Recently, I received an email from the John T P, from the much popular JohnTP.com.

It said if I would be interested to guest blog on his domain, since he is not well.

I thought it’s a good offer as more than any other benefit, JohnTP.com was a pretty popular blog and getting in to it’s writer’s board would definitely mean something good to me.

How John sees it is like this - I can get a free PR 6 backlink from the articles I’m writing. Well, that’s his pitch so I didn’t think twice about it.

Meanwhile the searchcamp came up and I was not available for the two days.

John had also asked me to send him an article or two through mail. I don’t know why he insisted it because he already have seen my articles on dailySEOblog as well as Bloggingtips.com. Now, I replied back to John saying if it’s OK to send him the articles after the even to which he agreed.

Okay, long story short - I did not accept the offer.

Reasons
I don;t think John was good in his emails. Good in the sense, the way he talked to me sounded very bossy (unlike Kevin at Bloggingtips.com, who’s a really good chap!) and did not really ignited the passion in me.

It wounded to me more like he is trying to do me a favor.

I could’ve easily taken up the offer and got the PR 6 link to this blog (which incidentally have very few incoming links).

But the moral of the story here is that, when talking to people over e-mail, you got to be very cautious and polite. Don’t you think so? I’m not talking about listening to every shit the other guy is talking but you have to be polite and firm at the same time. Just the right kind of etiquette required to communicate well to others.

See the email transcript between me and John below. I think John needs some improvements in his email etiquettes seriously. Nothing personal John. hope you take it in the right spirits.

JOHN 

Hi Mani,

How are you? I am currently looking for guest bloggers for JohnTP.com as I am having fever. By guest blogging on my blog you get a free PR 6 backlink, new readers and traffic for your blog

If you are interested, please write one or more posts on Bogging or SEO and email it to me at this email address.

Thanks,

JohnTP

ME

Hi John,
I’m keeping well. Sorry to hear that you are having fever. Wish you a speedy recovery.
Can you please let me know if you are you looking for guest blogging for a particular amount of time or not?
I’d be happy to accept the offer, John.

Best,
Mani

JOHN

Hi Mani,
I am currently looking for guest posts until I recover from my fever, I may also post if I can.
Regards,
JohnTP

ME

Sounds Great John,
I’m flying to the Searchcamp, Chennai early morn tommorow. So shall I post the article to you by sunday?
If you’ll agree to it, I think everything else is OK.

JOHN

Sunday is fine

ME

Sounds cool John.

John, Since I was at the Searchcamp, Chennai (and they had a broken wifii there) I couldnt write to you. I was thinking if you’d take a loot at the articles i write on dailyseoblog as well as blogging tips, so that you know what my style is and if its acceptable to you? Makes sense right?

ME

Hi John,
I have the post ready. Please let me know how you’d like me to go about it.
Sent it to you or access the dashboard?
Best,
Mani

JOHN

Hi Mani,
Send it via email.
Regards,
JohnTP

ME

Hi John,
Many thanks for the offer.
But I don’t think I’ll be taking up this offer at the moment.
I appreciate your efforts in contacting me.
Best,
Mani

What are your thoughts on it?

UPDATE
I think this has gone a bit personal and I seriously did not want it to be. If you think so, please shout!

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Have you noticed that Indian SEO’s are looked at with doubt by the rest of the world? A fact it is.

Just to get an idea how serious this issue is, first check out Mr.Seo’s(Joe Balestrino) podcast where he talks about SEO’s in India, and the “problems” he thinks you can run into hiring one.

Joe had a client who had initially outsourced his SEO work to a SEO firm in India and he ran into problems(which is why he approached Mr.SEO). The client complained that the SEO firm in India did not submit projects on time, and did not really communicate anything to him on what is being done. Joe adds on later that outsourcing SEO work to India may not be a good idea.

Well, if you ask me, I can’t agree completely with Joe because he’s talking from a single client’s experience. I think this is a one-off case, and Joe should not completely label Indian SEO firms(outsourcing) as non-credible.

The problems he found with the Indian SEO firm were..

They ere not on time with projects
Were incredibly cheap (So he suspected it was a fraud company)
Did not communicate with the client
Failed in on-site optimization, and rather emphasized more on link-building

Joe’s client was unfortunate, to having selected a poor SEO firm in India. This is not a problem faced due to outsourcing SEO work to India or any other company.
The real problem lies in un educated clients.
Clients sometimes may not know anything about SEO except the fact that they need their site on the top of SERPs. Many a times, they do not agree to the time  we suggest we require and wants to hurry things.

