A couple days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a Valentine’s Day card from Google sent out by good old snail mail to select Adsense publishers.

Included in the card was a code for $100 in free Adword credits, good to drive a decent amount of traffic to your site!

On the back of the card was a QR Code, the popular 2D matrix bar code that is popular in Japan.  It’s a code that can be read by some mobile phones and directs to the same URL shown on the card.

If the pictures are too small, the card reads:

Front: Others will fill your heart this Valentine’s Day
Inside left: We want to overload your servers.
Inside right:

Because nothing says “I love you” like free traffic to your website.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

XOXO The AdWords team.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all my readers!

Popularity: 1% [?]

As all web developers know, the best source of traffic is from search engines such as Google.  But just getting listed on Google isn’t good enough, you also need to be listed as one of the top results (ideally the very first result).  This is because the vast majority of users will not click past the first page of search results.  In fact, most of them won’t look past the first couple links.

In order to increase your search engine rankings, the best way is by building what is known as “organic” or natural backlinks. An example of an organic backlink is when a blog links back to your site because of your interesting content or relevance to their content.  Typically, these are done without asking or any sort of trade, hence the term organic or natural.

Trading links used to be a common tactic amongst website owners and I still often get e-mails along the lines of “If you’ll put a link to my website from yours then I will do the same.”  While this has the advantage of potentially increasing exposure to new users, this type of trade is typically very one sided with one site being more popular than the other.  Also, trading links does not increase search engine rankings as the links can be seen as “cancelling” each other out.

Ideally what you want are one-way organic backlinks and LinkWheeler.com is a service that looks to address this issue through the creation of link wheels.

What is a link wheel?
A link wheel, simply explained, is when sites link to one another in a cyclical pattern.  For example, site A links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links back to site A.  This example is a small link wheel and generally does not work as their short cycle is easily detected by search engines. LinkWheeler.com offers link wheel packages that are much bigger and more sophisticated with links coming from different types of sites.

Their link wheels are also not cyclical, meaning the last node does not link back to the first node. This “open wheel” is more effective and more attractive to search engines compared to traditional closed wheels.

Web 2.0 and Social Media
Perhaps the biggest advantage of LinkWheeler is their usage of social media websites and other web 2.0 outlets in addition to traditional article submission strategies.

I’ve seen other backlinking services, all of which make big promises, but their methodology is pretty primitive compared to what LinkWheeler is doing.  Simple directory submissions and article farms just don’t cut it anymore in this day and age.

Pricing and Features
There are three possible packages to choose from ranging from $149 for 27 backlinks to $359 for 89 backlinks. Not everyone will consider this cheap, but you do get what you pay for and results can speak for themselves.  The lowest package includes linking to two URLs with two different keywords whereas the top package links to eight URLs with eight different keywords.

In terms of value, the top premium package is definitely the way to go in my opinion.  With eight keywords and 89 backlinks, you can be sure you’ll get to the first page of search results at least for low-medium competition keywords.  For those highly competitive keywords, it may not boost you to the top but it will certainly go a long way to help getting you there.

Conclusion
The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is a highly competitive one so it’s nice to have a service like LinkWheeler who are experienced and clearly know what they are doing.  The money invested in building links will show returns within a couple weeks once search engine traffic starts funnelling its way onto your site.  In my opinion, link wheels are a great way to increase exposure of your site or blog, and LinkWheeler is an effective and easy way of creating these link wheels.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yahoo! Developer Network has posted a great article on 34 ways to speed up your website.  They divide these 34 methods into 7 categories:

• Content
• Server
• Cookies
• CSS
• Javascript
• Images
• Mobile

Some of the practices are a bit advanced and hard to implement for most people.  For example, setting up a content delivery network is by no means a trivial task and is probably unnecessary unless your website is serving tens of thousands of visitors per day.

Other tips are quite simple and are things that any seasoned web developer should already be doing, i.e. putting stylesheets at the top of the page and optimizing images.

This is a great article to keep bookmarked if you’re starting a new project or if you’re looking to improve an existing one!

Popularity: 8% [?]

The first release candidate of IE 8 was released today at noon. I’m downloading it now to check compatibility with my sites. It’s supposed to be a huge improvement over IE 7 and is finally follows Internet standards (that means it passes the ACID 2 test!).

It is also supposed to be better than current releases of Firefox and Chrome out of the box. No add-on support in IE 8 yet so if you rely on tons of add-ons, you’ll be better off sticking with Firefox for now.

What are you waiting for? Download IE8 and give it a try!

Popularity: 8% [?]

You’ve probably never heard of Eric Vasilik but his work affects millions on a daily basis.  He is a programmer and also the creator of the innerHTML element property.

The innerHTML element property is commonly used in Javascript (and therefore Ajax) scripts that so many sites use these days.  Basically anything on the web that is dynamicly updated without a page reload is probably using the innerHTML property to change content.

Web developers may know that using innerHTML on <table> elements does not work in Internet Explorer.  And the reason for this? Eric Vasilik didn’t implement it properly way back in IE3 when he was writing the parser for the DOM almost 12 years ago!

Yes he is the inventor of innerHTML but he is also the cause of a lot of modern headaches!  The funny thing is, his misimplementation came back to bite him in the butt 10 years later.

Luckily, the workaround for this problem is pretty simple but the morale of the story is: poor coding not only affects everyone, even you!

Popularity: 6% [?]