Welcome to IT Crack

Welcome to ITCrack! On IT Crack you will find all the Information that you need in order to set up your own Homepage, Blog or Social Network. You will find over 500 online tutorials, Free Homepage Templates, Free Domains and Free Hosting services. Choose from over 10 topics.

Learn how to “Pimp your Homepage” with Adobe Flash elements, or create and edit you own html templates with Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver. If you have no prior experience with building Homepages or Blogs you can do so by following our 10 Step programs . They will support and guide the way to your first own homepage. It is not as hard as you might think. I am no IT-Nerd either and only took C++ in High School which I failed. I designed this site only using online Tutorials and the regular documentation which comes with every software. Our 10 Step Programs were especially designed for people with no IT background and we use a language and Words that everyone can understand in our tutorials. Everything oh ITCrack is for free. So if we helped you to set up your homepage please make a small donation. Start today!!!!! George

Since almost everyone owns a twitter account these days it is time to stand out from the crowd. I look around the internet the last couple of days and found a couple of sites, where you can download and configure your Twitter background. It’s time to get creative.

All these sites will automatically upload the background to your twitter account. Depending on the site you can ad links and additional information.

1. Twitter Images
On twitter Images you can choose from over 100 different backgrounds. Backgrounds for everyone.

2. Twitbacks
Twitbacks is very functional, you can enter your name, company, website, blpg, short bio, tel, … and 4 links. It is useful, but it doesn’t have the best designs in my opinion. See for yourself.

3. Twitrounds
+100 Backgrounds for Twitter

4. Twiterbackgroundsgallery
+500 Twitter Backgrounds and it is possible to add a lot of links and text to it. My favorite site.

5. Twittergallery
+70 Twitter backgrounds. There is a really cool Apple background in there .

6. Twittershowcase
+25 Themes. More for little kids but there are a couple of okay themes in there

7. Wishafriends
A lot of backgrounds and Twitter widgets for polls.

In the last couple of weeks read more and more post from people, which were complaining, that their bounce rate is so high and that no one is subscribing to their blogs. Most of them publish content and that on a regular basis. I am going to discuss the most common mistakes webmasters or should I say webnewbies make.

Low Quality or no Unique Content – This is the most common reason why visitors won’t subscribe to your blog. But why should they? If you are not posting good ideas or not your own, why should they read the fake instead the original? Think about what you want to accomplish with your Blog. Do you only want lots of traffic on your site or do you want your user to return? Return users will let your blog grow faster.

Useless Sidebar – Get rid of all your fancy looking widgets in your sidebar. That is the first place your visitors look for new information, and if it only shows useless widgets I am out. Put your best rated content, latest posts, tutorials, pictures in it. Give the visitor something to work with.

Where is the Content? – Everybody wants to make some money blogging, but if your site contains more ads than content where is the value in your side? If you post 4-5 banners per page, you should provide killer content. But I have actually never seen this accept on zhare, but if you watch the video in full screen you don’t see them anymore, and then and only then it is acceptable.

Pop Ups – A reason why I use yidio and not zastv, even they had better content (links to videos) for a couple of month. But then they started putting up endless pop ups and forced advertising, and I haven’t been back in over 4 month. So delete all these pop ups and I will be back.

No way out – If I go on a blog I want links to other blogs or information directories. If you blog about cheese, there should be a couple of links on you blog which will lead me to cheese producers, tests, directories and maybe wiki. I will left your blog over these links, but I will be back for more, because I know that when I read a post I will get some additional information along with it.

Awful or Standard Design – It is so easy nowadays to get an individual theme. You can buy one online, hire someone, get a free template online or use program like Artisteer or Flexx.

You can change or customize your theme within a couple of hours. If you follow the directions more and more users will subscribe to your blog and you community will start growing.

Five ways to spot SEO Schemes

When you serve trough the internet nowadays you can find thousands of SEO Consultants, which promise to optimize your search engine ranking in order to get traffic on your site. These services start at 1$. You will find testimonies of former clients, who used the service and now make so much money from their website that they quit their day job and now work from home. So how can you tell the difference between a scheme and real SEO consulting?

1. #1 on Google. Don’t believe any company or consultant, who is telling you, that they are able to place your site at the top of the search results for your keywords. THESE are all schemes basically. If someone needs that kind of advertising to find new clients he or she is obviously desperate. It is almost the same as if you invest money. If the deal sounds o good to be true it is not true. People are more attempted to believe in a big lie instead a small on (9/11 or the Kennedy assassination). No serious company will advertise or guarantee that your site will be under the top 10 search results. Because they can’t. No one and I mean no one as hacked the Google code so far. The only thing they can do is to optimize and promote you site according to well known principals, best practice solutions and their own experience.

2. Low prices. I have been working in IT recruiting for quite some time now, and I can tell you real SEO Consulting is not cheap. If you do it right, you need a whole team. Most of the times there are programmers, content writers, SEO analysts, link builders and designers involved at the same time. Real SEO Consulting also means a lot of hours of hard work, researching, analyzing and harder work. I think this will give you an idea about who much work is involved and that you can’t get SEO Consulting for a low price. In this case quality has a price and it is not 99$.

