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.

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

But why?

Indexing frequency can be explained as the count or the number of times Google or the other search engines, visit your website to index your content.

And, the higher the frequency, the better you chances for a better rank or your importance in the SERPs.

Can’t believe? Neither did I, once upon a time.

Well, do you know that the best and the top blogs on the internet gets the best indexing frequencies? That is the content published on them gets indexed quicker that anyone else and gets more importance on the SERPs. Examples are TechCrunch.com and Problogger.net.

Content published on TechCrunch and Problogger gets indexed in minutes. The closest we have measured is like around 8 minutes or so. Yeah that’s right, when a content is published on Problogger, it is very likely that the next moment it is on the SERP’s.

At DailySEOblog, I’ve seen content indexed in 30 minutes or so, which is good.

Now the point here is that, if you are writing the same content as the above blogs, like for say example a movie review or so, it is highly likely that even if you have better content, TechCrunch like blogs are likely to get higher on the SERPs.

So they clearly have an edge of having the crawlers index them faster.

Now, how can you get this edge? How can you make crawlers index your content quicker as well?

Several factors.

1. Rapidly changing content.

2. A good sitemap structure.

3. Good pinging tools.

4. Good meta tags that tell the crawlers to visit more often.

5. Easy navigation structure.

Well, so many other factors as well. But these are the best of them I’d say.

Essentially, if you have rapidly changing content, that is made available to the crawlers through a well maintained and updated sitemap, that itself should take care of the problem.

For maintaining the sitemap, of course you’d be using the AllinOne SEO plugin right? That’s a good one.

Also, make sure that you have a regularity in posting. If the crawlers find that your content is being updated on a regular basis, like daily or  hourly, then they will set their crawl frequency(if not manipulated by META tags) to hourly or daily basis, however it is followed on your site.

This is exactly the same reason why blogs have an edge over static websites. It is easy for crawlers to find a pattern in your posts and hence they find it easy to follow the pattern.

You can find more information about this concept over here and here.

Digital Photography School is a blog that’s more famous for it’s author than it’s awesome content. It’s owned by the most influential blogger on the planet - Darren Rowse.

Darren is a very good mentor to me and often have given me valuable advices on topics knowingly or unknowingly. If you are a regular reader of DailySEOblog, you might have spotted Darren’s comments here and there on some articles. Most interesting of them being this one, where he was a bit miffed about an article I wrote which according to me was wrongly interpreted. We cleared things up, soon after,that’s a different story.

Well, recently, I came across this interesting post by Daniel, where he discusses about the factors deciding a good domain name. And today I came across this little discussion between Daniel and Darren, which provoked me to write this article.

Daniel thinks (and we agree) that good domain names should not have hyphens in them. According to Daniel,

Domain names containing hyphens and numbers are cheaper for a reason. They suffer the same problem of domains not using a .com extension or with complex spelling.

Daniel raises this doubt to Darren over here and Darren replies to Daniel over here -

Daniel - yeah it(Digital-photography-school) does well on an SEO front (has really increased in the last 6 months) but not so great on a memorability front.

So when Darren thinks that DPS is doing good in terms of SEO, I guess this is what he means.

For the keyword “Digital Photography”, a Google rank of 6. (Regional ranks may differ.)

Not bad for a blog like DPS right?

Here’s a look at some metrics.

Age of domain - Almost 2 years
Pages indexed on Google - 30,900 pages
Pages indexed on Yahoo - 62,337
Incoming links(Google) - 231
Incoming links(Yahoo) - 295,000
No: of pages in the main index - 2150
No: of pages in the supplemental index - 28,750 (Pages Indexed - Main Index)
Page Rank - 6/10
Alexa Rank - 19,382 (as of 23rd Dec, 2007)
Home page size - 34181 Bytes = 33 KB
Code to content ratio - 35.03 %
Incoming .edu links - 5
Incoming .gov links - None
Issues encountered - Canonicalization. My guess is that Darren have set the domain name preference in the webmasters tool to http://digital… rather than http://www.digital-pho… which is why a search for site:http:/digi.. returns results while as site:htp://www.digi… does not. May be Darren should fix this, and make all the URLs to www.url.com format and not http://url format. For Problogger, he has used the www.url.com format.

Why should this be fixed?
Though seemingly both the formats are the same, Google prefers to use one format for a site. Which is why it has given you the  option to make a selection in the Webmasters tool. If some people link to http://url and some to http://www.url it does not look good on your site, and you lose some value there.

Supplementary pages
DPS has quite some huge number of pages in the supplementary results. Though Google pulled off the importance of supplementary pages along with the operator(site:www.yoursite.com ***-view) last July,you can still determine the number of pages through a simple calculation, and I found that DPS has almost 30k of it’s pages in the S-Index.

