Social Media is the buzz. And it’s the carrot to many. A power user is a member with influential powers and has the potential of making any given article popular on the social medias.

Becoming a power user on all the social medias is sure big deal, despite everyone using the social media only a few make it to the top or grabs the powers of a power user. Now, it’s a fact probably that no one can make it easily to the top as a power user in a short time. It requires the effort and time that it deserves. But there are pointers for sure that will help you make it to the top if you get your basics right. It’s all about doing the right thing and following the right methodologies daily in a very religious manner, and one day you’ll find yourself there on the top showered with digg and stumble requests and friend invitations.

So what are the good practices that you should follow to make it  to the top as a power user on the popular social medias?

Understanding Which Social Media works best for you - The behavioral differences of the popular social media sites

First off let me tell you that each social media channel has it’s own unique quality. You cannote use all the media at the same time to get a story popular. Each community has it’s own characteristics and behavioural pattern.

Digg
- Is a news oriented website where there’s no place for internet marketers and bloggers.
- The community gives more importance to breaking news, exclusive stories and articles.
- The community is more techno savvy and if you are targeting to get the attention of technology related crowd, then Digg is the best place for you.
- Digg community does not entertain marketing, self promotion and press releases kind of articles.
- They give more value to the “uniqueness” of the stories and the real value it passes on to the community.
- The secret of getting popular on Digg is to get the maximum diggs in the shortest time span. If you get late getting the diggs, you lose the game.

Stumble Upon
SU is a community which has a different chemistry altogether from Digg - it loves sharing all the lite things(photos, videos, funny stuff) and in between some news articles too.
- SU community does not like anything that is related to promoting your blog.
- Neither does it like people selling their service or products.

Linked in
- Linked in has a very focused community.
- It’s a no nonsense one with no frills but all serious guys out there. Business consultants, CEOs, bloggers and the like.
- If it’s business that you’d like to promote, then probably this is the right place.

Here are the good practices to become a social media power user.

1. Share
   Social media sites are nothing but places to share. If you used to share interesting stories on email two years earlier, now you have Digg and Su to share. This way the original sources of the story also gets benefited and you get a place to share thoughts with like minded people too.
   So rather than seeing them as platforms that generate traffic, see them as places to share ideas, stories and interesting pieces of articles over the internet.
2. Participate
   Social medias are all about participation. Along with user generated content they are also platforms where lot of ideas and thoughts are shared. Most of the social medias today has the groups feature where people create groups based on their interest. These are excellent places to find similar minded people. I’ve seen that making use of these groups and participating in them attaches a special honour to your profiles in the social media and it helps you get make more friends in the community.
3. Be proactive
   I’ve seen many guys complain that one of their friend/friends on the social media never responds to their nudge and they are simply pissed off. It’s completely understandable a problem. It may ask you - why did you add him/her as a friend in the first place?
   The answer to this question is to get proactive. By getting proactive I mean, making sure that you do everything in the first place that you want your friend to do. If you want your friend to digg your articles and respond to shouts, you respond to other peoples shouts first.
   So give before you start to take. If you make a habit of this, it makes life easier at the communities.
4. Contribute to the community
   Social media sites out there are not marketing channels. They are not out there to buy somethign from you. instead they are out there to learn from the internet, from you. So give them something to learn, if you have the resources pass them on, if you don’t pass it on from other useful resources.
5. Be Regular
   Imagine you were with your friends, wouldn’t you be spending time with them daily? And not approach them when you have something to show off?
   The same formula works here. Be a frequent participant in all the social medias that you want to be popular in. Many of them shows the last login time details so others can easily judge from your login patterns as to whether you are a frequent member or not. If you are not, they probably will take you for a spammer, and I think they have all the right to believe so.
6. Be generous, pass information
   While in the community, make sure that you are a generous person. A generous person is someone who will share value with others without a second thought. In a community others give respect to you based on whether you are generous or not. No matter where you get it from, if you are someone who provides valuable conent to the community, then others will accept you and respect you as a master, yes , even if the information you passed on was not really yours.
7. Buy ideas never sell
   Communities are for everyone, for those who are buying and selling. But make sure you are always on the buying part. At least for a major part of your time. Because there are more sellers in this world than buyers. So when everyone is looking for a buyer, be one, so that you have their attention. At a later point, may be, if they find you interesting, you could be a seller. But let that not be your point of interest.
8. Never promote yourself
   Do you have a product to sell or  service to offer? I’d suggest that you keep away your marketing strategies away from the communities. The problem is that the social media community is so sensitive that they can easily make out a marketing guy and a contributor. So don;t act smart trying to sell your product/service by promoting yourself. That’s for the community to decide.
9. Adapt to the customs
   Every social media site out there is a community. And every community has its rules and customs just like in real ife. So in order to get in to one you got to gel to their customs first. If you stand apart from them, you’ll probably end up being an island. You don’t want that to happen.
10. Its almost like real life
    See communities on social media just like real life communities. They are not a bunch of robots out there. They are indeed a bunch of clever guys like you sitting at eth other end of the world. So try to make friends with them treating them just like you are meeting a real person.
11. Make friends
    Forget diggs or stumbles. During your initial days in the social media, make sure you make more friends than anything. Communicate to them through comments, groups etc and make yourself comfortable with the community and learn what’s happening there. Sit back relax and study tha patterns. Don’t do the mistake of going ahead and digging your favorite story in the very first day. There’s no problem as such but had you submitted after making some friends, it would’ve got a better visibility.
12. Never beg
    One of the mistakes I see people repeating time and again is to beg for votes. Well, I’m not talking about you letting know your friend about a new submission or shots. But begging someone , a stranger may be, to vote for you. This creates a negative impression about you to the other perrson and although he may digg your story, the next time you approach him he’ll avoid you. Because you are not passing any quality or value to him.
13. Develop niche groups within
    This is one of the very effective strategies I’ve seen people use in social media communities. Develop small interest groups within the community so that you can share and communicate with the like minded people. Although, please do not confuse this with closed communities. I’m totally against closed communities, they are no good for the sharing purpose. Let your communities be open so that like minded peple can jon and communicate within.
    
