That’s good news isn’t it? So what does it mean? What does it give to you and your blog?

Well, basically it just means that when you comment on any articles on this blog, the link that you provide is actually getting indexed by Google and some juice is passed over to your blog.

Normally when you comment on any blog, the link is “nofollowed” which means that they will not be traced by search engine spiders, other than Yahoo and some insignificant ones. Now, DailySEOblog is an exception, so if you want incoming links to your blog, all you need to do is write sensible comments on the blog (You are reading t anyway).

So commenting on DailySEOblog has two benefits now.

1 - Get some google juice from the no-nofollow links to your blog.
2 - Get some traffic to your blog from the “latest post” link featured from your blog on the comments.

Why this new change ?

Well, I know for a fact that there are readers out there on RSS readers and other places who read Daily SEO blog on a regular basis and there are some smart and loyal ones like Niyaz who regularly post sensible comments on the articles.
Now, it’s perfectly fair for the rest of them out there not to comment on DailySEOblog, because they don’t get anything out of it. They read the articles and that’s about it. Why should you comment……..? And now you have an answer. For a backlink whenever you need to.

I also realize that this would be good news to the spammers. Well, got to live with it anyway. I’ll be selectively moderating comments and approving them. If there are more, there will be a time limit put on new commenters, before their comments become no-nofollow.

So if you are a regular commenter, your links get indexed quicker than anyone else. Makes sense? What are you waiting for?

—- UPDATE——
The comments will be selectively moderated and keywords/author names that does not give any idea about the author but in turn looks deliberate to drive google juice to the products will not be approved. Ex:- Pharma, Free software, Online games.
However comments that are sensible and makes sense to the community will be approved even though may carry a not so popular name. Consider this a manually approved comments area.

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

Ever had problems finding what your blogs ranks are on the search engines for particular keywords?
Like for instance, if you wanted to check where your blog ranked on Google for the keyword “make money online”, it would be a big task since the keyword itself is very competitive and if you are not problogger or shoemoney, you are probably in the 167th page or worse. So it’s not quite possible to track where your blog is ranking by searching through the Google results right?

Here is a nice tool that will take care of it. Rank Checker is a plugin for firefox that will take care of this task.
All that you have to do is , install the plugin, restart firefox and given in a keyword + URL combination into the plugin page.

Like for instance if you are finding out where the blog “dailyseoblog.com” is ranking for “wordpress seo blog” then give in these two criteria into the “domain” and “keyword” fields respectively and click go. First you add the combination to the queue and then on clicking the “start” button the engine searches for the results.

You’ll be able to get the search engine rank result for Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). There is an option to give multiple keywords and also export the results to a CSV file, enabling you to open it in your spreadsheets. Pretty cool eh? However, one minute problem I faced is that it gave me no option to resize he window, it stretched all the way horizontally and wasn’t really maneuverable.

Install the Firefox plugin here.

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

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

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

We do all SEO services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hey, did you see the SEO Green theme released lately? There were some errors reported from users that made me (well, pushed me) to do the corrections and release a stable version. So here we are. The SEO Green theme has a updated version now.

Here are the issues that were reported.

• The meta info weren’t getting inserted properly on some sites on installing the headspace plugin - SORTED, We have contacted the plugin developer and fixed the problem. Now, the theme is completely ready for the HeadSpace plugin and it’s advanced features.
• The Google Analytics tracking code could not be inserted and tracked - SORTED once and for all.
• The pages links did not update - SORTED once and for all.

If you recall, I insisted that you use the Headspace plugin, and though some users complained about not being able to use it easily, I stand by my word. Please make yourself comfortable with the plugin it will help you a lot.

Anyhow, I understand that the plugin itself is a bit tricky to use for the first time, so here are some tutorials for beginners. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find how useful it is.

Step 1
Install the plugin and go to the Options > HeadSpace > Page Settings and click on Global Settings.
Enter the blog description and page title here (Leave the tags/keywords column free, we’ll do it later). This is actually the global settings of the meta tags, which will be repeated on every page unless otherwise the individual page has a different setting(info on how to do that …down the page).

Step 2
Click on the fifth setting “Posts & Pages”. Enter in the page title and the description.This is the setting that would appear for each pages and individual articles, unless otherwise specified.

Step 3
Now go to Modules menu. This is an important option. This menu basically lets you decide what are the options you want to access from the dashboard while writing a post. For instance, when you create a new post, if you have installed All in SEO plugin, you’d get two extra columns beneath that asks you the meta information. Similarly, in headspace you can decide what are the modules that need to appear in the “write post” page.

By default, the modules available are Page Titla, Page Description and Tags (Seen in the green box left). Now you can see a set of disabled modules to the right (in the grey section). Pull and place the modules that you think you need in the writing page. Ex: No Index/ NoFollow will give you two checker boxes in the write page, asking you whether to include the “No Index/ No Follow” info in the meta tag of that particular article. This is extrememly useful if you want certain pages/article not to be indexed by google (to reduce duplicate content/avoid content issues). There are some cool options available there like page specific themes/ page specific plugins, Google Analytics tracking etc. None of them have SEO effect, so I’m not going to tell about them, you may want to tinker and find out. Make sure you save the module order after re aranging them so that they appear on the write page.

