There are quite a lot of social bookmarking sites and equal number of plugins available these days. Every new blog has a list of social bookmarks by the side. One question that came to mind is , how many of them do you really use?

There is magnolia,blink bits, blink list, buddy marks,citeulike,connotea,del.icio.us,digg it,feed me links, furl, give a link, gravee, igooi, lilisto, linkagogo, linkroll, netvouz, newsvine, reddit, scuttle, rawsugar, shadows, sphinn, simy,tagtooda, talkdigger, wink,diigo, dzone, squidoo, looklater, recommendzit,segnalo,mr.wong, my tuts, flog this, feedmarker, linkroll and boy there are many more getting ready for 2008.

I was thinking of putting the most popular ones link on the blog and was literally confused going through the entire list of available social bookmarking sites available. Many of these sites are very much popular in their own niches, and localities like Mr. Wong which is very popular in China. But the truth is that all the visitors may not find all the social bookmarks interesting. Everyone needs to make a selection out of the whole bunch.

My favorites are Stumble upon, Sphinn and Digg. I normally use these out of the whole array and am pretty sure that they are the popular guys around. Anyway, I’m putting these guys(along with some other guys) link in the articles page so that visitors can easily pick their favorite social bookmarking site.

Also, I;d like to introduce you to a nice site which will help you put the social bookmarking links to your site as well. It throws up a neat looking HTML code, that you can of course tweak around to your own styling preferences. But there are no buttons, this one is for the guys who believe in minimalism. The site is called Social bookmark link creator and it gives you a clean little HTML code based on which social bookmarking site you prefer. Try it out today, hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.  

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This is an interesting case study for everyone.I hope my readers from outside India give me their sincere opinion on this and not dodge the question. Here goes.

Recently, at a conference I remember the CEO of a popular Indian SEO company proclaim that their company ranks high on Google for the term “SEO India”. And this should show others how good they are and what great deal of business they do.

Honestly, this seemed like a baseless statement to me because, for any SEO company, ranking high for a particular term cannot (underline) bring them real business. I’m talking about real good, genuine, healthy business. From my experience, I’ve learned that good business always come from referrals. And for referrals, there needs to be an incredible amount of credibility towards the company. By just ranking high for the term SEO India, can give you probably one time clients, but if you lack in quality, that’s the end of it. For it’s a service not a product we sell.

And I’ve enough reasons to think that company’s that boasts of ranking high for the term SEO India are bogus themselves! First off, the term SEO India, as suggested by the CEO gentleman itself is not a popular word among clients (US and UK predominantly). Because of the poor quality of services offered by many SEO companies in India, there is a widespread belief that all SEO’s in India are weak, which is not true.Yes, there are weak ones, but not all are.

Out of all my clients that I deal with today, almost everyone (this is shameful) has had a bad experience with an Indian SEO. The common issues raised are that, the so called “professional SEO’s” does not reveal to the clients what they do with their site. They don’t tell them where they are sourcing the incoming links from, they don’t tell them why they are using a particular keyword on the meta tags, they don’t even tell them what they should do with their duplicate content on the site.

I’ve heard this issue with many clients and I think they have all good reasons to complain that Indian SEOs are poor quality. Now, if we further investigate into this problem, we can find some interesting equations.

Normally when a client wants to outsource their SEO work to India, they’d normally go googling. And they are likely to go ahead with the first few companies that they find on Google ranks. The problem arises here. Out of the top rankers for the term SEO India, on Google, many so called “professional” companies use keyword stuffing and hidden text to make it to the top.

Why that frown on your face? Check it out yourself. I don’t want to take names but it is disappointing to see that even in the top results, many of them use the words SEO India, SEM India, SEO company India and many similar keywords either extensively on the top header, in the ALT tags, in the title, more like spam often repeated and in lines with black hat methods.

One simple question here -

If these companies will do such kind of unethical SEO practices to get better ranks themselves, would not they do similar unethical strategies to the clients?

Indeed they will. Now, that explains it all. Doesn’t it ?

