color to blend in the ads. This is the basic that everyone knows.
   
   2) Change the URL and ads text color to the same color (usually black color) as your content text. I know that many adsense users like to use green or grey color for the URL but it don't works now! People straight away recognize it is an adsense ads, and won't click on the URL. Black color URL works the best together with black color text. -> Change your URL and ads text color to #000000

   
   3) Change your ads title to bright blue color instead of the normal blue color link #0000FF. Too many websites in the Internet are using this blue color for their ads title. Users in the internet already accustomed to the blue color links and they won't click on the blue color adsense links anymore. For the hex code of bright blue color, I will not reveal it. Very sorry!
   
   4) Try making your content font size smaller than your ads. Why? This is to make your content pop out prominently. This always work.This method is used by Jim Hudson by adsense 6 dights code.
   
   
   5) Change your content color to light gray color. Yes, light gray color. Why? Changing to light gray color turns people off and make your adsense ads stand out prominently. Hence, their attention will be at your adsense ads instead of your content. If they want to read your content. They will read up your content.
   
   6) Put your adsense ads above the fold and only use 336 x 280 ads. Use Text ads only as I found out 90% of the time text ads work better than image ads. Some adsense users prefer using both image and text ads because they want more competition for their ads slot, more competition means higher CPC. Don't put too many ads above the fold, recently google update affect 1% of the website that put too many ads above the fold.
   
   
   7) If you are using skyscraper ads, use text ads only. Skyscraper works better on text ads.
   
   8) Target only visitors from the google.com search engine. USA visitors can make you more money than a visitor in india.
   
   Using WordPress › Ozh' Who Sees Ads block all the visitors that are not coming from google search engine. You need targeted traffic and people who are interested in your adsense ads.

2.  
   
   
   
   

   9) Bold, Underline, Italic your content keyword. Why? This will make your adsense ads more relevant from my test. Especially the keyword in the first sentence and the last sentence of your article. To make your ads more relevant, try to have your keyword in your post/article title, URL, Meta Description too.
   
   
   10) Adding adsense channels to each and every of the ads in your website and tweak them accordingly to the CTR. Don't be lazy, if not you will not increase your CTR. 70% of the adsense marketers don't track their ads.
   
   
   
   
   11) Don't put images and videos above the fold, it affect CTR, embedded videos and images drawn attention and make your adsense ads become less prominently to users eyes.
   
   12) Using large font size for adsense ads, large font size works better than medium or small. Big font size is more prominent and readable.
   
   13) If you ads is irrelevant to your content, there will be much lesser clicks, you need to do section targeting. Section targeting to certain section of your page such as the sidebar or the footer. You can place tags around the parts of your content that you want ads to relate to and other tags around content that you want adsense ads to ignore.
   
   14) Set your internet based internet to the below settings, you will most likely get more related ads instead of unrelated ads. This is important step, I found out that after changing to this setting I get more relevant ads ever. This is recommended by Jim Hudson.
   
   
   
   
   15) Keep some spaces between your content and ads. Your ads will stands out more prominently. This has been mentioned in many adsense guides.
   
   <div style="display:block;float:left;margin: 5px 5px 5px 5px;">INSERT-ADSENSE-CODE-HERE</div>
   
   16) Use 2 ads instead of 3 ads. 3 ads looks spammy and turn people away.
   
   17) Go to adsense competitive filter block all these low paying advertisers.
   
   http://jayboxlabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/adsense-advertisers-filter-list.txt
   
   18) Arial or Verdana for adsense ads?
   If you use arial for adsense ads, then change your content text to arial too. If you use verdana for adsense ads, then change your content text to verdana.
   
   Once you have done all the methods above you SHOULD see an significant increase in your CTR.

   
   
   
   

   I know there are a lot of adsense websites that don't receive a lot of traffic, hence there is low CTR.
   
   You don't need to SEO your website to get to the first of google in order to make money! All you need is to buy traffic.
   
   Combine this traffic buying method with the above tips and you will make passive 6 digit adsense USD.
   
   Also, If all the above steps don't work then try this one.
   
