Please keep the number of 404 errors and broken links on your site to the minimum, or none if possible, says Google. The basic idea is to help the robots index content more efficiently from websites and help index relevant information.

Both you and me would have number of 404 errors on your blogs and websites, now in order to align yourself more towards the league of good guys who follow the standard guidelines, let’s see how we can detect and avoid the number of broken links on a website.

1. Making use of Google Webmasters
   Google Webmasters is a wonderful tool that can help you in detecting and getting rid of broken links (or all those errors) from your site.
   Join in using your Google ID at Webmasters and add your site to the account.
   For this you have to,
   i) Add your website by providing the URL
   ii) Verify that you are the webmaster by uploading a file or adding a meta tag to the files.
   iii) Submit the XML sitemap
   After submitting the XML sitemap, you have to wait for the nest successful indexing to happen. This depends on your crawling frequency.
2. Finding out the errors
   Soon after the next successful indexing is done, while you visit the Webmasters dashboard, you will be greeted with all the errors possibly found on your website. And this includes broken links, http errors, 404 errors, broken sitemap files etc.
   
3. Trace the broken link
   Click on the “Linked from” page to get a popup that will give you the URL that carries the broken link.
    
4. Find out the URL from your website and delete it.
   It might be from one of those articles you linked to, which is no longer existing or a dead link. Most of the time Google will tell you the exact URL that’s suggesting the broken link. So just get rid of it.
5. Now, rebuild your sitemap and resubmit to Google through Webmasters
   Wait for a fresh new indexing. If you have successfully deleted all broken links you should not see that yellow, annoying icon in your dashboard !

Keeping your site clean off broken links and http errors are a sign that you are a “good guy” to search engines. It’s just a simple ignorable thing but technically, will pass lot of value to you.

The Google webmasters folks have put up a good video giving us information on the right way to get a brand new site indexed on Google. According to Google, here are the steps you have to go through to ensure a brand new site is getting indexed on Google.

1. Submit to Google at www.google.com/addurl.html
2. Acquire relevant links from other sites that are already established
3. Submit an XML sitemap
4. Use a robots.txt or noindex meta tags to exclude pages from being indexed by Google.

And here’s my two cents to explain this in detail.

• Submitting to Google through www.google.com/addurl.html
  Although this is technically, the best way to get indexed by Google, there are possible problems here. First off, if you are submitting a relatively unknown website, it might take ages to get indexed on Google this way, as Google does all the “calculations” before evaluating your submitted site. A better method is to acquire an incoming link from an already established website. Doing so, Google can probably bypass/shorten the “evaluation” process and get straight to indexing your website. I have a detail article on this here.
• Sitemaps
  Brand new website with few content or many pages, it is always good to submit a sitemap to Google. We are not talking about HTML sitemaps here, those are for users, but XML sitemaps are what the bots need.
  Sitemaps helps the bots to index the content faster and more efficiently.
  Details on creating a XML sitemap for small and large websites.
• Using the robots exclusion protocol
  I think it’s equally important to keep Google away from indexing the wrong pages. Pages that are under construction, or pages that have broken links with unfinished data. In order to make sure that Google indexes only relevant information from your website, make sure you give the directions to the bots to keep away from the wrong pages. You can do this by using a Robots.txt or Nofollow Meta tags.

There are of course a bunch of basic SEO elements that you should check your site for occasionally like the W3C validation, redirect errors, sitemap generation errors etc. These crop up unknowingly and are identified only when a problem occurs. Example - If you are using the All in One SEO plugin, in the settings there is an option to specify the xml file template. Now, if you had uploaded the SEO plugin to a directory after renaming it, then chances are that the template fails to load and your sitemap will be broken. Where as if you upload the plugin directory without renaming it, then there won’t be errors. This happened to me sometime back with another site of mine.

So, basic errors like this one goes unnoticed and often requires checks. A few things that you mus check regularly are,

1 - The sitemap of course
Check for updates, frequency set, unwanted URLS etc, Rebuild the sitemap if updates have not been made, check the sitemap accessing from the Google webmasters, if template is broken, check the folder name on FTP and suggest the right URL.

2 - Broken links
Check for broken links on Webmasters, if you find them, download the entire table and correct them by either suggesting a 301 redirect or pulling them down from the site.

3 - Titles
You know that titles are crucial, so checke them for duplications and wrong code. Sometimes, there could occur a clash between the theme code and plugins that even double entries occur in some cases. You might want to do a bit of code tweaking to correct it.

4 - Meta headers
Of course, meta headers like description and keywords are not an y longer going to help you in deciding your SERPs ranks, but the meta description tag is very important as it decides the “clickability” on the SERPs. Assuming that your site appears on teh SERPs in the first or second age, if people have to click it, the meta description or the snippet should be interesting and compelling. So make sure you don’t end up using the same meta description for all posts, instead make it exclusive for each article.

