Some of you might have already spotted it.. for those who have not, here’s the news.

I have a new website directory launched at DaiySEOblog. You can find it here.

It is a simple directory which enables you to add your site with the Title, Description and URL to the appropriate category. No link back required ;)!

There are some interesting categories at the moment, and many of them are technology, blogging and internet related. I’ll be expanding it soon to at least 50 in number soon. My idea is to keep the listings close while focusing on the content.

Does it make any sense having two categories - Web 2.0, Internet, Blogging and Weblogs? No Isn’t it?
So I may stick with one category Internet. But it’s not that horrible as it sounds I have some really nice categories for you there.

I will be manually moderating the submissions to the directory, and ONLY quality websites will be added, just because I want to keep out spam and low-quality websites.

By quality, I mean sites with original content and good quality articles. If you have a young site with no incoming links at all, don’t fret, provided you have good articles and a decent post frequency, you’ll be included.

Why should you include your blog in the directory?

Good question. Here goes -

- It’ll fetch you some quality  google juice.
- Get indexed on Google and other major search engines in less than hours.
- Also some decent traffic (you may have to get creative on the description.)
- Get noticed by other DailySEOblog readers.
- You don’t have to copy paste a code to link back!
- It takes only less than a minute to submit a site.

Who is the directory for?

Yet another good question. Popular bloggers might find it irrelevant because, they already have submissions at various directories.
But this directory is for the young bloggers, the budding bloggers who have great content in their blogs but cannot find a place to show it off.

I have gone through this earlier when I started blogging. When I had a month old blog, I found it difficult to get people’s attention. And honestly speaking, even some of my friends today were not willing to link to me, they would simply avoid my request.

So this directory aims at taking young bloggers out of that frustration.

Here, we give free incoming links to all the quality bloggers out there who is looking for some attention and some google juice the next google update.

Having said that, I’m extremely concerned about the quality.

If you are still not convinced whether to submit your site or not, read this and this and this.
Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, forward them my way.

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

I just looove these ads. There are lot of Get a Mac ads out there, and this one is a grand collection of all that together. You might have seen it already but this goes out to all those who not have. Must watch ! BTW Any Mac haters out there?

Now you can talk to multiple people on Google Talk and use emoticons which are very similar to MSN’s.Reports Mashable,

Group chat has finally found its way to gmail’s instant messaging system. So right there while you have your email inbox open, you can chat with multiple people at one time. Start a group chat by clicking on the Options link at the bottom of a conversation window. You’ll now see “Group Chat” as a new option. Once that’s selected, just type in the name of the person you’d like to add to your current conversation. If you don’t see the group chat option yet, try signing out and logging back into your Gmail account.

I’ve heard this question over and over again from many friends. How do I control the appearance of my site info on Google SERPS. Many think that it is not possible to, but in fact it is very simple, provided you understand how Google sees it. Matt Cutts recently posted a video on this. So let’s take a deeper look at it.

1. The Page Title
In the above figure, marked 1 is the page title. As you may have guessed already the page title is the data that is pulled from your title information in the head section of your page.This is the data given in the <title></title> tags.

2. The description or the text seen right below the title (Snippets)
This information (numbered 2 in the figure) is normally seen as a text in around 25 words. This information is taken from three sources.
(i) The meta description <meta name=”description” content”what you want to appear beneath the page title in SERPS”>

(ii)The DMOZ open directory - If the site is listed in DMOZ, the description is picked from there.
(iii)When the information is not available from the above two places, google searches for contextual content from your sites copy and picks up relevant information from either a single paragraph or one or more sentences from all over the page.
One thing to note here is the it is approximately 160 characters long, so if you would like to write an attractive meta description that would prove as an ad-copy and more visitors would be prompted to click on your URL. Make it attractive as well as relevant.

3.URL
Of course, this is taken from the sites web url. It also takes into consideration your preference settings in the webmasters account. If you had preferred it as http://yourdomain without the www, it would show that way in the SERPs.This is the page Google will take you to when clicked.

4.Page size
Just next to the URL there is a tiny text showing the file size of the document you will be directed to when clicked.

5.Cache
Right next to the page size,a blue link is shown that will take you to the cached version of the website. The cached version is simply the copy of the webpage google saved when it last visited your website. If it had visited your site last week, then you’ll have the page from last week.

6.Similar pages
This link will take you to other similar pages to the one that is listed above.

