Found an evil tweak the other day, one blogger was displaying his feedburner status on the main page and the number shown on the stats was strange - because this is a regular blog i visit, I can’t remember this blog(can’t disclose the name) having this many subscribers at any time. Curious, I took a closer look at the feedburner status and found that the image is a fake.

It was photoshopped and showed a fancy number - the image was but linked to the feed url. At first look, nobody would suspect at the stats. The numbers had a smudgy edge - which is what pulled me towards it.

I was wondering if you guys would support this or not? It is true that, if a blog can flaunt it’s subscriber count, then the visitors have a natural tendency to follow and get subscribed. But is faking the subscriber count, ethically correct? Though the blog will get more subscribers, wouldn’t it be the same as lying to them?

Got a doubt on SEO? Post it to me HERE. I'll try and answer it asap. :) -- Mani

I know that title would bring a frown on your face!

- It’s all over the internet Mani, what are Google images for?

Well, well i know i know! Let me explain.

In India, this is not a popular concept, but elsewhere it is. I’m talking about stock photography and royalty free images.
In the US, UK and rest of the world (excluding some countries like china,India etc) images can be used only with the photographer’s agreement.
Be it on online, editorial or any other use. There are stock photo agencies that buy the pictures from photographers and provide online stores for users to buy them.
As you buy the images, the photographers are given a percentage of the sale.
There are many affordable online stock photography agencies like istockphoto.com dreamstime.com that offer you images from as low as US $1.

But this is of no interest to us unless you want to spent a few bucks for every image on your posts. What we are interested is free royalty free images to use on every blog posts.Before we go into the sources to get free royalty free images, let’s see how this topic affect us bloggers?

Okay,so if you are in India or China or such countries where the licensed use of images, are not popular, you can manage to get free images from Google or Live image search.Fine.But what about others? Do you find images from google or ask for permission from the photographer/agency?

I think it’s fair to be asking the photographer permission to use it on your blog. you can very well reciprocate the favour by linking back to his site through a credit line.
Many a times, this results in email exchange delays and other bottle necks -hell you don’t post the article because you haven’t recieved the permission yet.

There is huge potential for stock photo agencies here - if there is a stock photo agency that will provide us bloggers with images from as low as US $1(squeeze it down even), then considering we have around 15.5 million blogs, imagine the revenue that could be generated from image use on blogs?

Darren says that he normally gets images sent to him by companies so finding images for new products is not a problem for him.I’m assuming that might be the case with Gizmodo or Techcrunch. But what about the rest of blogosphere?

Well, luckily we have a few options here -

1 - Stock Exchange.
These guys offer free royalty free images for any use. They have a pretty impressive collection of images as well. Good enough for a amateurs but not professionals.They have many smudged and brushed images also, so you may want to keep away from them but select the best ones.
They don’t want you to link back for credit or anything of that sort but from the number of backlinks they’ve got it’s clear that anyone who uses their image will link back to them.

2 - Morgue file.
The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. To acknowledge the artist’s accomplishments, we ask that you credit the photographer when possible. They have an impressive collection of images too.

3 - Indexstock
These guys have an impressive collection of images across many categories. they may not be hi-reosultion ones but fit enough to use on blogs.They are one of my personal favourites.

4 - Free large photos
This is a free images site that provides great collection of places and people photography. You have to link them back in order to use the image in your blog.

So, you have all these resources where from you can collect images of good quality for blogging purpose.The advantage you have over using Google images is that you know exactly whether the photographer/website need be credited or not and that you get good quality images.

And it is a good habit to credit the site where from you have used the image so that they know that you appreciate it. Also, asking the photographer as to whether you can use the image on your blog is also a good idea, and when it get’s frustrating you have all these free resources to try.
Images courtesy

There’s news for you, Indian bloggers. The new blogcamp is here! This time @Pune.