5 - Typos in URLs
Well, I can’t surely tell if they are errors or not because some bloggers say that they have good traffic coming from typos. But for the guys who wants to have things in place, make sure you check out your site listings on the SERPs with the “site:” search and find out typos on URLs. If there are typos, make sure you give a redirect on the old URL to the new one, before the new one is updated on Google index.

6 - Dual H1 headers etc
Sometimes due to your theme options, there could occur two or more H1 tags on a single page which is not good. It is always advice able to use the standard format of H1, H2, H3…H4 according to decreasing priority of text. H1’s generally occur only once on a page, but duplication of the rest are fine.

7 - Robots.txt exclusions
Sometimes even though we might carefully use the robots file to exclude files and folders, due to continuous usage there might be files and articles we wrongly placed. Like placing an article into a category that was once banned by the robots file. It is advised to check the robots.txt file once a while for indexing issues.

8 - Inline style v/s Stylesheet clash
We all have issues with stylesheets (at least I do) and sometimes we all use inline styling to get things fixed. Excessive use of inline styling can lead to a bloated code and this might result in bigger file size and cross browser incompatibilities. It is advised not to use inline styling a lot, and if there are particular codes that you’ve been using, try to incorporate into the stylesheet.

9 - Redirect Issues
This is not very common but happens with guys who have done a lot of moving around from hosts and deal with Apache mod redirects. Although 301 redirects are fine, usage of generalized code for redirect can cause unwanted redirect issues on articles that came later. Like a 301 redirect issued to all URLs in one category, that redirects all articles that came past the redirect.

You can either do these checks manually or use the numerous site validation and SEO check tools available online. I use this tool, for basic checks and of course the Google Webmasters console occasionally.

Out of experience? Well, I don’t know, but looked like everyone is so interested in talking about getting successful on Twitter. Well, I followed many of them and, guess what? They enlightened me on the below points. With due courtesy to all of them….

1. Please follow your followers
   Or guess what happens? Your followers would be responding to your tweet and they never hear back from you. Okay, you are a pro - master - guru, blah blah…fine..but that doesn’t mean that you won’t talk or reply. Does it ?
2. Please don’t even dare say “Good Morning” or “Good Evening” or even “Good night”
   Cos, the 300ish guys subscribed to your tweet is not from your neighborhood, they’re most likely from the other end of the world. They may think you’re nuts!
3. Please try to respond, or be a bot
   I can’t think of a good reason why one wouldn’t respond. Unless it’s a bot using your profile. I’ve seen Digg bots (some of them even have the profile pic of that of a robot), but twitter bots? Come on…that’s disgusting!
4. Twitter is not a place to yawn..come’on now for God sake!
   Thou shall not yawn, or do any of those organic sounds. Remember, though you’re on your bed, the world’s watching you..err…listening to you.
5. Be logical
   This is tough to explain. Example? Here goes…

   Mr. X : I’m going out for a movie - Dark Knight.
   Mr. Y : @Mr.X - Man, that’s a cool movie. Yaay!

   (After 30 mins….)

   Mr. X : Just woke up..had coffee, off to Gym !
   Mr. Y : @Mr.X huh??

Makes sense?

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.

Somebody had to do it and Rajesh from Tech Bliss Online is the man to do it. Even though All in One SEO was the most downloaded plugin, I wasn’t quite impressed by it’s functions. Sure it took care of the basic functions, but it wasn’t versatile. There were so many other functions and features a real SEO plugin had to take care of, AllinOne SEO ignored many of them. There were some better plugins available like the Headspace one, but it was too complicated for new users of Wordpress.

Rajesh has the new Platinum plugin now, which is an improvised version of the AllinOne SEO plugin. It does everything that AllinOne was doing and also some extra cool features. I’d say that this one is more closer to the real SEO plugin I was talking about. It takes care of pretty much everything, a bit more advanced than a basic SEO plugin but easy to use as well.

Here are the features.

• Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines - Present in AllinOne SEO
• Generates all SEO relevant META tags automatically - Present in AllinOne SEO
• Helps you avoid duplicate content - Present in AllinOne SEO
• Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page - Present in AllinOne SEO
• Compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag
  Warrior and others.However you may have to disable All in One SEO pack
• You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not
  satisfied with the current permalink, change it through
  Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about
  loss of Page rank or google penalty.Platinum SEO plugin will take care
  of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential
  feature, not present in All in one SEO - Absent in AllinOne SEO
• Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet,
  noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page.These options are not
  available in All in one SEO Pack.Find out why this option to set
  post/page level Meta Robots Tag useful? - Absent in AllinOne SEO

The best part of the plugin is that it helps you to block certain pages like category, tags or any posts by Google, Yahoo and search engines by including “no index” tags at these specified pages/posts.
You don’t have to tweak Robots.txt hereafter, just select from the page as to which page/caegory is to be blocked or no indexed and the plugin does it beautifully.