7.Note this
This link will help you to use the Google notebook tool. You can save off the current link for reference later on the notebook. Just a quick one for noting down things.

8. Plus box and Stock info
If the website or the comany is listed at the stock exchange, google will display it’s shortcode, and if you click on it a small menu will be displayed showing the graph of how the company did at the stock exchange for the last few months.

9.Sitelinks
The site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out.

10.More results
This link will take you to more pages from the site. In the example, it will show the next few inside pages from the starbucks website, apart form the ones those are shown in the sitelinks.

Bonus

A few things worth mentioning here. Google sometimes shows maps of the office location etc of the company in it’s search results. This is triggered when the companies physical address is given in a very evident place in the page. Again like the sitelinks this is triggered only for  websites with great traffic and user interaction.

Sometimes, near the cache link Google will show when they crawled the website last. Ex: 12 hours earlier. This happens only for fresh results. I believe there is a threshold value for the time so any searches made within that time will be shown the freshness of the Google crawl.

So that basically rounds up the basic anatomy of a Google search result and how we can SEO details on our website to control how the information appears on Google SERPs. Hope you enjoyed it.

If there was one thing that you could do to dramatically boost your website traffic, what would it be?

You may go buy a copy of “Click monkeys”, buy the “Ghana Institute’s world famous Traffic Booster software”, or enroll in a “Double your traffic with popups” program. The first one doesn;t even exist, the second one will hack your paypal id and the third one will get your AdSense ads a lifelong ban. Kaboom!

Now, is there something that you can do worthwhile to really boost your traffic by double fold?

Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to claim anything such. After all we know that there is nothing as “predictable traffic”. If that was the case,then SEO’s like me would’ve given you the exact measure of traffic boost you’ll get if we tweak just the title tag!

So coming to the reality version of things, is there really something that I can do to boost my daily traffic? Yes of course!

Now, this is no magic or “trick” as they call it. It’s sheer hard work. I’ll tell you the short-cut if you are willing to work hard.It worked for me so it should work for you, provided you try.

Step 1 - Subscribe to all those blogs you are interested in. They may be from the same niche you are in or they may be different, that’s not a problem.

What matters is,
- whether the blog authors are popular
- do they reply to comments
- are they likely to get high number of comments and
- do they update regularly

Yea so keep those in mind while subscribing.

Step 2 - Watch out for updates at these blogs in Google reader like  Hawk!!
Do you have a problem doing that? Then you are out of the game. If not, please continue.

Whenever there’s an update in these blogs, be the first to comment. No second no third, be the first!

I know what you are thinking - That’s not easy Mani, there are time differences, there could be others, and the topics may not be interesting, you know there are all these troubles.

Well, my friend, that answers the question why you are not seen a blogstar in the blogosphere!

Had you been the first to comment on the blogs..

- You’d get personal attention from the author.
- You’d get attention from the rest of the commenters.
- You become genuine and passionate blogger.
- You write meaningful comments, not a “I’m doing it just because I have to” thing.
- You’ll get insights on how to write better blogs.

Get the idea? You know that you can’t write great articles like them (the super blogs that you’ve subscribed to), so why not get the maximum out of them with the minimal effort? Makes sense isn’t it?

Some of the blogs that I’d recommend you to subscribe and star commenting firs would be - DailyBlogTips.com, Problogger.net,45n5.com,Copyblogger.com,Bloggingtips.com and Dailyseoblog.com

The inspiration to this article is Amit Agarwal when he “called” me A Rising Blog Star.

Meta tags and Titles play a significant role in deciding your search engine ranks. Meta tags are normally added manually to a page in it’s head section. But many a times, this becomes a tedious process. Luckily for Wordpress there are plugins that will help you to do this stuff pretty easily.

Here is a plugin called HeadSpace, which does exactly this.

HeadSpace configures your metadata, by creating custom titles for a post, converting it’s tags for specific pages or particular posts etc. in fact it does a variety of Search Engine Optimization tasks to relieve you of the chores. The plugin uses data from the post itself to create custom meta tags and description. It also allows you to edit meta tags of multiple posts from the dashboard. It also helps in enabling Google’s section targeting to improve the quality and relevance of AdSsense ads appearing in your articles.

The best part is that it uses data from other SEO plugins such as UTW, and All in One SEO pack.
It is compatible with Wordpress 2.3, you can download it here.

What’s common between Bloggingfingers, Cashquests, 5xmom, and Blotrepreneur.com?