Okay, coming back to my readers outside India, I’m just curious to know, what keywords will you use to search for an outsourced SEO firm?

Google Trends shows that nobody outside India uses the search term “SEO India” on Google. Absolutely none. My opinion is that it is the SEO firms in India that are competing among themselves to rank for this term (See the number of ad results on Google), and not any genuine potential client. He might be searching for other keywords but definitely not SEO India. In order to test this out, I’ve changed my title tags and metas to feature the keyword SEO India, I’m just curious to see how much traffic this change is going to bring?

So how often do you check for incoming links to your site? I must admit that I keep an eye on incoming links like a hawk. I believe most people have a special liking to incoming links, and boy, they have all the reasons to. Don’t they?

So how often do you check and where all do you check for incoming links? Do you keep record of them? Do you accept all or do you keep away from some?

I normally get alerted by the Wordpress engine when someone links to me. They come up as track backs on the comments approval area. Most of us would be relying on this method. But is it always relevant and correct? I trust many of us get more than spam links than genuine ones. And especially when there are more “splogs” appearing, it is not surprising that we get linked from them every now and then.

One thing I’ve noted over time is that whenever I use the term “Google” in my post titles, soon after the post is published, I’d get a couple of incoming links, and all of them would be splogs.

Splogs are engineered in such a way that whenever there’s a reference in the blogosphere for a certain set of keywords (like the term Google), they immediately catch hold of the blog and link to it with their automated mechanism. And this many of them time is along the lines of -

Your article title here…
I found this interesting information written by (Tom/Dick/Harry), see original article here(your link)

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here. Where do you look for incoming links?

1. Google - Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
2. Yahoo! - Search term (linkdomain:www.yoursite.com)
3. Google blog search - Search term (link:www.yoursite.com)
4. Technorati

Are there any other places that you’d look for incoming links? Any way,the most important guy here is Google. And if you’d like to be alerted whenever someone(who is indexed on Google) links to you, here’s a shortcut.

1. Go to Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)
2. In the search term field, give (link:www.yoursite.com)
3. In the type field, select “Web” (third option)
4. In the “How often” field, select “As it happens” (second option)
5. In the email field, give in your email.

That’s it. Now whenever, a site that’s indexed on Google links to you, you’ll get an alert mail in your inbox. So you don’t have to go always checking for incoming links on Google. Clever isn’t it?

India is shining - once again.

This New Year, New Delhi will play host to OMCAR 2008, world’s first online marketing careers conference. Precisely, on Jan 12, 2008.

The event is aimed to empower current online marketing professionals in their careers and to attract aspiring professionals into this fast growing and lucrative industry, OLM that is. This edition of OMCAR 2008 will focus on various facets of online marketing careers such as “Endless career opportunities in the OM industry”, “Entrepreneurial Opportunities”, “Personal Branding” and “What lies in the future?”. OM Careers, a non-profit, online marketing careers community, will host this event.

Over 200 participants are expected to attend this event. Online Marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, Sales & Marketing professionals, web professionals and students will make the majority of the participants to this conference. The conference will be coupled with a unique online marketing job clinic opportunity for online marketing companies who are interested in hiring the right OM talent for their growing talent needs.

Speaking on the Event, Pradeep Chopra, one of the founders of OM Careers, said,

“Through this event, we aim to address the challenge of lack of skilled resources in the online marketing industry.”

He further added that the growth of the online marketing industry is dependent on the rate at which we can produce talented professionals to serve the growing online marketing needs across the world. OMCAR 2008 is supported by leading industry bodies such as TiE New Delhi and will be blessed by India’s leading online marketing experts such as Mahesh Murthy, Vivek Bhargava and Manish Vij as speakers.

If you are an individual and is interested in building a successful career in online marketing, you may not want to miss this unique opportunity. You can register online and also can participate in the Job clinic by submitting your resume.

Events such as this one, sure is making India go places. Congrats to Pradeep Chopra and his team. Looking forward to an fruitful, eventful event.

Vishal has a doubt on linking strategies.

