Why should you save bandwidth? You’ve got enough of it haven’t you?
You should ask that question to someone who gets lot of traffic, especially from Digg/ SU etc. They’d immediately gulp down anything you suggest to save the bandwidth.

Recently, there have been server breakdowns with many bloggers because of the social media outburst. Many of them did nothing wrong but some ardent reader of their’s picked up one of the stories and submitted to Digg. The story went viral and made it to the top of the Digg’s most dugg pages. Unfortunately the blogger was running on a shared hosting platform and the server could not stand the immediate traffic burst that was created from Digg making it to go crash. The site went offline soon after the story was popular resulting in some bad reputation too.

Now this would happen only if you make it to the top of Digg, anyways it makes sense to save some bandwidth with some common, unharming tips right?
One of the things that eat up your bandwidth is images - when you upload images in wordpress it goes to the default directory - wp-admin/uploads
Now, when ever a story is accessed with the picture on it, file is being accessed and it doubles your bandwidth usage.

What you can do in this case is upload the images to flickr or any other image upload utility so that the image gets accessed from there and not your server.

Now, I know how hard it is to upload image to flickr while you are writing a post, it takes another 10 minutes of your time (unless you are using the upload function from the Flock browser).

So here is a wordpress plugin that will help you upload images to flickr just the way you do it on wordpress. Yes, while you are writing the post with no extra time lost.
Download the plugin here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter has become a rage. Many bloggers have got into it so much that they’ve started to quit blogging. Some think that twittering eat up most of their time and make them less popular. I’m following like some 98 people and 75 are following me. Every day, there are more followers too.

And let me tell you, this thing is getting messy these days.
So there are 75 followers and 98 that you follow, all of them keep twittering every other second on Gtalk, you try to reply to one with the @somebody tag and nothing happens..You post your tweet…you edit it..tweet again…somebody replies..and that’s about it. What’s the return?

Social Media - did someone say? Ah! Cool. So..being social eh? Well…honestly my friend, it isn’t social. Readers…all of you who get replies for every single tweet on twitter, hands up !
…… None?

Okay, everyone who gets a client signed from twitter hands up…

None?

Hmm..everyone who has subscribers signing up for you through twitter….hands…up??

Ok forget it.

See the point I’m trying to make is that, twittering is essentially bad for bloggers. Really bad.
Here goes my reasons.

1. You are already running out of ideas to blog and with twittering, you end up throwing all of that in two lines.
2. And, no one is interested in your twitters, you don’t find a client in your followers.
3. You think it’s social media, but no one ever talks or take the effort to.
4. Everyone is busy shouting their personal stuff, what they had for breakfast, what they did while sleeping.
5. Blogging superstars lose their charm by offering too much of them up close and in real to the followers (exceptions available.)
6. You tell to the world that you have a serious problem with typos.
7. Whoever is following you either know you directly or through your blog, there are no new acquisitions.

Seriously my friend, I could think of more such reasons but this isn’t doing good at all.
Bloggers, stick back to serious blogging. Don’t shout out to the world what you had for breakfast or what you did while sleeping, you might want to keep it to your immediate circle of friends.
And don’t misunderstand that twitter will bring you new clients or new subscribers to your blog. Who ever is following you are either your readers or your friends.

Essentially, Twitter doesn’t give you anything in return , but only takes away from you - your time, your content and a good major part of your brain.

The Wikipedia says,

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Dailymotion, Hi5, Gather.com, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Squidoo, Last.fm, Twitter, Eventful, ePinions and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Moove and There.com.
The goals of each SMM program or campaign will differ for every
business or organization, however most will involve some form of
building an idea or brand awareness, increasing visibility, encouraging
brand feedback and dialogue as well as to possibly sell a product or
service.

Now, whether you are a social media enthusiast or not, I know for sure that you’ve been using either Twitter or Orkut or Facebook or Linked In just to name a few. So essentialy all of us are hooked to social media one way or the other.
Now, who are the guys who really benefit from social media marketing? Of course, the big guys who are successful in marketing their ideas, their products or their brands (and mad some fortune on it).

Let me be honest with you my friend, I really don’t think the so called A-Listers are worthy enough to be in the social media networks. I mean they shouldn’t be included.

Because,

1. They are mostly confined to a small group of like minders who have vested interests in selling their products and services.
2. They never are honest to so called “no-vices”/common blogger.
   You have to pay them to get a consultation, damn it !
3. They never reveal.
   I understand when Mandrake says - “Magicians never tell”, but over here?? C’mon this is no magic. We are here for sharing information and having fun (I’ve no clue how, but yet, that’s the whole concept).
4. They don’t approve you as friends, while you keep trying.
   Ever heard of someone being invited by an A-Lister into his network? I bet never.
5. They are not here to participate but sell their stuff.
   While the whole idea of social media is about building communities to share knowledge, here is a guy who comes in to sell his e-book !
6. They belong to their own mafia. LOL
7. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer while they are here.
   Not blaming it on them, but yes it’s a fact.
8. A-Listers have a heavy attitude.
   None of them thumbs up or Digg your article, do they? While you might be doing it on their articles daily, to get their appreciation, lol you silly boy !

So there you have it. All the reasons you need to know that the real losers in Social Media are the A-Listers. The Social Media as such belongs to the masses and the crowd, and there’s no stopping them. We belong to the bigger chunk of the population on the Internet, and not the group of A-Listers who are here to sell their products and make you buy their e-books.

