First off a clarification. Links aren’t everything that can get you higher ranks on Google.Yes, links can be the most weighed metric, but it definitely is not the single thing that will help you get ranks.

Somehow, there are many people who are adamant to believe that links are everything. These days, webmasters are very particular about link building and some of them have even collected some dirt and dust in the whole process that it annoys you.

By dirt and dust I meant some common misconceptions about link building. Here goes.

(These ideas were collected from numerous “SEO gurus” who claimed that they are “Link building experts” on a couple of Google groups.)

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.

It is unfortunate to know that many SEO’s agree to the above and in rare cases even get confused.

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.

Completely wrong. Aaron Wall might have referred something along these lines in his SEO book (which was released years earlier mind you.), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it in these times of SEO 2.0

Sure the volume of links are a great metric that will push you forward but, more than the number it’s the quality that matters. 100 links from different directories is not good while 10 contextual links from blogs can cut the competition.

- Directory submission is the secret weapon.

Did you know that Google keeps an eye on the most popular directories and keeps them off the authority brackets? Aaron did not mention it in his book, as a matter of fact. Directory submissions are only a push factor to your ranks. I think a well crafted mix of backlinks from some real good contextual text and some “respected” directories will make it an irresistible combo while backlinks from directories alone is futile. 

- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.

Last day I got contacted by a link building expert on chat. He asked me if I had a PR4 website, I said yes and he demanded the URL (To test if it’s really PR4). On approval he told me that he’ll give me a backlink for which I have to reciprocate another. I denied. He offered me two links for one. I denied again to which he replied - “OK, I’ll give you 3 links”. On denial again he got frustrated. He asks - “Why? I’m giving you three links from different sites and that also theme based !! You won’t get a better offer than this.” :-p

The funda was that he had a network of websites in his belt and every time someone offers a link he goes for a three way link exchange.

Three way (or for that matter any link exchanges) will not work. They are simply a waste of time.

- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
Sure it does. But what is the meaning of themed websites? One version is that websites which belong to the same category as your’s are themed websites.

Perfect! It is true that getting links from a site that is similar in content to your’s make sense. But I believe the “theme” thingy should come down to a more refined level. You should talk about the paragraph of text surrounding your link to the “themed”, the keyword proximity and keyword density is what should make your link themed. So, rather than finding a site based on it’s category as listed in the blog directory, it makes more sense to hunt links in similar or related content.

So there you go. Getting links to your site is not a mechanical process, it’s largely natural. As the SEO 2.0(more on that in the next posts) rule goes, a compelling content is your biggest link bait. And of course you can cement together your site strength with other factors such as directory submissions and link building etc. But solely relying on artificial methods to link building is retarded.

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Very interestingly, two emails that came in recently to my inbox from the contact form read similar in content though they were from different readers. Both of them requested a free review of their blogs.

One wanted to know the SEO basics that he needed to tweak while other was asking if directory submissions will do him any good. Both of them makes sense, but it hit me with another idea.

Wouldn’t here be many others who’d be interested in their blogs review? If I could find time, I could go through all of them. But due to time constraints, it might make more sense to review at least a few ones.

So, if there are any bloggers out there who want a free consultation on their blogs SEO, do let me know.
You could also let me know by placing these badges on your blog. I could work in preference with those who place these badges on their sites. Feel free to select one. Once you place the links, make sure that you have those questions ready for me. Drop me an email with your site URL, and I should be able to answer your question.

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I hope you’ll ask me meaningful and specific questions like - What keywords to rank for or What link building strategies to opt for. Rather than questions like “How do I make it to the top of Google?” In which case, you’ll land back here.

Doing SEO involves lot of reports and spreadsheets - SEO professionals might agree with me. Link reports, PR reports, SERPs changes, Duplicate content changes and blah blah. Many a times, smaller SEO projects can escape without having any projects at all, but bigger ones definitely needs to be tracked.
To help you with SEO reporting and tracking, you could use SEO softwares.
There is webceo, web position, etc which can handle all the basic tasks pretty decently.