BlogCampPune is a free unconference focusing exclusively on blogging, organized by bloggers for bloggers. It‘s built upon the principles of the famous BarCamp (ad-hoc unconference) focussed on sharing, learning and new ideas. This is going to be an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction between attendees. Any blogger who wants to contribute is welcome and invited to join. In the spirit of BarCamp, if you attend, be prepared to present something (even if it’s just 10
minutes).

See the official page for details
You can add your name at the Wiki if you are attending.

If you would like to endorse this camp, use one of this badges on your blog.

You might have come across this topic on various other tech/seo blogs, but what prompted me to write this article is that - they all seem too techie to me, so i’m guessing it’s not reached all the bloggers yet. And this is my attempt to reach all the non-techie bloggers on what are Google supplemental results and how they are affecting an ordinary blogger..

By ordinary bloggers(no offense please) i mean passionate bloggers, who wouldn’t want to tweak the HTML code for search engine optimization but who doesn’t want to get into trouble as well due to any ignorance on SEO.

So, what are the Google Supplemental results?

When you search for a term(keyword) on google, you get results from many websites on the same topic/term.Right?
Suppose, there is a website called cats-dogs.com. It has information on “cats” as well as “dogs”. So when you search for cats, the pages on the site with information on cats are shown on the results page. but when you search for dogs the site does not come up at all.

Or simpler yet - Google sometimes think that some of the pages on your website(here cats) is not as important as other pages(dogs) on the same website. They are seen with different weightage and pages with less or no importance are kept in a separate “folder” called supplemental results - which will not be shown on the google’s results page at all.

So in the above example, if there are two pages cats.html and dogs.html on the same website, dogs.html will not be considered at all to be

shown when some one is searching for “dogs” on google, while cats.html will be shown for searches on “cats”.

So two types of pages on a site - 1) Normal Index and 2) Supplemental index. Get the idea?

Now, if you want to see how many pages on your site are in the supplemental results category, just use this query at the google search.

site:www.yourblog.com *** -view (note that there is blank space before and after those three stars)

Every search result that appears on the results page now has this green tag on it which says - supplemental results.
Now you have an idea on what pages in your site will not be considered to be shown on the google search results.

Now, there’s nothing to panic. Having supplemental results on google is but natural. For example, if you check with the above query on how many pages are supplementary on google, you will be surprised. Search for site:www.google.com *** -view

What causes supplementary pages on your blog?

1 - Google thinks there is duplicate content on your blog.
It needn’t be true but if Google thinks that some of the pages in your site are having the same content, they may place them in the supplemental results.

2 - Short posts or posts with less content.
If you have posts that are very short, it is likely that google cannot make out the real content of the page, and when you have several short posts, then it is more likely that they are labelled as supplementary pages, because google simply doesn’t know what your pages content is.

3 - Template generated pages.
This is applicable to websites that generate many pages using the same template and very less change in content among thm.Since the same template is used, the content will be repeated on every single page.

4 - Non usage of meta tags.
If you haven’t used meta tags properly on your blog, bots will have trouble detecting their content from the body alone, so they may push those pages to the supplemental index.

5 - Poor linking structure.
This may be the most significant point out of all.
If you have a chunk of template generated pages or some pages that you didn’t care to link since you posted them, may be ignored due to the fact that they are redundant and have not been linked(external and internal). For this reason, google thinks these pages are less important and pushes them to supplemental index.

6 - Inequal distribution of PR.
Another important one. As i have said in another post, internal linking is very important because, you don’t want your valuable content to be ignore just because you don’t promote them yourself. It is quite natural that the wonderful piece of information you wrote in your early blogging days had not been read by anyone, so it’s your responsibility to link to it in one of your new posts, so that people read it.
This also distributes your blogs page rank in an equal fashion to all the posts, new and old. If you miss to do this, certain pages would have higher PR and some less PR.
Since google sees a pages importance on the basis of PR, make sure that none of your pages is deprived of Page Rank.

