Top blogs

There are many dictionaries available free on the web. Some are available online and some can be installed on  the  computer and can be used offline . Of course, word processing programs come loaded with a dictionary. For example, Microsoft Office has an in-built dictionary which you can access by right-clicking on a word in Word, Power Point, etc. New versions of MS Office are quite intuitive when it comes to suggesting corrections. MS Word also supplies a list of synonyms through right click.  But, for writers and serious bloggers, nothing beats a professional thesaurus* that is available to them at all times. That's what prompted us to introduce such a tool, Wordweb , to you. It is a free dictionary app - with great thesaurus inbuilt. You can download Wordweb from its site free of cost. Once installed, it sits quietly on your system tray and can be called from a document by clicking control+right click ! If calling another app from a document feels like a bothe...

All website owners and bloggers are keen to take their websites to the top of Google search results. However, only about 10 out of millions of webpages can appear in the top search result page (SERP). It is found that searchers usually don't go beyond the first few search results. SEO experts (only a few of them may be genuine) confuse new bloggers and website owners with SEO terms like analytics, keyword research, deep SEO, search intent, algorithm and Core Web Vitals to fill them with awe. It is mostly deliberate. As if that was not sufficient, blogging and SEO experts often talk of tools and utilities such as Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and SEO plugins. Some advice on SEO techniques and tools could be well-meaning, but much of that is hype. How much SEO is really needed to get your website to the top of Google search pages? Let me tell you the reality in short. Some search engine optimization is needed but not as much the SEO experts tell you. You can optimize your site w...

On TopBlogs, we sometimes review software and tools that we find useful for common users (not full-time professionals). All the tools reviewed by us are free or freemium tools. In this edition, we introduce a free online tool for screen recording and video editing: Recordcast . What we like about Recordcast is its simplicity: it is intuitive for most of its functions. If you have used any basic software relating to image viewing, audio/ video playing and experimented with their hidden features, you will find Recordcast very simple to use.  In addition, being web-based, the software is available to you all the time, and anywhere if internet is available.  At the same time, the software comes with video editing facility, with some useful frills. So, if you need to regularly record your screen for making tutorials, video presentations, etc and do some minor but repetitive video editing (e.g. removing an unwanted scene from a video or joining videos or adding audio) you will find...

Users prefer to open links in a new tab When you place a link on your website or blog, it can either open in the same tab, thus replacing the open webpage, or it opens in a new tab or a new window.  When tabs first appeared on web browsers, they were lapped up by people though they looked annoying to some. And when tabs had become a norm on desktops, came mobile browsing in a big way. Initial mobile phone browsers did present a problem when a link opened in a new tab.  Some diehard fans of 'single window, single tab' experience still don't like links opening in a new tab but the majority find it a better option. The older lot also argue that tabs are being abused by many advertisers and therefore should not be there. You by chance hover the cursor over an ad or a text link and it quickly opens the ad in a different tab; not only that, the ad tab opens on top of the genuine tab. But I believe that such obtrusive ads can come in many other ways; only because some ...

  Friends, As you'd know,  Top Blogs  has been bringing out the Directory of Best Hindi Blogs since 2011. Every year, we also check the Directory for some general parameters during our mid-year review and remove blogs that fail to meet our selection criteria. We also keep finding new blogs of good value and adding them to the list of top Hindi blogs during this review.  This mid-year review of the listing this year has resulted in the addition of 4 blogs and the deletion of 18. An interesting discovery this year has been that though, in English, we found many bloggers stopping to write due to Covid19, in Hindi nearly all regular bloggers continued to contribute to their blogs. That shows the resilience of serious Hindi bloggers. At the link, you can visit the updated directory of top Hindi blogs .   

Topmost blog design advice ever! When you think of design of your blog, or any other type of website, what comes to your mind? Its appeal? Colors, backgrounds and fonts? Columns and their content? Widgets and plugins? I think, the best web designing advice anyone can give you is that Your blog or website must have great navigation: visitors should be able to easily find what they are looking for. Its topmost content must come on top: it must show up at the first opportunity. In this post, I will deal with the second advice.  The design and layout of any website should be such that people are served this main content when they visit the website. On the web, visitors do not have the patience to visit the bottom of the web page to look for the content and then select the best.  It is the top 8-10 inches of space on your blog's desktop version and top 2-3 inches on its mobile version. During our review of blogs and compilation of blog directories, we look at thousands of blo...

When you start a blog, you do so either as a hobby - just to put your thoughts into it OR you make the blog to earn money out of it. Earlier, most people created blogs for the first reason, but now the trend is towards trying to make money out of blogging.  Bloggers and small website owners can make money with AdSense without knowing any tech, even with a free blog and without spending a penny on web hosting, web designing, etc. In this post, I have tried to simplify things for bloggers who don't know the subject of making money from AdSense. The tips given here will work well in 2021 and beyond.  Because the post is an all-in-one post on AdSense, it has become quite big. So, I have divided it into two parts. If you do not know how Google Ads work on blogs and websites, you would want to learn as much as you can: if so, continue reading the rest of the post. If you already have AdSense on your blog or are interested only in tips to make more money with Adsense ads, jump...