Remove formatting from Word HTML documents

If you want to paste HTML content into your website from a word document, one problem to overcome is the fact that Microsoft Word adds miscellaneous formatting to your HTML that rarely looks good on the website you are pasting it in to. You would be better off if you could remove that formatting, and use the formatting of the website to format your site.

Luckily we have come across a tool that can do that for you – it’s a free, online tool to strip MS Word formatting out of HTML. Here’s how to do it.

1. Save your Word document as an HTML document on your hard drive. Close it in MS-Word
2. Open the document in a text editor like Notepad++ and copy the HTML that MS-Word generates to Notepad.
3. Open a web browser and go to Word Off, the MS Word cleaning tool
4. Copy and paste the code saved in Notepad++ into the tool and submit it – clean HTML will appear that you can paste into your website. Easy!

This is a great tool that will save you endless time and pain! Well done to its author Tom Dyson!

SEO: How to check backlinks in Bing and Google

Link building is an essential part of growing your website’s search engine rankings so how can you find out how well you are doing? Yahoo Site Explorer was previously an excellent tool that you could use for this purpose but with the amalgamation of much of Yahoo!’s functionality into Bing, there are now two places you can go to find out your backlinks: Bing and Google.

Bing is the better of the two tools as it gives you more up to date information and makes it easy to check many websites (for example you and your competitors) quickly.

Here is how to check your backlinks in each of Google and Bing:

Bing

It’s easy to check the indexed links back to your website from other sites (the “votes” for your site from other websites). Go into the Bing search engine and type the following:

link: www.geekz.com.au

Substitute geekz.com.au for your own domain name and make sure you put the space between the colon (: character) and the domain name otherwise you’ll get no results returned.

Google

You can do a very similar thing in Google but you’re likely to get only a fraction of the links returned by Bing. You would type:

link:www.geekz.com.au

Substitute geekz.com.au for your own domain name and note there are no spaces between the colon (: character) and the domain name.

For one of your own sites you can see more than this fraction of links by going into the Google Webmaster Tools tool, verifying your website and checking the backlinks – but if you want to check a competitor’s site to give you an indication of how well you compare to them, Google is not the tool to use – Bing does it better in that respect than Google.