Just logged off from the Google Webmasters Tricks and Treats event and it was fun and tiring !

The session started off with presentations from Googlers on various topics such as “Myths in SEO” and ended with a vibrant question answer session on the Google Moderator tool. The panel was awesome with Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik in the lead, and some 400 plus SEO’s and Webmasters in the chat !

It was exciting to be a part of the discussion because this time around, we got to listen the “real stuff” from the horse’s mouth. And what more can we get ?

Here are some of the interesting questions and their answers.

Keyword density is not something you should be keen on

Adam reinforced this once again that there is NO particular percentage keyword density that webmasters need to follow on their pages to “artificially” highlight keywords. The focus is more on relevancy of the page as a whole and just by increasing the keyword density and using variations of it, one cannot force search engines to get “ideas” off a page.

Shared IPs and Penalizations

There is no such thing as “ill effects” of being on a shared IP. Google understands that exclusive IPs are not within everyone’s reach and it is not a webmasters fault that he is on a shared IP. In fact,what’s more important is the content of your website and who links to you, than who shares your IP. It is very possible that you are the only non-porn guy on a shared IP, which is shared with 99 of the porn/poker/pharma guys. That does not mean that you are going to be penalized. But as usual, if you don’t have any valuable backlinks or popularity, you should not blame it on the ip for not enjoying the positions on SERPs, It’s probably a problem with your content.

Good quality servers are preferred to cheap ones

Google also suggested that quality servers are better than cheap ones as cheap ones prefer to accommodate a lot more websites than the normal rate and tend to give more down times and glitches. This may not help the user and in turn the search engines. Try to stick to a reliable host with decent uptimes and less crashes.

Does W3C validation score affect the ranks?

Apparently, no. W3C validation is again more a technical thing that not all would be aware of. Imagine a yoga teacher designing a page himself with valuable information. If his page does not validate, that does not mean that his information is bad. So google gives more importance to the relevancy factors of a site than the W3C validation issues.

A lot more SEO stuff was discussed at the event, that it was overwhelming. There were as usual lot of questions on penalizations and “I lost my PR F*&%^ you Google” kind of questions on chat, but I think the folks at Google made it clear again that those are the things you should ignore, and focus more on the user experience.

Make a site for the users, give them access to more valuable information, and let your SEO side take the backseat. If you are good stuff, the crowd will vote you up and we trust the crowd – was the ideology Matt Cutts and his team was trying to propagate. And I think that makes sense.

This is for all the AdSense lovers out there, who have their blogging network thriving on AdSense.

There are situations when your much earned traffic does not really pay off on AdSense right? Like for instance, imagine you had 10,000 page views on a day and another day you have 5,000 page views.
1,000 clicks were made on each day, but you made more revenue on the second day compared to the first day.

I won’t be able to tell you the exact reasons why this happened as there are metrics beyond our reach that decides the revenue like “Click source” “Ad value” etc. For example a click from a US ip may give you more value for a click from Pakistan. Similarly a click on one ad may give you less revenue than another even though the number of clicks are same.

Essentially, it is evident that there are these “unknown factors” that decides the average CPC.

But one known fact is that if you are able to display ads to only the targeted crowd, and avoid displaying it to crowds that are likely to generate less revenue or are less likely to click on ads, then you have a better chance to generate more revenue.

One such target is “Search Engine traffic”. Traffic from search engines are basically “information seekers”. They don’t want to stick with one website. If they find the information they are looking for on your website, great. But if you are able to provide leads to other website that might have the information, that’s fine too. So, they are likely to click on your ads and link provided. So, why don’t you create a win-win situation out of this?

An ideal situation for generating maximum value and revenue from your AdSense ads would be to :

- Display ads to the crowd that’s “craving for information”
- Not display ads to the “Ad Blind” crowd
- Selectively chose the posts and categories that you want the ad to show up (so that you don’t end up showing low value ads)

To accomplish this, here’s a plugin from OZ, called “Who Sees Ads“. It’s been there for quite some time, but I’m unsure if anyone have used this plugin to this aspect.