   Step 1: Buying AdSense safe traffic to your blog using InnoShow
   In order for this method to work you need to buy traffic to your site. What you’re going to be buying are cloaked, real visitors that are interested in your niche. What these visitors do is stay on your website for a good amount of time, look through everything and eventually click on an ad. The cost per visitor is 3 credits.
   
   For 15 dollars you can get 500 visitors, I make $90 with 500 visitors and my CPC is as low as $0.48. If you have a high CPC like $1-25 you could make upwards of $200 or $300 in a few hours. It’s really a very simple process, you just need to make sure your CTR (Click Through Ratio) isn’t too high. In order to do this you buy View Visitors.
   
   These Visitors just view your website for like 30 seconds, and count as a few in AdSense. This drops your CTR, and costs very little money. The website we do this on is InnoShow. When you get on InnoShow, sign up and verify your account, usual sign up steps. When you’re signed in you should see a screen like this:
   
   
   Alright, Now that you’re here let’s fill out the information
   
   
   Title: A Title you want to remember this website with
   Info: Any information you want to put down for this site
   URL: Obviously, the URL to your website you’re sending the traffic.
   Keywords: Put the keywords you chose for your website in here
   Type: Scroll down and select focused visitors. Also set up another identical campaign but instead of focused choose view. This will be the CTR reducing campaign.
   
   
   Step 2: Keeping your CTR down and Purchasing Credits
   Having too high of a CTR will make Google very suspicious, and we definitely don’t want that. So, in order to avoid that we are going to have to add visitors that don’t click ads or anything. That’s where the view campaign you just made comes into play.
   
   Let’s say you wanted to put $30 worth of credits onto your account. You would get 3,000 credits. You could get 500 focused visitors 7,500 view visitors which would keep your CTR at a very good level. Let’s learn how to purchase credits, and assign them to a campaign. Look below for where to add credits:
   
   Now, credits are $.01 for every $10 you get 1,000 credits. So, let’s just say we buy $30 worth. I would recommend putting 1500 credits into focused visitors (500 visitors) and putting 1500 credits into views (7500 views) and that should be good for about 3-4 days

   
   

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How to Print Office for the iPad Documents

As you probably know, Microsoft Office Apps for the iPad are now available for downloading. The Apps are free but to edit or create documents you’ll need a Microsoft OneDrive account. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are nicely done Apps for the iPad but there is one feature that didn’t make it into the first edition. That’s printing. Yep, there is no native way to print from the Apps themselves. After some hemming and hawing about the fact that we don’t print as much as we used to, Microsoft did admit that this will probably be an included feature in a future update.

So, what do you do if you need to print an Office document from your iPad. Well, the answer to that is to find an App that will do that for you. There are any number of Apps that will let you print from your iPad, but I’m going to focus on two of them that offer two different solutions for how to print Office for the iPad documents.
The first is called Printer Pro and it is made by Readdle. The App itself costs $6.99 although there is a free Lite version that you can download to see if it will work with your printer so you don’t have to pay the freight to find out. Printer Pro works with any Apps that you might create documents in and it works much like most iOS users would expect.
To use Printer Pro, download the App and then select Add Printer to add your printer to the list.

Again, there is a Lite version that you can use to test to see if your printer works correctly. If you download and use the Lite version the paid version will import your installed printers from that version.
Once you create a document in a Microsoft Office App it is saved to your OneDrive account. Open the OneDrive App and select and open the document. Once you’re in the document go to the lower left corner of the screen and select the three circles on the bottom task bar.

This will give you the option to Move or Rename your document or Open in Another App. Choose Open in Another App. This opens a small window that you can scroll through to see which Apps you can open your document in. Scroll until you find Printer Pro and select it. Your document will open in Printer Pro.

There are several printer options you can choose from and you can also choose which printer you wish to output your document to. Once you’ve set your options hit the big blue Print button and your document should arrive in your printer’s output tray.
Another alternative is called ThinPrint Cloud Printer. After setting ThinPrint Cloud Printer up the procedure to print is as described above, but the setup is quite different

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3 Reasons You Shouldn’t like to Buy A Cheap Phone

There you are at the carrier store looking for a new phone to get, since your previous two-year contract is up and you’re ready to sign another to get your discounted phone. A lot of the new devices you see are about $200, but there are a couple that are free! They don’t look as cool as the more-expensive ones, but you want to save money. That’s a bad idea.
You can get a lot of smartphones for free after signing a new two-year contract, while other models will usually cost around $200-$250. These cheaper smartphones are still decent, but when you take advantage of a deal for a cheaper phone, you’re not really saving a whole lot of money when you factor in how much you’ll pay over the period of a two-year contract. This is why it’s optimal to buy the best phone that money can buy when you enter into a two-year contract with a carrier.

