Ever had problems finding what your blogs ranks are on the search engines for particular keywords?
Like for instance, if you wanted to check where your blog ranked on Google for the keyword “make money online”, it would be a big task since the keyword itself is very competitive and if you are not problogger or shoemoney, you are probably in the 167th page or worse. So it’s not quite possible to track where your blog is ranking by searching through the Google results right?

Here is a nice tool that will take care of it. Rank Checker is a plugin for firefox that will take care of this task.
All that you have to do is , install the plugin, restart firefox and given in a keyword + URL combination into the plugin page.

Like for instance if you are finding out where the blog “dailyseoblog.com” is ranking for “wordpress seo blog” then give in these two criteria into the “domain” and “keyword” fields respectively and click go. First you add the combination to the queue and then on clicking the “start” button the engine searches for the results.

You’ll be able to get the search engine rank result for Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). There is an option to give multiple keywords and also export the results to a CSV file, enabling you to open it in your spreadsheets. Pretty cool eh? However, one minute problem I faced is that it gave me no option to resize he window, it stretched all the way horizontally and wasn’t really maneuverable.

Install the Firefox plugin here.

Facebook has applications that you can add to your profile, you know that right?
Now, Orkut is planning for introducing applications so that it can harness the full power of social media as such. And talks are in progress and the grapevine is that the applications will be available to all (including India) in June/July.

But here is a neat trick which will get you access to all the entire collection of applications available due for release right now.
See the entire screenshot of applications here.

There are a lot of applications like

• “Book iRread” - iRead is a social book discovery application. With iRead you can organize your favorite books in bookshelves, rate and review them. You can browse what other iReaders and friends are reading. iRead learns from your book reading tastes and recommends books you will like and also users who read like you. Add application and join the social book discovery revolution!
• India Dekha - India Dekha has been developed by Zoomtra.com in an effort to connect Indian Travel enthusiasts with one another. How much of India Have you traveled or plan to travel to in the future? Make your India Dekha! Map and share it with your friends.
• Music iLike - Add music and videos to your profile, list your favorite artists, and test your skill in the Music Challenge! Join 23 million iLike users to share and discover music.
• Photo Attack - Attack photos of your friends with cool animations! Slap them silly, send them a kiss, splash them with color balloons. No matter what your emotions are we have an animation that can help you to express yourself. Let the game begin. Attack Now !!

and a lot more.

Now, you can add music, photos, and fun stuff to your profile. It’s simple as adding an application.

Now how to get the orkut applications working in your profile?

1. Go to your HOME.
2. Click Edit Profile (On the left hand side panel)
3. Scroll down to locate your “country”.
4. Change your country to “Estonia” (find it in the drop down list).
5. Now go back to the Home,
6. You’ll find a strip that allows you access to the entire list of orkut applications. (Below today’s fortune and profile views text)
7. Click on “Add applications and customize your profile”
8. You’ll get an entire list of available applications. Scroll down to the desired one (se their descriptions along side.)
9. Click on “Add application”
10. You’ll be asked a confirmation, click again on “Add application” - You’re done!

All your added applications will list down in your left hand side panel (see screenshot). Now to really enjoy these applications you need to get your friends use the applications to. That’s the fun part of social media right? So refer more and enjoy more.

Cheers!

This should explain the little surprise news that I had promised earlier. I’ve decided to co-run OrganicApex with Ashwin. And this little card with the Digg button explains what we are going to do. We are probably the best guys in India who can handle SEO and SMM together delivering a ’single umbrella’ online marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, Barcamp was awesome. Met some cool chaps with some brilliant ideas. Also, met some blog readers like Ankit Arora, Ranjan Varma, and some other very cheerful people. Thanks all for grabbing me out of the crowd and chatting hope you all have my cards with you.Drop a line when you think it’s necessary. Hope you liked the Digg thing on the card.

Hey, have you ever checked out those SEO firms claims on the features page? I always make it a point to thoroughly go through all those points mentioned in those sites, particularly the “We do it all” segment.I mean clients too should go through this and let me tell you there are a few things by which you can easily mark out a fraud guy from genuine.

Recently, been to a popular SEO firms website who claimed to do “everything SEO”. Curious enough, I checked their features page to get an idea of what exactly dos they mean by saying “Everything SEO”.

Well, basically what the guys have done is, put in everything they could find as SEO and arrange them randomly in the features list.
One interesting feature list went something like below -

We do all SEO services.

