A good increase in the number of subscribers and total traffic. There has been a steady increase in the number of unique visitors and page views as well. More pages at the blog is now viewed, which is really exciting. I think the large footer placed with all the SEO tutorial links has really worked, people are really finding it useful.

However, this December I had been involved with house shifting and transfer so there were less posts than usual which has reflected on the traffic. I think this will be a one off thing and the traffic will gain in the coming months.

There are some interesting and basic SEO tips and tutorials that’s coming up so that should keep you hang around the blog for a while.

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

Wondering what’s it?

Well, at DailySEOblog, I’ve tried my best to keep away from personal stuff. Simply because, I never wanted to disturb my readers and clients. So this idea of starting a new personal blog clicked! For a writer, getting an opportunity to write is like getting high on hashish. And that’s why all of us like blogging isn’t it? We can create platforms of our own.

So I have a personal blog now. It’s Manikarthik.com, and you’ll see a lighter side of me there.

I’ll be sharing jokes, travelogues, places and basically all the interesting stuff. If you’ve been bored listening to my SEO, SMM, marketing bhashans, come over to my personal space (well, not really personal right?). It’s like inviting you all to a Saturday night get-together at a favorite food joint.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed.

OK, So what about the money..Mani ?

I’m giving away $250 this season, and there’s a competition you can win. It goes like this.

It’s going to test your SEO link building and offsite optimization skills. So only the best-hardcore SEO’s who think they are really game for a battle need to take part.

The subject would be my personal blog, (which is brand new).

What you have to do

1 - Pick a keyword of your choice that is suitable for the website. It could be something like Mani Karthik, SEO India, Best SEO India, well, it’s your choice to select what you are comfortable with. You can use SEO tools to pick the keyword but make sure it’s relevant to the site.

2 - Let me know what keyword you’ve selected through comments here, so that everyone knows about it. (Don’t email please). You might want to pick keywords first so that there is no duplication. Each contestant will be assigned a single unique keyword. Incase there are more than one contestants for a keyword, variations of the keyword will be assigned to you by me.

3 - You have a time of maximum, 60 days. Ending March 29, 2008 you have to submit your results as to what is the position the site have achieved, because of your efforts, for the particular keyword that was assigned to you.
Of course, the progress of the competition will be monitored through out the schedule.

Points to note.

- Based on which keyword ranks me higher, the winner will be announced. For example, if the keyword, “Mani’s blog” ranks higher than any other keyword, it would be announced the winner.
- Incase there are more than one keyword that ranks number one, for instance both the keywords “Mani Karthik” and “Mani’s blog” ranks number one, the winner will be decided on the quality of the keyword.
- If it’s confusing still, it will be open to readers to select which is the best keyword.
- Keyword selection is totally up to you, but it should be related to the site and should be approved by me prior to the start of the competition (in comments).
- The results will be checked on Google.com and not any regional domains.
- Prize money will be sent through paypal ids only.
- There will be no control over the onsite optimization factors for the contestants. I’ll be making regular posts on the blog during the competition time.
- You can adopt any white hat strategy you like like reviews, link building etc. As long as it’s not black hat, it will be approved.
- Contestant should provide details of link sources on demand, though it may not be necessary.

So, there you go.

Time to prove you SEO skills and test out what you’ve learned over the years form DailySEOblog. This is going to be a litmus test for all of you SEO’s/SEO wannabes out there. I’m sure only the best would win, and if I find your work really worth it, you’d even get into a contract with me. So make sure you win the contest at any price!

The current stats of the blog are as follows.

- Not indexed on Google.
- No incoming links.

So what are you waiting for? Get set…go !

You’ve been using Lijit on your blog right? No? Then do it right now.

Since their launch, I was impressed with the tool as well as the guys behind it. They seemed to be a friendly, fun loving, jolly group of geeks. Remember this post?

I had trouble customizing the widget for this blog, but thanks to the quick responses and help over email from Tara, she actually bugged me to get it right. I like that kind of spirit, especially at work, when you’ll go extremes to get things done.

I’d seen Tara in one of her blog posts wearing the cute Lijit Tshirt and I wanted one! Unfortunately, Lijit haven’t opened a store yet like Linkedin (and that’s fine.), so Tara very kindly offered me to send one as a compliment.

