Knowledge is Power

CSS galleries are a little out of ordinary yet useful link building technique. If you have a website or blog based on CSS design, you are qualified for the gallery submission. If your design is approved, your site then will be showcased on the galleries with a backlink to your site.

GSS galleries basically showcase sites that have CSS based design. Just like art galleries where arts are displayed, online CSS galleries are sites where CSS designs are displayed. Since these galleries allow the site owner or site creators an opportunity to submit their designs including the site info and URL, both the designers and site owners are using it to their advantages. Site designers are submitting their designs to promote their designs or their design service and site owners are using it to get backlinks and traffic to their sites.

How to Submit to CSS Galleries

Just think of a directory submission or social bookmarking submission where you submit your site to link directories or social bookmarking sites. Just the same way you submit your site design using a screenshot or site preview image. Most sites will require you to submit your site name, URL, and basic design or site info. Your submission is subject to moderation as most of those galleries are moderated.

Benefits of CSS Gallery Submission

It is unbelievable to see how high these CSS gallery sites go in page ranks. Not almost, all these CSS galleries have high PR where some of those galleries are as high as PR6 or even PR7. Since this method of link building is little out of tradition and somewhat unique, not many people are still using this to build backlinks. You basically get a high PR backlinks form the sites that don’t have too many external links. High PR and less external links compared to link directories or social bookmarking sites gives your link a very high value.

Another benefit of CSS gallery submission is that you can get a lot of traffic to your site a lot of traffic to your site since most of those galleries are high traffic sites.

The Value of High PR and High Traffic Backlinks

We all know by now that the value of backlinks matter most these days than the number of backlinks. It is no longer how many backlinks you have that determines your ranking, it is where you are getting the backlinks form. High traffic and high PR sites already gained that trust from Google and have certain authority established. Taking advantage of these high value backlinks will be a must for any link building campaign.

Since it doesn’t require you to spend any money to gain these backlinks, you do not have any excuse for not utilizing this link building technique. Just do a search for CSS gallery or CSS galleries and you will run into lot of those galleries.

Some galleries might require you to sign up in order to be able to submit you site, you will therefore need to register first. Even if it takes a few minutes to register, it will still be worth your while.

To read about other helpful link building techniques, read the author’s SEO Blog or visit the Link Building Service site.

Subtitle: Why the US has 50,000,000 Functional Illiterates

In 1955 Rudolf Flesch published a blockbuster called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” In this still-relevant book Flesch lamented that: “The word method is gradually destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class the privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people.”

Toward the end of the book Flesch made an intriguing comment: “Mind you, I am not accusing the reading experts of wickedness or malice. I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow-travelers. All I’m saying is that their theories are wrong.”

Point is, by 1955 some people were accusing our top educators of being “un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow-travelers.”

Flesch prefers to put the blame on money. All of the leading Look-say (or Whole Word) authors had a Dick and Jane series and were making millions.

I recently asked Don Potter, phonics crusader, to explain why the Whole Word crowd had attacked phonics. He gave the same answer: “Follow the money.”

I’ve asked another leading expert for his opinion on why the educators hated Flesch so deeply and pushed Whole Word so ruthlessly. His answer: “Our educators are jerks.”

Jerks chasing money? Do you find that a satisfying explanation of motive?

Here’s what we know for sure. Starting around 1931 this country’s Education Establishment forced the Look-say method into nearly all public schools. Note: in the middle of financial collapse, millions of text books were wastefully tossed in the trash.

The new approach had not been tested in a systematic way. Trials should have been conducted in many cities over years. Instead, the educators acted in a sweeping, preemptive way. Businesses and academic fields rarely turn on a dime and charge off in the opposite direction; this happens in totalitarian societies. And that’s what happened with reading in America circa 1931.

Mark the year. The Russian revolution was a fact of history; and its progress was said to be glorious. Meanwhile, the US was falling into a deep depression. All the far-left elements were giddy with confidence that Moscow owned the future. In the 1930’s the Russians had many hundreds of front groups in the US, meddling in every aspect of American culture, certainly including education. (People forget how intense the Cold War was and how intense it would continue to be for decades. This was war for control of the planet. Communist ideology approved every dirty trick.)

The Education Establishment–with considerable see-no-evil cooperation by the major media and elite universities–pushed Look-say as relentlessly as Philip Morris pushed cigarettes. In both cases, there were increasing reports of undesirable side effects.

As early as the 1940s, major magazines ran articles about declining literacy. Look-say proponents mused in a mystified manner about why we could possibly have so many sub-literate children. What a puzzle! However, in 1955 Flesch’s bestseller explained how Whole Word was causing major damage to the country. Samuel Blumenfeld wrote “The New Illiterates” in 1973, making similar points. So the devastation was well-known, and well-explained. Meanwhile, children in parochial and private schools learned to read via phonics in the first few years of school. But guess what? Our Education Establishment did not relent! For my money, what we see here is an extraordinary display of “party discipline.”