As you may be aware, SEO is not a miracle doer, it takes time, lots of time. In fact it’s an on-going project may a times rather than a “Start, okay, done” project. Search Engine rankings does not stand forever, they change as algorithms change. Unfortunately many clients are not aware of such things and blindly need SEO firms to..

- Get their site on the top asap.
- Make it stay there forever.
- Cannot stretch on time and
- Need guaranteed results.

I think with such unfair demands from an ignorant client, black hat SEO’s can grow easily. And which is what might have happened in this case.

As Joe’s observation goes, the client had copied articles from Amazon and other sites (which explains his motives), so there were lot of supplementary results in the site, which the Indian firm did not find out. And they rather focused only on backlinks. Joe further says that the Indian SEO firm did not let the client know as to where the backlinks came from. Which is a fair comment. SEO’s should let the clients know where the backlinks are from and firstly, why they need backlinks.

When ignorant clients are a reality (like this case), it could also be a fact that, Indian SEO’s don’t communicate well with the clients, making things tough.

But I don’t think it’s a healthy practice to label “outsourcing SEO work” as dangerous just because they are cheaper. Rather, efforts should be made to educate clients on why they need SEO, what can be done to help them and what cannot be.

Backlinks are very important for your ranks - everybody knows that.
How do you normally check your backlinks?
- Using Google? OK. So you type in link:www.yoursite.com for your incoming links - cool. But what you get is note really all your backlinks.
- You can search for backlinks on Google blog search and it will show all your backlinking blogs. They won’t be shown on the normal google search.
- You can search on Yahoo with the same query - link:www.yourdomain.com and it will show you all those nofollow and comment links.

Now, what if you wanted to know what anchor text, people have used to link to your blog? Of course, this is very important in SEO. The more number of anchor text with your keyword, the better. But all anchor texts with the same text is too bad. You know, google does not like anything artificial.

Take this tool - It’s an excellent backlink checker. It shows all your backlinks on the internet, including the comment links and the nofollows. Also, it shows the anchor text by which others have linked to you. If you find anything wrong with the anchor text, it’s now easy for you to edit it.

So you started blogging only months back and already feeling bored with no backlinks, no popularity and no recognition? Think again.

For the blogging legends, success did not happen overnight. It took them years of posting, consistency, knowledge sharing and socialization(just to name a few) to make it big today. Ask anyone of those celebrity bloggers - they don’t live in vacation homes nor do they spend evenings sipping whiskey and wine in their yachts. They’d probably be writing a new post sipping a coffee.

I did a research on the top blogging legends on their initial days of blogging. I thought I’d find something interesting in these posts since they would be their best of all time.But not really. Many of them were on the usual - “How to get popular” and “how to get discovered” topics.(Yes just like you!) See for yourself.

1. Problogger - Darren Rowse, Sep 23 -2004
   Page rank explained was Darren’s first post, where he writes about what google page rank is. Google PR is one of the hot favorites of bloggers even today.
2. Labnol - Amit Agarwal, Jan 01 - 2005
   Amit writes about travel directions to get to India. He offers the route maps available online in his first blog article.
3. John Chow.com, Dec 31 - 2005
   John wrote his first post about how the year 2005 went(No link-sorry) and what he’s going to do in 2006. No making it top to the make-money-online bandwagon was not in his checklist. Instead it was - “Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading”
4. Seth’s blog - Seth Godin, Oct 01 -2006
   Seth’s first posts was about effective speech.
5. Blogoscoped - Philip Lenssen, Dec 01 -2003
   Philips wrote first on Carl and Keyword stemming way back in Dec 2003. I was at college then
6. How to change the world - Guy Kawasaki, Oct 02 -2006
   Guy Kawasaki’s first post on his experience in returning from Mumbai after the IBM conference.
7. Kottke - Jason Kottke, March - 1998
   Kottke wrote his first post on what’s hyper text?
8. Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel, Oct 01-2006
   Steve started off with a bunch of links?

Interesting common factors

- Most of them started off with something “seemingly” silly.
- All of them were consistent with posting regularly.
- Most of them had either very less or no comments at all in the early posts.
- Most of them wrote on posts that were already covered by someone else.
- Most of them linked a lot to other resources.