Web CEO has a good reporting system that gives you link anaylyis, competition analysis and keyword research. Although these tasks can be done using firefox plugins and free online tools, webceo’s reporting system is very appealing. It even allows you to send emails of your reports, and create HTML files out of it.

The sad part is that many of these SEO softwares are expensive and webceo even charges a monthly subscription option or a upgradation to pro option. I think it’s really not worth the money though. Especially when there are lot of free SEo tools and LinkDiagnosis tool, which is a pretty impressive tool for link analysis.

Of course there are the array of SEO tools at SEO Book and SEO chat sites that anyone can use without automation of course.

There is a new breed of online SEO project management services like SoloSEO.com, which can completely do your SEO tracking and analysis online for a very nominal price. They promise that they’ll handle keyword management (huh?), content tracking (i hope they mean content generation), link building and the like. I’m not sure if they can add value to what you can do for free with the online free seo tools, but if you are looking for easy automation, services like this one sure comes in handy.

Have you tried to outsource your social media campaigns? Link building, bookmarks, creating viral content etc?

No? Well, if you decided to, then you’re unlucky. Because, once you have decided, and you have the budget, it won’t be an easy task to find the best guy around. In fact, there are so many SEO’s and SEO gurus that you get sick of them so easily.

During my early days, I had contacted some DP forum SEO experts for contract work and with my limited budget, I really had no choices but to go for the cheapest guy. And DP forums as you know has quite a lot of them. Interestingly, many of them were “we do everything” guys who could do everything from link building to directory submissions to content writing. Everything at damn cheap prices. In fact, with my limited budget, I could manage to get a link building campaign that would run for three months, collecting over 500 one way links or more, directory submissions to 1000 directories, and they promised to write articles on any topic you suggested provided it’s under the sun.

Funny isn’t it? Of course DP forums isn’t the right place to find quality people, but if you are ready to do a huge compromise on the quality, you can find some really damn cheap vendors there.

The point I’m coming to is that, it’s alarming to see how many companies work today under the SEO umbrella. They do everything from A-Z, at damn cheap prices. I’m not sure if they are a good bargain but the fact is that many clients prefer them and the money is rolling. As a matter of fact, there were many situations personally, where I had to suggest another cheaper service because the client is adamant on the price. Many clients are happy that way too.

There are many guys around, both freelancers and professional teams who are ready to do custom packages for you. My advice to people who are looking to hire SEO’s and SEMs is that

- Never go for a company who promises everything, it’s highly likely that they don’t have the expertise.
- Never go for damn cheap prices, the service too would be of less quantity and you can’t question it.
- Never go for companies/freelancers who does not have a proven track record/references.
- Never go for the “look” of the site, appearances are deceptive.

But having said all these, there are real good talents too out there. It’s just that they aren’t either seen or talked about. Just google for SEO companies in your locality and you’ll get enough of them.

There’s a new company around that offers some very good services at competitive prices. Nitin Jain is the man behind the company and his company offers everything from link building to social media management. Pretty interesting.

They have an attractive services range and though I haven’t tested them, it sounds like they’re promising what they can deliver. Nitin believes in credibility publicity and has also offered an affiliate program here (No, that’s not my affiliate link, you know I never do that exercise).

Why I selected Nitin, is because he has been in contact with me for quite some time and I think he’s passionate about whatever he’s doing and that should reflect on the services. I’m not sure if they’d be able to pull off everything from link building to directories to digg to blogging…sounds like a little too much to me but, he says those services are put up there because there may be people who are interested in them and he don’t want to lose out.

I wish there are more people like him come up and start their own services companies like Submit comfort. My only concern would be that they should maintain the professionalism that will match the quality of their services. There are many other services like Submitcomfort, that are lost in the sea of frauds and wannabes. If you know one guy or a company, do let us know and I think rather than shooing them away, talk about them and find out as to who’s genuine and who’s not.

This has come out to be an one-stop SEO guide for all you wordpress users out there. I’m not sure if I’ve covered all the topics but I’m sure that these are(in fact all) the basic, essential steps all you wordpress users out there should follow in order to make sure that you have your wordpress blog on steroids. I’ve kept in mind all the SEO metrics possible that will make your blog SEO friendly.