- It helps you to selectively show ads, like for instance, it can show ads to users coming from search engines.
- It alows you to create custom criterias to selectively show ads (use this feature wisely)

Another plugin that will help you get selective with ads is the “Why Work Adsense plugin“

On this plugin, you can : -

- Select not to display ads on particular posts by providing their ID.
- Select the time frame after which a post will carry an ad after publishing.

In my opinion, it is safe to remove ads from posts that are intended to the social media like StumbleUpon. Because Stumbleupon crowd is not bothered about your ads and they are ad-blind. And while there are thousands of impressions coming from them, it is wiser to protect your effective CPC, by reducing “non-clickable-impressions”. (I may be wrong but share your thoughts on this, please.)

Install these two plugins today, if you have bee using already try out these methods to selectively display your ads, and see if it generates more revenue for lesser pageviews. Works for me, hope it will work for you too.

Appealing and impressive - That was my first thoughts on trying this guy out.

Psst..(Social Median, was opened to public today)

Socialmedian is a social news network that focuses more on
personalized news and information. And I think they’ve very much used the “personalization” thing to delightful levels. (Details on how Social Median works)

I’m doubtful if I’ve experienced a good social media networking like this guy ever before, just like it promised, I could find three social media enthusiasts from India, I haven’t seen them anywhere on the other channels, but this guy helped me. I think that’s point proven.

The “Snip” feature is a charm and I’m sure many are going to use it instead of the usual IM thing, unless something strange happens. But I think it’s a cool tool.

What I’d be interested to see are news from my selected websites updating quickly so that, SM will be my first and only place of visit to get connected to the crowd and the news sources.

There are news networks available where by similar minded guys can share and network togethere and there are quite some interesting ones, that look very promising.

I think Social Media takes off the pain of three processes.

a) Keeping updated with News sources
b) Staying in loop with social networks
c) Connecting and communicating with similar minded folks

We’ll have to wait and see how quick and bug free this guy is, but at the moment, it’s looking all rosy to me at least.

I’m here on SM, meanwhile and I’ve created an Indian Bloggers Network as well, please join if you are a Social Media Enthusiast, I’m sure it’s going to be fun.

A better written title is half the job done.
Titles would be the most important SEO factor I’d chose if you’d ask me to select one important factor that directly affects your SE ranks and at the same time takes care of your readers “likeability”.
While it’s a fact that the same title cannot (mostly it does) satisfy both your readers and the robots alike, let’s attempt to get as close as we can to that level.

Why cannot titles be as good on SEO and users?
- The reason is that the two are entirely different. For SEO, you might have to use keywords extensively, to the level of repeating them to gain your edge on the search engines. While as for users, they don’t necessarily need to enjoy your SEO “tricks” where you’d put your keyword first, then your secondary keyword etc..they don’t even care what your keyword is. They like titles that are attractive and has a meaning to it.

So, when you want to write meaningful titles while not losing out on SEO, what do you do?

1. Guess out all the variations you can think of your primary keyword.
2. Use Delicious, Digg and other social bookmarks (food for thought*) to find out what are the best alternative (sometimes original) keywords for your primary keyword
3. Find out stories related to the primary keyword that are most popular on the social media sites (more food..)

Now, logically analyzing the above, draft an attractive copy embedding the keyword while ensuring a fancy title. i agree it may sound lame, but when you are in situations that are likely to look stupid on you, I guess the lame way is the best one out.

This way you can ensure that -

1. You use the crowd power and folksonomy to pick up the most popular keywords, so you are not using anything out of this world or out of your imagination. It’s there and liked by the crowd.
2. You are likely to write a better looking and acceptable copy without letting ooze out your creative juices!
3. You don’t lose out on SEO, as you’ve done a better and up to date KW research.