So those six points shows us that yes - supplemental pages are quite natural and any site can get it(even google).

Let’s see how we can get out of this, or stay away from getting supplemental index on your blog.

1 - Practice good internal linking.
Make sure even your oldest post is linked once in another post, and read by users.Maintain a column of best posts from your archives on the sidebar for quick access.

2 - Get quality inbound links to your blog from other sites.
This is the most repeated statement on the blogosphere these days - Write quality content rich articles and gain incoming links. Well, nobody says how patience is required for this and nobody can guarantee you anything. But hey, it is an important point.

3 - Categories
When you post articles, make sure that you don’t tag them into more than one category. If you do this way, it creates duplicate entry in each category and the chances of those pages landing in the supplemental index is high.

4 - Don’t encourage duplicate content
When you post an article, make sure that it’s not a repetition of what you had posted earlier. If it is, make the necessary changes in it’s text content so that it seems different from the old article. May be add more of a different keyword in it.

So, that brings us to the end of this article - What is supplemental index, why does it happen and how can you get of it or stay away from it. I hope this was a easy to understand article and not as techie as many other articles on it is. So check today, if you have any supplemental index pages on your blog, and pull your socks up to fight them out.

References - Matt Cutts Search Engine guide Google groups Seobook

I would be lying if i said - I’m a self styled professional blogger.

I must admit that I get influenced by other bloggers just like you.
Sometimes it’s the writing style, sometimes the blog template, or simply the footer text.I copy them, try to modify the idea and implement in this blog.Sometimes it works sometimes otherwise.
Many a times, you forget to thank others for how they’ve helped you - unknowingly though.

Here’s the list of those blogs and bloggers who have inspired me in one way or the other.This is all honest opinions so there may be both black and white shades - hope all of you will enjoy it.

1. Amit Agarwal of Labnol
Undoubtedly one of the most influential bloggers in India.

Reasons why he makes me go wow!
- The money he makes through the blog
- He manages to blog regularly with 4-6 per day
- He finds tweaks that others haven’t
- He managed to get interviewed by CNN IBN
- He still runs a blogger account
- His posts make every one think - “Damn, i could’ve thought of it earlier - I can do this too!”

What i copied most - His idea of posting regularly on tweaks and software reviews.

2. Darren Rowse of Problogger
King of blogging - the man that he is.

Reasons
- His writing style (and that green t shirt)
- How he manages to blow up a simple topic into a 8 parts post
- Traffic
- That he managed to get into blogging earlier than me
- His link love to bloggers, i think he’s someone who values content more than your template

What i copied most - His easy to read and friendly writing style.

3. John Chow
I tried my best to ignore this guy honestly. But…

Reasons
- Traffic
- How he self promotes him beautifully as the evil guy around
- His awkward dress sense
- Figures he posts in the month end

What i copied most - The IM Google ads he ran on problogger. (I copied the same thing on Labnol)

4. Matt Cutts
I wouldv’e ignored him had he not been a Google employee.

Reasons
- Knowledge about the algorithm
- White hat SEO tips and his interaction with bloggers
- Cheap April fool tricks

What i copied most - His Template

5. Qucikonlinetips
Must admit his efforts in keyword research and wide coverage of topics. Sometimes i feel it’s an MFA, but hey he’s on the SERPS top results for almost all high-paying keywords.

- Topics to blog about
- The idea of tips and tricks
- The fact that the guy is anonymous and is an Indian

Yeah, I know what your’e thinking - these are all famous guys, what’s the catch? Well, i have a whole list of less popular blogger’s who have inspired me with seemingly silly ideas. but there is no way i can go ahead with them without mentioning these big guys. So the next batch would be those “Z-List bloggers” as you call it. Watch out, your blog may be there too..

Hey, Thanks for visiting this blog through Stumbleupon.
I’d appreciate if you’d click the “I like it”(Thumbs up image) button on the toolbar.