So that’s the story. As a matter of fact, I really like the Lijit logo, the site and the tool as such, so I’d be proud to be wearing the T shirt. I’m planning to wear this T-shirt to the conferences and geek get togethers.

Here are the pics.

Thanks much Tara, you guys are a lovely bunch of guys there!

What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc

Tips and tricks

• Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
• Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
• Use a three column layout. Enough said.
• Avoid content duplication.

I’m unsure how by metrics am I going to depict this, but it is surely a remarkable reference. Some would agree and some ould not, just as it should be. What are the things that you’d take into consideration before linking to a site?

If we were to dissect out the essentials of blogging, links play a vital role. Links as many calls it are votes given by one person for the credibility of another. Every time someone want to link to a site, he things twice. There are many thoughts that goes through your head. Some bloggers are voracious linkers like John TP, some are selective like Darren and many are in between.

Now, if we all know that links are the building blocks of the internet and the blogging world, why do we hesitate to link?

After all, a link is important to another person as it is to you. So why do you not be proactive and link to others?

What are your mental blocks?
Few of the things that keep you from linking to a person are these questions.

Is extensive linking good?

Many a times, people ask me, Mani why do you keep linking to Google , AdSense and such sites often, Is it good for SEO?

Well, not really. I link to them because it helps as a reference to even novice readers who might be new to a product like AdSense. It might help me in SEO in very little amounts, but that’s not my interest first.

And, I’ve never recommended anyone not to link too much. It all depends on how many incoming links you’ve got. If the ratio of incoming to out going links is fat, you are in good shape, if it’s thinner then you might not want to link too much. That’s the point.

So provided you have a healthy number of incoming links to fight the competition, you can go ahead link to various resources and content relted websites, that’s not a problem at all. Having said that, make sure that you dont go about inserting stand alone links on the sidebar and the footers as non contextual links. When Google spiders a page, it can easily make out the contextual links and the non contextual links.

If there are 10 links within an article write up, referring to content related websites, it is perfectly fine. But at the same time, if there are 10 links on the sidebar referring to websites (which cannot be determined if it’s contextual or not), it may not be ahealthy situation.

So please expel your doubts on linking and number of links. If it’s all well withing the article and it supports the article, Google sees no harm in them.

Does the guy who’s linked deserve the link?

This is yet another popular factor. Before linking to (mostly personal sites) a site, it is normal for someone to think as to whether the person being linked to is actually deserving the credit. Well, the choice is your’s. If it’s not a relevant content you better not link. Keep in mind that you are not linking to a person to make him happy. You should be linking to a site because the content in the website is interesting and you like to refer it to someone else. Simple as that.

When you think in that sense, you might link to a person boldly than otherwise.

Will he reciprocate?

Again, here are two situations. 1 - If you are linking to a person to make him happy, then chances are that he would just be happy with your link and never link back to you.

2- If you are genuinely linking to a person because you think the content is interesting and you agree/disagrre to it, then he sees some value in your link and is more likely to reciprocate.

So, when you link, let the question be as to whether your link is passing on value or not rather than it is to make someone happy.

Will he acknowledge it?

This is interesting. There is no thumbrule to this, but from experience I’ve found that genuine and gentlemen bloggers do acknowledge links. Some of them I can name are Nate Whitehill, Michael Martine and Kevin Muldoon. They are big names in the blogosphere but rarely miss a chance to acknowledge genuine links. I’ve experieinced it over the years.

So if your link is genuine and passes on value, people are likely to acknowledge it. Again, it depends on whom you are linking.

Will he just enjoy the link or will he return it back?

This might be of interest to all those link-exchange freaks out there. My sincere apologies to all of you. But this practice is something that I don’t recommend. If you are linking to someone assuming (or even nudgin him on chat) that he will link you back, then I’m sorry even if they link back, it is not going to give you any value. It just becomes an excercise that is not going to help in long time.

So essentially speaking, when you realy have to link to someone, because an article he wrote is interesting or you’d like to refer it to your reader, please do go ahead and link to him even if you don’t like his hairstyle.

But never link to someone in the hope that tommorow he will link back to you or send you some money over paypal.

TNX.net is a one stop place for both Advertisers and Publishers who’d like to make some quick bucks online. Well, the idea is pretty clear. If you have a blog, you can advertise it on other publishers network at cheap rates and if you are a publisher you can earn money by displaying others ads. Simple as that.