As for the other times, when you have the luxury of drafting your own titles with the unique content you have, I’d say, forget this tip, but in difficult times, try it, see what difference it makes.

Stumbleupon is no doubt the best targeted traffic source available today. But unfortunately there is very less information on how to use or utilize stumbleupon to the maximum. We all know that some people do it better, while some are awesome with SU. There are no secrets, buy some lesser known or lesser used features on Stumbleupon that helps the power user.

I might sound like a fool if I said that nobody knew about these, so these are likely to be known by some while it might be news for the rest. Let’s see.

1. Quick stumbles with “From the page” review
   You can highlight any text from any page and clik the “review” button, so that the text will automatically appear with a “From the page:your text” format in the review column. When discovering a new site, just highlight the text and click thumbs up. The text will automatically fill in.
   So hereafter, no need to write reviews for each submission.
2. Increase your productivity with shortcuts
   Go to “Toolbar Options” and assign shortcuts like “CTRL+S” etc to thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. This will make your stumbling easier.
3. Subscribe to Tags not just topics
   You can subscribe to tags as well, not only to topics. It is done via the ‘tag page‘ (it’s also accessible through Preferences ? My interests) by choosing a tag and clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button on the upper right of the tag’s page.
   Since there are more tags than topics, and tags are likely to be more relevant to the crowds tastes, it’s a good idea to subscribe to them.
4. Thumbs up images in jiffy
   If you come across images on a site, right click on the image and select the “Stumbleupon Photoblogit” menu. It wil quickly add a rating for the image. No need to find the images URL and then go rate it. Two clicks saved!

Today, we have with us an interesting personality - Neil Patel, co-founder of ACS.
Neil is a respected authority in the social media arena. He’s a man the industry looks upto for his experience with the social media and seo, which explains why he’s a much sought after Marketing Consultant today.

Thanks Neil for this interview, next time we’ll have an audio one, people always love to listen to you.

1. How did you start with Social Media, when did you recognize the potential and how did you get involved with it?

I got started with social media once I noticed that people were getting thousands of links from sites like Digg.com. The way I got started was by first networking with the top users who were successful on these sites. By interacting with these users they taught me how to leverage the social web so that I could be successful.

2. Which is your personal favorite and which works best for business/clients?

Not sure exactly what the question means, but if you are referring to social sites… then my favorite is Facebook. If you have a successful application on Facebook you can consistently get over 20 million pageviews a month.

Although Facebook is my favorite site, it doesn’t work well with all clients. Due to this, I would have to say that Digg is best for business/clients. It is much easier to leverage Digg than it is to leverage Facebook.

3. Everyone is talking about getting on the front page of Digg and being popular on SU, Is that all to it, or do you think efficiency is measured in any other way on these tools?

It may sound easy, but there is a lot to leveraging Digg and StumbleUpon. Success can be measured by getting on the front page of these sites, but ideally it should be measured by the amount of traffic/links you get.

4. I’ve read that you’ve done something on YouTube as an experiment that taught you the potential of social media (especially with videos), could you explain us what was it and how did it happen?

I have no clue what you are talking about.

Overall YouTube is a great site to leverage. Because of universal search you can create videos and get them ranked for competitive terms on Google.

The only experiments I can recall were faking views to see how many days in a row I could get a video to be number 1 on YouTube. Or how few links you can point to a YouTube video so that it would rank for competitive terms. And lastly, how many users I could force to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

5. Now, big brands like Virgin and Coke are opting for social media marketing, recognizing the potential of online space. Could you please tell me your thoughts on it?

I think it is great that companies want to embrace the social web. Once more large brands start leveraging it, social media marketing will become more mainstream.

One thing I think many companies don’t realize is that you can’t control what people think of you; especially on social web. Due to this some companies may end up with a sour taste in their mouth.

6. What according to you is a good strategy (generally) for offline retail brands to adopt when they get to the online space? (Like Nike)

I think it is good for companies to adopt it when they get into the online marketing space. But before they try and jump in, they need to try and understand how it works.