The above posts were “discovered” from the blogs archive sections, (who ever featured it.) and it could be wrong. If you have better information please let know.

The most often question on forums and e-groups.And the most often repeated answer too. Honestly, there has been very few or no changes to the answer - How to get free backlinks?

Let’s analyze the answers and see how much of it’s actually practical and what’s not?

- Directory submission
Everybody knows it. Submit to those free directories after all they are free. And there is even a whole list of directories that allow free submission.

But the hard fact is that none of them actually benefits you.Well, almost none - but some do!
When you select a directory to submit your blog to - don’t go for the looks. There are really sleek looking directories with the shortest fill-up form so it’s easy for you to get hooked.

Before selecting a directory check these -

- How long has the directory has been around?(Check here)
- How many sites are already present in each category?
- Is there a price?
- Does it ask for a link back?
- Does it link to bad neighborhood?

A directory with a longer existence is always better than a newly started one.
The more the number of sites in each category - the better.It shows the authority.
If there is a reasonable price, good. Provided that the above factors are in good position.
If it asks for a linkback - quit at once. It will drop your PR or give you just nothing for that link back? Why waste your link real-estate?
See if it’s got Poker partners or Viagra affiliates, If yes, quit at once.

Now you may find only a few directories out of the huge list you had, that meets the criteria. Still fine! Please don’t mis understand that the more directories you submit, the better. NO! The less the number the better,provided the quality is high.

So go for long existing directories, with many listings in each categories,with no link-back schemes,and no bad neighbourhood.Get linked safely!

See other methods of getting links here.

Okay, I take for granted that you are a Firefox fan. Here are some must have Search Engine Optimization related plugins for Firefox that will help you get high rankings by beating your competition. Hope you are aware that in Search Engine Optimization - finding what your competitor is doing for SEO is what you need to know more than what you are doing in order to rank higher than them. Keeping this in mind, I’ve listed out the following Firefox plugins for SEO.

1. Keyword Generator is an extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web page. Than, you can retrieve them for social sharing (tag filling) or webmastering/SEO.
   KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph). This is very useful when you need to know what your competitors are doing and what keywords they are using on their pages.
2. a4SEO - This wonderful SEO extension provides you the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.It gives you backlinks number, indexed pages, keyword occurences on the page, page rank, all in anchor, all in title and all in text rank for both domain and webpage information.
3. SeoQuake - This extension will help you find the SEo stats like number of backlinks, page rank, number of pages indexed etc right in the Google search results, right beneath each website results.
4. SEO for Firefox - This is the coolest one. it is Aron Wall’s ace plugin for Firefox where all the SEO data is available right in the Google search results page. Very consistent and reliable tool.
5. SEO Hand - The add-on is used as an extension for the site http://www.seohand.com. It activates when the working area of the site in the location bar is viewed. The area gives the user opportunity to identify Google ranking for the sites. A decent one if you ask me.

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

This is the story of another failure. You know, sometimes, despite your attempts, some things don’t go the way we see it.

This is about the review competition that was opened this month on Daily dose. The competition was that if you write a review about this blog, you stand a chance to win a premium domain.

As you might have guessed, the purpose of the competition to get as many back links as possible.But unfortunately, this competition was an utter failure! Such a failure that it gave me no backlinks or reviews except one from Rishi Raj.Clearly this is not what i had expected.
I had expected at least a couple of reviews and links.

Well, soon after the competition was rolled out, the response was very cold. There were no comments or emails that enquired about the competition.Somebody suggested on the comments that i added a few bucks as the prize - in the comments which showed that the prize(domain) was clearly not one that many wanted.

Well, the competition is scheduled to end this month end, so I’m guessing that there wont be any entries further and the price as declared would be given to Rishi(who is the only reviewer.) Despite the fact that this was a failure, it taught me a lesson. What are the things that counts when opening a competiton like this.What eill grab readers attention and what will not.

I’d like to share my experience with you. Here goes-

Reason why i think this competition was a failure.

1- Zero motivation
The prize failed to attract readers. It was a premium domain name - bloggersense.com. I was under that impression that it’s a very sought after one. True may be, but since all the visitors had a domain name already, or had settled with their blogspot domain transfers, this was not at all attractive to them.