Step 4
Now go to Manage > Metadata menu.
This is the best part. From this menu you can list out upto 250 of your recent posts. And from the drop down menu on the top, select either the Page description/ Page Title/ Site Decription/ Tags and Keywords of the posts to be displayed.
We are interested only in the page title, site description and the tags. So let’s do it one by one.
Click on any one of the criteria and click the green “refresh” button suggested against each post. Within seconds the page description/tags/title will be auto generated.
Unless you are specific on any article, you can pretty well generate the meta information (tags, description and title) for all the article on your blog in a jiffy. Save the info.

Step 5
Now, that’s pretty much about it. All you need to do is to make sure while you write a post, you give a unique page title, description and select the keywords from the ones suggested for each article.

So there you are, install the SEO Green theme and forget about SEOing your blog.

I want to thank Moon Blogger, w3Mixx who helped me with the feedback on using the theme.

And these are the improvements we’ve made in the new version of the SEO Green theme.

• Added more onsite optimization elements that will make your articles/posts SEO friendly by default. You don’t have to muck around with the codes to tweak them. Leave it to us.
• Cleaned up the footer to a more cool design.

Download the updated theme here SEO Green V 1.01. Live Demo

Hey, there’s a cool site that will do just that. Search rapidshare (and some other infamous file storing services) for downloadable files with the name you are searching for.

This is really cool since rapidshare does not allow you to search it’s database while services like 4shared does. Rapidshare is the most popular service for temporary file storage, so this too may come in handy. I searched for “google” and here are the results. Some ebooks and some rar files. A word of warning, there could be illegal/virus infected files. The service does not scan the files for viruses unlike 4shared.

Search Rapidhsare files here.

Keyword density is the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page.

That’s the wikipedia’s definition of keyword density. The total number of times a particular keyword repeats in the whole copy.
Let’s pick an example.

SEO India is a keyword that many people think is getting lot of traffic on the search engines. As a matter of fact, the keyword SEO India is not a high traffic keyword. Also, keywords like Indian SEOs or SEO consultant India and even SEO firm India are ot high volume traffic keywords.
Interestingly, if you’d check the Google trends graph, you’ll see that the term SEO India is being repeatedly searched from India the most. So I’m under the impression that more than the clients who are likely to search for this keyword, it’s probably the SEOs in India who are searching it themselves.

Do you get an idea there?

In this example, out of the almost 100 words used, the keyword SEO India is being repeated 7 times and in it’s variants. So theoretically, the keyword density is 7%.

According to old school SEO, a keyword density of 6-8% is pretty healthy. This can change according to the competition on that keyword.
Having said that it doesn’t suggest you that as you increase your keyword density, the more the chances to rank. No. Beyond a healthy level, the keyword density would be assumed to be spam.

Now, the 6-7% keyword density is the old school SEO. It’s no longer valid or you just can’t depend on it.

Come web 2.0 and a lot has changed on the web. The way pages are created, the way content is sourced and displayed and the way people find information. I’m going to give you an idea of the basic keyword concepts one should follow, while developing dynamic or web 2.0 content on their websites.

1. Keyword authority sculpting
   Keyword authority sculpting is nothing but making sure that the entire copy looks natural to search engines (and humans) by evenly placing keywords at the most important places or nodes in the whole copy text, enabling the webmaster to help the search engines determine their importance and authority.
   For example, your keyword is “red flowers”. First the webmaster have to identify the nodes in the whole copy text, to determine their importance and relevance. This could be elements like H1 tags or STRONG tags. Based on their importance, relevance and priority, place the keywords maintaining individual keyword densities at the nodes. Take a look at the screen shot.Here, you can see that the keyword (Atlanta real estate and it’s variants) is being populated in the whole ad copy in a very high ratio. In fact, the competition for this keyword is really high which is why the keyword density is too high.
   Now, it’s easy for the search engines to make out whether this is spam or not. But where this copy wins is, in the fact that, the keyword is being sprinkled evenly utilizing the importance of other elements on the page. Therefore, the keyword using all it’s variants is being sculpted deliberately to generate an authority to itself which is being passed on to google.
2. Keyword combat
   Earlier you were taught about keyword research - remember ? In order to get maximum traffic to a site, first you need to find out what are the keywords and it’s synonyms that are being searched on the engines by real humans. Pick them up and make copies on it. Simple right?
   But, things have moved on from there. Today, you need to do a bit more research. Research on the types of keywords that are being optimized by competition. How do they rank? What are your scopes of intruding into that territory?
   It’s easier than it sounds like believe me. Many a times, you can get your set of keywords by analyzing the first few competition itself
   Essentially, get the set of keywords that are worth your time, study the patterns on the competitor’s website, see the opportunities and than bang ! Make sure that it does not end with just finding that one “traffic generating keyword”.
3. Keyword variation
   Imagine if your keyword was XXXX and you kept repeating that word every single line to maintain a good keyword density?
   In fact, many “SEO gurus” are doing it. And that’s only what they can do - nothing beyond
   My advice is to find the variations of your primary keyword, find the best combinations with other synonyms as the most searched related keywords of it and make a formula that will work for you.
4. Keyword channels
   Keyword optimization does not end with keyword density checks on a single page or a set of pages. On the older sites, it used to work but not anymore. Search engines know that you’d place the keywords deliberately in your copy and optimize for them. So they look for other options.
   Another way to let know the search engines of your keywords and it’s relevance is by following a pattern in your site structure. Sounds weird? Glad it did.
   Different pages on your website have different authority and importance (Not just Page Rank). As a webmaster, you’ll need to find out as to which are the ones that’s up on the priority list and which are down. Then, doing a keyword study on each page would reveal you as to where are the places you have left untouched and where have you placed the wrong keywords. Find it, and work towards channelizing the keyword importance. Decide for yourself creating a combination of the most important keywords and authority pages. The right mix will give you the best results.
5. Keyword neighborhoods
   The idea about keyword neighborhoods is that while selecting keywords for your website, it’s easy for you to just go about selecting the most traffic generating keywords with the help of a keyword selection tool. True. But what you’ve got to notice here is that, the same keywords that were shown to you might have been taken (or is being researched on) by another webmaster. You don’t want to waste your time optimizing on that keyword. Meanwhile, smart work would be to research on the keywords that are already being optimized, find out as to what the theme of those sites are. How do they relate to your primary keyword. An are those sites in the “bad neighborhood” or not?
   If they are, you might want to skip that keyword and move to another fresh one. (Real smart guys would find an opportunity here too.) This point may not help you to really help you move up the SERPs but, it will help you stay out of bad company and not waste your efforts.