7. Personally I believe Social Media Optimization is dead. Agree/ Disagree - what are your thoughts on it Neil?

I don’t think it is dead. I think it has just really started to become mainstream. More people are leveraging the social web and more companies and getting budgets for social marketing.

8. Digg, SU, Sphinn, Mixx now there are lot of them and each has a typical character to it considering the user behavior - If I were to ask you to match these sites with a particular crowd, how would it be? Ex: - Digg = Geeks?

I wish it was as easy as Digg = Geeks, but as these sites keep on evolving more people are starting to leverage them. Due to this it is hard to say that one persona type uses each site. For example on Digg people who are into politics also love the site and in many cases these users are not geeks.

9. Are there any “loop holes” available in the Digg system still? We’ve heard you knew a couple of them earlier.

Not really anymore. There are still things you can do like build powerful accounts or network with other members, but the best loop hole is to write great content. Sadly, writing good content isn’t much of a loop hole.

10. Suppose “Mani Karthik of DailySEOblog” is a new entry to the online space, what would you recommend as a strategy to me to get popular on the social media.

Best advice I could give is writing really detailed content such as how to guides. Things that are timeless usually do well and build the most links

How to get on top of Digg? How to get popular on Digg? How to get a front page Digg?
These are questions being thrown upon day in and out at the forums, at the coffee club and everywhere bloggers get together. Everyone wants to know how to get to the top quickly with the minimum effort. It would be nice if someone found out a hack that helps anyone to get on top of Digg in 24 hours. Unfortunately there have been none so far, but yes there are theories flying around that claim to put you on top of Digg, or make you power users on Digg in even less than 48 hours. I wished if one of them truly worked.

Well, taking into consideration some basics, there are few facts all of them agree on.

• To get a front page Digg, you have to -
  - Be Popular
  - Have lot of “friends”
  - Have submitted lot of stories prior
  - Be popular on Digg
  - Have commented on many articles
  - Be regular with using Digg
  - Have a good reputation on Digg

Many of these points are easy to listen than achieve. For instance, it’s known that you have to have a good “following” or “friends” on Digg to get a top Digg. The reason is that when you submit an article, there has to be enough guys to digg the same without even checking the title, but just because you Dugg it first. Now, this is linked with “Reputation”. One would digg a story you submitted even without checking it’s title, only when they believe that whatever you are digging will be good, the truth may be/may not be right. “Reputation” on the other hand is linked with “Reference”. Where does one find you first? Either they could’ve found you on one of the top Dugg article OR they could’ve “befriended” them. “Reputation” is alos linked with “Image/Brand”. When one first sees you, what do they absorb from your profile? When you have some already top dugg stories, people get the idea that you are a top class digger. OR they might see the number of articles submitted and make out if you are active on Digg or not.

REFERENCE
( Seen first on top diggs/from a friend )
V
NO. OF FRIENDS
( the more the merrier )
V
REPUTATION
( based on latest dugg story/ top duggs )
V
HISTORY
( Topics active in/ top diggs )
V
V
Action : ADD AS FRIEND

So essentially, being a power user on Google has got to do more with “influencing” people and “making friends”.

Keeping all this in mind, here are a collection of resources that are worth a read and bookmarking. The best resources on the internet that will tell you how to be popular on Digg and always hit a front page with your submissions. It sounds a bit glossy, but there is value in each of these articles for sure.