Three cheers to the true spirit of social media !! Down with the A-Listers !

Image Courtesy istockphoto

Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.

Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.

All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.

Well, it may happen without your knowledge most of the times, and if you really look for it, you’ll find it. (Damn, I’m sounding like a preacher now.)

Yes, indeed. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it in my earlier days of blogging. But as it grew on me, I could sense some pressure building up. And that’s right here with me as I write this post.

What is the pressure, is it the stress?

Well the Wikipedia definition for stress is  -

Stress is the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the person’s biological, psychological or social systems.

So, that explains it. I constantly get’s questions asked to myself while writing an article.

• Will this article be of interest to your readers?
• Does it make sense?
• Would you run out of topics to blog on?
• Is it of the quality that will make it popular?
• If it get’s popular, would you be able to write a second part to it?
• Are there any errors in the points that you mentioned?

So as long as I’m going to be asked these questions, I think the stress factor is always going to be there.

But it’s just not bloggers right? Everyone goes through it, the news reader, the ceo, the stock broker and the police man. And bloggers are the one group of geeks that stay on the edge all the time, so it’s quite natural.

How does it affect you in blogging?

Positively. You see it’s natural for a blogger to undergo stress, after all, you are competing with the rest of the world to make it to the top. So, I think it’s a good sign to have stress. The point is that you shouldn’t let it grow bigger than you. You got to have a command over it. Once it gains over you, you collapse and things go haywire. So make it a point to keep it to a minimal level and make it a positive virtue.

What can do to get over it?

Getting over stress is easy for bloggers compared to other fields of work. Simply because bloggers have a lot of options, a lot of them. Take for instance the questions I asked you earlier.

Will this article be of interest to your readers? - Just rephrase this question. What is the worst case scenario if your readers don’t get interested in it ? They may not leave comments. They may write a comment criticizing you. What else? Cancel your subscription? Yes may be. But in that case you can write a better article next time. Something that explains the readers who not to be stupid and write stupid articles that make you lose your subscription. You caould take the example of the first post too.

So it’s basically about making the best of whatever you’ve got. If you got a bad writing style, show it to people and say - this is how you shouldn’t write your article. You just passed on some information to them. And, they’ll appreciate it.  

Another way to go about it is to get proactive.

Foresee what your goals are and what the bottlenecks are. Make a comparison, study it well and start gathering resources that will get you over the situation. So when the time comes, you’ll be pretty much comfortable with what you are doing.

So essentially, stress in blogging is pretty much natural, but bloggers are at the luxury of having more options than others. Get proactive and study your weaknesses, you’ll be safe when the testing time comes.

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.

Very interestingly, two emails that came in recently to my inbox from the contact form read similar in content though they were from different readers. Both of them requested a free review of their blogs.

One wanted to know the SEO basics that he needed to tweak while other was asking if directory submissions will do him any good. Both of them makes sense, but it hit me with another idea.

Wouldn’t here be many others who’d be interested in their blogs review? If I could find time, I could go through all of them. But due to time constraints, it might make more sense to review at least a few ones.

So, if there are any bloggers out there who want a free consultation on their blogs SEO, do let me know.
You could also let me know by placing these badges on your blog. I could work in preference with those who place these badges on their sites. Feel free to select one. Once you place the links, make sure that you have those questions ready for me. Drop me an email with your site URL, and I should be able to answer your question.

88 X 31 Buttons

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I hope you’ll ask me meaningful and specific questions like - What keywords to rank for or What link building strategies to opt for. Rather than questions like “How do I make it to the top of Google?” In which case, you’ll land back here.

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.

How often do you twitter? I’m finding myself spending more time on it than ever before. Both of them are easy to handle and cute. Everything about it is so short and sweet, and takes least time to get the best thing done. The best thing implied here is probably a weird thought about a facebook application that I had, or a link to a powerful plugin, or a kickass domain name that just went over my head. We have to admit that on WP, it takes good 15 minutes to do it, while on these cuties, less than 2 minutes? And it’s all so compact and fun!

We all have a liking to tools that are customized and personal right? Some good ones I met recently are these three.

- I like the “Maami” on ibibo, who (reminds me of the Channel V Bai) appears in between and prompts you to fill in your details like address and telephone number. She’s so annoying yet nice with her witty lines. Once she asked me - “You are looking cute in that picture you just uploaded, do you mind giving your telephone number? I promise I won’t call you.” Now I’m sure whoever used that tool enjoyed it. Innovation.

- I also like Tumblr for it’s personalized messages it throws up. When I uploaded a profile pic of mine, it said something along the lines of the ibibo Maami.

- Of course Flickr. Those regional “hello” messages helped me get a name among friends. They thought I traveled to Hawaii and Israel recently.(Shhh!)

For bloggers - There’s this cool plugin that integrates twitter completely with your blog. It’s from Alex King and it’s here(That probably is his 9198423th incoming link.) Another interesting deviation plugin is over here.

Why Twitter and Tumblr?

• Both are extremely flexible yet powerful at the same time.
• Ease of use.
• Has a personalized touch.
• Support is extremely good.
• Helps me in SEO (*food for thought)

Technorati Tags: twitter, wordpress plugin, social media