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

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

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

We do all SEO services.

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

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

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

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

Search Engine Submissions are no longer valid.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

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

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

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

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

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

I thought I might be the only guy who prefers it. In fact, it was an easy guess to me that it would die out soon as any other social media mushroom. But the fact that it managed to get into the good books of many and stood face up to the criticism made me like it more.

ChrisG liked it and I completely agree with him. It has all the features, carefully planned to take down Digg (I assume). Community, UI, Ease to handle, Content - everything is just rich enough to take down any existing social media site. Some of the features made me think - “Why did not Digg implement this earlier, or why aren’t they?” Now, if you compare Digg to Mixx, clearly there are differences that puts Mixx on the forefront.

1. Digg takes more time to submit a story.
   Digg
   A normal story submission process on Digg will take me 2 minutes or more, since there are more clicks involved.
   - First the waiting screen.
   - Second, I’ve to write a description myself and select from a picture.
   - Third, select a category.(No miss here)
   - Four, Enter Captcha.
   - Five, Submit.
   - Six, Duplicate check.
   - Seven, final submission.Mixx
   A normal story takes lesser time to submit, with lesser clicks.
   - First, submit URL.
   - Duplicate check.
   - Three, title and description automatically filled.Select category,tags (optional)
   - Four, Submission.

2. Digg wastes my time and confuses me during a submission
   Ssince it checks for duplicate entries only after I’ve taken time out to write a description about the story. While MIxx checks for duplicate content even before you provide the description, and quickly after you’ve submitted the URL. Makes sense this way.

3. Digg always aks for a captcha, Mixx requires it only when they find you submitting stories too frequently.
   This probably may have something to do with the traffic and spam ratio. But as a end user, I’m not bothered about it, I’m worried about my time, my effort and how easy the process is. Digg fails here.

4. Digg is Spam, has no room for development
   Digg is controlled by the mafia you know it. There is very little or No chance at all for fresh stories to get popular, however good it is, unless you have the help of the mafia.
   Mixx is all new, there is lot of quality submission done and every one gets appreciation. Again, down the line Mixx may become like Digg, but as of now, it’s pretty good.

5. I can’t find an appropriate category on Digg, Mixx has better categories
   It’s a shame that Digg has no apt categories for submitting blogging related stories or niche topics like it. You have very narrow choices that doesn’t make any sense at all. Everyone can’t be running a TV station or a Gizmodo to break stories. Why don’t they understand it?
   On the other hand, Mixx has got a better array of categories, and even if you fail to find one, there’s the option of tags. Which is awesome!

6. Digg throws up stories that it thinks is interesting. Mixx shows me stories that are of interest to me.

7. Digg does not have groups and Communities, Mixx has lot of them
   I think one killer feature of Mixx is that it has groups and communities to share your stories according to your taste and preferences. After all, that’s the whole fun in Social Media isn’t it ?

8. Digg is harsh, It thinks some sites are unworthy of submission
   That’s bull s**t. While I tried to submit a story from a nice site, Digg says that the site is banned from submission, and I can’t submit any article from that site, despite them being good articles.

9. Digg is Dull, Mixx is Hot !
   Looks matter after all. Especially when you are spending more time on one site , you don’t want to strain your eyes looking at dull and pale colours. Mixx on te other hand has got soothing colour scheme for your eyes, not too bright not too dull, just perfect with the best UI and user friendlyness.

So those are the nine points I think makes me prefer Mixx over Digg. Hope they make sense. If you really like Mixx, feel free to join The Mixx Fans group and get the company of the most passionate mixxers.

US real estate brokers, personal loan financers and mortagage agents are the ones who approached me more frequently than anyone else during 2007 for SEO projects. Truth be told, I’ve had a hard time declining offers.

You’d laugh at it but, I prefer to decline offers from many of these clients because, over the period of time, I’ve found that out of 5 clients who approach me for SEO work around keywords like real estate agents USA, Personal loan fianancers etc are not genuine. More than me, what they’d require is a black hat SEO.

Initially, I used to pick up clients from these industries, I’ve done a couple of projects with an Arizona real estate agent (that’s what he told he is), but later decided that rather than working on the full project (design,content,off site etc), I do consultation for him because of the following reasons. He needs to..