The idea is to - “Put your wordpress blog on an SEO Auto pilot mode and keep writing articles that has a very high possibility to make it to the first page of Google, every time you publish them.”

The process of blogging on WordPress can be dissected in to three parts.

1 - Creating a powerful SEO friendly custom wordpress theme.
2 - Using all the power tools to catapult you ahead of others.
3 - Writing killer articles that are SE optimized.

How to create a custom SEO optimized, unique Wordpress theme?

Some people may argue that Wordpress is SEO friendly by itself, therefore you don’t really need an SEO. If you ask my opinion on this I’d say, both right and wrong. Right because, Wordpress is SEO friendly. Wrong because every Wordpress blog is SEO friendly.

Image this, everybody has a Bazooka to fight, so what makes the difference? Only the guy who has a better one will stand out. Similarly, only the guy with a unique custom wordpress theme can win over the others.

1. Selecting a SEO friendly wordpress theme for your site.
Check this first. Your theme holds a lot of importance in deciding your search engine ranks. Really. There may be sites that get away with it using a stupid theme or no theme at all, but remember, those sites are supported most of the times by other SEO factors that a common blogger may not have. Your theme, it’s layout structure, number of images used, code validation all should be taken into consideration while making a selection. Here’s a detailed structure.

- Select a theme with a SEO friendly layout. So that crawlers don’t find it difficult to find the content on your pages.

- The content should be clearly highlighted on the pages.

- The HTML and JavaScript code if present should limit to the first 15-20 lines of the source code. The first part of the source code should predominantly contain the content of your article.

- The whole HTML code of your pages should be completely valid. Use W3C Validator tools to check this and follow the recommendations accordingly.

- There should not be any/or very less flash and AJAX content on your template. If at all they are present, let them be in the footer/sidebar or below the fold. I don’t recommend it for the header. Resources - How to do SEO on flash enabled website, How to SEO with AJAX.

- Header of your theme is a good real estate for SEO. An image is fine, but in my experience I’ve seen that if text is placed in the header (either alone or combined with the image) with the necessary importance given (clue), it weighs more than the other text on your page. So select a theme carefully.

- When you select a theme , do a simulation test on the demo site. A simulation test is one that gives you an idea of how your pages would be seen by crawlers. In the search engine simulation test, if the results show the text featured on your theme demo, it means the theme is good for search engines. There are some themes in which we can see the text visually, but in a simulation test, no or very less text appears, keep away from such themes.

2. On site Optimization for Wordpress
On site optimization for wordpress is one of my favorite topics, simply because there is always a new concept that emerges out of the blue.

• SEOing Wordpress Title Tags - A very often repeated topic this one. Still I find that many bloggers don’t implement it. In this tweak, the best option is to use the permalinks in the <category><post-title> format. Although, I find that adding the date option impresses Google. It also helps the users to find how old the post is.
  Resource - Title tags and Wordpress SEO
• Interlinking your blog posts is an excellent way to spread the Google juice evenly.
• Optimize your categories - Categories on wordpress is an excellent resource for SEO, not many people have discussed this if I’m right. But there are some tweaks that we can do to optimize it for the search engines.
• SEO’ing the footer text - This is yet another SEO factor not many have discussed, but something that I find has a good scope. It may not work well for all themes as some themes eve completely ignore the footer. But if you use some wise tricks(clue) to give it the right kind of importance, it will help you get that extra mileage for your keywords.
  More onsite optimization tips or wordpress can be found here.

3. Put your wordpress blog on steroids.
A wordpress blog is SEO friendly by default, but adding some power tools to it can make it 10 times as effective as a naked blog. In fact, there are a lot of power tools available online, and many of them are scrap. The wise strategy is to pick the best ones that really fit your blog.

Here are 7 power tools that will catapult your wordpress blog from ordinary to a super blog.