Now, you know the problems of having a huge supplementary index right? Google is doubtful regarding the relevance of those pages and it may keep away from showing them in the normal organic search results. So, here DPS have not been able to convince Google that 30,000 of it’s pages are relevant and original in content.

How to get out of supplementary pages?(Rel page)
- Remove archives from the sight of robots using nofollow tags.
- Don’t tag articles in more than one category.
- Create distinguishing titles and content on every article.
- Get deep links from external sites.

Other than the canonicalization issue and the number of supplemental results, DPS is in good shape.

If Darren would like to do something about it immediately, I’d suggest that instead to the homepage, from his network of blogs/websites, he should make an attempt to individual posts in the various categories. We all know that Darren has been linking to DPS from many of his Problogger articles, but almost all of them are linked to the blog homepage. Instead of this, had it been the internal article pages, he could reduce the number of supplementary pages.

Let’s do some very basic SEO checks

Meta Tags

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Digital Photography School, Digital Photography Tips,
Digital Photography Training, Digital Camera Tips, Digital Camera Advice, Advice,
tips, photography, digital camera, training,”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Digital Photography School -
Digital Photography Tips for You” />

Looking at the meta tags, I’ve the impression that Darren and his team has not been working on it lately. It’s a very basic meta tag, with the bare essentials. And the meta description is just not impressive. As you all might already know, the purpose of having a meta description is not to attract the search engine crawlers but human visitors.

The meta description is the text that you see beneath your site name in the SERPs. Only if it is attractive enough would people click on your site name. If you’d ask me I’d rephrase both the meta keywords and the meta description as below. 

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Digital photography, Digital Photography School, Digital Photography Tips, Study photography, Digital photo Digital Photography Training, Digital Camera Tips, Digital Camera Advice,
Advice,tips, photography, digital camera, training,”/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Take stunning photos with your digital camera using our digital photography tips and tricks - Digital Photography School” />

The title tag could also be changed to something attractive to both search engines and visitors. As of now, it looks like this.

<title>Digital Photography School &#8212; Digital Photography Tips for You</title>

Another grave mistake I found is that the Robots.txt file is put in the blog subdirectory (www.digital-photography-school.com/blog/robots.txt) Yikes! This simply won’t work. The robots.txt file should be placed  the root directory and if the blog is present in a sub directory, the commands should use the subdirectory URLs to control the crawlers. And if at all it worked, the syntax is wrong. Here’s how a healthy robots.txt should look like (only a suggestion)

Sitemap: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/blog/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$

I couldn’t find a sitemap file anywhere, so that’s something Darren may work on to ensure that the great content is spotted by the crawlers. It may/may not help in the fight to put back the supplementary pages too.

Bottom line is that, even though there is great content on the DPS website, a major part of those pages are in the supplementary index, and thus will not show on the search engines results. Keeping in mind that the blog has a domain name that’s not memorable, the major traffic is likely to come from search engine organic results, getting these pages out of the S-Index may be first thing Darren should work on.
Also, please note that I’ve only checked the SEO basics here, and only after these basic stuff is fixed could the rest be analysed and worked on. Here’s wishing al the best to Darren and DPS.

The title says it all. If you have a MyBloglog community, ask people to join in and the community that grows the most, in their gross total, from now to November 30, 2007, will win. Read more here.

I think that means - the ratio of growth is what matters. Example - If your community has 1000 members and it grew to 2000 members bye the deadline, you would fail to a community that started off with 10 members and reached 100 members. That is 10 times growth while yours is only two times growth.

I’m unsure about this, but this is what it looks like.

This is an initiative from the MyBloglog team to encourage bloggers to grow their community. And the prizes? There are a handful of sponsors already.

Downside of the competition ? The promotion is open to U.S. residents who are 16 or older. And that puts me off !

Just noticed that DailySEOblog is ”awarded” Page Rank 4 !

And, I still strongly stick to my words.

I just don’t give a damn about it.  Eat that Google! (Courtesy-JC)

Interestingly, there seems to be shuffling again all over the web. Here is the old list from DBT with the updated changes. Seen in green are the ones that managed to hit back and seen in red are the one’s gone further down.