Google does not show any backlinks for his site - www.b2cjewels.com. He has submitted articles in forums and directories, he has also ensured good interlinking of pages.

So he’s wondering why the links are not showing up.

The second question is - while interlinking pages, is it better to link with the complete URL (www.example.com/url.htm) or just the pages - ..url.htm?

Well, Vishal, you have backlinks indeed. Search for google blog search and you can find 8 links to your site.

Seems like you have attempted to backlink from lot of expired domains or spam sites, I really don’t know how this could’ve happened, it could be spam robots who picked up your URL, or had you submitted them yourself? It is not looking good either way.

What you really need to work on is get contextual link from related authority sites. A few of them that comes in regularly will do the trick. I also noted that your site is up from 2005, so it’s high time you had some good quality incoming links.

Now, regarding the internal linking, the types of links you referred to are respectively called Absoulte links and Relative links. Absolute links will carry the whole URL with it while the relative links will carry only the respective correct path. See more info here.

In SEO, I prefer Absolute linking even though both are the same in Google’s eye. But using absolute linking is better because,

• It is easier to manage as there are less chances of error/broken links to appear when moving documents/pages.
• There are more occurrences of your domain name in the code, which is good.
• It is more recognizable to visitors and are likely to bookmark, provided the content is worth it.

So, go ahead with more absolute links, and directory submissions. Bit if you are really looking forward to a solution to your back linking problems, you should try article marketing and more contextual authority links.

Digital Photography School is a blog that’s more famous for it’s author than it’s awesome content. It’s owned by the most influential blogger on the planet - Darren Rowse.

Darren is a very good mentor to me and often have given me valuable advices on topics knowingly or unknowingly. If you are a regular reader of DailySEOblog, you might have spotted Darren’s comments here and there on some articles. Most interesting of them being this one, where he was a bit miffed about an article I wrote which according to me was wrongly interpreted. We cleared things up, soon after,that’s a different story.

Well, recently, I came across this interesting post by Daniel, where he discusses about the factors deciding a good domain name. And today I came across this little discussion between Daniel and Darren, which provoked me to write this article.

Daniel thinks (and we agree) that good domain names should not have hyphens in them. According to Daniel,

Domain names containing hyphens and numbers are cheaper for a reason. They suffer the same problem of domains not using a .com extension or with complex spelling.

Daniel raises this doubt to Darren over here and Darren replies to Daniel over here -

Daniel - yeah it(Digital-photography-school) does well on an SEO front (has really increased in the last 6 months) but not so great on a memorability front.

So when Darren thinks that DPS is doing good in terms of SEO, I guess this is what he means.

For the keyword “Digital Photography”, a Google rank of 6. (Regional ranks may differ.)

Not bad for a blog like DPS right?

Here’s a look at some metrics.

Age of domain - Almost 2 years
Pages indexed on Google - 30,900 pages
Pages indexed on Yahoo - 62,337
Incoming links(Google) - 231
Incoming links(Yahoo) - 295,000
No: of pages in the main index - 2150
No: of pages in the supplemental index - 28,750 (Pages Indexed - Main Index)
Page Rank - 6/10
Alexa Rank - 19,382 (as of 23rd Dec, 2007)
Home page size - 34181 Bytes = 33 KB
Code to content ratio - 35.03 %
Incoming .edu links - 5
Incoming .gov links - None
Issues encountered - Canonicalization. My guess is that Darren have set the domain name preference in the webmasters tool to http://digital… rather than http://www.digital-pho… which is why a search for site:http:/digi.. returns results while as site:htp://www.digi… does not. May be Darren should fix this, and make all the URLs to www.url.com format and not http://url format. For Problogger, he has used the www.url.com format.

Why should this be fixed?
Though seemingly both the formats are the same, Google prefers to use one format for a site. Which is why it has given you the  option to make a selection in the Webmasters tool. If some people link to http://url and some to http://www.url it does not look good on your site, and you lose some value there.