- Get things done overnight.
- Please do whatever you can, all I have is copied content from other sites.
- I have no content myself, neither do I plan to write any.
- I can’t wait for four months, that’s my break even point.

Honestly, if you client demands something along the lines of the above statements, I’d better recommend him a black hat SEO.
Many of these clients can’t wait for three months or above for they think that’s too long. Most of them need immediate results, which is close to impossible.

But honestly, the keywords are rich, and the pay from these clients are awesome! And it is very much possible to get a decent, solid, authoritive rank for these keywords if they can stretch a little bit, is ready to build a standards compliant website and have some patience. But unfortunately, apart from one or two that I’ve worked with, most of the others need overnight results. So basically they expect magic from SEOs. Balck Hat SEO’s, do you smell some fresh grass here?

If there was one thing that you could do to dramatically boost your website traffic, what would it be?

You may go buy a copy of “Click monkeys”, buy the “Ghana Institute’s world famous Traffic Booster software”, or enroll in a “Double your traffic with popups” program. The first one doesn;t even exist, the second one will hack your paypal id and the third one will get your AdSense ads a lifelong ban. Kaboom!

Now, is there something that you can do worthwhile to really boost your traffic by double fold?

Honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to claim anything such. After all we know that there is nothing as “predictable traffic”. If that was the case,then SEO’s like me would’ve given you the exact measure of traffic boost you’ll get if we tweak just the title tag!

So coming to the reality version of things, is there really something that I can do to boost my daily traffic? Yes of course!

Now, this is no magic or “trick” as they call it. It’s sheer hard work. I’ll tell you the short-cut if you are willing to work hard.It worked for me so it should work for you, provided you try.

Step 1 - Subscribe to all those blogs you are interested in. They may be from the same niche you are in or they may be different, that’s not a problem.

What matters is,
- whether the blog authors are popular
- do they reply to comments
- are they likely to get high number of comments and
- do they update regularly

Yea so keep those in mind while subscribing.

Step 2 - Watch out for updates at these blogs in Google reader like  Hawk!!
Do you have a problem doing that? Then you are out of the game. If not, please continue.

Whenever there’s an update in these blogs, be the first to comment. No second no third, be the first!

I know what you are thinking - That’s not easy Mani, there are time differences, there could be others, and the topics may not be interesting, you know there are all these troubles.

Well, my friend, that answers the question why you are not seen a blogstar in the blogosphere!

Had you been the first to comment on the blogs..

- You’d get personal attention from the author.
- You’d get attention from the rest of the commenters.
- You become genuine and passionate blogger.
- You write meaningful comments, not a “I’m doing it just because I have to” thing.
- You’ll get insights on how to write better blogs.

Get the idea? You know that you can’t write great articles like them (the super blogs that you’ve subscribed to), so why not get the maximum out of them with the minimal effort? Makes sense isn’t it?

Some of the blogs that I’d recommend you to subscribe and star commenting firs would be - DailyBlogTips.com, Problogger.net,45n5.com,Copyblogger.com,Bloggingtips.com and Dailyseoblog.com

The inspiration to this article is Amit Agarwal when he “called” me A Rising Blog Star.

What’s common between Bloggingfingers, Cashquests, 5xmom, and Blotrepreneur.com?

Yep, you guessed it right. They are all “Make money online” blogs, and that they are all on sale/or sold already!

So, it’s a fact that all are eyeing on the big money and short term goals and dumping all the blame on “personal reasons”. I thought this might be the right time to discuss about things to look into when buying a website.

Honestly, I’m no authority to discuss this. I can probably give you a lecture on SEO aspects one should look into before buying a domain, but I thought it might make more sense to get advices from experts in the domain.

I went around asking all the experts about their opinions on things to watch out for before buying a blog. Let’s see.

1. Chris Garret from ChrisG says -

The main thing I would look for are verifiable details of the traffic and subscriptions. What you don’t want to find is you have bought a site thinking it gets 20k visitors a month only to see that 99% of the traffic is from one or two front page diggs and all the links disappear because they were rented.
Also be cautious of earnings claims, get details. A lot of sales show monthly earnings based on one-off affiliate deals, like new product launches, negotiated commission deals you could not continue yourself, or things Google is clamping down on such as selling links and paid reviews.