• Statcounter (from 10 to 6)
• Engadget (from 7 to 5)
• AutoBlog (from 6 to 4)
• Problogger (from 4 to 6)
• Copyblogger (from 4 to 6)
• AdesBlog (from 7 to 5)
• Search Engine Journal (from 7 to 4)
• Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
• Search Engine Roundtable (from 7 to 4)
• Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
• Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
• JohnTP (from 4 to 3)
• Coolest Gadgets (from 3 to 4)
• CyberNet News (from 4 to 1)
• Washington Post (from 7 to 5)
• Washington Times (from 6 to 4)
• Charlotte Observer (from 6 to 4)
• Forbes.com (from 7 to 5)
• SFGate.com (from 7 to 5)
• Sun Times (from 7 to 5)
• New Scientist (from 7 to 5)
• Seattle Times (from 6 to 4)

New entries - Bloggingtips.com (0 to 4) and DailySEOblog.com (0 to 4)

So, it’s regret time for Google? Seems like they have taken off the penalty on some websites like Problogger and Copyblogger, while maintaining it for some, and even further degrading on a few like John TP.

Is this the end or is there another shuffling going to happen? 

Blogging has evolved into a career over the years. Yes the ride has been quite bumpy and there are both losers and winners. The charm of the winners probably have taken over the loser’s plight and today more and more people are plunging into blogging.

Blogs are an excellent marketing tool too. Especially for online startups and products, which seek a viral effect of marketing. Blogging medium gives an excellent platform to such products and which is why top bloggers are always on the lookout. There is big money flowing in and by the next two years it’s expected to soar high.

Finding a job online is not difficult but to get a reliable payer and a reliable company to work with is really important. It was the old times when there were online jobs for click fraud (remember click monkeys?) and even scraping.

Today the horizon is all shiny and gleaming. There are lot of quality bloggers around who have the power to kill or raise a product. Mike Arrington from TechCrunch is a classic example.

So if you have good writing skills, a charm that will make others follow you, then probably you are in the right path. All you need is a platform and some topics to blog about (will be provided). A personal blog that will boast your talents is definitely a big plus. You can find good and reliable companies looking out for quality bloggers at Problogger Jobs board and Bloggerjobs

Hey did you notice it? Seems like everything in the blogosphere is viral? No, I’m not talking about “i-phone reviews” by someone who even haven’t seen one or “I hate Aglocco because you didn’t pay me ” campaigns ….(Yeah! I made that up).

Did you notice the new “Ad - crazy” syndrome happening?  yeah, poor souls like you and me are spared, this has only got to do with the “ProBloggers” who have sponsors waiting in Queue for an ad-spot.

I first saw John Chow do it, then came in Darren, then John TP, then DailyBlogtips, then my buddy Kevin Bloggingtips. All of them have gone for a site template redesign and opted for a theme with more importance to ads. Particularly the square button (125 x 125)ones. What’s with this now?  

Darren has pulled off AdSense ads completely from his blog. So gone are the days when bloggers picked templates based on how it would accommodate AdSense ads and how the background colours blended with your AdSense ads.

Today we have templates that have 30% of it’s real-estate reserved for sponsored ads. In fact, these ads give them more money than Google Ads. When Google ads give them a dollar or two only when someone is clicking it, these image/banners ads are paid for impressions. And with probloggers enjoying huge traffic, it’s but natural for them to opt for these ads to AdSense.

An issue that’s raised (necessarily or unnecessary you decide) is the effect on user friendliness. It’s a fact that these blogs give more importance to advertising than the content, and this sudden change have even confused some readers. The bloggers argument is that sponsors like to show their ads ‘above the fold’ and hence they had to push the content to the lower half pane. Fair enough! John Chow has gone to extreme that almost all of this above fold region is either ads or promotion.

Another argument from the bloggers is that - regular readers always use a reader to read the posts. So the ads won’t bother them much. While the sponsors are targeting on organic traffic and “stoppers-by” from search engines, this is an excellent strategy where the ads are delivered only to the right kind of audience.

Now, that all probloggers are into “Ad-crazy” syndrome, I don’t think it’s far when we have Problogger and JohnChow look alike free themes on Wordpress.

Are you going for a redesign? Not me (atleast, until I have sponsors queuing up) !

Following discussions on the web about reducing duplicate content on wordpress blogs, found out a few interesting things. These are things that you may not notice and may assume is normal on a blog. You may even see probloggers practicing such mistakes on their blogs. Well they are unaware of it..but they sure are mistakes

An example is - categorizing an article/post in more than one category. This practice is bad for your blog as it increases the chances of duplicate content on your blog. So Google recommends (Matt Cutts does) that you categorize articlces/posts only in one category at a time. But I’ve seen Darren Rowse tag posts in more than one category on his blog. See his latest post on page rank today. Here he tags the post into two categories. Video Posts and Search Engine Optimization.

Although I believe that it’s good to tag the posts in your blog to one category, seeing top bloggers practice it the other way makes me think… where’s the line to be drawn?