Supplementary pages
DPS has quite some huge number of pages in the supplementary results. Though Google pulled off the importance of supplementary pages along with the operator(site:www.yoursite.com ***-view) last July,you can still determine the number of pages through a simple calculation, and I found that DPS has almost 30k of it’s pages in the S-Index.

Now, you know the problems of having a huge supplementary index right? Google is doubtful regarding the relevance of those pages and it may keep away from showing them in the normal organic search results. So, here DPS have not been able to convince Google that 30,000 of it’s pages are relevant and original in content.

How to get out of supplementary pages?(Rel page)
- Remove archives from the sight of robots using nofollow tags.
- Don’t tag articles in more than one category.
- Create distinguishing titles and content on every article.
- Get deep links from external sites.

Other than the canonicalization issue and the number of supplemental results, DPS is in good shape.

If Darren would like to do something about it immediately, I’d suggest that instead to the homepage, from his network of blogs/websites, he should make an attempt to individual posts in the various categories. We all know that Darren has been linking to DPS from many of his Problogger articles, but almost all of them are linked to the blog homepage. Instead of this, had it been the internal article pages, he could reduce the number of supplementary pages.

Let’s do some very basic SEO checks

Meta Tags

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Digital Photography School, Digital Photography Tips,
Digital Photography Training, Digital Camera Tips, Digital Camera Advice, Advice,
tips, photography, digital camera, training,”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Digital Photography School -
Digital Photography Tips for You” />

Looking at the meta tags, I’ve the impression that Darren and his team has not been working on it lately. It’s a very basic meta tag, with the bare essentials. And the meta description is just not impressive. As you all might already know, the purpose of having a meta description is not to attract the search engine crawlers but human visitors.

The meta description is the text that you see beneath your site name in the SERPs. Only if it is attractive enough would people click on your site name. If you’d ask me I’d rephrase both the meta keywords and the meta description as below. 

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Digital photography, Digital Photography School, Digital Photography Tips, Study photography, Digital photo Digital Photography Training, Digital Camera Tips, Digital Camera Advice,
Advice,tips, photography, digital camera, training,”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Take stunning photos with your digital camera using our digital photography tips and tricks - Digital Photography School” />

The title tag could also be changed to something attractive to both search engines and visitors. As of now, it looks like this.

<title>Digital Photography School &#8212; Digital Photography Tips for You</title>

Another grave mistake I found is that the Robots.txt file is put in the blog subdirectory (www.digital-photography-school.com/blog/robots.txt) Yikes! This simply won’t work. The robots.txt file should be placed  the root directory and if the blog is present in a sub directory, the commands should use the subdirectory URLs to control the crawlers. And if at all it worked, the syntax is wrong. Here’s how a healthy robots.txt should look like (only a suggestion)

Sitemap: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/blog/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$

I couldn’t find a sitemap file anywhere, so that’s something Darren may work on to ensure that the great content is spotted by the crawlers. It may/may not help in the fight to put back the supplementary pages too.

Bottom line is that, even though there is great content on the DPS website, a major part of those pages are in the supplementary index, and thus will not show on the search engines results. Keeping in mind that the blog has a domain name that’s not memorable, the major traffic is likely to come from search engine organic results, getting these pages out of the S-Index may be first thing Darren should work on.
Also, please note that I’ve only checked the SEO basics here, and only after these basic stuff is fixed could the rest be analysed and worked on. Here’s wishing al the best to Darren and DPS.

First off, let me tell you that Google does not like buying or selling links. So I don’t encourage anyone to indulge in text link sales. If at all you want to make money selling text links, use the “nofollow” tags, or else you could be penalized by Google.

Okay, having said that, let’s see what are the things that you should look for in a site which is selling you a link for advertisement purposes?

First, take a look, a deeper and closer look at the website that’s offering the link.

Is it an authentic site?

Authenticity of a website is the most important factor when considering it for link purchase. Though there are many metrics available to check for a site’s authenticity my best bet would be to ask your blogger friend.
Ask a friend, as to what he thinks about this guy, collect his opinion. Ask a few others if possible, and get a collective opinion. It’s the safest and the most comprehensive way to get an idea on a site’s authenticity.

