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.

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.

First off a clarification. Links aren’t everything that can get you higher ranks on Google.Yes, links can be the most weighed metric, but it definitely is not the single thing that will help you get ranks.

Somehow, there are many people who are adamant to believe that links are everything. These days, webmasters are very particular about link building and some of them have even collected some dirt and dust in the whole process that it annoys you.

By dirt and dust I meant some common misconceptions about link building. Here goes.

(These ideas were collected from numerous “SEO gurus” who claimed that they are “Link building experts” on a couple of Google groups.)

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.

It is unfortunate to know that many SEO’s agree to the above and in rare cases even get confused.

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.

Completely wrong. Aaron Wall might have referred something along these lines in his SEO book (which was released years earlier mind you.), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it in these times of SEO 2.0

Sure the volume of links are a great metric that will push you forward but, more than the number it’s the quality that matters. 100 links from different directories is not good while 10 contextual links from blogs can cut the competition.

- Directory submission is the secret weapon.

Did you know that Google keeps an eye on the most popular directories and keeps them off the authority brackets? Aaron did not mention it in his book, as a matter of fact. Directory submissions are only a push factor to your ranks. I think a well crafted mix of backlinks from some real good contextual text and some “respected” directories will make it an irresistible combo while backlinks from directories alone is futile. 

- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.

Last day I got contacted by a link building expert on chat. He asked me if I had a PR4 website, I said yes and he demanded the URL (To test if it’s really PR4). On approval he told me that he’ll give me a backlink for which I have to reciprocate another. I denied. He offered me two links for one. I denied again to which he replied - “OK, I’ll give you 3 links”. On denial again he got frustrated. He asks - “Why? I’m giving you three links from different sites and that also theme based !! You won’t get a better offer than this.” :-p

The funda was that he had a network of websites in his belt and every time someone offers a link he goes for a three way link exchange.

Three way (or for that matter any link exchanges) will not work. They are simply a waste of time.

- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
Sure it does. But what is the meaning of themed websites? One version is that websites which belong to the same category as your’s are themed websites.

Perfect! It is true that getting links from a site that is similar in content to your’s make sense. But I believe the “theme” thingy should come down to a more refined level. You should talk about the paragraph of text surrounding your link to the “themed”, the keyword proximity and keyword density is what should make your link themed. So, rather than finding a site based on it’s category as listed in the blog directory, it makes more sense to hunt links in similar or related content.

So there you go. Getting links to your site is not a mechanical process, it’s largely natural. As the SEO 2.0(more on that in the next posts) rule goes, a compelling content is your biggest link bait. And of course you can cement together your site strength with other factors such as directory submissions and link building etc. But solely relying on artificial methods to link building is retarded.

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.

What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc

Tips and tricks

• Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
• Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
• Use a three column layout. Enough said.
• Avoid content duplication.

TNX.net is a one stop place for both Advertisers and Publishers who’d like to make some quick bucks online. Well, the idea is pretty clear. If you have a blog, you can advertise it on other publishers network at cheap rates and if you are a publisher you can earn money by displaying others ads. Simple as that.

The TNX, website itself has a very user friendly layout and design, where everything is explained at every step. You won’t find it difficult to use it at all. And they have made the registration process too very simple. You just need to give in the minimum details and you’re done!

At the moment, TNX has 41075 users with 31844835 links in the whole system. Pretty impressive!

So how the whole system works on is based on points. You get 2000 points right when you sign up itself. Then for each ad displayed on your site/blog, you get points at TNX and you can redeem it later as money from them.

TNX also has an affiliate program that is easy to step up. Earning money will be an automatic process, once you have the referrals coming in. The pay out percentage is 13.3% for direct referrals which is impressive.

Setting up a TNX publisher account is easy too. Just sign up, install the TNX code on your website, then wait for ther approval which normally happens in less than 2 days, then display ads on your site (max 4), ge the points and redeem them as money form TNX. Pretty simple isn’t it? You can sell the TNX points to the TNX system or other TNX users also.

There is a cool application called income calculator, which on giving in your PR, number of pages and the total number of ads that you are going to display, will give you the amount of money you are likely to make. This is a nice tool just to get you an idea of how powerful TNX is.

For Advertisers, creating an account and finding millions of pages to feature their ads is easy.

The sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy as breeze. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)

On the whole, TNX is a nice place to find and sell ads, and make some money or get some great ad deals for cheap rates. Using it is very easy as they’ve take good care in ensuring that the whole process is kept simple and user friendly.

Have you ever had the chance of having a traditional Indian meal ? For the Indian readers, this question is irrelevant but for the rest of the world, this article might be interesting and mouth watering at the same time.