• Search Engine Submissions
• Directories
• Link building Experts
• Google Pr Rank Increase solution
• Paid Inclusion solution
• Software Marketing
• Meta tags
• Title tags etc..

Brilliant isn’t it?
More than half of what’s said there is BS and is in no way related to SEO.

You see there is a common misconception in peoples mind about SEO. The reason is that many people give their own definitions of SEO and SO services. For instance take the elements discussed in the above list.

Search Engine Submissions - I’m assuming it means submitting your site to Google/Yahoo/MSN etc. Though it sounds interesting to a client who wants to get his post atop search engines, the real catch is that he is paying the SEO guys for doing nothing.

Search Engine Submissions are no longer valid. In the sense that there are smarter, assured and safer ways of getting indexed and there is no need for submitting to search engines. And even if you are keen on that, anyone can do it in five minutes. So what’s the point in paying someone USD 500 to submit our site to search engines?

And directories are so old my friend, nobody uses them except for spam and unacceptable content. Of course there are the great directories like BOTW and V7, but none of them carry any weightage nor can they help you earn search engine rankings. As a matter of fact, many of the directories are banned from Googles index.
And if you are keen on paying for directories, anyone can use the Yahoo directory. Who needs a “professional SEO” to show you how to?

And of course there is “Paid Inclusion solution”. I’m assuming it’s a SEM/paid marketing that the SEO guy is referring to. Now, wasn’t that called SEM and not SEO? If you are going to pay someone to get you “top ranks” (well, almost) then why do you need an SEO? Hire an SEM company in the first place, they’ll manage your funds properly.

So essentially, I find that many professional SEO guys are limited to doing things like directory submissions, meta tags and link exchanges. All of them makes no or little sense to SEO.

The real or toughest part of SEO is to think like the search engines and frame a strategical approach to take your site to the next level gaining it respect, authority and popularity. Everything else will follow.

The next google page rank update is round the corner. No no no…easy, now don’t bug me on IM asking when is the date, I honestly have no clue. The grapewines say it’s around in April mid/last, so let’s watch and see.

Everytime there’s a page rank update the most excited would be the bloggers who started their blogging venture is less than three months earlier. This is the time when there are more searches for the term “when is the next google page rank update” and the related long tail ones on Google. Rest of the best, the boring daily bloggers wouldn’t be as excited as the young blogger because he’d have gone through the  update - downgrade - upgrade process by now and (probably penalized) lost his affinity to the green bar.

Now, the enthusiasm of the young bloggers is something that’s universal. Everyone is worried about whether their blog will get the green bar filled or not.

My question is - How much value does Google page give to your blog?

So you are a young blogger with a blog less than an year old. You have around 100 posts and gathered a few links from around the blogosphere. Hell, you’ve even submitted to directories only to know that they are a waste of time. I’m sure some of you might have even bought links from others in the blogsphere for as chaep as 5-10 bucks. So what value is Google Page Rank going to give you once you are calibrated?

You might sell some links? But Google will penalize you.
You might show off the page rank to potential advertisers? But they are more interested in your subscriber count.
You might show off your PR to a fellow blogger? They might have a better one.

Essentially, Google Page rank does not give you any value what so ever other than a fancy green bar.
It is just a publicly available visualization of Google’s own standards of rating sites to gather information.

And yes, please do not mistake that if you get a higher Google Page Rank you’d get better search engine rankings. That’s a mistake.

Google Page Rank has got no effect whatsoever on the search engine rankings position of a site. It is just an internal metric of Google to grade sites to make it convenient for them for data collection (or something similar).

So this time around, rather than fretting over the green bar, try gathering one way incoming links to your blog and developing unique content rich pages. Those two things can earn you lot of respect from Google, this page rank update.

What purpose does it serve?

Well, nothing much to give you any mileage but it helps you with a reference of all the things that you’ve stumbled in the past.

This tool helps you to import all your stumble upon favorites to one page, along with all the links to the websites you have stumbled and also categorizes them accordingly with tags.

A nice tool. I found it interesting to see all my stumbles on one page.
You can use this links page for several purposes such as -
- Resubmitting them to other social medias.
- Wiling away your time.
- Showing off your stumbles to your friends.
- Cross checking/Reviewing your stumble upon experience.

Okay, I cooked up all those but nevertheless the tool is cool. Check out.

Hey, did you see the SEO Green theme released lately? There were some errors reported from users that made me (well, pushed me) to do the corrections and release a stable version. So here we are. The SEO Green theme has a updated version now.