Hey, last week orkut made a small yet significant change. Orkut now allows to search and add your friends from outside the Google circle. Like AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo ! After all, it has probably discovered that all your “old  school buddies” are on other networks, while Gmail was not there. Good thought there.

SEO guru Eric explains to you how you can win over social media websites using authoritative content, and why  funny images does not bring any value to your business.

Recently, Google was spotted showing sitelinks for many websites.Erick Daffron reports that Google even lists the URL’s blocked by robots.txt in it’s sitelinks. lol

Read write Web has a nice interview with Mark Zuckerberg - I like this guy somehow!

Anthony (The OldschoolSEO guy) has posted some interesting Stumble Upon commandments at his blog. It’s worth a read and probably a stumble !

Donna has got a nice little link building tip for you over here. See if it will work for you.

More and more websites and blogs are getting the google sitelinks these days. I’ve noticed some of the popular ones being awarded the sitelinks, which were not having them earlier. I’m guessing this could be as a result of a recent tweak in the google algorithm.

My guess is that the sitelinks are appearing only for direct searches for the sitename or brand. Like “Dailyseoblog” or “labnol” or “andy beard”.

Google seems to have tweaked their algorithm probably in the belief that one who searches for the particular brand or blog name is likely to already know about the service/product and it makes more sense to provide the searcher with relevant information from the blog/site.

Since Google have introduced the “Search Box” feature where a search box appears directly in the search results for that particular website, I think the next step will be to reach that point - to have the search box in the search results itself.

An interesting piece of info here. If you search for “John chow” (who you already know that is kicked off Google SERPs), you’ll get Johncow.com with the sitelinks. Cool huh?

So far, I’ve seen many popular Indian blogs to be awarded the sitelinks, like Labnol, Kiruba, Clazh, Reviewsaurus etc. Have you had one too?

Meanwhile if you’re looking for information on sitelinks, check here.

How important do you think are the page titles on your blog ?

There is a new school of thought in SEO who thinks that they are not important as they were once. And there are people who are not keen on placing their prodcut name or sitename on the title.

I beg to differ. I insist that the sitename/product name/service has to be present on the page title.

Now, the argument from the other side is that, you are being spammy when you put in the blog name or the product name on your page title. Well, actually it is spammy if you want it to be. Otherwise it’s not.

I say spamming is something like this.

“SEO India, Indian SEO, SEO from India, BEst SEO in India, The SEO consultant India”

While, anything along the lines of “Visit Vishnu’s SEO blog - SEO consulting service, India” is perfectly normal.

The idea is like this. If you had an offline business, wouldn’t you put a board outside, so that passers by can know what business you are running from the first look at it?
You’d also place a tag line/name on the board that describes your business in minimum words like - “Vishnu’s Grocery Store”.

Here again, by the title tag we mean to provide maximum information to Google about what you are, what’s your name and what have you got to offer to people passing by so that the interested can come in.

So essentially, title tags and page titles should not be spammy but should take care of the basic intentions of it.

- Let people know what you are selling/what your blog is all about.
- Give them a name or brand to associate with.
- Give them an idea about what they can expect or how will they benefit.

Having said that, it’s easy to compile certain keywords and make it look spammy by repeating them more than once. Please avoid it, try to make it as minimal as possible with the maximum information being displayed.