14. Reply and respond
    I understand that you have no interest in responding to shouts on email or IM, and yes you may be completely true. Why do you want to reply to those emails, after all you have someone whoting eery minute. But hey, let me tell you, if you does not reply to any of them - fine, nothing bad. But try responding to each of them. Yes respond to every shout you receive and see what happens. I can assure you that, you’ll have at least 10 guys daily adding you as friend on the network. And that’s not a bad thing. All those guys add you as friend because they respect your actions and they see value in you. So I’d suggest that you try reply and respond to every little nudge that you get on the network.
15. Quick guys are smart
    You knew it already. Quick guys are smart. Here in the social media, being quick means being being qucik in responding, being quick in digging stories up the top, being quick in all the activities in the community.
16. Be the first
    if you got to do exceptionally good in the community, one short cut to getting poplar is to be the first in submitting breaking news or interesting stories. If you pick up the best happening story first, others are sure to follow. but this is no easy task, you got to keep a hawk’s eye on the news that is of interest to the community and act quick once it’s out.
17. Believe in quality
    It’s all about quality. If you have 1000 submissions with all of them stories that have been heard before, no one’s going to even bother talking to you. but if you have a couple of breaking stories and interesting, exclusive ones, that sure is going to earn you the respect you deserve.
18. Give before you take
    Essentially the point to keep in mind is before you start thinking about your returns, learn to contribute and share. Don’t count your returns on the very first day. It’s a natural process of getting popular and doesn’t happen over night. Once you have your basics in place, it will automatically throw you up to the top.

I’d love to hear your contributions/additions to the above points.

Okay, I have to be cool. And I’m ready for it.

From some of the readers emails, I’ve learned that there are quite some things that are not looking good on the blog. Like for instance there was a friend who said he doesn’t like the green color on the header. Another reader said he likes it very much and the color combo is really cool.

As a part of getting into shape, DailySEOblog is ready to listen to you. What are the things that you think are not looking good on the blog, what are the changes that you need ? And what are the things you wished has been there in place? Let it not just be about the design, you can talk about features, the adsense ads, or the linking pattern or the footer, title anything.

I’d really appreciate your opinions on this, feel free to throw it at my face, if at all there’s anything you want to.