• 1. Headspace Wordpress SEO - This is an extremely good plugin for Wordpress that I found very effective. It is even better than the much hyped All in One SEO plugin. It is a bit hard to manage this as there are more options in it, but this is far more effective than All in One SEO.
  2. Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps are an essential for your wordpress blog. You can either create a manual one here or use this plugin. The plugin creates an automatically updated sitemap whenever there’s a change in the site, like an article or a page edit.
  3. Homepage Excerpts - Duplicate content is a big issue on Wordpress. The same content is shown on one or more places on Wordpress and hence the chances of duplicate content and supplementary pages are more. But using this plugin will reduce the chances of duplicate content on wordpress as the homepage content is cut short.
  4. Social Bookmarking - Getting your sites content to travel and propagate is a key factor to getting popular. And what more could be better than social bookmarking? This is a best social bookmarking plugin I’ve seen in the recent times and the X number of them that’s been released.
  5. KB Linker - Extremely useful plugin. You know that internal linking is one of the best way to spread the Google juice and increase the authority and importance of pages. This plugin lets you to select a keyword and whenever there’s an occurrence of the word in your articles, a link can be automatically placed to the keyword. Use it to link to your articles and it increases the internal linking drastically.
  6. Kill supplemental results - There are more instances on Wordpress that increases the chances of supplemental results than you thought of. Homepages, Archives, articles the chances of getting supplemental results on a naked wordpress blog is higher. Use this plugin to decrease the chances in autopilot mode.
  7. Bunny’s Technorati tags - If you are looking for backlinks and traffic from Technorati blogs, you must have this plugin. I’m not a Technorati enthusiast, so I’ve not used them on this blog, but yes, I’ve tested it on other blogs and it works fine.

There are lot of SEO plugins available at the moment, but the truth is that you don’t have to use them all simultaneously. Many of them do the same purpose but some do one task better than other. In the above list, you can safely use all of them together without any clash while serving the purpose of SEO’ing Wordpress.

Now, that more or less completes the “Ordinary to Super blog” power tools that you need. But more importantly there are a few things that you should keep in mind or keep away from.

What you shouldn’t do to SEO your wordpress blog.

1. Say NO to Link Exchanges.
   Link exchanges are a waste of time. Unless you have a product that’s difficult to sell and get inbound links to like a P standing up thing, you really don’t have to do a link exchange. The links you acquire doing a link exchange is not really worth the effort as a one way link. So focus on your content and let the links come in because you have awesome content.
2. Avoid Wordpress themes that has lot of JS code especially in the first 50 lines.
   The first few lines of your blog when scanned by a crawler, is checked for vital information about your blog. Whether you have meta description tags or not, you need to have some information in the first few lines (speculated it’s 30, 50 and 100) of your code.
3. Do not tag one article in more than one category.
   It’s not a good idea to tag your article in more than one category. It is in a way fooling your readers and increases the chances of duplicate content. More info here.
4. Do not display the Archives links on the homepage OR use the Archives section.
   Archives increases the possibility of duplicate content. Either don’t use them or use the page specific meta tags to no follow/no index them. Headspace plugin can handle all this.
5. Do not use plugins that clash with each other.
   In the frenzy to get everything and not lose all, you install all the plugins only to find that nothing works out. I can give you an example. Using Headspace and Google XML Sitemaps with All in One SEO is not a good option. Especially if you are controlling the Robots.txt from Headspace, it tries to control Robots.txt, while All in One SEO too tried to write it. Which calls in a clash. So make sure you know what you are doing when installing plugins that serve the same or similar purpose. The best way out would be to have an in depth look into all the details and monitor what’s happening.

I hope I’ve covered all the bare essentials to SEOing your wordpress blog. If you follow the above steps, I can guarantee you that you’ll have great platform to blog. Now, it depends on what you write and how good you write that will decide how your ranks are on the SERPs. That’s something you should learn yourself, I don’t think anyone can train you on it although can give you pointers on concepts like keyword research and copy writing.

P.S - You’ll find numerous articles on the net googling for “SEO wordpress” but many of them were written long ago and does not reflect the new ideas and concepts pf the trade, which is what made me write this article. Hope it helped.

Are you a Social networking enthusiast (like I’m trying to be?) .