Cheaper Phones Aren’t the Best Deal

Sure, it’s easy to think that by going for the cheaper phone that costs only $100 compared to the flagship device that sells for $200, you’re saving a ton of cash. When only looking at up-front costs, this is correct; you’re saving a lot of money by going for the cheaper option.
However, when you go into a carrier store and are looking at new phones, you need to think long term. You’ll be signing a two-year contract, so you need to think about the next two years.

Your up-front cost for your phone are only a fraction of what you’ll spend on the monthly service charges over two years. For example, if you spend $70 per month for phone service, that adds up to nearly $1,700 over the course of two years. When pondering that, do you think that saving a bit of cash and going with the cheaper phone was really a smart idea? Saving $100 on a cheaper phone is pointless when you’ll spend almost $2,000 over two years.

You’ll Get Sick of Your Cheaper Phone More Quickly

Most cheaper phones that you’ll see in carrier stores are often older models and are under-powered compared to today’s standards. These phones are usually a year old, which is a long time in smartphone world. They might keep up with your needs today, but two years from now, these phones will be too old to keep up.
Plus, the features on these cheaper phones will become obsolete much quicker than the newer phones that cost just a bit more. This means that you’ll most likely get sick of that cheaper phone you bought a lot more quickly than if you spent just a bit more and got the latest handset model.
In the end, if you settle for a cheaper phone, you’ll have to deal with it for two years and most likely won’t be happy before the first year is even up.

Cheaper Phones Rarely Get Software Updates and Support

Perhaps one of the biggest downsides to buying an older phone is that they will no longer get software updates and support from the manufacturer before your two-year contract expires. Phone manufacturers and carriers alike are notorious for this; they’ll release a new device, but within a year, they’ll release a newer device, and that older model will no longer receive updates or support.
iPhones usually lose support and the ability to update after about three years, but Android phones are more of a loose cannon these days. By opting for the latest smartphone on the store shelf, you’ll pretty much be guaranteeing that you’ll get updates and support through your two-year contract.

What You Should Do

Buying the latest and greatest smartphone is your best bet, as it will last you for a long time — or at least longer than what a cheaper phone would offer.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take advantage of deals and pay as little as possible for a new smartphone, but make sure the deals are for good phones that will last awhile. Just in last few months we’ve seen incredible deals for the iPhone 5s, with Walmart having it as low as $119 on-contract at one point, with Best Buy going as low as $125. Best Buy even had the iPhone 5s for $1 if you traded in an older iPhone, which isn’t a bad deal at all.

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Facebook Will Buy Internet At $54 Trillion! Really? Posted by Nida Zaidi on 3/14/2014

The name Facebook is not new to anyone, it is today’s most famous online social networking website or service that came from a idiom for the encyclopedia which was handed over to some of the students of some American university. The founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg in collaboration with the colleagues named Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is due to its immense success that now it is considered as worlds 5^th most successful startup company of all times in terms of its market capitalization, in terms of its revenue generation and the speed of its growth. After a chain of great successes, Facebook is now again ready to surprise its users by making its largest requisition.

Facebook – As the most powerful requisition company

The value of Facebook in 2014 has reached up to the limits of 104 billion dollars and its market capitalization has mounted to 134 billion dollars. Today it is being said that Facebook is in complete preparation to make its net move and the biggest purchase ever. It is according to the news given by TechCrunch and CNBC that Facebook is in collaboration with the authorities in order to buy the drone manufacturer Titan Aerospace for $60 million to which they will make utilizations as a vehicle to help make user that the use of internet is even and completely spread all over the world.

This is though a very strong acquisition for Facebook, buying a drone manufacturer like that, but most remarkably the major focus is to buy the purchaser technology corporations and apps along with the establishments including WhatsApp and Instagram but according to the initial reports of the outlets it is being said that the purchase will attend internet.org which will be considered as an initiative that has been launched by the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that is meant for bringing the entire world close by means of internet.