• Become a power user on Digg in 48 hours -Earner’s blog
  Non realistic article, but the theories makes sense.
• Factors that will help get a story popular on Digg - Forum discussion
  A good thread where there are lot of information on the basics. There is some non-sense as well.
• How to submit stories that make to front page of Digg
  Pretty good article that gives a good insight on the behavior of Digg users.
• How to get popular on Digg - 15 Tips
  A presentation that will give you pointers on getting popular. Great illustration.
• What type of content is popular on Digg?
  A cool article that illustrates the crowds behavior and how you can utilize it. The statistics are awesome.
• Tuning your content for Digg
  Chris G has a small write up on writing content that is favorable and “likely” to get popular on Digg.
• Tips from a top 10 Digg user on how he made it to the top of Digg
  John TP extracts the best of tips from a active top 10 digg user.
• How to get on top of Digg
  Not a great article, but some excellent pointers on the importance of titles.
• How to be a top Digg user?
  Interesting article, especially the mentions on the shady practices and why you shouldn’t do them.

There are many more articles available, but many of them are repetitive and does not pass any value at all. Hence you won’t find them in this list.

Just got a nudge from the Proto.in guys that their brand new event for the season is happening this July 18-19 at Delhi. If you don’t know what Proto.in is, you must’ve been living in a cave !
The Venue for the upcoming edition of Proto.in is finalized in the halls of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, for the dates of 18th and 19th (Friday, Saturday).

This time around, the guys say that they’ve raised their standards and only the best of the best companies will make it to the stage. That’s interesting to hear - something worth following.
The Proto folks are expecting a good crowd of 600-ish technology related guys to turn up, so it’s likely to be a good event worth attending.

Also, the Proto guys have offered two blogger’s passes for two regular readers of DailySEOblog. It would cost you Rs.500 otherwise. So if you’d want to be there, do let me know.

The official Proto.in blog
Proto.in on twitter

Many a times, I get asked, what do you do in social media marketing? And before I answer, there would be a warning saying - I already submit to Digg and other social media sites…so what is it that you do apart from that?

That’s an interesting question altogether. The fact is that social media marketing is not just about Digg, or submitting to a few sites as Digg. There is a much larger picture to be revealed.

Submitting to Digg is in itself a big chapter. We’ve discussed it on this article and this one.

Anyone can submit to Digg. But not all of them get popular, be it a great story or not. There are strategies you must follow while submitting to Digg, a lot depend on who the submitter is, what the crowd is, what your story is about, who are your contacts, how long have you been digging…and 1432 other things as well. And that’s exactly the reason why everyone’s story isn’t the top dugg one. Precisely, that’s why you need experts help on it.

Coming back to social media, there’s more to it than Digg. It’s about connecting the dots. Between you and your target audience.
Your target audience is spread out and scattered everywhere on the internet. But what’s interesting is that every online entity has a target audience. Be it a porn site, a scientists blog or a movie review blog. The problem why your site is not popular is because you have either not connected to your audience at all or that you are with the wrong audience.

And the initial step of a social media marketing campaign is to find your target audience, define them and track them. Studying them for their behavior and delivering them “food” is the final stage of social media marketing. It almost ends with it. Post this phase, you start getting results and the beauty is that the bounce rate is very minimal unlike SEO.

So essentially, Social Media Marketing doesn’t end with digg or SU, it only starts there. A careful full stretch social media marketing goes through as many processes and steps as a market researcher and an ad-agency would go through combined with that of an SEO. It is a healthy combination of all that, and only someone who is well verse in all of these fields can help you through a successfull social media marketing campaign, or else you get stuck with a few submissions on digg with one number diggs.

It may be a big deal getting lots of fans on Digg. Most of us get minimum ten friend requests daily and there is a whole bunch of friends on Digg.Now, how many shouts do you get on email everyday from all of these friends? Quite some isn’t it? And how many do you reply to or digg? Well, keep the answer to yourself.

The question is - How can you effectively use the friends and community on digg to market your websites on Digg?
The answer probably is in the question itself - You are trying to “market” your sites.

Digg is a community where everyone is on the look out for networking. The basic motive of course is to harness the power of community. Let me take you through the process of “digging”.

Step 1.
Submit a story.

Step 2.
Shout/share it with your friends.

Step 3.
Grow your friend circle.

Step 1 and Step 2 are comparatively easier steps, but what matters most is the third one - growing your network.