2. Daniel from DailyBlogTips says - 

The first thing you need to consider is what kind of content is going on that blog. Blogs that publish too much personal stuff lose a point here. You must make sure that the readers go to that blog because they are looking for the usefulness of the information there contained, and not because they like the opinions or style of the author. If that is the case it would be very hard to keep the momentum of the blog going after the sale.
The second aspect is the monetization one, given that many of these blogs that go on sale claim that they make good money. Make sure that the revenue sources are stable and legit. If they have direct advertisers, for instance, it would be a good idea to confirm that they would stay on board even after the sale (just ask the contacts and talk to them directly). Be careful with blogs that used to generate money via PayPerPost and similar as well, because that source is not stable.

3. Amit Agarwal from Labnol, suggests -

1. Check for any traces in the archive.org database
2. Check if google ads are not banned (through Adsense preview tool)
3. Ask for raw server logs before closing the deal

4. Emma Jean from Blog about your blog says -

If I was to purchase a site I would want to know about the history. How long its been established and if the domain has ever been dropped. If its been dropped and has a PR it could be affected the next update. Therefore the value isn’t as high.
As you can see with the recent sales of blogging fingers and cashquests is the branding and the blog. People know them just by the name.. “Oh Cash Quests ya that blog is about etc.”
The most important thing I would consider is the ability to expand and earn. If you are buying a site and must pay 10 months revenue, you want to be able to earn back your investment. If you can’t it’s essentially a waste.

5. Patrick Altoft from Blogstorm says -

1. I would want access to the sites Google Analytics account. If that wasn’t possible I wouldn’t buy.
2. Also I would check as many pages as possible from archive.org to see if the site sold links or anything in the past.
3. Check every page on the site and every link using Yahoo Site Explorer.

6. Mohsin Naqi from Bloggingbits says -

Essentially, I’ll give top consideration to the blog’s niche and its earning potential before checking domain’s age, its  google and Alexa rank, and other similar factors.

7. Ankesh Kothari from BlogClout says -

 * Current cash flow.  Is the site profitable?  $$ it earns.  Followed with: page views / unique visitors it gets.  Subscribers / members it has. 
 * Future potential.  Whats the current strategy of the website.  Is the seller selling because of some impending legal / technical reasons or maybe because of increasing competition?  Can I improve upon the strategy and the business model?  How much time, effort and money will go into it?  Will the site work without its current owner?
The price I would pay is 6-8 times the current monthly cash flow.  Plus $1-2 per subscriber.
This changes if the site also owns intellectual property (patents / exclusive softwares).  Also if the site sells a tangible product and I have to buy its inventory too.
I don’t look at the site age.  Or the participation on it.  Or its page rank or alexa rank or any such 3rd party ranking that has no effect on the bottom line. 
Google backlash comes under future potential - which I check for (For eg: if a blog whose business model upto this point has been earning via payperpost only - then I would think about buying it.  And go for it only if its price is lower than I would otherwise pay for it.).

8. Monika Mundell from Writer’s Manifesto says -

For starters I would look at the following stats:

Alexa ranking
Google page rank
Age of the blog
Active Subscribers
Blog Layout (is it designed to display ads effectively)

If the blog doesn’t qualify through this I will not go further. It would be silly to think that buying a so called established blog with no rankings and no subscribers will be justified. If the blog qualifies, then I will apply some deeper scrutiny, such as looking for income revenue. If the blog currently provides the owner with a monthly income either via adsense, direct advertising, pay per click or anything else, then my first point of evaluation would be how much income there is per month. If the sales price exceeds the blogs monthly earnings x 24, then it would be considered too expensive or over ambitious.
Example: Blog currently earns $400 of monthly revenue.
$400 x 24 months = $ 9,600 then this figure is the maximum I would pay.
Also another important step is to look at the current spending habits of the blog owner to get those $400/month. Naturally if the cost is considerably high, I would keep my fingers from it. One kind of blog I would never buy is a self branded name blog. Buying an established blog can be a great decision for any serious entrepreneur. But we mustn’t forget that the future growth of the blog will only happen if we choose the right niche for us and keep the blog
updated. It is no good spending $10,000 on a dog blog if we intend to write about cats in the future.