The Real Story

It is being supposed that Facebook will buy the Titan Aerospace, makers of near-orbital, solar-powered drones that are supposed to fly continuously for five years without having to land on earth any time soon. The prices which are being set for the acquisition is supposed to be around 60 million dollars and form the understanding of critics, Facebook is attentive in making the most of these such high flying drones to cover up those parts of the world who are in dire need of an internet connection in the areas.
The commencement of this project will start from Africa and major parts of it which are without the access of a decent internet connection. The company is thinking about building around eleven thousands of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), specifically the “Solara 60″ model. An example of such models can be easily seen on YouTube and other sites which will explain how these drones can be considered as atmospheric satellites that are made-up to carry out the conduction of the operations of an orbital satellite system but are much cheaper in price and are more modified than the other ones.

Titan Aerospace-As a gigantic company

These drone models are supposed to fly so high which is as much as around 65 thousand feet which is far more effective in working as a satellite device with much less operating costs, making them cost effective and also what their company calls them “atmospheric parking”. The models of such drones are considered to carry up around 100 kg of the entire equipment.

It has been claimed recently by TechCrunch that Facebook is showing interest in buying some of these solar powered devices or drones which are allowed to remain into the space for about five years without causing any hindrance in the hope that they can effortlessly be improved to provide great internet connection in the areas which are in calamitous need for an internet admittance.

What to Expect Out of This Acquisitions?

According to the owners of Facebook it is very easy to take those people for granted which have complete access to the internet connection but only 2.7 billion people in the world are lucky to have such resources and others are un-able to stay connected to the world. The major objective of this project is to connect everyone right now but with the aid of some melodramatic changes possible.

The plan might be a little eccentric than it seems but if Facebook can convince the authorities to use Titan’s drones to do such experimenting on the internet then it is possible for them to get deeply and entirely hooked up in to the world of social media and services which will help them turn into a money-spinning lifetime user. Facebook is playing the long game here actually and hopefully everyone will have access to an affordable internet connection in the coming times which will help them join acquaintance economy and gain more procurement influence.
So this is really interesting to see Facebook growing with such a great pace.
Share your views,

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iPad mini with Retina Display Review

Last week, Apple released the iOS 7.1 update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, an update the replaced iOS 7.0.6 as the company’s latest iOS 7 update. After spending a week with the iOS 7.1 update on the iPad mini with Retina Display, it’s time to take a look at how the update is performing on Apple’s latest tablet.
In November, Apple released the iOS 7.1 update into the beta program. Per usual, the company did not say when it would release the update though reports soon pegged the update’s public release for 2014 rather than 2013. January and February went by and iPhone and iPad owners, particularly those dealing with iOS 7 problems began to grow weary.

Apple finally delivered the update last week, just a short time after reports pegged the update’s arrival as imminent. As expected, the update is available to all iOS 7 devices including the aging iPhone 4 and iPad 2. For owners of those two devices, iOS 7.1 figures to be the last major iOS update.
That isn’t the case for a device like the iPad mini with Retina Display. Instead, for owners of Apple’s latest tablet, iOS 7.1 serves as the first major iOS update.

Prior to the arrival of iOS 7.1, we heard from a number of iPad mini with Retina Display users, including our own Warner Crocker, who were dealing a issues inside iOS 7.0.6 and below. Most of those users complained about springboard issues wherein the device would randomly reboot itself. Apple promised a fix for the problem and the iOS 7.1 update came with the supposed remedy on board. But did it actually fix the problem?
We take a look at that and more in our final review of the iOS 7.1 update for the iPad mini with Retina Display.

iOS 7.1 Performance

Last Monday, I took the plunge and installed iOS 7.1 on my iPad mini with Retina Display. I say plunge because iOS updates always have the potential to deliver a poor experience. And while I didn’t expect iOS 7.1 to deliver one, I have faith in Apple’s beta process, I’ll always remain skeptical.
For a week now, I’ve used iOS 7.1 on Apple’s latest tablet. During that week, I’ve received a ton of questions and comments about the update and its performance. Many friends, family and readers are wondering exactly how the update is performing on the 7.9-inch slate and whether it’s worth installing. It seems that I’m not the only one aware of the risks involved when it comes to installing new software updates.
My first impressions of the iOS 7.1 update for iPad mini with Retina Display were good, but how is the update holding up after a week? Let’s take a look.