I’m very much enjoying the social media boom happening. It all started with Digg, Delicious, and SU. As you might know, I’m a SU enthusiast, and prefer it to others. Because there is less spam on it. Though the traffic it generates is gradual, it’s quality one. There are less marketeres and more genuine guys. While it’s possbile that the kind of traffic from SU is not targeted, because it’s more likely that they come searching for a funny pic or so, whatever happens out of it is legit. You get a thumbs down if you are boring and a thunbs up if you are really good. Nothing in between. And more importantly, it doesn’t crash your servers !

I’ve been using Twitter, Tumbler, SU, Sphinn and quite some new ones recently. Apart from the fact that it’s the “bandwagon effect” that makes me jump into all those, the product quality is what makes me come back to it. Otherwise, I’d register my ID on Twitter and never come back.

One such newbie that impressed me is Mixx. Yep, nice name right? Well, to be honest, it’s a Digg clone (probably guessed it from the name). But, this is a clever clone.

I find Digg cluttered and beaming with spam. So i avoid it however great and popular the product is. I use it on a minimal scale, just to keep the balls rolling, that’s it.

Mixx scores in this area. It’s a clean one (at least now) with some interesting users and a good product. It offers everything as Digg but hey, I have more breathing space here!

Let me give you one golden tip - whatever social media it is, if you are the first to jump in, your chances to get to the top are more.

So if you want o join me in the Social medias, hop in. Here are my profiles.

Twitter - Tumblr - Facebook - Linked In - Stumble Upon - Digg - Mixx

Did I miss any? Quite possible.

Social media profile management itself has come out to be a profession these days right? Someday down the line, I may hire someone to manage my social media profiles (There are numerous companies in the west who does it already).

Is that a new term you heard? Dangling pages?

It probably got popularized by Andy more than anyone else, and I think there is some sense in the concept.

Dangling pages can be described as -

Links that point to any page with no outgoing links.

And according to Google’s docs -

They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

A better description is also over here

OK, so Dangling pages are the ones that -

- updateAre not accessed by traffic/users
- Does have incoming links to it.
- Does not link to any page internally/externally.
- Does not carry any weightage what so ever.

Let me clarify something. Dangling pages are not the same as supplementary pages. Supplementary pages are a different scenario probably because they have the least importance in comparison to other pages on a website. They may pass juice and links. They get indexed but are not shown on the normal search index, while dangling pages may be shown.

When I worked with Alamy.com they had almost 60% of their individual HTML pages in the Supplementary Index, which were not preferred to be shown on the normal search index by Google. But none of them were Dangling pages. They all had severe interlinking done, and sometimes even relished links from outside.

But there were dangling pages too. There were pages and files in the live site, that were never used or linked to. They probably were installed for testing purposes and later not used. But they were indexed and Google thought they were scrap.

It could happen to your site too. In blogs, it is highly unlikely that there are dangling pages unless you have a poor template and a very poor linking system.

How to avoid dangling pages in a blog?

• Interlink pages as much as possible.
• Let there not be a page that does not link to any other page internally or externally.
• Let there be a universal navigation bar or linking structure that will ensure that even the most unimportant page get’s into the linking network.

So essentially, dangling pages are not good for your site/blog. Remove them or reduce their occurrences. Sometimes even an important page can be mistaken for a dangling page if the navigation structure fails to update the links.

Free SEO tools are always popular. Just like Aaron who manages an array of free SEo tools on this domain, there are new guys coming up as well.

When Aaron is dabbling between Keyword analysis tools and meta tag descriptions, which are basic old school seo, there’s this brand new link analysis tool that’s come up. In fact, there could be better and powerful tools around, but this one is packaged well. Take a look here.

What it does.

- It checks for a sites total number of backlinks.
- Also checks the total unique anchor texts and
- Total text
- The pages in your site sorted by Google Juice strength.
- A chart showing the types of links (follow, nofollow etc)

- Most popular anchor texts in your incoming links.

The backlinks are arranged by their Page Rank, the Anchor text used, the number of incoming links to that site , whether the site is good or not and the strength of the link.

I’m not really sure how the last two metrics work. “Link strength” and “Linktype”. Probably link strength checks whether the link is a weak one like the one placed in a sidebar with no contextual text around it or not.

Anyhow it’s a really poerful tool with lot of data assorted in to one single digestible capsule form. The only problem is that it may take a while to crawl and assort your links especially if you have many incoming links. But it’s worth the wait.