Another aspect that stays in my mind is that the Look-say experts concocted irrational explanations and cruel treatments. Life magazine, in 1944, claimed that reading problems might be caused by a range of physical ailments (glandular imbalance, heart disease, eye or ear trouble) or by psychological disturbances. The article described a little girl who was examined at Northwestern University’s reading clinic. Experts said she needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” The Life article concluded: “Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or a thorough airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of normality….these range from alcoholic fathers to ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in school.” Irrelevant stuff. Sick stuff. Very sick.

So my judgment is that the people who kept this scam going were total fanatics. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how money could buy that kind of fanaticism, decade after decade. You have to think of people even more orthodox than priests or rabbis, ready to dumb down an entire country, create 50 million functional illiterates, and as well perhaps one million dyslexics. Play your mind over this story. I can see some crazy old Commies doing all these things–people like the Rosenbergs, willing to be executed in silence for the Kremlin.

In any event, the people pushing Whole Word cannot be considered ordinary people. They were a cult. Maybe money explains it for you. Maybe they were just little twerps with no idea how destructive they were. But the entire con is a lot easier to understand if you have 100 people at the top who took some sort of vow.

In short, my take is that these people were Stalinists, or they walked that way.

(For more of this analysis, see “21: A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch”–especially Parts II and III–on Improve-Education.org.)

Bruce Price

There’s a big irony to the writing process, and it is this: While we seek to optimize our creativity while writing, the inert nature of the task works against the brain’s ability to perform at its imaginative best.

It’s become axiomatic that flashes of insight or even grand epiphanies come to us while showering, driving, walking, hiking through the woods and so on. In other words, breakthrough thinking comes during physical activity when the brain is charged with quicken blood flow and a higher dose of dopamine and other chemicals.

This is no mystery. We’ve known for a long time that physical movement stimulates the brain. A stimulated brain is more creative. Yet almost all writing is done sitting in a chair with the body physically inert. No significant movement, as with showering or walking, and no significant visual stimulation as with driving a car and observing the rush of passing imagery.

Indeed, one of fiction’s most prolific and respected novelists, Joyce Carol Oates, and one of the craft’s foremost writing coaches, Julia Cameron, have both talked about walking as an essential part of their routines for keeping their writing sharp. Cameron’s even written a book titled, “Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity.”

I tackled this issue years ago when I bought a tiny hand-held digital recorder. Mine happens to be manufactured by Sony, though there are many different makers of the device. They’re not expensive and they hold many hours of spoken content. The recorder permits me to “write” while I walk or drive or engage in other types of physical activity.

Ninety percent of this article was written during an afternoon walk through the rainy streets of Northern California. The walk lasted all of 30 minutes. There is even good software these days that will take your recorded text and turn it into printed type in your word processing document, so you don’t have to painstakingly transcribe your recordings.

I was inspired to buy the recorder when I started taking walks and noticed better ideas springing to mind for the writing assignments I was working on. My recall was good but not complete, so when I got back to my word processor I’d dash off as much as I could. What obviously made sense was to buy a recorder and capture those thoughts in their entirety in real time. It allows me to produce a high volume of content for my first or original drafts.

It wasn’t easy at first. It seemed awkward talking into a recorder. I tended to walk streets, walkways and hiking paths with the fewest people and vehicles. Still, in short order I found “writing” aloud a more natural and less self-conscious activity.

I was further drawn to this concept of writing on the move after I read a book titled Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. It was given to me by 24 Hour Fitness CEO Carl Liebert, who considered the book a breakthrough work on the comprehensive value of exercise and fitness.

The book’s author, John J. Ratey a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, writes in the book’s introduction: “In today’s technology-drive, plasma-screened-in world, it’s easy to forget that we are born movers – animals in fact – because we’ve engineered movement right out of our lives.”

Ratey writes at length about how exercise floods the brain with neurotransmitters and other chemicals that stimulate the brain, enhance its learning capabilities and generally help maintain its overall health – so much so that women who exercise are 50 percent less prone to dementia in their elder years.

Even the act of getting up from the desk and pacing in my living room would often give me access to the wordplay, turns of phrase or transitions I was searching for. Then it was back to the chair, back to a static posture and a gradual deceleration of the brain’s electrical activity.

So what I’m proposing is that we rethink our traditional way of writing, that we get off our seats and move, that we stimulate our brains and verbally narrate the document we’re writing. Make writing a physically active process.

There’s an additional benefit to this approach. Our writing becomes more conversational, a characteristic that enhances its readability. There’s something about the formality of sitting in a chair, hunched over a keyboard, that encourages formality in our writing. Certainly there are times we want our writing to strike a formal tone. But more often than not that’s a stilted way to communicate. It’s less interesting, more difficult to read and lacking in personality. The less personality in our writing the less chance of people being drawn to it and feeling an emotional connection. That’s key to producing powerful, influential writing.

So get on your feet and get moving. Make it a habit. It will make you healthier and more imaginative. Done consistently and earnestly your writing will blossom and take on some new dimensions.

Mike Consol is president of MikeConsol.com (http://MikeConsol.com), which provides business writing seminars, PowerPoint presentation skills training, Web 2.0 strategies and media training. Consol spent 17 years with American City Business Journals, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business journals.