Yep, you guessed it right. They are all “Make money online” blogs, and that they are all on sale/or sold already!

So, it’s a fact that all are eyeing on the big money and short term goals and dumping all the blame on “personal reasons”. I thought this might be the right time to discuss about things to look into when buying a website.

Honestly, I’m no authority to discuss this. I can probably give you a lecture on SEO aspects one should look into before buying a domain, but I thought it might make more sense to get advices from experts in the domain.

I went around asking all the experts about their opinions on things to watch out for before buying a blog. Let’s see.

1. Chris Garret from ChrisG says -

The main thing I would look for are verifiable details of the traffic and subscriptions. What you don’t want to find is you have bought a site thinking it gets 20k visitors a month only to see that 99% of the traffic is from one or two front page diggs and all the links disappear because they were rented.
Also be cautious of earnings claims, get details. A lot of sales show monthly earnings based on one-off affiliate deals, like new product launches, negotiated commission deals you could not continue yourself, or things Google is clamping down on such as selling links and paid reviews.

2. Daniel from DailyBlogTips says - 

The first thing you need to consider is what kind of content is going on that blog. Blogs that publish too much personal stuff lose a point here. You must make sure that the readers go to that blog because they are looking for the usefulness of the information there contained, and not because they like the opinions or style of the author. If that is the case it would be very hard to keep the momentum of the blog going after the sale.
The second aspect is the monetization one, given that many of these blogs that go on sale claim that they make good money. Make sure that the revenue sources are stable and legit. If they have direct advertisers, for instance, it would be a good idea to confirm that they would stay on board even after the sale (just ask the contacts and talk to them directly). Be careful with blogs that used to generate money via PayPerPost and similar as well, because that source is not stable.

3. Amit Agarwal from Labnol, suggests -

1. Check for any traces in the archive.org database
2. Check if google ads are not banned (through Adsense preview tool)
3. Ask for raw server logs before closing the deal

4. Emma Jean from Blog about your blog says -

If I was to purchase a site I would want to know about the history. How long its been established and if the domain has ever been dropped. If its been dropped and has a PR it could be affected the next update. Therefore the value isn’t as high.
As you can see with the recent sales of blogging fingers and cashquests is the branding and the blog. People know them just by the name.. “Oh Cash Quests ya that blog is about etc.”
The most important thing I would consider is the ability to expand and earn. If you are buying a site and must pay 10 months revenue, you want to be able to earn back your investment. If you can’t it’s essentially a waste.

5. Patrick Altoft from Blogstorm says -

1. I would want access to the sites Google Analytics account. If that wasn’t possible I wouldn’t buy.
2. Also I would check as many pages as possible from archive.org to see if the site sold links or anything in the past.
3. Check every page on the site and every link using Yahoo Site Explorer.

6. Mohsin Naqi from Bloggingbits says -

Essentially, I’ll give top consideration to the blog’s niche and its earning potential before checking domain’s age, its  google and Alexa rank, and other similar factors.

7. Ankesh Kothari from BlogClout says -

 * Current cash flow.  Is the site profitable?  $$ it earns.  Followed with: page views / unique visitors it gets.  Subscribers / members it has. 
 * Future potential.  Whats the current strategy of the website.  Is the seller selling because of some impending legal / technical reasons or maybe because of increasing competition?  Can I improve upon the strategy and the business model?  How much time, effort and money will go into it?  Will the site work without its current owner?
The price I would pay is 6-8 times the current monthly cash flow.  Plus $1-2 per subscriber.
This changes if the site also owns intellectual property (patents / exclusive softwares).  Also if the site sells a tangible product and I have to buy its inventory too.
I don’t look at the site age.  Or the participation on it.  Or its page rank or alexa rank or any such 3rd party ranking that has no effect on the bottom line. 
Google backlash comes under future potential - which I check for (For eg: if a blog whose business model upto this point has been earning via payperpost only - then I would think about buying it.  And go for it only if its price is lower than I would otherwise pay for it.).