Thanks Praveen.

How often do you twitter? I’m finding myself spending more time on it than ever before. Both of them are easy to handle and cute. Everything about it is so short and sweet, and takes least time to get the best thing done. The best thing implied here is probably a weird thought about a facebook application that I had, or a link to a powerful plugin, or a kickass domain name that just went over my head. We have to admit that on WP, it takes good 15 minutes to do it, while on these cuties, less than 2 minutes? And it’s all so compact and fun!

We all have a liking to tools that are customized and personal right? Some good ones I met recently are these three.

- I like the “Maami” on ibibo, who (reminds me of the Channel V Bai) appears in between and prompts you to fill in your details like address and telephone number. She’s so annoying yet nice with her witty lines. Once she asked me - “You are looking cute in that picture you just uploaded, do you mind giving your telephone number? I promise I won’t call you.” Now I’m sure whoever used that tool enjoyed it. Innovation.

- I also like Tumblr for it’s personalized messages it throws up. When I uploaded a profile pic of mine, it said something along the lines of the ibibo Maami.

- Of course Flickr. Those regional “hello” messages helped me get a name among friends. They thought I traveled to Hawaii and Israel recently.(Shhh!)

For bloggers - There’s this cool plugin that integrates twitter completely with your blog. It’s from Alex King and it’s here(That probably is his 9198423th incoming link.) Another interesting deviation plugin is over here.

Why Twitter and Tumblr?

• Both are extremely flexible yet powerful at the same time.
• Ease of use.
• Has a personalized touch.
• Support is extremely good.
• Helps me in SEO (*food for thought)

Technorati Tags: twitter, wordpress plugin, social media

Have you thought about it? If yes, this article is for you, if not quit at once.

When I first started a blog on a blogspot account, I was in a very bad shape, to be honest.
Just like you, I was in the learning phase of the blogging phenomena.
I picked a free template, tweaked it a bit to suit my preferences, and added all the possible plugins.
And when someone told me that content is the king, I wrote content daily. As anybody’s guess I struggled to find content. I’ll list down the things that really bothered me at the time of blogging.

• Content
  - Somebody would’ve already blogged about the content that I thought writing of.
  - It was difficult to write long paragraphs about something very silly.
• Audience
  - No comments
  - Confused over who I’m writing to.
• Returns
  - No incoming money.
  - No appreciation.

Content was the major concern. When people told that you should find traffic rich keywords, I found it difficult to write on “Mesothelioma” and “Asbestosis”. And when I managed to find some interesting topics, others would’ve already blogged about it and it would dishearten me.To top it up, even when I wrote about some topics that I was comfortable about, there wouldn’t be any response from the readers (if at all there were any). I think it’s a phase all young bloggers go through when they start blogging. Despite all this events, it was not an easy task to climb up the ladder.

But, down the line, there are some things that I think worked out in making the blog a success. And let me be honest with you, there is no rocket science involved. To bring you all that in a capsule form, here goes.

• Content is not the king. Consistency is.
  Well, content might be. But I think being consistent in delivering articles to your readers plays a more important part than the content itself.
• There is no topic on steroids. Your passion in your steroid.
  You don’t need to write on mesothelioma and asbestosis. You write from your head but make sure you have the dedication and passion all the way. It shines through.
• You will or cannot make everybody happy.
  Success doesn’t mean that you will make everyone happy. A more important thing is to make everyone talk about you. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t something that you need to work towards but something that comes along.
• Nor will you get followers overnight.
  Followers doesn’t exist. It’s a wrong term. What I’d be interested to know is, the number of people whom you managed to develop an interest in.
• Success does not come with money.
  Success isn’t money. It’s the measure of how close you are to your personal goals. This is my personal perspective, it should differ for you.

So there you go, all that blogging taught me in three years in a capsule form.

The point I’m trying to make here is that, blogging is a profession/career/hobby/whatever that is very slow in delivering results. It’s probably not for the stock broker kind who wants a return the very next day. It climbs slowly and steadily. Yes, the returns are there but it comes as a surprise and you can never invite it to you. Sweet isn’t it?