How did i guess that you visited this blog through stumble upon?

Simple - 90% and more of my visitors these days(from the last stumble on June 1) are from Stumble upon. So i assumed you are a referral !

So, I’m sacrificing my rest 10% readers (feed readers and direct)with this post?

No.

It is more likely that out of the 10 visitors on this site, 8-9 are through Stumble upon - Just like you!!!

And the best way to convert a stumble upon visitor to your loyal visitor is to get his attention on the first visit - just i like i did with this post!

Meanwhile, this is a search engine optimization, blogging related blog written by Mani Karthik, an SEO from India.
Curious?

See my SEO related posts here.

Once again Thanks very much for visiting - don’t forget to click the green thumbs up button on the tools bar!!

(Sshh..Meanwhile, you can write a similar post on your blog too to attract stumble upon visitors. What say?)

Gracias!
Mani

Recently Ankesh Kothari developed a plugin which John Chow implemented to his blog and became an instant hit. (The man have promoted some cool ideas earlier too). It’s the “Buy me a beer” plugin I’m talking about. It helps visitors on your blog to donate money through paypal - to buy a beer for John Chow(or you).

This is an interesting plugin since it gives you a valid yet simple reason to donate money to the blog owner and i more persuading than a “Donate me money” button.See Ankesh’s thoughts on it here.

Unfortunately Ankesh developed this plugin for Wordpress users only. But blogger platform user’s like me would really want to use this plugin -but how?
Here’s what i found - a workaround to implement the same to your blogger platform.

Here’s how to

1- You should have a paypal account.
2 - Login to your paypal account
3 - Goto Merchant Tools
4 - Under “Key Features” click “Buy Now Buttons”
5 - Enter the details by filling in the forum
6 - As you enter please copy down the details to a notepad
7 - Copy down this link below

(https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=
youremailid@paypal&amount=&return=&item_name=
Your+servicename+separatedby+plus+signs)

8 - In the above code, replace youremailid@paypal.com with your paypal login email id.
9 - Also, replace “Your+servicename+separatedby+plus+signs” with the service name you entered while filling in the form(the first detail you entered)

Make sure the service name is separated with plus signs. Ex:- If you entered “Buy me a beer”, then it should be “Buy+me+a+beer”

Implementing the link in blogger template.
Goto your template and paste this link wherever you want, i.e between posts or on the sidebar.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=
mani@dailydoseofinternet.com&amount=
&return=&item_name=Buy+Me+a+drink+if+you+liked+this+post

That’s it - it should work if all everything is allright.

—————–UPDATE——————–
Thanks to Ankesh, there is a small correction in the above procedure.

In Step 4, instead of “Buy Now” click on “Donations” and in the details fill up form, Under “Security Settings” select the “No” button and this will generate you a HTML link which can be used to link link text. Select any text(that you want to prompt readers to donate you money) on your blog template and link them using the ahref command to this link.

Here’s part 1 if you missed. It is normal to have a blogger’s block.Finding topics to blog can be quite confusing. As said in the earlier post we have tools that will give us suggestions on what the world is searching for and so search engine optimizers recommend you to select one of them and start blogging. Fair enough! But as (link) Michael Gray said, there are two schools of thought here - one is to blog for money and other is to blog for passion. As Michael rightly puts it - you need to strike a balance between both. The methods discussed in the earlier post(part 1) were mainly finding topics to blog for money. Those are the methods that will help you find keywords people are searching for, you may not have a liking to them though.

Today, let’s see if there are any interesting places to find things to blog about. Well, what came to my mind first is the statistics page. All of us like to check our statistics page. I do it when i have nothing to do online. Do you see a gold mine right there?