Go for a site, only if it authentic, or is likely to be authentic in the near future. Never ever go for sites that claim the sun and moon. Most of the times, they appear fake. This is my experience.

What is their content?
Second, see what the content in a website is. This is really very important because, more than where your ad is placed or what the anchor text is, it’s the general content of the link donator that matters. If they don’t place a nofollow tag in your link, while the content in that website deals with porn or online gambling, you are screwed.

So make sure that the content in the site is relevant to your niche. Should the linker forget the nofollow tag, you are safe.

Is it focused on content or a service?

Next up, check whether the blog is focused on the content/information or a service. Despite differences, both categories can give you excellent traffic, but in a content rich site, your link is more likely to get buried in all the other information, but who ever clicks though it will be genuinely interested guys. While as in a service oriented site, you may get vague clicks from visitors who just clicked the link out of curiosity. So no hard and fast thumbrule here, but I prefer a content focused site.

Is it built just for the purpose of selling links? 
You might just run into trouble if you buy links from a site that is built solely for the purpose of selling links. So check whether the motive of the site is to sell links or not. You can easily make it out from where the content is placed on the website. If more importance is given to links and ads, then it’s likely that it’s a “made for selling links” site. Keep away is all I’ve to tell.

Does it have active user participation?

Next up, check whether there is regular visitors acitivity on the site. Like comments, MyBloglog clicks, and page views. Since your intent is only traffic and not google juice, it’s better to chose a site with good user participation and click rates. Advertising on a dormant site will not help you get the ROI. Will it?

Does it have regular content updates? when was it updated?
Also check whether the site is a regularly updated one or not. A regularly updated site means that there is steady traffic to the site. But a dormant one with a post/article three months earlier, means there is no traffic juice. So the one thing you might want to check is when was the last update/article posted on the website. 

Do they have a contact page? Do you know who it is?
Make sure that you know whom you are doing business with. After all you are paying him so you ought to know where in the world this gentleman is. Hunt for a about page on the site. If it’s not there, write a “I’m sorry, let’s part as good friends” email to the offerer.

Are there others who bought links from them earlier?
This is the litmus test. Simply check if there are other advertisers on the list. If there are, ensure that they are not the seller disguised in other forms but genuine advertisers. I believe you can go ahead safely if there is good company.

How many out going links are already present on the site?
This check should be done just to make sure that you are not getting linked from a link farm.The link might give you no traffic if there are numerous number of links in the farm. No user would be genuinely interested in your advertisement and is not likely to click on it to buy your service or product from a crowd. In such situations, when there are lot of links on a page, a better distinguish placement may get you the right attention, but keep away from buying links among a crowd.

Do they allow nofollow tags?

Very very important point this one. If your link is not placed with the no follow tag, you are going to get penalized by Google along with the link seller. Ensure that your link seller adds the nofollow tags to the link.

Do they have traffic?

Since you are buying a link spot on the publishers site for advertising your site/service, it is vital that you look for traffic on the site. Only a site with steady traffic can ensure ROI for you. Good content websites which are young with no or less traffic should not be chosen for advertising, because even if they manage to sell to you for discount rates, it doesn’t serve the purpose. You don’t have a target to bait. Do you?

Are there better competitors?
Check to see if there are your competitors advertised already. If more than one of your competitor have bought links from a site, it means that the site is having the potential clients/readers who might be interested in your product/service/site. Your competitors are hanging in there because they might have tasted success with the site already. So have your bite, share a spot.

Please keep in mind that none of the points explained above is focused on getting you a higher page rank or google juice but the link purchase/sales here are in the context of advertising only.

Have you ever had the chance of having a traditional Indian meal ? For the Indian readers, this question is irrelevant but for the rest of the world, this article might be interesting and mouth watering at the same time.