8. Monika Mundell from Writer’s Manifesto says -

For starters I would look at the following stats:

Alexa ranking
Google page rank
Age of the blog
Active Subscribers
Blog Layout (is it designed to display ads effectively)

If the blog doesn’t qualify through this I will not go further. It would be silly to think that buying a so called established blog with no rankings and no subscribers will be justified. If the blog qualifies, then I will apply some deeper scrutiny, such as looking for income revenue. If the blog currently provides the owner with a monthly income either via adsense, direct advertising, pay per click or anything else, then my first point of evaluation would be how much income there is per month. If the sales price exceeds the blogs monthly earnings x 24, then it would be considered too expensive or over ambitious.
Example: Blog currently earns $400 of monthly revenue.
$400 x 24 months = $ 9,600 then this figure is the maximum I would pay.
Also another important step is to look at the current spending habits of the blog owner to get those $400/month. Naturally if the cost is considerably high, I would keep my fingers from it. One kind of blog I would never buy is a self branded name blog. Buying an established blog can be a great decision for any serious entrepreneur. But we mustn’t forget that the future growth of the blog will only happen if we choose the right niche for us and keep the blog
updated. It is no good spending $10,000 on a dog blog if we intend to write about cats in the future.

9. Kevin from BloggingTips suggests -

1 ) With regards to traffic. You need to see as many stats as possible. Ask for screen prints of analytics, webalizer, awstats and any other stat scripts the current owner is using. You should of course be interested in the current level of traffic however more importantly you need to look at where this traffic is coming from.

   * If a lot of traffic is coming from other sites the owner owns then you need to ask if these links will remain up after the sale and if so, for how long. Likewise, if traffic is coming from an advertising campaign, when does the advertising campaign end?

  * Has a lot of traffic come from social networking - eg. digg. If so, you should bear in mind that these traffic spikes were most likely due to the blog owner working hard to get posts dugg and unless you do something similar yourself you wont receive traffic in this way

  * What sort of search engine presence does the site have? What sort of keywords and search terms are bringing in the most traffic? Can you improve the SE presence the blog has?

2) The most important thing you need to pay attention to is how many subscribers the blog has but I believe it’s also worth checking out the growth of the feed. An easy way to check this is to view the feedburner feed graph. Big jumps in subscribers may have been of a result of an advertising campaign or even a guest post. It’s worth noting how much the feed count grows on a ‘regular day’.

3) Make sure that the income stats the blog owner is giving you are true. Try and get as much proof as you can. Many website owners exaggurate how much money their site makes in order to make more money from the sale. This is something which is unfortunately very common. Another important factor is how is the advertising generated. Does the blog make money from direct ad sales or through a CPM ad network etc?

You should also find out how long the blog has been live and how long the domain has been live on the net (sometimes not the same) and you should think about the design of the blog - are you happy with it? If not, how long would you spend working on a new theme, or, if your not a designer, how much would it cost to get a design which suits the blogs needs.

Finally, it’s worthwhile doing a background check on the seller. Check the previous posts from the seller - is he a trusted member of the forum community? Has he sold before - if so, what did the previous buyer think about them as a seller.

10. Skellie from Skelliewag.org says -

My primary concern would be that the content is transferable or not. Sometimes a blog and its author are virtually inseparable, and people visit and subscribe as much for the author’s experiences, advice, personality and style as they do for other aspects of the content. A blog like that(with strong personal style) may well flounder if it’s handed over to new authors.
Site age wouldn’t matter much to me. Some people take three months to grow as much as another blogger might grow in a year. PPP would actually devalue a site as far as I’m concerned as it’s not something I’d personally want to pursue. As for Google backlash, I’d want to take over a site with high quality inbound links but wouldn’t be bothered about PR and that sort of thing.

So essentially, there are a few things in common that’s interesting.

10 things that you must check in a website/blog before buying it.

1. Traffic is stable or not
2. Had there been a Digg effect recently?
3. Was the blog thriving because of the authors personal branding?
4. Get the detail report of their earnings. Make sure it’s not PPP or any affiliate sales.
5. Contact the existing advertisers to see if they will continue the ads if you buy the site.
6. Make sure the site hadn’t got a backlash from Google because of PPP or text link ad sales.
7. Check if Google ads are banned.
8. Check in archive.org for recent drop in Google ranks (PR drop).
9. Monitor traffic and cash flow for a longer period than specified.
10. Check if you are comfortable with the blog Niche and there’s future potential to it.

Some SEO aspects you must check before buying a blog/website(Just my two cents).