Yes, the referrals page is a gold mine. If you watch carefully there are those Google referrals links that bought new visitors to your page.(Can be seen in the referrals section). It may look something like -

http://www.google.com/search?q=podcasting%20blogger&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.google:en-US:official&client=firefox

Now, this tells us that somebody was searching for -”podcasting blogger”- and your blog showed up in the results page (not necessarily at the top).This may be because of two reasons.
1- Your blog contained the exact information what the visitor was looking for.
2 - Your blog contained parts of information what he was looking for but it showed up on the SERPs page.

Let’s look at scenario two. If the information the visitor was looking for is available partly on your site, it is more likely that the information he is looking for (now available to you from the url) is related to your blog.

Pick up these informations from the referral url. If he was looking for “Free mp3’s” don’t go ahead and dive in write a post on Free mp3s. Goto the tools mentioned in post 1 (where and how to find topics to blog) and research along the lines of this keyword. Find a match and write an article with the proper keyword density.Ensure that you make good titles that will be easily picked up by the search engines.

This way we can ensure that
- we deliver the articles people are searching for right now.
- we find topics that are related to your blog/articles.
- decrease the bounce rate of visitors.

For more SEO related articles, click here

Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.There, we talked about your own domain name, traffic, related content and space.

Let’s go further deep.

5 - Do you network?
Are you the type who socializes at the blogosphere? If not, start doing it today. Cos, that’s the new mantra of blogging. Although you may have an excellent blog with exclusive articles, it’s no good if you are a loner and you don’t link to people around.By networking i mean linking to others, participating in other blogs, commenting and the like.In short, you have to interact with people around, accept them, review them, comment and make sure your posts are read.Without networking you are cut off from the loop and you stand no chance to win the game.

6 - Incoming links from neighbors?
Incoming links are not just page rank boosters. They are votes given by others. Only if they find you reliable will they ask someone else to visit your blog - else they are taking a risk. In order to make sure that you have a blog where people are ready to click on your ads, make sure you are linked from those blogs that are already playing well.You know the blogs that are doing well in monetization, so keeping a smooth flow from them to yours(by getting links through their articles) will ensure that the same kind of enthusiasm will be maintained by the visitors in clicking the ads on your site, just like the way they do it on their site(provided other factors are in place).

7 - Target?
Study your target inside out. Who they are, where they are from, what is their age group and what are the pages they visit most on your site and which are the ones they don’t.This will help you to identify the kind of ads that will be accepted by your visitors. Suppose the most visited page on your article is your about page, you might want to consider giving more ad-space there.If you have a target audience of the age group 16-22, you might want to select affiliate ads that cater to them.

8 - Credibility factor
This comes in as a result of many factors combined. You are responsible to create this on your own, there is very little that others can do.This counts right from the attitude you show in posts, language, contact details provided on blog, how you interact with others, replying to comments/emails, being consistent to an idea and the like. Viewers can easily make out any deviation from the above factors and will result in instant dying of your readership. While on the other hand, if you have readers who trust you and think you are reliable, they will click on the ads you show too.

Podcasts are quite a craze these days. Every Tom, Dick , Harry and Mani seems to be podcasting their own shows these days. There are indeed a couple of cool ones out there that are free podcasts and really help you in gathering knowledge. I’ve always wanted to create free podcasts for my blog but all the tools i tried came at a price. (Kindly let me know if you know another free podcast generator program.)

Anyhow, today i found the real one i was looking for, actually it delighted me rather than surprising. It gave me all that i was looking for and with quickness and ease that i hadn’t imagined.This is honestly the best one I’ve come across in quite some time. This is a free online tool that will help you create free audio podcasts of your posts on blog.

All you have to do is - register, copy down the html code and add it to the posts. Simple and straight forward. The code shows up a link that will download the corresponding posts mp3 file to the reader.A lady(US accent) recites the entire article srarting with the blog title, post date and author’s name. Quite amazing.

The tool is talkr and you can register here to get this tool.

This one is highly recommended - If you have any trouble setting it up let me know and i’ll be happy to help you with it.