9. Kevin from BloggingTips suggests -

1 ) With regards to traffic. You need to see as many stats as possible. Ask for screen prints of analytics, webalizer, awstats and any other stat scripts the current owner is using. You should of course be interested in the current level of traffic however more importantly you need to look at where this traffic is coming from.

   * If a lot of traffic is coming from other sites the owner owns then you need to ask if these links will remain up after the sale and if so, for how long. Likewise, if traffic is coming from an advertising campaign, when does the advertising campaign end?

  * Has a lot of traffic come from social networking - eg. digg. If so, you should bear in mind that these traffic spikes were most likely due to the blog owner working hard to get posts dugg and unless you do something similar yourself you wont receive traffic in this way

  * What sort of search engine presence does the site have? What sort of keywords and search terms are bringing in the most traffic? Can you improve the SE presence the blog has?

2) The most important thing you need to pay attention to is how many subscribers the blog has but I believe it’s also worth checking out the growth of the feed. An easy way to check this is to view the feedburner feed graph. Big jumps in subscribers may have been of a result of an advertising campaign or even a guest post. It’s worth noting how much the feed count grows on a ‘regular day’.

3) Make sure that the income stats the blog owner is giving you are true. Try and get as much proof as you can. Many website owners exaggurate how much money their site makes in order to make more money from the sale. This is something which is unfortunately very common. Another important factor is how is the advertising generated. Does the blog make money from direct ad sales or through a CPM ad network etc?

You should also find out how long the blog has been live and how long the domain has been live on the net (sometimes not the same) and you should think about the design of the blog - are you happy with it? If not, how long would you spend working on a new theme, or, if your not a designer, how much would it cost to get a design which suits the blogs needs.

Finally, it’s worthwhile doing a background check on the seller. Check the previous posts from the seller - is he a trusted member of the forum community? Has he sold before - if so, what did the previous buyer think about them as a seller.

10. Skellie from Skelliewag.org says -

My primary concern would be that the content is transferable or not. Sometimes a blog and its author are virtually inseparable, and people visit and subscribe as much for the author’s experiences, advice, personality and style as they do for other aspects of the content. A blog like that(with strong personal style) may well flounder if it’s handed over to new authors.
Site age wouldn’t matter much to me. Some people take three months to grow as much as another blogger might grow in a year. PPP would actually devalue a site as far as I’m concerned as it’s not something I’d personally want to pursue. As for Google backlash, I’d want to take over a site with high quality inbound links but wouldn’t be bothered about PR and that sort of thing.

So essentially, there are a few things in common that’s interesting.

10 things that you must check in a website/blog before buying it.

1. Traffic is stable or not
2. Had there been a Digg effect recently?
3. Was the blog thriving because of the authors personal branding?
4. Get the detail report of their earnings. Make sure it’s not PPP or any affiliate sales.
5. Contact the existing advertisers to see if they will continue the ads if you buy the site.
6. Make sure the site hadn’t got a backlash from Google because of PPP or text link ad sales.
7. Check if Google ads are banned.
8. Check in archive.org for recent drop in Google ranks (PR drop).
9. Monitor traffic and cash flow for a longer period than specified.
10. Check if you are comfortable with the blog Niche and there’s future potential to it.

Some SEO aspects you must check before buying a blog/website(Just my two cents).

1. Age of the domain, from Archive.org. If the niche is promising, then you can compromise on the age, but the more the age, the better.
2. Incoming links on Google, Google blog search and Technorati. The more the merrier.
3. Quality of incoming links - Are they bought from link farms or are they genuine from blogger’s review?
4. Recent Google backlash? Google page rank drop?
5. Had the site offered PPP and paid text links?
6. Outgoing links - Does it link to malicious sites(mainly from the sidebar/footer)?
7. Content has duplicate content or not?
8. Has it got supplemental results on the SERPS? The less the better.
9. The frequency of posts to links ratio. An even ratio is better.
10. Spiderability of the site. Test with a spider simulation test to see if the contents are poperly seen by Google, or else you may have to go for a template change.