So in cases like this, it may be useful to have a little survey done on your readers to check what they look for in a competition and what prizes they would like to have.

2 - Wrong target
This prize should have been announced in a domain selling/related website.Where the target are people who are looking for domains.In this case the target already had their domain names - why should they look for another one? Again a clear case of wrong communication.

3 - Short time frame
Honestly, i think this is not a big factor, but there is a possibility that there would have been more entries, had the dead line was longer.

There are more reasons but these probably are the most important ones that fuelled the failure of this strategy.
Meanwhile, any ideas on what else would have been a better competition?

I’m trying to get as many opinions as possible from top SEO’s regarding a particular case.

Because every SEO has their own mode of working, and different set of valuables/factors, I’m wondering if there is/are anything that will be strikingly common among us.

Here’s a case for you - in which, for a particular keyword, the Top 5 analysis is as below.
(The on site optimization features are not available at the moment except the number of times the keyword is repeated on the page.)

The client sites statistics are also given.

Site A
Pages Indexed - 1150
Number of page backlinks - 39,000
Number of domain backlinks - 70,000
All in anchor Rank - 1
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 2
Page rank - 5

Site B
Pages Indexed - 171
Number of page backlinks - 1760
Number of domain backlinks - 2170
All in anchor Rank - 2
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 5

Site C
Pages Indexed - 699
Number of page backlinks - 784
Number of domain backlinks - 965
All in anchor Rank - 4
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 5

Site D
Pages Indexed - 82
Number of page backlinks - 1340
Number of domain backlinks - 1520
All in anchor Rank - 4
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 3
Page rank - 4

Site E
Pages Indexed - 1230
Number of page backlinks - 931
Number of domain backlinks - 1060
All in anchor Rank - 10
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 7
Page rank - 5

Client Site
Pages Indexed - 26
Number of page backlinks - 1200
Number of domain backlinks - 1560
All in anchor Rank - 14
Number of edu backlinks - 0
Phrase on page - 1
Page rank - 4

How would you prioritize your SEO work, so that the client site gets to the top?

I’d appreciate if you can list down the SEO variables in decreasing priority.

Remember, the whole idea is to find out if there is/are any common SEO factors that we all agree on? If yes, what all, in what priority?

Sorry a bit of repetition here!

According to Google, back links are votes given by other sites to you.

According to me, in the SEO process, getting these votes is the best SEO practice known so far.

One question that nags everyone is - How to get back links?

The answer is simple - Think about how to improve the contents on your site rather than torture your head thinking of links.
Because, once you have great content on your site, then it’s basic human psychology that people want to get associated with it - so they link.

- The above piece of information can be found on almost all SEO related websites and I’m sure is nothing new to you.

Now what decides what’s a great content? Or what content will attract more links? Here are a few tips from my experience.

• Be Innovative

  Let it be such that the readers will think - “Damn! Why didn’t i think of it earlier?”

  Which means that the content should be simple and related to the topics everyone knows, but in a way that they would’ve never thought of. It’s not easy to think of something like that every other day.But if you can manage to squeeze in at least a few every week, that should do the trick.
  Some famous examples would be - When john Chow released the Link bait posts.

• Be the first to report.

  This one’s easier if you are a techie and watch blogs/news sites closely. All you have to do is report a sensational news the very first time.It is very tricky - because sometimes the news is so common and popular that, when you post it, millions would have posted it on the other end. So you have to find some tweak to get the best news the first time. A very effective method is to religiously read all the news blogs by grabbing their RSS feeds on your favorite RSS News reader.

• Review with a twist.

  Suppose there is a lovely piece of software you love using. And you thought, why not do a review on it. But you have seen 143 reviews on various blogs on the same software.

  So what do you do? Collect data from all those blogs and see what are the common points in them, then since you are very familiar with the software, it’s more likely that you’ll find something all of them have missed. Trust me, I’ve had similar experiences.

• Write the content with user participation

  It wouldn’t make any sense if you just write excellent articles explaining about the technical wizardry you have or the super piece of code you developed, if a reader does not enjoy it. It’s more like watching TV - you prefer a reality show to a News channel(at least many of us). So write articles that will participate users, or at least strike their thinking pattern and provoke them to write about it on their blog. It works if you hit the right note!

More ideas will continue the next week..