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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 17 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:32:17 +0000

The previous post (Links for SEO) was an explanation about how to get incoming links for the purpose of SEO. However, this topic is too long to explain fully in one post, so this post will continue with the same topic, with more detail about how to get quality incoming links for SEO purposes.
- Search for quality directories and post your blog over there.
- Yahoo answers is a great initiative where you can earn quality incoming links. The idea of Yahoo Answers is that anybody can ask questions, and if you answer the question and it is judged to be a good answer, and the question itself is popular (and search engines also index the question and answer), then you can get some traffic coming your way
- Ask your friends and relatives (those who run sites and blogs) to link you; in this case, you should be able to get a high success rate
- Create a Facebook Page (How to create a Fan Page) and link up your blog posts to your Facebook Fan Page so that you can start getting Fans (and if you have good content, slowly you will start seeing an increase in the number of fans). On the Fan Page, provide a link to the Blog.
- Be active in forums and discussion boards related to the topic of your site. If your information is found useful and people value the updates your provide, then some of them will want to explore your site as well (make sure that your site is there in your signature) and many of them will also link to your site
- This one will take more effort, but many human edited directories ask for editors; become an editor and also take the chance to easily submit your own sites as well
- When you are writing a post that refers to another post of yours, then refer to that post using a link with keywords as the anchor text. You might think that an internal link does not matter, but you would be surprised.
- If you have multiple blogs and some of them are ranked higher, then you should have a link from these blogs to your other lower ranked blogs. Why not take advantage of some link love from your stable of blogs.
- If somebody has already linked to your site using some non-descriptive text such as ‘click here’ or something similar, request them to change this to something more descriptive – ideally supply them a short keyword rich phrase along with an already formatted link
- Keep on monitoring your logs to see which are the keywords that most people use to link to you, and then modify your posts that are on the same topic to become more keyword centric, and also focus on those keywords when requesting links from third parties
- Prepare newsletters and send them out on a regular basis to your subscribers, and at the end of the newsletter, ask people to link to your site if they feel that the newsletter was useful or informative to them
- If you are a product company that orders a lot of equipment from many vendors, then ensure that all of these vendors have provided a link to your site. Since you supply them business, most of them will indeed do that.
- Do a competitor search, and if you find sites linking to your competitors, then write to them requesting them to link to you as well. If you write politely, and if they don’t have any association with your competitor, many of them will honor your request.

As always, this post is getting about as long as I would like it to be .. so the next post will continue on the same line.

Keep your title of the blog as long as possible – for social networking tools

ashish — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:28:46 +0000

I have always believed in keeping the titles of my blog posts short and sweet, but then I started discovering something. I have an automatic process using Twitterfeed to update my blog posts to my Twitter account, and using Networked Blogs to update my Facebook Fan Page. On Twitter, what I found was that with my short beautiful title, only that much amount of the title was showing via the Tweet. Now, this is configurable, and you can set for the update to pick up the following text of the post if the title proves inadequate, but considering that people can find your blog post via Twitter search, and many more services which pick up Twitter posts, you should work to make sure that you have a title that looks sharp, and yet has enough text in it such that it can get picked up from Twitter posts. Craft your title so that on reading it, somebody can immediately see it as the answer to their question.
For example, if you consider the above title, the blog title could have been “Benefits of keeping a long title”, but I decided to keep a longer version of the title, as you can see above. When this shows up on Twitter and Facebook, somebody viewing it can immediately make out that the need for this title is because of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Now, to get the exact correct title everytime that also contains the desired keywords will take some time and effort, and I am ready to make the required effort, it it means that I am able to get a title that causes benefits in terms of users coming to my blog from Twitter search. Usage of Twitter is only increasing, and it is better to spend time to learn about how to optimize ones usage of Twitter.

Differences between Facebook Fan Page and Groups ? Which is better (contd..)

ashish — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:36:52 +0000

The previous post (link) had started out with an analysis of the differences between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group, and based on that analysis, and comparing with your need, you would need to figure out which one is more suitable for your needs. Here is the concluding part of that article:
1. Groups can send messages to their members as long as members are less than 5,000, while Page Admins can send updates to any number of fans
2. You can directly update content from your blogs and other areas such as Twitter by using applications such as RSS, Networked Blogs, etc, while Groups need manual updates – this if you want your blog posts to automatically appear on Facebook, then a Fan Page is the way to go
3. You can promote your Fan Pages through the use of targeted ads, something not possible with Facebook Groups. Through ads, you can get a large number of fans
4. Groups allow a far higher degree of control over who all can join the group or not, including ensuring that members need to be approved before being allowed inside, while the level of control in a Page is far lower

In short, it seems more like that Groups was something that Facebook was supporting earlier, but the focus is now moving over to a Facebook Fan Page being the area that will have a higher focus.

Differences between Facebook Fan Page and Groups ? Which is better ?

ashish — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:16:03 +0000

Well, there is no easy way to determine the right answer for the last question above – “Which is better”. I know that most people detest an answer which starts with “It depends”, but it is true in this case. It depends on what you are trying to promote, what is the level of response and involvement you are looking at, and so on. So, let’s do some evaluation of the differences between a Facebook Fan Page and a Facebook Group.
1. The way that Fan Pages and Groups are setup (including their privacy settings) are different. Fan Pages, when they started out, were modeled after the concept of they being the representation of the fans of a artist, a musician, a rock band, and so on. A group allowed the administrator to set higher levels of privacy, including this being secret, and was more like a club.
2. Groups are meant for a more closer or intimate level of interaction, such as being able to see who the administrator of the Group is, being able to view the profiles of the group members, and so on. On the other hand, you can hide the name of the administrator of the Fan Page, and the profile information of members is also hidden. As a result, a Fan Page allows a viewer to maintain privacy while reading the information on the Fan Page.
3. Groups cannot have additional information added to the pages through applications, while Fan Pages allow you to extent the functionality through the use of external third party applications. As the number of such applications increases, this becomes more important.
4. Groups are not available to non-Facebook users, while Fan Pages are visible to non-Facebook users, letting a greater number of people get access to these posts and find these results through searches.
5. However, since the apparent involvement of users with Facebook Groups is greater, any update sent to the group is displayed more prominently on the user’s profile in the case of a Group rather than in a Fan Page
6. The level of statistics provided in a Fan Page is far greater than that in a Group, and if you are interested in doing a number of statistical analysis of your readers, then a Fan Page will be more useful.
(to be contd..)

Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)