So you started blogging only months back and already feeling bored with no backlinks, no popularity and no recognition? Think again.

For the blogging legends, success did not happen overnight. It took them years of posting, consistency, knowledge sharing and socialization(just to name a few) to make it big today. Ask anyone of those celebrity bloggers - they don’t live in vacation homes nor do they spend evenings sipping whiskey and wine in their yachts. They’d probably be writing a new post sipping a coffee.

I did a research on the top blogging legends on their initial days of blogging. I thought I’d find something interesting in these posts since they would be their best of all time.But not really. Many of them were on the usual - “How to get popular” and “how to get discovered” topics.(Yes just like you!) See for yourself.

1. Problogger - Darren Rowse, Sep 23 -2004
   Page rank explained was Darren’s first post, where he writes about what google page rank is. Google PR is one of the hot favorites of bloggers even today.
2. Labnol - Amit Agarwal, Jan 01 - 2005
   Amit writes about travel directions to get to India. He offers the route maps available online in his first blog article.
3. John Chow.com, Dec 31 - 2005
   John wrote his first post about how the year 2005 went(No link-sorry) and what he’s going to do in 2006. No making it top to the make-money-online bandwagon was not in his checklist. Instead it was - “Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading”
4. Seth’s blog - Seth Godin, Oct 01 -2006
   Seth’s first posts was about effective speech.
5. Blogoscoped - Philip Lenssen, Dec 01 -2003
   Philips wrote first on Carl and Keyword stemming way back in Dec 2003. I was at college then
6. How to change the world - Guy Kawasaki, Oct 02 -2006
   Guy Kawasaki’s first post on his experience in returning from Mumbai after the IBM conference.
7. Kottke - Jason Kottke, March - 1998
   Kottke wrote his first post on what’s hyper text?
8. Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel, Oct 01-2006
   Steve started off with a bunch of links?

Interesting common factors

- Most of them started off with something “seemingly” silly.
- All of them were consistent with posting regularly.
- Most of them had either very less or no comments at all in the early posts.
- Most of them wrote on posts that were already covered by someone else.
- Most of them linked a lot to other resources.

The above posts were “discovered” from the blogs archive sections, (who ever featured it.) and it could be wrong. If you have better information please let know.

I would be lying if i said - I’m a self styled professional blogger.

I must admit that I get influenced by other bloggers just like you.
Sometimes it’s the writing style, sometimes the blog template, or simply the footer text.I copy them, try to modify the idea and implement in this blog.Sometimes it works sometimes otherwise.
Many a times, you forget to thank others for how they’ve helped you - unknowingly though.

Here’s the list of those blogs and bloggers who have inspired me in one way or the other.This is all honest opinions so there may be both black and white shades - hope all of you will enjoy it.

1. Amit Agarwal of Labnol
Undoubtedly one of the most influential bloggers in India.

Reasons why he makes me go wow!
- The money he makes through the blog
- He manages to blog regularly with 4-6 per day
- He finds tweaks that others haven’t
- He managed to get interviewed by CNN IBN
- He still runs a blogger account
- His posts make every one think - “Damn, i could’ve thought of it earlier - I can do this too!”

What i copied most - His idea of posting regularly on tweaks and software reviews.

2. Darren Rowse of Problogger
King of blogging - the man that he is.

Reasons
- His writing style (and that green t shirt)
- How he manages to blow up a simple topic into a 8 parts post
- Traffic
- That he managed to get into blogging earlier than me
- His link love to bloggers, i think he’s someone who values content more than your template

What i copied most - His easy to read and friendly writing style.

3. John Chow
I tried my best to ignore this guy honestly. But…

Reasons
- Traffic
- How he self promotes him beautifully as the evil guy around
- His awkward dress sense
- Figures he posts in the month end

What i copied most - The IM Google ads he ran on problogger. (I copied the same thing on Labnol)

4. Matt Cutts
I wouldv’e ignored him had he not been a Google employee.

Reasons
- Knowledge about the algorithm
- White hat SEO tips and his interaction with bloggers
- Cheap April fool tricks

What i copied most - His Template

5. Qucikonlinetips
Must admit his efforts in keyword research and wide coverage of topics. Sometimes i feel it’s an MFA, but hey he’s on the SERPS top results for almost all high-paying keywords.

- Topics to blog about
- The idea of tips and tricks
- The fact that the guy is anonymous and is an Indian

Yeah, I know what your’e thinking - these are all famous guys, what’s the catch? Well, i have a whole list of less popular blogger’s who have inspired me with seemingly silly ideas. but there is no way i can go ahead with them without mentioning these big guys. So the next batch would be those “Z-List bloggers” as you call it. Watch out, your blog may be there too..