The (grand) Indian meal is pretty popular, particularly the south Indian one. Once, a foreign friend of mine who had the chance to have one jokingly said, that the thali itself reminded him of the solar system model he learned at school. Huh? He said, the rice is the sun (being at the middle), and there are lot of planets and their satellites revolving around it making it look almost like a solar system.

Well, I’d agree him on all points except that, in the traditional Indian meal, eating the sun won’t burn you, but the curries (the satellites) may, they are very spicy.

Having said that, I think there’s lot of points in common between having an Indian meal and blogging.

1. Template.
   In blogging, it is essential that you have a cool template, good enough to get the attention of the reader. Similarly, in the meals, there’s the template - the plantain leaf. A plantain leaf is used instead of a plate, which must be large enough to carry all the ingredients well.
   Similarity - 80%.
2. Starters.
   In both blogging and the meal, there are the starters. In blogs they are the headers and above the fold stuff. If the starter is good both the meal and the blog is enjoyable. In the meal the starters are placed “above the fold” and also in the blog.
   Similarity - 99%
3. Main course.
   And there’s the main course which is rice and the curries. In the blog, there are the articles in different categories. Having a good main course fulfills your hunger, be it a blog or the meal.
   Similarity - 99.7%
4. Dessert.
   In the meals, there is a always something sweet at the end. It normally would be “payasam”. And in blogging, there are the comments. Comments, though not always sweet, is definitely a dessert!
   Similarity - 59%
5. Addiction.
   Both the meal and blogging is addictive! If you taste it once, whenever you think of one, your mouth starts watering and you can’t get rid of it. Everyday, new tastes, new flavors, a whole new meal !
   Similarity - 70%
6. Widgets.
   In the blog you have the widgets to spice you your blog. Like the Lijit widget or the Mybloglog widget, and in a meal, you have the pickles and banana chips that sits alongside the main template , though very small, adding to the spice of the blog.
   Similarity - 85.6%
7. SEO and the thali meal.
   A thali meal is very much like doing a search engine optimization on your blog. As you know, in SEO, there are some procedures that has to be done methodologically in order to put yo in good shape. Like the keyword saturation and onsite optimization procedures. In an Indian meal, the order of serving the meal is really important. First, the spicy pickle, then some banana chips, then some curries, then the rice, then the sambhar(spicy curry), then the next set of curries!
   It sounds more or less similar right? If you mix up the order neither the meals is enjoyable nor the blog. You have to serve every ingredient in the same proportion.

   SEO - Keyword density - You sprinkle the keywords here and there to meet the right density.
   Meals - Salt - You sprinkle the salt to meet the right density.

   SEO - You make sure that the template is search engine friendly by ensuring a standard three column template with a proper header and footer.
   Meals - The template (plantain leaf) is very much like the template with the header to one side and the footer(tapering end) to another.

Seven reasons to think that an Indian meal is similar to blogging - there you have it. Now, some of the points may sound bizzare, but if there’s at least a 50% similarity that you found, I’d be happy!

These days, importance is given to link building than anything else in SEO metrics. Out of the various factors considered today as must have’s for SEO, link building stands out. At the forums and discussion boards, there is always someone who’s looking for outsourced SEO’s who can work on link building for their site. Many are preferring cheap SEO’s too. Hmm, though it looks murky, I’m not of the opinion that link building should be outsourced to any cheap SEO.

If you take a look around, you’ll see that out of all the bloggers, only a few say less than 10% even consider outsourcing link building. The majority of them handle it themselves. And they are good at it. May be there’s something you can learn here.

1. Link building is not tough as it seems like.
You have no clue why your site is getting a better PR, or a better position. That doesn’t mean that your link building campaigns, if at all any, has gone wrong.
Probably it means that you’re not doing it right. I’ll get to some tips of how to do link building successfully down the article.

2. Link building is not easy as it seems like.
Having said that, it’s not something everyone can focus on. Many of us do a one man job at the site, writing content, tweaking template etc. In between all this, link building goes out of focus and remain down the priority list.