The (grand) Indian meal is pretty popular, particularly the south Indian one. Once, a foreign friend of mine who had the chance to have one jokingly said, that the thali itself reminded him of the solar system model he learned at school. Huh? He said, the rice is the sun (being at the middle), and there are lot of planets and their satellites revolving around it making it look almost like a solar system.

Well, I’d agree him on all points except that, in the traditional Indian meal, eating the sun won’t burn you, but the curries (the satellites) may, they are very spicy.

Having said that, I think there’s lot of points in common between having an Indian meal and blogging.

1. Template.
   In blogging, it is essential that you have a cool template, good enough to get the attention of the reader. Similarly, in the meals, there’s the template - the plantain leaf. A plantain leaf is used instead of a plate, which must be large enough to carry all the ingredients well.
   Similarity - 80%.
2. Starters.
   In both blogging and the meal, there are the starters. In blogs they are the headers and above the fold stuff. If the starter is good both the meal and the blog is enjoyable. In the meal the starters are placed “above the fold” and also in the blog.
   Similarity - 99%
3. Main course.
   And there’s the main course which is rice and the curries. In the blog, there are the articles in different categories. Having a good main course fulfills your hunger, be it a blog or the meal.
   Similarity - 99.7%
4. Dessert.
   In the meals, there is a always something sweet at the end. It normally would be “payasam”. And in blogging, there are the comments. Comments, though not always sweet, is definitely a dessert!
   Similarity - 59%
5. Addiction.
   Both the meal and blogging is addictive! If you taste it once, whenever you think of one, your mouth starts watering and you can’t get rid of it. Everyday, new tastes, new flavors, a whole new meal !
   Similarity - 70%
6. Widgets.
   In the blog you have the widgets to spice you your blog. Like the Lijit widget or the Mybloglog widget, and in a meal, you have the pickles and banana chips that sits alongside the main template , though very small, adding to the spice of the blog.
   Similarity - 85.6%
7. SEO and the thali meal.
   A thali meal is very much like doing a search engine optimization on your blog. As you know, in SEO, there are some procedures that has to be done methodologically in order to put yo in good shape. Like the keyword saturation and onsite optimization procedures. In an Indian meal, the order of serving the meal is really important. First, the spicy pickle, then some banana chips, then some curries, then the rice, then the sambhar(spicy curry), then the next set of curries!
   It sounds more or less similar right? If you mix up the order neither the meals is enjoyable nor the blog. You have to serve every ingredient in the same proportion.

   SEO - Keyword density - You sprinkle the keywords here and there to meet the right density.
   Meals - Salt - You sprinkle the salt to meet the right density.

   SEO - You make sure that the template is search engine friendly by ensuring a standard three column template with a proper header and footer.
   Meals - The template (plantain leaf) is very much like the template with the header to one side and the footer(tapering end) to another.

Seven reasons to think that an Indian meal is similar to blogging - there you have it. Now, some of the points may sound bizzare, but if there’s at least a 50% similarity that you found, I’d be happy!

I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

I must admit that I agree it’s a professioanl SEO who should do all the work on optimizing a  site, but it’s also true that many of them can be done by the site owner itself. Irrespective of whether he’s a techie or not. Agree or disagree?

So you’ve heard all those Jazz and Jargons on SEO, keywords, meta tags, links, H1 tags, density, anchor text and what not? Phew, quite an overload for a newbie or a non-tech site owner.

This goes out to all the non SEO educated people who wants to do that 5-10 things that will make their site SEO’d for Google. Just do them and sit back, you don’t want to mess with it anymore.

Here goes.

1. Selecting a keyword
   Selecting a keyword is the first and foremost step to SEO. If you don’t have a keyword ready, you are doing SEO like searching for something in dark. Your keyword forms the vital part of your structure, they are the building blocks, so you got to decide what they are.
   One important thing to note here is that when selecting a keyword, you got to see how much competition you’ve got already. For a keyword like “Weight loss”, there is already immense competition, so unless you have the time and money to fight them, it’s better you dodge them and select a new keyword of your own.
   For example, if your site is on outsourced jobs, you probably have to narrow it down to “Outsourced jobs India” or to your locale, so that you create a niche of your own.
   Makes sense right?

   Ok, now you have one or two keywords ready, and you are sure what search terms on Google do you want your site to rank high for. So let’s move ahead.

2. URL Structure
   If you are on Wordpress or not, your URL structure should be SEO friendly. When I say SEO friendly, I mean they should be in a presentable form to the Google spiders. Let’s take an example.
   Non SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/82u83nbdfbdfhcat?12hhre
   SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/88e-free-dvd-rentals?12uk

   As you might have noticed, the second URL carries more information about your website than the first one, which is a more machine friendly one.
   In wordpress, this is pretty easy to do. While, if your site is on a CMS/coded, like Joomla,Mambo, or PHPbb, V Bulletin etc things can get tricky. There is a solution to each and there is no one rule that goes for all of them.