The TNX, website itself has a very user friendly layout and design, where everything is explained at every step. You won’t find it difficult to use it at all. And they have made the registration process too very simple. You just need to give in the minimum details and you’re done!

At the moment, TNX has 41075 users with 31844835 links in the whole system. Pretty impressive!

So how the whole system works on is based on points. You get 2000 points right when you sign up itself. Then for each ad displayed on your site/blog, you get points at TNX and you can redeem it later as money from them.

TNX also has an affiliate program that is easy to step up. Earning money will be an automatic process, once you have the referrals coming in. The pay out percentage is 13.3% for direct referrals which is impressive.

Setting up a TNX publisher account is easy too. Just sign up, install the TNX code on your website, then wait for ther approval which normally happens in less than 2 days, then display ads on your site (max 4), ge the points and redeem them as money form TNX. Pretty simple isn’t it? You can sell the TNX points to the TNX system or other TNX users also.

There is a cool application called income calculator, which on giving in your PR, number of pages and the total number of ads that you are going to display, will give you the amount of money you are likely to make. This is a nice tool just to get you an idea of how powerful TNX is.

For Advertisers, creating an account and finding millions of pages to feature their ads is easy.

The sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy as breeze. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)

On the whole, TNX is a nice place to find and sell ads, and make some money or get some great ad deals for cheap rates. Using it is very easy as they’ve take good care in ensuring that the whole process is kept simple and user friendly.

I somehow have the feeling that it’s not fair to write something so harsh about SMO, after all, it gave me traffic like no one ever did, all the time, every single time. But after all that hep, hype and hooplah at the end, it all rolls into fancy titles, numbered lists and those endless 101 blah blahs you could do to blah blah! That’s about it. Eat it !

I tried my best but social media optimization simply wouldn’t let itself grow. It limited itself from palatable, numbered lists and crafty articles to bookmarkable low-value posts. There seems to be “see-saw” going on between quality content and traffic.

When you want to make SMO friendly content, the quality factor plummets down, and when you write real good classic articles, the SMO factor is gone for a toss. Well, as always, there has been exceptions to this and there are quite a few who managed to get the best of both worlds, but it didn’t happen all the time for them - meaning they were lucky.

Like my creative juices always pull me I feel SMO is like a Mc Donald quickie while real good content is much beyond it. It is right that people don’t like to read, but skim. They like to share slick things, and dislike thick write ups. True, but in all that hustle to make shareable, candy floss articles there is something that we often ignore - the infoseekers are too out there, who make less noise, but observe you carefully. They may not share your article, but remember it, they may not digg or thumbs up your article, but congratulate you when you see in person.

So ultimately it boils down to one question - SMO, or info seekers? Seems like we have quite a lot to sort out and probably time will prove.

The guys at MyBLogLog, Ian Kennedy and his team have been putting on some good show recently. First they released the MyBlogLog buttons , then they had a competition, and now they have a new widget, the AboutMe widget.

The ABout Me widget is an interesting one, if you have been planning to put all that social media profile links and a compressed profile with all the info on you, this is the widget for you.

Check this sample widget. It’s Ians. I had trouble customizing it for the blog and believe so many others too would’ve had the same problem. Yes, the colours and text were very much cusotmizable, but adjusting the width was a problem.

And guess that, the guys have gone ahead and added that option too. Now you can adjust the width of the widget suiting it for your blog.

I had tried the widget on the footer first, but thought I’ll wait for some more customization. Well, now with all the customization available, you might want to add it to your blog too.

After the Lijit guys, I’m liking the MyBlogLog guys too.

Undoubtedly, Stumbleupon is the most favorite social bookmarking site these days, because of it’s quality traffic(server friendly ) and ease of use. I have recieved the best traffic frok StumbleUpon and not Digg or any other social bookmarking site. StumbleUpon gives steady traffic and does not axe your server.

Found a cool plugin for wordpress here. This plugin is called stumble crumble and what it does is, that it shows your recent stumbles as a list in your sidebar. This is not a widget but a configurable plugin.

The good thing about the plugin is that it is configurable, which according to me is amazing. Download the plugin here.

Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.

Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.

When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).

How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?

Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.

The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.

During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.

One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.

The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.

But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.

Rating scores
AdSense compatibility - 8/10
Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10

Download the wordpress theme here .