Speed

iOS 7.0 on the iPad mini with Retina Display was fast, much faster than it was on the iPad 3. iOS 7.1 is faster than iOS 7.0 thanks to changes Apple made to transitions and animations.
As I pointed out in my iOS 7.1 review for iPad Air, the change is not as noticeable as it is on a device like the iPhone 5, but there is definitely some added zip. Folders appear quicker and the time between tapping on an app and it popping up full screen is much shorter. It just cuts down on a lot of that extra time that iOS 7 used to take.
Overall, it just feels a lot more crisp, a lot more fluid than iOS 7.0 and I think that this change alone makes the upgrade to iOS 7.1 worth it for iPad mini with Retina users. It’s subtle, so don’t expect a dramatic different, but again it’s something that I’ve come to appreciate over the last week.

Apps

Since the arrival of iOS 7.1, I’ve heard complaints about broken applications. Many of those complaints center around Facebook, one of the App Store’s most popular pieces of software. iPad owners say that the app now refuses to open and even after re-installing the app, it fails to work.
I haven’t seen Facebook crash in iOS 7.1 nor have I had issues with any other applications inside iOS 7.1. Apps, including Apple’s stock iOS apps, appear to be stable and I have yet to run into any random crashes. It seems that I’m not alone.

According to a new report from performance monitoring firm Crittercism, app crashes are down with iOS 7 on the whole. My app experience with iOS 7 has been solid and nothing has changed with iOS 7.1.
Those that are dealing with problems should try uninstalling the application. If the problem persists, get in touch with the developer.

Battery Life

Tests performed by ArsTechnica suggest that battery life hasn’t changed after iOS 7.1. My experience on my iPad mini with Retina Display lines up with the site’s analysis.
I haven’t noticeable any visible drop in battery life and there certainly isn’t any abnormal battery drain on board. The device still offers up a massive charge that’s hard to get through in a day.
As I’ve said before, battery life is going to vary from user to user. We all have different habits and different software on board. iOS battery life tends to stay the same for most people after an update but if for some reason you’re experiencing bad battery life, be sure to check out our iOS 7.1 battery life tips and this one easy fix that might solve all of your issues.
If nothing works, bring the device to Apple because there is a good chance that it’s not the software that’s affecting the iPad mini with Retina Display.

Connectivity

Wi-Fi and 4G LTE on AT&T’s network remain strong on iOS 7.1. Unlike some people, I haven’t run into any issues in iOS 7 and the upgrade to iOS 7.1 hasn’t changed a thing. My signals are strong and I don’t expect that to change as we move forward.

Bugs & Problems

I did not run into the springboard crash issue on my iPad mini with Retina Display though I have heard, from colleagues and friends, that the issue has been taken care of in iOS 7.1. What I can say is that I haven’t experienced any trouble since installing the iOS 7.1 update. The tablet remains stable. I haven’t bumped into any other major bugs or issues either. iOS 7.1 seems to be extremely stable.
There does appear to be another security issue inside iOS though all we iPad mini with Retina Display owners can do is sit back and wait for Apple to address the problem with a future update.

iOS 7.1 Features

iOS 7.1 also brings some other changes to iPad mini with Retina Display owners, two of which I have found to be extremely useful on the iPad mini with Retina.
The first, the change to the calendar app. In iOS 7.1, Apple added an easy way to display events in the month view. It’s an extremely small change but it’s one that I, and many others, appreciate.
Apple also made a necessary change to Siri. It’s not going to turn me into a regular Siri user but the fact that I can now hold down the home button and give Siri orders without her interrupting me is a big improvement. Siri will no longer respond until after you let go of the home button. It’s a small but much needed change.

Should You Install iOS 7.1?

If this review makes the iOS 7.1 update sound like a fantastic update, it’s because it is. iOS 7.1 is a solid, all-around piece of software that kills off bugs and doesn’t seem to bring any major ones of its own to the table. While it doesn’t offer any major battery life improvements, it does bring improved performance refinements to the look of iOS 7.