3. Link building is not about commenting and directory submission alone.
Many of us count link building practices limited to directory submission and commenting. Well, honestly that’s only 10% of the whole process. There is a whole lot more in link building. Let’s see further.

Let’s clear some common mis conceptions about link building.

Last, day I asked a question, what are your link building methods?

And the common answer many agreed on was that - Exclusive content and natural linking will help you more than anything else. 

Josh Spaulding says that, since he deals with niche sites, he believes in natural linking though he submits his blog to directories.

Josh is right. If you have a niche site, and if you haven’t marketed in properly, it is highly unlikely that it will get noted by others and hence the link building will be fairly okay while not helping the site much. In such cases two things can help.

1. Directory submission and  2.Social Media Optimization.
If you submit the site to some quality directories, it is likely to get some attention and traffic(Not all does give it, you have to chose wisely).It would help you get some Google juice atleast, again it’s only a better alternative to waiting for your content to get noticed.

Social Media Optimization is the thing! If you are clever enough to create a remarkable(in the right sense of it’s meaning) article, which is likely to get noted by others, then things happen really quick! People notice your blog and favour it with links. Just what we wanted.

Nitin Pai is of the opinion that, natural linking is the best way to get links.

Here too, the uncertainty in when you will get the incoming links and attention is something that will put us off.Again, SMO will help you out here.

Rajan and Mohan is also of a similar opinion. They say that the content itself will bring you links if it’s exclusive.

So what we can learn from this discussion is that taking into consideration, the uncertainty and ambiguity in waiting for the spotlight to feature your content, taking a step forward and creating those killer, viral articles optimized for the social media, would help you more than anything else in building links.

• Agreed that content is king and exclusive content will bring you natural links but optimizing your site for the social media is the right weapon to hunt for links. It’s a fool proof strategy. Waiting for natural links to come is vague.
• Links from commenting does not help you get a higher page rank.
  I heard some one say that he builds couple of links a day through commenting to ensure that his page rank is better the next update. It’s a wrong idea. Commenting on blogs can only bring you traffic, and backlinks on Yahoo and MSN but not Google, unless if the blog is “Nofollow” free.
• Links from forums don’t help you at all.
  I know many of you will disagree with me on this. I can explain.
  Just answer the following questions and you will agree with me.

  - How many links can you gather from a forum?
  - If you are getting signature links at a forum, many others would. Isn’t it?
  - If all of us link to our sites from one single forum (or as many which provides sig links), wouldn’t Google put them all in one bracket ?
  - What’s that you’ll get from a forum that other’s don’t?

  Do you get my point now? From my experience, if you rely solely on forum links, they don’t give you any exclusivity at all. If you know of a forum that allows signature links, probably everyone will. Though it carries some weight, when everyone starts getting incoming links from common domains, they does not give you that edge over others. This is more applicable in the case of sites that fight for positions on the SERPs. For the small time amateur blogger, who just needs an incoming link for the sake of it, it works fine.

So the point here is that, handling link building campaigns yourself may not give you the desired effect because you are not specialized in it. But if you are very clever, there’s nothing stopping you. From my experience, hiring a so called “cheap SEO” doesn’t serve the purpose if you are looking for quality links. Many of them I know rely on forum links, directory submissions and at the most article submission. Beyond all these traditional methods, I’ll rank Social Media Optimization as the right weapon. If you can find someone who’s good at it, he can give you quality links than a cheap SEO. Remember, links are not just about numbers, it’s also about quality. Fifty incoming links from forums/directories is equal to five quality contextual incoming links.

I just spotted some strange looking Google AdSense ads on the blog today.

Here’s the screenshot, and here’s the full screen.

I use the large rectangle ads (336×280 pixels) beneathe each post. Today instead of the large rectangle I spotted two square ads or similar. There were four ads and they appeared well positioned with enough space padding in the larget rectangle space.

I couldn’t find the new formats listed at the official ad-formats page nor did I see any official notifications.

This may be a new trial run from AdSense unless if I’ve not missed any latest news from Google.

Anyway the ad looks like two small squares appearing in the large rectangle ads I’m using.