If you had been knowing the website for too long all this factors won’t really matter, but if you can probably negotiate with the seller if you find something interesting here on the above factors.

So there you have it! All the factors you must check before buying a blog. Hope they are also useful for bloggers who plan to sell their sites. Because you heard it from the experts.

Managing ads on Wordpress is quite a tedious process, especially when you have a template that shows bright yellow/black on white error messages when you try to tweak it (I guess that’s an error most of the time from the other end and not the template, though we firmly believe otherwise).

So I thought bloggers running on wordpress might be interested to learn about the best Advertisement manager plugins available to them, while discarding the stupid ones. Here goes..

1. Shylock AdSense Plugin
   The best one in the category and a must must to all WP bloggers ( % stars ).
   This plugin allows you to show AdSense (or any other ads) on posts at various places (top, bottom, midle, top-left etc) and based on how old the post is. You can configure more than one AdSense code to it.
   I’m running this on DailySEOblog and strongly recommend it.
   Get plugin here.
2. Who sees Ads
   A great idea in plugin form.Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions like whether the user is referred from a search engine like google, or he is a direct visitor or referred from another site.
   Based on these user conditions, the ads are either triggered or not triggered.
   This plugin is extrememyl good to increase your AdSense CTR. Why? In AdSense if your impressions (which are not clicked) can be minimized, then your revenue will increase. With this plugin, you select whether you should display the ads to one particular section of visitors (like regular readers) or not thereby minimizing the chances of wasteful impressions.
   Get the plugin here
3. Chitika eMini malls
   This plugin allows you to put a Chitika eMiniMall right into the body of the blog post. There is also a convenient button in the editor to customize keywords, colors etc. Good for bloggers who have been banned on AdSense and looking for other income streams.
   Download plugin here
4. AdSense Manager
   This is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets. It can also be used to manage text and image based ads.
   Download plugin here
5. WP-Ads
   A very good plugin for managing non-Adsense image banner ads. Easily configurable and very effective. It can be automated to make random banners appear on different positions on your blog.
   Download plugin here

Managing ads on Wordpress even without these plugins is possible but at some point of time it tends to be tedious and an automated way can be much helpful. If you plan to insert AdSense/Image banners in your template, all you have to do is tweak your respective template (like sidebar.php), but when you change the theme, the ads may disappear, but in a plugin’s case it’s likely to remain if no other errors occur.

DailySEOblog had already featured Suhas Gopinath as the world’s youngest CEO in the world sometime earlier. The story was about a guy who made it big owning a company at the age of 17. But hey! That’s old story.

Meet Ashwin Ramesh, the “Youngest CEO in India. Probably the youngest in the world.”

I met Ashwin at the SearchCamp Chennai and was deeply impressed with his skills and am sure you too will be. He is CEO to OrganicApex a company which is into SEO, SEM and SMM services. He started his first firm when he was 15 years old and evolved into Organic Apex. Today Organic Apex has branches worldwide and employs around 35 people.

I managed to interview the man and this is the first of it’s kind interview he’s given ever. Exclusive to DailySEOblog.

How much money do you make per month?
- That is something which I cannot say that openly but yeah, its a good amount. I reinvest most of the profits I make..

What is the size of your company?
- Almost 35 people ( as per my knowledge )

What services do you offer?
- Organic SEO, PPC Related Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing Solutions

What opportunities do you see forth?
- I see an imminent boom in the Internet sector resulting in people everywhere trying to monetize on it.
But as always, only the early birds will really make loads of cash and also Internet Marketing is going to be HUGE ( h1 tags for that? )

What is your current business model?
- We currently do direct sales marketing ( does that make any sense? ) for our services and I do have a set of web ventures which are doing pretty decent for the time being.

When did you start this business?
- I started this about a year back and before that i was here and there into Adsense and affiliate marketing.

What actually made you think about it? Please describe how things rolled out.
- Well, that’s a very very long story.

A friend of mine ( or should I say mentor ) told me that he got his first Adsense cheque. I didn’t know what the heck Adsense was and i though “WTF! When he can do it, I can too”.
I started out with my first blog trying to monetize on Adsense but miserably failed.
I was making 0.00$ a month from Adsense and I decided to resort to click fraud, I worked with click fraud till i made 99$ on my Adsense account and my account got banned just then. That small mistake of mine, is costing me a lot now…
Once Adsense was done with, I met this guy who taught me affiliate marketing and clickbank, I did make a little money with it but wasn’t satisfied.