At this point, only those who are thinking about jailbreaking their iPad mini with Retina should avoid iOS 7.1. Others would be wise to take the plunge along with me.

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HTC One Review

The HTC One M8 is arguably the best Android available right now and an excellent choice for both new and seasoned smartphone users.  The HTC One M8′s excellent design, outstanding camera app and smart Android customizations earn this smartphone a Gotta Be Mobile Editors’ Choice Award. We confidently recommend the HTC One M8 to Android shoppers, but have some reservations about its camera. Read on for our full HTC One M8 review.
The HTC One M8 was announced on March 25 and went on sale immediately at Verizon Wireless stores for $199 with a two-year contract. It’s available from other carriers in the United States starting April 10.  It looks similar to last year’s HTC One M7, but it is taller and has several noteworthy enhancements. What sets the HTC One M8 apart from other Android devices is its superb build quality and aluminum exterior.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, the HTC One M8 design is superior to the iPhone 5s in many ways. I still recommend the iPhone 5s to most people, but the HTC One is a strong contender. The HTC One M8′s camera app is awesome, but the camera produces muddy photos – a deal-breaker for a lot of people that use their phones as their only cameras.
I carry the iPhone 5s as my primary smartphone and the HTC One M8 is now my secondary device, serving as a mobile hotspot, Google Glass companion and entertainment device. I have a drawer full of Android devices and the HTC One M8 is by far my favorite. You can read my previous article about why the HTC One M8 is probably the only Android device I’m going to buy this year.
The HTC One doesn’t have as many software features as the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S5 and it doesn’t have anything close to the iPhone’s ecosystem, but it might be the right smartphone for you. Read the rest of our HTC One review to learn why.

Read: 8 Ways the HTC One Beats the iPhone 5s

HTC One M8 Design

HTC’s knocked it out of the park with the new HTC One’s design. It is almost completely made out of metal, which means it’s solid and feels like a premium gadget. It’s available in Glacial Silver, Gunmetal Gray and Amber Gold. I opted for the silver version because I like that it blends in with all of my Apple devices and natural aluminum finishes are usually the most durable. Speaking of Apple, it’d be very easy to confuse the HTC One M8 as an Apple device. If Apple suddenly got in the business of producing Android phones, they’d probably sell something like the HTC One M8.


The HTC One M8′s gorgeous 5-inch display make it a much better device for watching videos. The iPhone 5s has a 4-inch display, which doesn’t sound a whole lot smaller than that, but the HTC One M8′s display has 56% more surface area. The HTC One M8 features full 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) and simply looks fantastic, especially with brightness cranked up all the way. One of the downsides of the bigger screen and overall dimensions is that it is difficult to hold with one hand. The rounded edges and smooth metal finish makes the phone downright slippery and easy to drop.
The HTC One’s dual front-facing cameras are significantly louder than the single speaker on the bottom edge of the iPhone 5s. The stereo speakers actually produce enough separation that I could clearly hear the left and right stereo channels when watching movies.  That’s a much better experiencing than when I have to cup my hand around the iPhone 5s’s speaker so I can barely hear a movie’s dialogue.


There’s an easily accessible microSD card slot that can boost the HTC One M8′s capacity from the built-in 32GB to up to 160GB with a 128GB microSD card.  That means you don’t have to pay big bucks to get a decent amount of storage and you can swap in more (or bigger) microSD card if your needs ever change. With the iPhone 5s, you’re stuck with as little as 16GB of storage and there’s no way to expand.
HTC One M8 Battery Life
One of my chief complaints about Android devices over the past few years is lackluster battery life. I always ended up having to plug in my previous Android devices by the early afternoon or playing with settings to stretch battery life. I’m happy to report that the HTC One M8 can easily make it through a day of regular use without trying. Google’s recently improved how Android manages battery life and HTC’s helped the cause by stuffing the new HTC One M8 with a 2,600 mAh battery, which is about 15% more than last year’s model.