3. Onsite content
   Honestly speaking there is quite a lot that goes in here, and it would be difficult for a non-techie to comprehend, hence I’ll talk only about the bare essentials.

   The textual content on your website (select All, CTRL+A) should be able to give the spiders some information about your site and the products. This is vital. If you can’t do this, then there is a lot you are compromising.

   So tweak the landing pages textual content so that your keywords are sprinkled evenly. Don’t over do it. A text to keyword ratio of 5-6% is just fine.

   You can repeat this on all the pages at your site, and make the textual content in them optimize for the keyword. This will help in the overall worthiness of your site. Remember…don’t over do. It may lead to trouble.

4. Others onsite factors
   I’ve put all the other onsite factors to one category because each of them are not significant on their own but makes an impression when combined with other factors. These are -
   Image ALT tags - Not really worth, but may help sometimes.
   Change all the ALT names, descriptions and Titles of your images to a sentence that related to the keyword and the content. You may be easily tempted to stuff all your keywords into them, but that is not good at all. It can harm you if you over do it.
   H1 Tags
   Make sure that there are H1 tags in your code, and ensure that your keywords and related clauses are embedded in H1 tags. Spiders pick up content from the H1 tags, and consider them relevant to your site. Again, don’t over do it.
   STRONG
   Make sure that you don’t use BOLD element in your HTML instead, either replace them with STRONG or find a work around. BOLD is only visual while keywords in STRONG are absorbed by the spiders.
   So if you can combine H1 tags and STRONG tags, that is great. If you run into trouble by highlighting unwanted words, use CSS to tweak it and clear the junk out.(Bonus tip )
   Footer Text
   Utilize the footer text, it carries some level of importance on some search engines, because that’s the last thing they see on your site. Make sure that instead of that boring copyright text it’s something related to your keyword that you write. Makes more sense.
5. Off site factors - Incoming Links
   All of you know that incoming links help much in building your authority. Also I often see lot of wrong ideas floating around regarding link building.

   Some wrong ideas about link building that I found popular are.

   - Link exchanges give you authority - NO they don’t. It’s a worthless exercise.
   - Google Page Rank decides your rank on Google results - NO it doesn’t. I can rank a PR1 website over a PR 5 with less effort for a selected keyword.
   - If some porn site (bad neighborhood) links to you, you are in trouble - NO it does not. It will not help you and it will not harm you either.
   - If you get anyone linking to you, it’s good - NO, you should be selective as to who links to you (if at all you decide who links to you).
   - The more the links the merrier - NO, It’s not the numbers but the quality of the links that matters.
   More link building tips here.

6. Sitemap
   Now, assuming that all the above steps are taken and optimized without overdoing it, you are ready to submit your site to Google. For this create a sitemap.

   Remember, this is the final step, so you want to go back and make sure that you haven’t done anything wrong like overdoing keyword stuffing.

7. Promoting your site
   Now that everything is in place, you can start letting the world know that you have a great website. Two simple strategies I’d recommend here are - 1) Submitting to Directories and 2) Submitting to Social bookmarking sites.
   When submitting to social bookmarking sites, make sure that a powerful user notices your site. And don’t immediately sign up for an ID and submit your site. It doesn’t work that way.
   I can help you submit your sites, provided they have quality content if you can add me as a friend at my social networks (see right hand panel top). My recommendation is Stumble Upon, it gives you great traffic.
   I’m not allowed to add any more friends on SU myself, as I’ve reached the 200 limit, but you sure can add me.

So there you have it, the simple 7 steps involved in making your site successful, right from basic SEO to promoting it. If you are comfortable with it, start with Step 1 today and put your site on steroids. Make sure that things are natural and steady any rush can lead to disappointment. If you have any doubts meanwhile, feel free to ask me or hire me if you wish.

One of the ways to ensure that your site get’s more value and google juice is to increase the number of internal links. Internal linking is very good for the following reasons -

• Increases chances of internal pages getting more google juice.
• Increases traffic to your site by providing quality to internal pages.
• Increases page views by showing up more pages through links.
• Gives a better browsing experience for users as they find more cite content.
• Decreases the chance you pages landing at supplementalindex.

One of the ways to increase internal linking is to manually insert links in the sidebar. This is tedious so you may want to use plugins like Recent posts plugin or the Random posts plugin.

Here’s another cool plugin that will help you to increase internal linking - WP Autolink plugin 

This one automatically makes a link to the respective tag from the tag labels itself. This will help users get more valued pages in each tag category labels. Also, increases the internal linking structure distributing the google juice almost evenly in your blog.