How can you grow your network on Digg?

Anyone might have easily guessed that digging the maximum number of stories is enough to take you get popular on Digg.
Well, I don’t know about everyone, but this happened to me. I thought digging the maximum number of articles on digg can get me  popular. And I made it even a practice to digg a good number of articles every day, religiously. But, there was no big difference in the “popularity” as such.

Now, the bigger question is - What do you mean by popularity on Digg?

Well, popularity (or I’d call it power) to me is the power to submit a story and declare that this story is going to get 1000 diggs in the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee and I wonder if the top diggers would say such a thing. But essentially, what all of us are aiming to is to be able to submit a story and when you share it with friends, all of them digging it.

I’d call it the the  Digg Power Quotient.

Digg Power Quotient = (No. of diggs on an article in an hour / No. of friends in the circle) / No. of diggs from the community in an hour

This may not be the best metric though sometimes because we’ve all seen cases where a guy with less than ten friends submitted a story that made it to the top. Excluding all those “miracles”, if there is someone who has a very healthy “Digg Power Quotient”, then I think he has the potential to make a story popular.

This article may not make any sense at all because Digg is an unpredictable community sometimes, and things can work at a totally different pace and dimension than expected, for the good or the bad. But some pointers on how to be a popular guy on Digg is interesting !

What practices will get you popular on digg?

Again, with all the unpredictability taken into account, let me share a few observations.

1 - Digg ONLY relevant articles that are related to your interest.
In the frenzy to get more numbers, people go around digging anything and everything, and end up being everywhere. This may not look good on you if you are trying to build an image. For example, if you are a techno geek who blogs on technology, it makes sense for you to digg through articles in the technology corner and not the fashion and lifestyle section.
The reason is that, when people find that you are more active in one particular category, they’ll derive an impression that you are an authority on that topic and this is good for brand building.

2 - Participate in the community
In the rush to digg more articles, we tend to forget the fact that Digg is a community. A very sensitive community. Digg’s popular members are all very well networked and communicate with each other a lot on the digg platform. They see it more as a place to share thoughts with like minded people. And anyone who can’t adapt to this, may stand out of the crowd. And handling things single handed is not a good idea on digg.

3 - Comment as much as you digg
Rather than digging or submitting much , try commenting more, at least as much as you digg, and you will see the results. Commenting is a good way to generate interest among the community and gain trust. Here again, you got to really genuine while commenting or you’re gonna get burned out spamming.

4 - Create a circle of “trust worthy” friends
Friends are always good. The more the merrier. But make sure they are “trust worthy”. By trustable I mean, you got to make sure that whenever you send a shout, you get the story dugg by him. Well, it is not possible all the time, but a 90% hit ratio is satisfactory.There are a lot of guys who’ll add you and keep bombarding with shouts, at the same time never responds to your’s.

5 - Don’t digg stupid articles
Aww…did someone had to tell you this? These days there are lot of “spam” being submitted to digg. The titles make no sense, neither the description, nor the URL. If you are on a digging spree, it is most likely that you’ll digg one of those articles. So keep away from them so that, people don’t misunderstand you for a spammer.

6 - Respond well to shouts
Next time when someone see your shout notification in their email, they shouldn’t go “Oh no!  Not that guy again! “. The simple solution is that you have to respond well to others shouts whenever they send you one. Only then will the community recognize you a trust worthy guy.

7 - Create trust among the community
This is probably the most important and significant thing out of all these stuff mentioned here. And probably the most non-comprehensive. It is easy to talk about it, but to measure as to how much of it you actually earned is quite difficult. Simply because there are a lot of metrics that go into it, and it takes time to gain trust.

8 - Sharing is the key
While digging keep asking this question - “When is the last time I dugg a story just because it was interesting?” n
Essentially, the idea is to keep digging interesting articles from the web so that you can share it wit the world. Keep away your marketing interests and genuinely participate in the community. It will reward you.