As I write this review, it’s 9pm and  my HTC One M8 has 50% of its battery charge remaining.  I unplugged it at 8am, just before I left to drive my son to school. I used the HTC One M8 to take about a dozen photos and a short video of him at school. About an hour later I paired the phone with my Google Glass and uploaded some videos to Facebook using the phone’s 4G connection. A little while later I used Chrome to read some news articles for about 15 minutes, before firing up Google Maps to navigate to a repair shop to get new tires for my car. I used the HTC One M8 to make several short phone calls in the early afternoon. During a late lunch I launched Google Play and watched about 30 minutes of a movie I bought on Google Play. I used the phone to try out different apps and functions repeatedly until 9PM, which is when I took the screenshot above. I’m certain the HTC One would have more like 60% remaining if I enabled automatic brightness rather than keeping it on maximum brightness all day.
The usage scenario I described above is pretty typical of the average user and the battery performance is more than adequate for that. On Sunday I used the device much more heavily to take photos and videos of my family at a festival in San Francisco almost non-stop for two hours. The battery was drained to 20% by 3PM. While the HTC One has good battery life, you’ll have to recharge if you have its screen on all day, just like you’ll need to with any smartphone with its standard battery.
Based on my experience so far, it’s reasonable to expect the HTC One M8′s battery to last two or three full days if you use the device sparingly and dim the screen as much as possible. That’s not a very good way to use a mobile device, but the point is that you can stretch battery life in case you’re stuck somewhere without a charger.
One thing to note about the HTC’s battery life claims of 20 hours of talk time and 496 hours of standby time is that the ratings are for 3G connections. In the United States, wireless carriers sell the HTC One M8 with 4G LTE turned on by default. While you could switch off 4G LTE to conserve battery life, 3G connections are too slow to stream video or quickly load web pages.
HTC DotView Case
HTC sells the Dot View case along with the HTC One M8. It’s interesting because the dots on the front cover are transparent, allowing the user to see basic info, such as the current time and caller ID for incoming calls without opening the cover. The cover is touch-enabled, which means users can tap and swipe the same gestures with the Dot View cover closed as they can directly on the display.

The downside of the Dot View case is that it takes too much effort to actually keep the case open. There’s too much resistance when the cover is open and folded against the back of the phone. The cover doesn’t contour to the phone’s shape, creating about a quarter-inch gap between the cover and the right edge of the phone. Another thing I don’t like about the Dot View case is that it almost completely hides the HTC One M8′s beautiful design with bland plastic. It’d be nice if HTC could make the cover more flexible and introduce a case with a transparent back to fix these issues.
HTC One Camera
The HTC One M8 is my new favorite way to shoot family outings thanks to its killer Zoe shooting mode and Highlights video builder. The device also has some fantastic photo and video features, but the phone’s camera isn’t all that great at taking plain old still photos.

The back of the HTC One M8 has not one, but two cameras set up in an array that HTC calls this the Duo Camera system. It allows for some interesting 3D effects and helps blur backgrounds.
Rather than trying to capture more megapixels like the iPhone 5s (8 MP) or Galaxy S5 (16MP), theUltraPixel Camera’s 4MP sensor has larger pixels. That might sound a little confusing, but it’s like using four big buckets to catch rainwater rather than eight or sixteen little buckets. This strategy doesn’t work well in the HTC One however and the competitive devices can capture cleaner photos pretty consistently. Photos shot with the HTC One M8 look good on the device’s own display, but look soft and mushy on larger displays, such as my Mac’s. The images aren’t terrible by any measure, but there are better options if photo quality is important to you.

The HTC One Camera app is outstanding thanks to a clean layout and options that are easy to use. Video and continuous photos can be shot with a single tap in Zoe Camera mode. This is a fantastic way to capture the perfect shot without forcing people to pose like statues. The standard Camera mode captures depth information using the smaller of the two cameras on the back of the phone. Dual Capture mode captures two photos at the same time, overlaying a selfie with whatever you’re looking at.

Above is an example of a picture shot with the HTC One M8 in standard picture mode. The tourists milling around the fountain are distracting and take away from the mermaids in the middle of the frame. 

A quick tap on the UFocus editing tool blurs the background. The depth information captured by the second camera allows users to tap any part of the frame and refocus on it. This kind of look typically requires a bulky DSLR camera.

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