Then there came Mr. SEO Guy…
He was this guy who was 1 year elder to me who was bragging to me about his BIG SEO FIRM ( which turned out to be bogus ) and his large kitty of earnings.
I obviously got jealous and set out to create my own firm and made enough money freelancing from home to create a fully functioning unit.

Were there any bottlenecks during this time running your business? How did you overcome them?
You Bet! Being a Young Entrepreneur in India Sucks! Especially if your from a very conservative family like mine.
My dad wanted me to become a software engineer and it took a whole load of persuasion and a not or recommendation from my uncle to really make him have a look at the potential in this industry ( I’m sure my dad would agree now that it was stupid to call this a waste of time now )
I still face these bottlenecks - Formal Education.

It gets very tough pursuing formal education and running a firm.
Worse cause people in school don’t understand what I’m doing ( I’m nicknamed foreigner after I told them that I might be going to Adtech NY this year )

Actually, none of my teachers know what I’m doing and I wouldn’t want them to know.

Most of the people I meet think that everybody who makes cash must wear a costly sneaker or own a BMW car - That is dip shit ( inspired by Mr. Someone from Taiwan at SearchCamp )

PS: I get a pocket money of 25 cents a day
PPS: MY bank account is in my mom’s name.

Anybody else in my shoes would have dropped out of school, but I still stick to school because I think I should be DIFFERENT ( Lets see how long that lasts )

If other people were to take inspiration from you, what would you recommend them?
I really don’t know.
If my story inspired you, maybe you should keep this in mind ” Always do what you want even if someone tells you not to do it - They’re telling you not to do it because they couldn’t do it or think it cant be done ”
( Flicked from the movie “The Pursuit of Happiness” )

What are your future plans?
Short Term:
Make Organic Apex the Largest Organic SEO Firm in the World ( IS that too BIG? - Then lets settle for Asia )
Long Term:
To create something which would make everyone else would look up and take notice at ( A competitor to one of Google’s products )

I want to do so many things one of which would be to clear the Internet of people projecting themselves to be nice guys but clearly trying to make cash. 

Did you know that you can ask your SEO related questions to me through this contact form or by emailing me?

We have an interesting question today from Prashant P. Prashant is a newbie blogger and is looking for answers to the following SEO related questions.

1) How do I get a site listed on top of a search engine. This sounds really silly, I know. But, will it be of any use if I use meta-tag? I have heard, search engine crawlers ignore whats given in meta tag.

Answer: It indeed sounds silly asking that question Prashant. Getting to the top of Google SERP’s is not impossible. A clever mix of strategies that suits you best, can ensure you top ranks on Google. It differs from each site to site. Many of the times, SEO techniques employed are unique optimized content generation, on site optimization, link building and overdoing your competition.

Regarding metatags, Yes it will help you to some extent. But meta tags alone can’t help you straight up the SERPs. Search Engines do not cimpletely ignore Metatags, but it’s no longer a factor that will give you edge over others. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, meta tags improves your blogs quality and increases it’s chance of being clicked from the SERPs by a user. But in the first place you blog has to appear in the SERPS, for that you should rely more on other onsite SEO factors.

2) Will a site get listed higher, if I fill in junk text and hide it? For example, if I have a site on ayurveda can i fill it with random text related to ayurveda and then hiding it?

Answer:This is black-hat-seo. Meaning, it will kill your site or blog if implemented. Google have clearly stated in it’s guidelines that such sorts of back-hat methods can straight take your site down and even banned on Google. Please refrain from the following back hat methods.

- Creating doorwawy pages

- Buying links

- Creating hidden texts

- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords

3) Does every search engine work the same way?

Answer:Yes they work almost the same way. Though they have differences in displaying data (on the SERPs), they collect data more or less the same way.
Example: Submitting a single sitemap through your robots.txt file will ensure that all search engines pick up the same sitemap from your site. But they may take into other consideration other factors and treat them differently before displaying your site on their search results page. Which is why, for the same keyword, you get different rankings on different search engines.