I used to blog because I never did write diaries or took notes and it was comfortable doing the same on the PC with notepad (Yuck!) .
Well, trying to say that everyone has a different and unique reason to blog. After all what is it that motivates you to sit in  front of the PC and type rapidly entering all those random thoughts into bullet points? There’s got the be the carrot somewhere isn’t it? Let’s see…

1. Fame for the blog (Behind the scene masters)
   Some of us like Dosh Dosh or Daily Blog Tips, are more heard of by their blogs name and not theirs. It is one way of motivation - to get a brand of yours to the top into a recognizable one among the crowd. And when you are the man behind it you get sort of a satisfaction from it isn’t it? A large part of such bloggers remain anonymous or in pseudo names.
2. Fame for the author (Publicity freaks)
   While in some cases, it’s the other way round. People blog because they want to get popular themselves. These guys are lucky , they are likely to see dreams where they have their portrait super imposed in the on the front cover of Maxim, or The Week for that matter. (Ahem..Ahem!)
3. Money from AdSense (Wanna be John Chows)
   Some smarties blog because someone told them about the little Google magic! Blog and ye shall receive!
   I fact, the larger population of the internet is after this formula and end up being a “hypnoticed” follower to an AdSense guru or Affiliate Marketer.
4. Status as the Guru (Smitten by Rand Fishkin)
   Some people blog so that they can become something that they never were. Gurus. AdSense gurus, SEO gurus, Social Media gurus and what not? Name it and you have them. Spend a little time with them and they ask for your money. You say no and start being a guru yourself. (May differ according to situations)
5. Living from money online (Hail Shoemoney and the cheque picture)
   Some people are damn lazy. All they wanna do is earn some quick cash by doing no work but anything that will get them money. They sell affiliates, sell services on Digital Point, click their own Google AdSense ads and “make money online”. They are the most clever out of the whole bunch.
6. Appreciation for writing (Attention Deficit Syndrome)
   And then there are those serious guys out there who failed to impress publishers on their writing skills. They write stories, poems etc.
7. Platform to express your thoughts (Introverts)
   Some people express better while they type on keyboards. They never talk loud or join discussions. But they are superstars in the blogosphere.
8. Brand Marketing Service/Company (Hoardings)
   These guys would have a company, a brand to promote and they see Rand, or Nate and jump in. Jason branding the “Mahalo” flower all over social media is an example of good (?) branding. But this is a very good and effective strategy seen in the recent times. At the end of the day you have a clear brand with good recall value and also the “potential clients” read your message as well.

No wrong ideas please. Please take this post in the right/left/non sense, and don’t ask yourself the question - “Which category would you fall in to?”. Seriously.

At the Mumbai Barcamp, while talking to the audience there was a gentleman with a genuine doubt.

“Ok, so you tell me that Google will penalize you if you sell links. But how the hell would Google find it out when I’m not talking about it?”

Interesting perspective huh? So many of us are scared about the Google ban and have not sold links at all (or have not publicly told so) and there’s this guys who challenges Google asking how does it find out if he’s selling links?

There is one school of thought that says that Google traces you down from links on other websites that sells links.
Some others say that it detects you from the TLA database. (Weird!)
Even some say that Google has it’s own spider to do the job of detecting if the blog it’s on is selling text link ads.

Hmm, that sounds like lot of guesses. In fact, the last theory is pretty much believable comparing the other two. Google might have a robot or a specialized one that detects elements on a webpage that associates it with selling text link ads.

What could those elements be?

- Lot of emphasis and repetition of keywords like “Buy this ad” or “Text link for sale” etc.
- A sales page where there is a quote on the text link prices.
- Inclusion of totally unrelated, standalone, non contextual links on the site sidebar/footer.
- Presence of links to poker/pharma/porn/malware sites.
- Hosting of your website on a shared host that shares it’s IP with an already banned site.
- Excessive use of outgoing links to non contextual sites without the use of nofollow attribute.
- Public announcement of text link prices through RSS feeds/Newsletters.
- Presence of affiliate links to text link ads and brokering websites.

Dave did a better guess in finding out how easy is it for Google to find out all the websites that sold text link ads.

He says - Do this search on Google

How hard would it be for Google to write a script which basically does this…

open folder : http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/

Search for TLA_ which would return http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/tla_44565.php

Now, if that is the TLA plugin, you are doomed.