1. Age of the domain, from Archive.org. If the niche is promising, then you can compromise on the age, but the more the age, the better.
2. Incoming links on Google, Google blog search and Technorati. The more the merrier.
3. Quality of incoming links - Are they bought from link farms or are they genuine from blogger’s review?
4. Recent Google backlash? Google page rank drop?
5. Had the site offered PPP and paid text links?
6. Outgoing links - Does it link to malicious sites(mainly from the sidebar/footer)?
7. Content has duplicate content or not?
8. Has it got supplemental results on the SERPS? The less the better.
9. The frequency of posts to links ratio. An even ratio is better.
10. Spiderability of the site. Test with a spider simulation test to see if the contents are poperly seen by Google, or else you may have to go for a template change.

If you had been knowing the website for too long all this factors won’t really matter, but if you can probably negotiate with the seller if you find something interesting here on the above factors.

So there you have it! All the factors you must check before buying a blog. Hope they are also useful for bloggers who plan to sell their sites. Because you heard it from the experts.

Lijit is an exceptionally good tool for bloggers. It helps you to give your readers an option to search ALL your social medias, and I mean ALL. That includes delicious,facebook,digg, stumble upon and quite a lot more. All your bookmarks, all your micro blogs and even all your contacts in those networks along with their social medias (opt in) are searchable with Lijit.

It is a small widget with a search bar that can sit on your sidepanel.

Now it makes more sense to have a lijit widget (wijit as they prefer to call it) on your blog so that your readers can find sites and information that you think are good. It helps you to improve and fulfil that personal commitment to your readers. And readers should find it interesting too.

According to Lijit, it think searching on Lijit is like doing a search in real life.

When your readers search for information in real life, their first step is to typically seek out a friend for the answer. If their friend doesn’t have the answer they need, someone in that friend’s social network may. Eventually, they get an answer they trust, because it came from a source they trust. Your readers can now have that same experience on the web and it all starts with the source they trust. That source is you, the blog publisher.

It’s a very good concept and I totally agree to it. Unfortunately their widget didn’t quite “style” itself to my theme so I had to remove it after placing it the first time. But. I’m contacting them to customize it the way I want it.

You can register for Lijit here.

MyBlogLog had released some buttons yesterday to help you in your “community building exercise“, hope you read about it already. I thought none of them were really web 2.0 style. They were all 88×31 pixel buttons which could easily get buried into those directory badges of your site, if placed on your sidepanel.

If you were really serious about building your community, you got to use some really cool buttons isn’t it? Well, inspired from Nate Whitehill, I designed some buttons myself for you. I hope you like them.

Feel free to use them at your site, to promote your community at MyBLogLog. If you’d like to credit me, feel free to do so, or if you prefer to steal them, go right ahead.

Do you see all those link give away campaigns happening around?

“Subscribe to my feed, I link to you” - “Comment on my post, I link to you” - “Subscribe to me, I give 100 bucks” goes the hype.

Now that he page rank thing is abused, and carries less weight, bloggers are focused on the feed count.

What’s the catch? Clearly, the owner wants to increase his subscriber list and is trying all that he can to pull you in. Fair enough.

But, does it work all the time? Is it a sure shot strategy to win you readers? Can everyone copy the same strategy?

Well, yes and no.
Yes because everyone who wants to increase their reader base or get more traffic can copy it. It does not require any investment or any particular wealth. All you need is a well planned strategy and an attractive “reward” for participants.

Many a times, it’s a linkback or cash. Some bloggers prefer cash while some prefer linkbacks. I think linkbacks works best for grabbing new and young bloggers while cash works for established ones.

No - because the campaign is just a number focused game.

True that you get to increase your reader base (in numbers), but apart from the numbers does it give you real value and quality?

Are these readers likely to read your articles and comment on them regularly? Yes they are. But hey, they would do it even if you didn’t offer them a backlink or money. 

Ethics - Another concerning factor is the blogging ethics part. Running a campaign is not really unethical but sometimes Google thinks that they are. Remember what happened to John Chow, running the “Review me-I link you” campaign..it got a backlash from Google. And anybody who links to John now are likely to be counted as bad neighborhood now. So these campaigns carry a risk of penalty from Google, since they are counted as “artificial methods to get backlinks”. An increasing feed count campaign may not be treated as one, but yes there is some amount of risk as the links are involved.

Bottom line - Loyal readers subscribe to your blog willingly. You don’t have to offer them anything to. The reader base you collect offering a reward is probably second quality. They are not your loyal readers.

Mohsin from Bloggingbits inspired me to write this post. He’s running a “Link giveaway” scheme at his blog, where if you subscribe to his RSS feed, he’s rewarding you with a linkback. Young bloggers who are looking for linkbacks, can try your luck there.