Further reading recommendations: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Hope I’ve answered your questions. Readers who’d like to ask me a question can either ask it through the contact form or email me.

UPDATE - You an ask questions here as well.

Are you tired writing articles on your blog ? Can’t find topics to blog about? Losing out on the frequency of posts on your blog ?

Worry not. There are plugins to your rescue. Confused? Well, you should be. We’ve heard about numerous ways to help you write more articles on your blog.

Allow guest blogging, find more topics, ask questions to readers etc… Well, we have a brand new option now.

Allow visitors to submit posts/articles to you. Yes, allow all visitors (including all of them without any registration what so ever) to submit posts to you.

You know that your readers have a lot of contributions to make, but they don’t have a platform to express it. At the moment what they have is a contact form or email contact with you. If you are allowing guest blogging it again requires one to register first and then apply for a position etc. This filters down content and finally only a few make it.

But how about letting everyone contribute articles to you? Cool isn’t it?

This plugin does just that! It provides a submission page where in just like the ‘contact me’ page, users can submit articles to the admin of the blog.

The articles get saved as drafts in the dashboard where from the admin can publish the articles if found good. You can even allow special users to directly publish the posts. And you can also ban IPs from posting.

My only concern is about spam. Luckily, the submissions are saved as drafts only (except for the trusted users) so you can very well delete spam from the dashboard. but if there are too many of them (like how they normally are), then it may go into a waste-of-time exercise mode, deleting spam manually.

But this seems to a good plugin to increase the number of posts in your blog and as well as give privilege to users and gain their confidence by allowing them to participate in the blog. A must try for people running out of ideas to blog.

Download the plugin here
Test page here

I had to write about this. There are lot of fraud SEO’s around. No doubt. Many of them somehow downloads a pirated copy of some popular SEO book ( there are many around ) and becomes SEO’s overnight (That’s not my idea - I read it on the DP forums ). Now they go on to set up a one - page website with a Google, MSN and Yahoo logo with a dart picture (un-licensed) saying something like “The world’s best SEO - Rank No.1 guaranteed “. Have you seen one?

It’s easy to make them out as frauds from their overly detailed testimonials and super-duper client list (Some even have Yahoo on the client list - what the..?). It’s essential for genuine SE optimizers to make aware the public on these frauds and hence this post.

This post is inspired from this article by Philip Lenssen. I thought this post might enlighten you to make out between fraud SEO’s and genuine one’s from their claims. Though Philip has mentioned many white-hat terms here, I think it’s OK to assume that many of them are used by fraud SEO’s than genuine ones.

He says

In the SEO industry agencies, experts and even bloggers have adopted a special mode of speech not to say slang that might be misunderstood by outsiders like clients, website visitors or the general public. To help you understand what search engine optimization experts really mean I devised this real glossary of SEO speak:

And here is the article -

What they say…
What they mean…

We offer Search Engine Optimization/SEO
We assume you are the Google bot and want you to index this page for both keywords

We offer Search Engine Optimisation
Our SEO company is based in the UK

Guaranteed top positions
We place Google Adwords for you

We do SEO, SEM, PPC to increase your ROI
We do not want you to know what we do

We stick to the Google Webmaster Guidelines
We only break them in a way that we assume Google won’t notice

We tell you how to make money online
We want you to click on our ads

10 ways of making money online
Those are our 10 affiliates, please click on the respective undisclosed ads

We offer social media optimization
We got several accounts banned at Digg

We offer link baiting services
We want to put those drunk naked ladies video on your site

Our network
Our link farm

Authority sites
Sites that do no SEO

Black hat SEO
We do anything to get rich quick, even if your site gets banned

White hat SEO
We only cheat Google where we have to, others do it too, come on!

We optimize for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask
If we fail in Google you still have to pay

Search Engine Submission
We need your mail address, those guys offered us $$$ for each 1000 verified addresses

Partners
People we never heard of until we exchanged links

PageRank optimization
Sorry, we just started doing SEO and do not have a clue

SEO India
We offer 1000 links for 30$

Alexa optimization
All our employees have the Alexa Toolbar installed, it really works!