I strongly recommend all readers to refrain from practices of selling links on your websites, even if you do and want to make some cash, nofollow them so that it doesn’t corrupt the Google algorithm.

Have you been waiting to advertise your blog/service on other websites but never could possibly do it because of the high rates in advertising?

Do you have a kickass service or product that you want to show off to others?

Are you a freelancer who wants to get some business and get people to know you?

Here’s a golden chance to grab some ads at damn cheap rates on DailySEOblog ! Being March, which is not the best time of sales, I thought a giveaway at really cheap prices would really help both me and the advertisers alike.

The 125×125 ads on DailySEOblog have been sold for USD 70 per month untill now. This whole month and April, the ad spots will be available for USD 30 per ad. Yes, you read that right. Just 30 bucks for a premium placement !

Also, there is the option for advertising your blog/product/service to around 600 tech savvy readers daily for just USD 20 !!

What do you get?
Place your ad on RSS feeds and let all the potential clients know and talk about your blog/product. All that for just 15 bucks!

Target a tech savvy crowd of search engine experts by placing your logo and introduce your service to them for as low as USD 30 per month.

Here are the new discounted rates !

• 125×125 image ads on the sidebar - USD 30 per ad, for 30 days.Your logo will remain on the most viewed part of the blog, not to mention the traffic and the clicks.
• Ads on the footer of RSS feeds - USD 20 for two weeks reaching 600 readers daily.

So make your mind now. Now or never. Make use of this discount and get that extra mileage and same success rates for even less than half the usual rate.

Wise men make quick decisions!

Order a 125×125 ad for USD 30

Order a RSS feed ad for USD 20

I’m delighted to introduce to you - a new SEO friendly wordpress theme from DailySEOblog - “SEO Green” !

We’ve been working on this theme for quite some time now, and after a lot of modification and tweaks, here it is. We’ve managed to make it SEO friendly as much as possible, along with keeping the looks and feel of a contemporary wordpress theme.

This is a free wordpress theme, so feel free to download it and use tweaking it according to your taste.

What is so special about the theme?

The simplicity and effectiveness.

The theme is designed keeping in mind the common blogger who is on the look out of a wordpress theme that he can implement once and the forget about. This is for those bloggers who don’t want to think too much and crash their brains about optimizing their site.

The categories

The categories are put right on the top of the theme. Now, this is something unusual. You either find the categories on the right hand side or on the top bar header navigation menu. The reason they are put on the top is that you have a good real estate for doing SEO here. Make your categories SEO friendly by using keywords in them and even otherwise your categories are picked up by the search engines by default. Therefore highlight is on the categories, so you may want to tweak them and make them really attractive.

The meta tags

There are no meta tags by default on the theme. Simply because, they have no SEO value at all. Instead I’m using the categories to appear at the description on the SERPs. Once you install the theme, the description text that appears for it on Google would be the categories.

Now, for those who have lot of categories, this may look as spam on the SERPs. For those bloggers I recommend the headspace plugin to be added to the theme and everything regarding the meta content will be sorted out.

It is a common mis-understanding that the meta tags gets you lot of SEO importance while the truth is that it does not (apart form the titles). It does serve the purpose of an Ad-copy that compels people to click on your site while it is appearing on the SERPs.

The Header

The header has a logo to the left and the recent comments and the recent posts listed on it. To the right, you’ll find the subscription options. The recent comments and posts plugin is used here keeping in mind that the header should contain as much content as possible to be absorbed by the spiders. I could’ve easily left it blank, but there was a good real estate for SEO, so I thought it might be wise to just use it.

The logo space can also be customized according to your taste, just replace the image logo.jpg in the template directory to get this done.

The Footer

The footer has three columns that are very much “tweakable”. The first column contains an about me section where you can add text about you or the site, while adding a photo or logo of yours. The second and third column can be customized to add links, external or internal depending on your taste. 

Essential Plugins

- The theme comes packed with the recent comments and recent posts plugin, please activate it from the the Dashboard> Plugins menu.
- For those who want custom titles and meta info, I recommend you use the HeadSpace2 plugin.
- Any other plugin can be easily added to the right hand sidebar. A demo of plugins working can be seen here.