3. Top secret SEO Consultants. If an SEO Consultant doesn’t reveal his technical work and won’t tell you what he is doing with your site, fire him. As a costumer you always have the right to be informed about what is going on, and with which SEO principals your consultant is working. There are no top secret techniques, which he could apply. Every SEO Consultant is working after the same principals and guidelines.

4. Shady techniques. More companies than you might think offer their clients illegal techniques, also called black hat practices. Stay away and play save. Google and the other search engines are smarter than you think, and if your domain appears in high up in the page rank but visitors leave your site after a couple of seconds then you will lose you page rank faster than you think. You could even get banned from Google. It happened even to BMW a couple of years ago.

5. Using out of date Techniques. A long time ago search engines ranked your page by, reciprocal link exchange, keyword stuffing …. You used to get goof page ranks with that, but those times are over. Talk to your SEO Consultant about different ways to promote your website and what kind of package he or she offers.

If you stick to these 5 simple guidelines, chances are minimal to get ripped off. Meet you Consultant if possible, but never judge IT Consultants by their clothes, they all look awful.

Getting traffic on your blog is easier than you might think. When you start blogging, get a XML sitemap for site. This will help you to get indexed easier than just waiting for Google or Yahoo to find all your pages. When you submit your sitemap with the Google Webmaster Tool do not check it on a daily basis. If you have lost of content it will take 6 to 8 weeks for a new site to get full indexed. If you are a total Newbie you shouldn’t worry about keywords and how to edit your content to get a higher rating in the search engine index. It will take you way to long read up on it and configure your site. You will have weeks without any traffic and that doesn’t make blogging fun. So how to you get traffic when your site is not indexed?
                                                     

The answer is really easy.

There are four easy steps, which will give you +250 clicks per day after two weeks. But read this carefully now, because I am only going to say it once. You have to follow these three steps as I tell you to and you have to keep up your rate, otherwise it won’t work and you will come back and give this post a low rating. So when you only get 35 clicks a day two weeks from now you know already know what went wrong.

I am assuming, that you are at least submitting one quality post a day. If this is not the case, this is going to be a four step program.

1.       Backlinks                                                   

If you have read my 10 steps to professional blogging you will already know what backlinks are and how to use them. I would recommend every Newbie to read the 10 Steps first, so you know what you are getting yourself into. A backlink is a link to your site on someone else’s blog.

The most powerful backlink is a comment that includes your URL. I am talking about comments on high traffic sites and not the blog, which might be slightly better ranked then yours!!!  The more traffic they have, the more you will get.

But, make sure that your comments have some kind of value and relevance to the post, and that it is on one of your competitor sides (this will ensure targeted traffic). You can also criticize the author, but you have to do it in a nice way. Don’t say this and that statement is wrong. Start you critic like this: In my opinion, or I have made the experience that… Only this will make the visitors want to read what you are writing about, and they will check out your Blog. If you are not getting at least 10 hits 24 hours after submitting your comment you have done something wrong. Make sure to post one comment a day in the first week and 2 comments a day the second week.

2.       Social Networks                                              

Engage a discussion with a valuable player on a Social Network Twitter, Facebook, My Space,... He or she must be some kind of GURU on a certain topic. Make sure it is someone with a lot of readers, friends or followers. You will get instant traffic if you are able to engage a discussion or conversation. Take Karl Lagerfeld as an example, he has ca. 45 000 followers on Twitter with 13 tweets. Of course him being the grand master of fashion he is following no one. Who could tell him something he doesn’t already know? If you can make it happen that Karl writes a message to you or follows your tweets you will get 45 000 clicks within the next month. Karl is an extreme example, but I think you can see the benefit to this now.

So how do you engage a conversation with valuable payers? It is almost the same as picking up a girl. You can either comment something (statement: “Hey baby, I like that short skirt on you!”) or ask a question (“Is it so hot in here, or is it me?”). Don’t worry I got more game than that, and I hope you do too, because in blogging and in real life you will just be ignored. It should be something, which is up to date or controversial or interesting. And if a beautiful girl or a nerdy bloggers answers you, don’t just stand there try to engage a conversation or discussion.

3.  Social Bookmarks                          

What is a social bookmark? A Social Bookmark is similar to a social network. It is a place where you can share Bookmarks with other users.

Example: You have just read an interesting post about the North American ants and you want to share it with other people because you think it contains valuable content. So what do you do? You go to a social bookmarking provider and submit the link to the article and type in a couple of keyword which reflect the content so other user can find it. So if other users are looking for links to sites about the North American Ants they will find the link you have submitted.

This is a really important step to get traffic on your site and to let people know that your blog is out there. This will give you targeted traffic instantly. You won’t get hundreds of clicks right away, but it will slowly and constantly direct readers to your site. Use this excessively.

Like on any other social site you can connect to other members and you can exchange links. There are several providers like:

- del.icio.us
- StumbleUpon
- Technorati
- Digg
- Newsvine
- choose from over 30 sites here  http://itcrack.net/node/923

4.       Forum or Thread                                             

Another way to get traffic on your site is to sign up on a couple of popular forums. If you are new to this you should first read a couple of threads to get familiar with the forum. Look for high traffic threads and start submitting posts and comments. You can also start your own thread, but be sure to choose an interesting or edgy topic.  This will provide you a lot of traffic for a long time, even if you don’t feel the impact straight way. Big boards is a Forum search and ranking engine. Here you can find the Forums which are relevant for you.  http://rankings.big-boards.com