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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 18 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:15:52 +0000

In the previous post (How to get links for SEO), I outlined some more steps to get good quality incoming links. Some of these may be something that you think that you can do, in other cases, you might be somewhat worried or embarrassed. For example, I know some people who are very embarrassed about the thought of writing lots of emails to other webmasters requesting for a link; for such people, it is important to keep in mind that getting links is one form of promotion and is also a marketing strategy. For any sort of marketing, even the most effective ones, people need to learn how to promote their own blogs and be not in the least bit afraid of doing useful steps if that means that promotion of their blogs happen.
- Look to find some experts in the field that you are writing about, and if you can get interviews or an explanation of their techniques, you will find more people linking back to your site. This may require some amount of persistence in getting these interviews or comments, but the result will be worth it.
- Court controversy. This is a controversial tip, and is more relevant if you are writing about some sort of news, reviews, or something where opinions can be strong. If you take strong views on a particular subject, especially if you are going against the majority opinion, then you will find a lot of people linking to you, even if these referred posts are critical of your viewpoint.
- Get in depth about the topics you write about. This is back to the viewpoint about writing posts that has a rich content, but this can be repeated again and again; if you do a lot of research about the topics you are writing about and come up with content that ir rich, you will find a number of people linking to you even without your needing to do anything about it. In fact, if you have a series of well written posts, then many people will start referring to you as a guru.
- Being quick on the take. This sort of tip is more useful for people who write about news related stuff. How many times have you seen blogs being referred to when a blog makes a scoop of some information that has not yet made it to the popular news – no need to answer, this happens many time. Conversely, If you write about a subject that has already been beaten to death, then you will not find many people even interested in this post, forget linking to your post.
- Encourage people to link to your post. In many cases, a large percentage of the people who think about linking to your posts don’t follow through for any reason (could be laziness, could be putting off the linking, and so on). What you need to do is to encourage people to link to your posts by proving a section at the end of the post (something like, if you like this post, why not link to this post -and create a small box where you provide the code to do this linking)
- Use Twitter and give an option to readers to re-tweet your posts. Once this happens, when people happen upon your posts, many of them will actually try to re-tweet your posts (when I say many of them, even 5% doing so is a good percentage); this in turn makes your post accessible to more people and increases the percentage of people who will link to your post.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 1

ashish — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:54:37 +0000

What is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is called ? And more important, is this another Three Letter Acronym, or is this something important that you should know about ?
Well, Search Engine Optimization is important for everybody who wants more visitors to their site / blog through search engines, and given that for a large number of blogs, their visitors come through search engines, it makes a lot of sense to try and ensure that your blog comes up high in search engine rankings. You would have heard of people stuffing their site with keywords, with meta tags, using keywords in their page with the same color as the background so that they rank higher, and so on. Well, if you were upto date with SEO techniques, you would have learnt that many of these are liable to get you penalized rather than promoted in search engine rankings. After all, as a technique to game a search engine ranking becomes widely known, the engineers at the Search Engine stop the utilization of that technique, and in many cases, consider the sites using them to be unfairly trying to game the search engines and penalize them. Search engines get their credibility based on the accuracy of their search results, and look upon the misuse of such techniques pretty unfavorably.
If all this is true, then how does Search Engine Optimization work ? Well, the fact is that the operative word is “unfairly”; there are a number of techniques that are pretty okay by search engines and which a lot of site creators do not know enough about in terms of optimizations. So, for example if you have a site that has is linked to by other sites, search engines consider that a good think. But wait, if you go out and buy such links and these links are coming from places that search engines (such as Google or Yahoo search) know have low credibility, such links can hurt you.
What does all this mean ? Well, all this means that you need to be more attentive to the ongoing study of Search Engine Optimization, about what things work, and what things do not. In the next many posts, I will be laying out some of the techniques used (primarily with respect to blogs built on either WordPress or Blogger, but some of the techniques will be relevant to other blogs as well).
As a parting shot, here is something that is a quick solution, and works for a large number of blogs (but not for the Blogger platform). It is a tool called “All in One SEO Pack”, and can be found on this page (link).
Here are some details from the page:

Some features:
Advanced Canonical URLs
Fine tune Page Navigational Links
Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
Nonce Security
Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs

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)

How to promote your Blog on Facebook – Some tips

ashish — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:38:51 +0000

Facebook is turning out to be a great tool for promoting your blog. Well, you might consider as to why Facebook ?
- Facebook has a growing number of users who spend a huge amount of time on the application
- If you create a Facebook Fan Page for your blog (click to learn how), your posts are also searchable
- Typically, the structure of a Facebook Fan Page is that your users can start to generate content on their own and post that on the Facebook Fan Page, increasing the amount of content you have (but this takes time, and needs a number of users)
- When combined with other blog promotion strategies such as using Twitter, allowing your users to easily subscribe, and many others, using Facebook increases the potential of your blog finding more users

Now that you are convinced (hopefully) about using a Facebook Fan Page, how can you increase the promotions you do via your Facebook Fan Page:
1. Mention your Facebook Fan Page in your posts at the end, and as your signature on emails
2. Use a Facebook Fan Box to send your blog viewers to your Facebook Fan Page (click to learn)
3. Ensure that your blog is automatically posted to your Fan Page (click to learn)
4. Don’t only depend on your own blog posts. Post other articles from other sites that are relevant (don’t steal – link to the actual article and put a small teaser on top). If the site owner sees you doing this, they will appreciate your not stealing, and in fact, promoting their content.
5. Post a link to your Fan Page in your Profile, so that your friends get a chance to find your Fan Page
6. Automatically link your Fan Page to your Twitter account so that any update on your Fan Page gets published to your Twitter account (click to learn)
7. Run an Ad campaign on Facebook, it is not very expensive and can get you a large number of Fans who would not have otherwise found your Blog
8. Add a logo. A logo, if interesting, gives a brand value to your Fan Page, and can differentiate your page from other pages
9. Add detailed information to the info tab. Many people go to the info tab, and if they find some interesting information, it can enhance their opinion of the Fan Page and give a higher chance of becoming loyal readers.
10. Write a blog post about your new Facebook Fan Page. This gives your readers the knowledge that they can also connect to you on Facebook.

(contd..)

The name of the URL should be as descriptive as possible – primarily for WordPress

ashish — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:15:35 +0000

You would have done many steps / tips to ensure the optimization of SEO for your blog, to ensure that you get as high a place in search engines, including Google Search. But this quest to further optimize your blog needs to be an ongoing quest, and since search engine placement is an evolving art (especially since people keep on working out how to game the search engines and the search engines keep on evolving to ensure that the results are as accurate as possible, free of influences such as people twisting their login by tricks and tactics). As a part of this quest, I was reading about more tips on how to ensure that your blog / post gets that slight extra bit of promotion.
This tip was something that was a bit surprising, and unexpected, but now that I think of it, it seems a continuation of making content more relevant. You would have known by now that tricks like keyword stuffing, using more keywords the same color as the background, etc, do not work, and in fact result in the search engines enforcing penalties. Further, you would also know that it is important to ensure that you do not have copied content, that you do not indulge in tricks such as buying links (since search engines also have people who know these tricks and enforce penalties).
You would started getting used to the fact that you need good unique content, that is one of the most critical tricks needed to ensure that you get a higher boost in search engine rankings, and cause more people to link to your content (as well as send your posts to more people on their own – something called viral marketing).
But, you can do this:
Make sure that your URL’s also have some unique nomenclature, rather than be some default numbering scheme. If you are running a WordPress Blog, then you need to go the following option:
Login into your account -> Settings -> Permalinks.
The default selection is the one where your final post URL ends up in something called

http://earn-cash-tips.com/?p=987

This is not a URL that is guaranteed to be very attractive, and does not let anybody know what the URL contains. However, if you select the “Day and Name / Month and Name” option, then you get a URL such as this one:

http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/01/the-name-of-the-url-should-be-as-descriptive-as-possible

Anybody who sees this URL will be able to easily figure what this URL means, and what kind of article will be at this location. Apparently, search engines also value this extra bit of nomenclature. You also need to apply this to images that you post, where you need to name the images before they are posted.