Here are the issues that were reported.

• The meta info weren’t getting inserted properly on some sites on installing the headspace plugin - SORTED, We have contacted the plugin developer and fixed the problem. Now, the theme is completely ready for the HeadSpace plugin and it’s advanced features.
• The Google Analytics tracking code could not be inserted and tracked - SORTED once and for all.
• The pages links did not update - SORTED once and for all.

If you recall, I insisted that you use the Headspace plugin, and though some users complained about not being able to use it easily, I stand by my word. Please make yourself comfortable with the plugin it will help you a lot.

Anyhow, I understand that the plugin itself is a bit tricky to use for the first time, so here are some tutorials for beginners. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find how useful it is.

Step 1
Install the plugin and go to the Options > HeadSpace > Page Settings and click on Global Settings.
Enter the blog description and page title here (Leave the tags/keywords column free, we’ll do it later). This is actually the global settings of the meta tags, which will be repeated on every page unless otherwise the individual page has a different setting(info on how to do that …down the page).

Step 2
Click on the fifth setting “Posts & Pages”. Enter in the page title and the description.This is the setting that would appear for each pages and individual articles, unless otherwise specified.

Step 3
Now go to Modules menu. This is an important option. This menu basically lets you decide what are the options you want to access from the dashboard while writing a post. For instance, when you create a new post, if you have installed All in SEO plugin, you’d get two extra columns beneath that asks you the meta information. Similarly, in headspace you can decide what are the modules that need to appear in the “write post” page.

By default, the modules available are Page Titla, Page Description and Tags (Seen in the green box left). Now you can see a set of disabled modules to the right (in the grey section). Pull and place the modules that you think you need in the writing page. Ex: No Index/ NoFollow will give you two checker boxes in the write page, asking you whether to include the “No Index/ No Follow” info in the meta tag of that particular article. This is extrememly useful if you want certain pages/article not to be indexed by google (to reduce duplicate content/avoid content issues). There are some cool options available there like page specific themes/ page specific plugins, Google Analytics tracking etc. None of them have SEO effect, so I’m not going to tell about them, you may want to tinker and find out. Make sure you save the module order after re aranging them so that they appear on the write page.

Step 4
Now go to Manage > Metadata menu.
This is the best part. From this menu you can list out upto 250 of your recent posts. And from the drop down menu on the top, select either the Page description/ Page Title/ Site Decription/ Tags and Keywords of the posts to be displayed.
We are interested only in the page title, site description and the tags. So let’s do it one by one.
Click on any one of the criteria and click the green “refresh” button suggested against each post. Within seconds the page description/tags/title will be auto generated.
Unless you are specific on any article, you can pretty well generate the meta information (tags, description and title) for all the article on your blog in a jiffy. Save the info.

Step 5
Now, that’s pretty much about it. All you need to do is to make sure while you write a post, you give a unique page title, description and select the keywords from the ones suggested for each article.

So there you are, install the SEO Green theme and forget about SEOing your blog.

I want to thank Moon Blogger, w3Mixx who helped me with the feedback on using the theme.

And these are the improvements we’ve made in the new version of the SEO Green theme.

• Added more onsite optimization elements that will make your articles/posts SEO friendly by default. You don’t have to muck around with the codes to tweak them. Leave it to us.
• Cleaned up the footer to a more cool design.

Download the updated theme here SEO Green V 1.01. Live Demo

BarCamp Mumbai sounds like fun and I’ve decided to join.

There are some popular names in the attendees list, so this is something to look forward to.
I hope they have ready enough room for the attendees (there are 261 right now), unlike last time.

Feel free to grab me while you spot me at the venue.
This time, I have a surprise, and this is the right time and place to reveal it, so stay tuned.

Hey, there’s a cool site that will do just that. Search rapidshare (and some other infamous file storing services) for downloadable files with the name you are searching for.

This is really cool since rapidshare does not allow you to search it’s database while services like 4shared does. Rapidshare is the most popular service for temporary file storage, so this too may come in handy. I searched for “google” and here are the results. Some ebooks and some rar files. A word of warning, there could be illegal/virus infected files. The service does not scan the files for viruses unlike 4shared.

Search Rapidhsare files here.

Here are the twenty four kickass plugins that are used on DailySEOblog. Some are active and some are not. Marked against each is the reason why it’s cool and what it won’t do.

Akismet
The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.