About the author

The theme is designed by my partner designer Prasanth, who have coded the entire code himself, while I bugged him with the SEO metrics.Prasanth helps me with design on my SEO projects.

Demo ~ Download theme

If you’ve spotted any errors on the theme, please let me know on the comments. I’ll very much appreciate it.Hope you’ll enjoy the theme as much as we liked designing it.

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.

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.

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?

As you might already know, titles and title tags are often seen carrying more weight than any other on site optimization factors be it on blogs or static webpages. And I bet, that it’s the one thing all of us tweak mostly to try and reposition yourself on the SERPs.

Well, the liking to the title tag may be due to various reasons.

• It is one of the most easily spotted onsite optimization factor.
• It is easy to tweak it.
• Lots of options are available, which makes it fun.
• It has almost a direct and immediate effect on the Google SERPs.

Apart from all these options, it is also true that it’s difficult to get the right combination of keywords, that will give you the maximum results on the SERPs. So the challenge for an SEO would be to find this right combination and the perfect title tag.

Before going into the perfect title tag, let’s see what are the “don’t do’s” with title tags?

Well, one word would be enough to explain it all - Spam. With all it’s flexibility and weightage, it’s very easy for SEO’s to get high with it and screw it all up. We’ve seen lot of examples in the near future that were “study materials” on how not to write a title. Just go Google down “SEO India” and you will find some really interesting ones.

Now, watching those sites rank high for a particular keyword using the so called “title spam” and “title keyword stemming”, would naturally throw this question across to you - “Why can’t I do a keyword spam on the title tag, when it will deliver the results? After all, that’s what my client is keen on.”

Very honest question and a dangerous one at the same time. My answer to that question would be another one?

“How long do you want your site to appear number one-ten on the SERPs ? ”

Choice 1 - A few months

Choice 2 - As long as the site exists

If it’s choice two…..yep you got it right man…you better not spam.

A spammy title tag would look something like “SEO India, SEO services India, SEO Indian, Indian SEO, The SEO India, SEO Indias”.

I must appreciate this webmasters English creative writing skills but seriously this is no better than a high school guy.

“I read it at Aaron’s E-book that you should include your keywords in the title tag so there you have it, all the ten versions of the keyword! ”

Rather than doing good, this kind of practice will give you bad reputation (if not immediately) in the long run.

So what is a good title tag? How does it look like?

A good title tag is

- A healthy one.
- A short and sweet one.
- Both visually and technically appealing.

Now, this is old school isn’t it? We all know that good title tags are supposed to be the short and sweet, non spammy and all that but, when our competition is tough (and they are spamming) how can I make sure that I reap my profits ?

Well, that’s the catch my friend. That’s what makes you unique.

1. Use your keywords “wisely” on the title.
   Just because you heard that you got to fix your keywords on the title, you don’t have to repeat it and make it look like spam.
   Let’s see it like this. Only you know what your keywords are, not your readers. Draft a title so that your readers can’t make out what your keyword are. It should be a carefully drafted copy that “includes” the keywords in a natural way.
   Ex: SEO India, SEO India Services,SEO India outsourcing, SEO from India - NOT good. It shows that your keyword is SEO India.
   Good Ex:- SEO outsourced services in India from - your company name -.
2. Use your competition to your advantage.
   Analyze all your competitors. See if they follow a pattern. If they’re all spammers, you have an opportunity to beat them. See what’s a better copy for you to break into all of their positions. *Food for thought*
3. Makes sure the title makes sense to a reader.
   Read out your title tag to your colleague or friend. See how he responds to it. Don’t just think of all that you can and plug it in.
4. Let there not be just keywords, but synonyms too.
   Synonyms are a great way to build traffic. Repeating the same keywords in combination with other words may get you the spam tag, but adding it with synonyms is a better alternative.
5. Special characters on the title tags.
   Let there not be any complicated characters in your title. I’ve seen people place funny symbols like tilde and ambersand to create a visual impact. In fact it does but reader’s  probably might like you to use, even that much space for some more information. .::[ So use it ]::.

Essentially, titles are like your visiting cards to a site. You can create and print them in whatever ways you like it. But if you really want a information seeker to read/access you, you better give them the information they are looking for and let that be in good, simple and understandable language.