So far I haven’t come across any glitches but the good thing is that unlike AllinOne SEO, Rajesh is available for support on this plugin. I would rate it a 4 our of 5 !

Before reading this article, you might have to check this article here by Rand, where he is suggesting 10 questions to the search engines.

I had replied to it over here with two more questions from my side to Google and here is Matt’s reply to my questions.

Well, basically I was trying to ask Google about sitelinks. I wanted to know from Google as to whether they would give us more control over the sitelinks as many of the links appearing there are not relevant.

We had a discussion on DailySEOblog over sitelinks over here once. Where we had discussed on how to control sitelinks using Google webmasters tool.

Okay now to the problem.

In the SEO Moz thread, I asked Google if they would give us more control over sitelinks. What I intended was that, we needed authority on the Google webmasters tool, which enables us to decide what links appear and doesn’t appear. The “and” is important here.

As of now, you can use Google webmasters to “block” any link that has already appeared on the sitelinks. But the main problem is that the sitelinks appear “automatically”. If there is a wrong link (Ex: - Title of your about page and link to an article page), then there’s nothing much you can do about it other than to block it and wait for another replacement.

For example, in this image -

Social Media is the buzz. And it’s the carrot to many. A power user is a member with influential powers and has the potential of making any given article popular on the social medias.

Becoming a power user on all the social medias is sure big deal, despite everyone using the social media only a few make it to the top or grabs the powers of a power user. Now, it’s a fact probably that no one can make it easily to the top as a power user in a short time. It requires the effort and time that it deserves. But there are pointers for sure that will help you make it to the top if you get your basics right. It’s all about doing the right thing and following the right methodologies daily in a very religious manner, and one day you’ll find yourself there on the top showered with digg and stumble requests and friend invitations.

So what are the good practices that you should follow to make it  to the top as a power user on the popular social medias?

Understanding Which Social Media works best for you - The behavioral differences of the popular social media sites

First off let me tell you that each social media channel has it’s own unique quality. You cannote use all the media at the same time to get a story popular. Each community has it’s own characteristics and behavioural pattern.

Digg
- Is a news oriented website where there’s no place for internet marketers and bloggers.
- The community gives more importance to breaking news, exclusive stories and articles.
- The community is more techno savvy and if you are targeting to get the attention of technology related crowd, then Digg is the best place for you.
- Digg community does not entertain marketing, self promotion and press releases kind of articles.
- They give more value to the “uniqueness” of the stories and the real value it passes on to the community.
- The secret of getting popular on Digg is to get the maximum diggs in the shortest time span. If you get late getting the diggs, you lose the game.

Stumble Upon
SU is a community which has a different chemistry altogether from Digg - it loves sharing all the lite things(photos, videos, funny stuff) and in between some news articles too.
- SU community does not like anything that is related to promoting your blog.
- Neither does it like people selling their service or products.

Linked in
- Linked in has a very focused community.
- It’s a no nonsense one with no frills but all serious guys out there. Business consultants, CEOs, bloggers and the like.
- If it’s business that you’d like to promote, then probably this is the right place.

Here are the good practices to become a social media power user.

1. Share
   Social media sites are nothing but places to share. If you used to share interesting stories on email two years earlier, now you have Digg and Su to share. This way the original sources of the story also gets benefited and you get a place to share thoughts with like minded people too.
   So rather than seeing them as platforms that generate traffic, see them as places to share ideas, stories and interesting pieces of articles over the internet.
2. Participate
   Social medias are all about participation. Along with user generated content they are also platforms where lot of ideas and thoughts are shared. Most of the social medias today has the groups feature where people create groups based on their interest. These are excellent places to find similar minded people. I’ve seen that making use of these groups and participating in them attaches a special honour to your profiles in the social media and it helps you get make more friends in the community.
3. Be proactive
   I’ve seen many guys complain that one of their friend/friends on the social media never responds to their nudge and they are simply pissed off. It’s completely understandable a problem. It may ask you - why did you add him/her as a friend in the first place?
   The answer to this question is to get proactive. By getting proactive I mean, making sure that you do everything in the first place that you want your friend to do. If you want your friend to digg your articles and respond to shouts, you respond to other peoples shouts first.
   So give before you start to take. If you make a habit of this, it makes life easier at the communities.
4. Contribute to the community
   Social media sites out there are not marketing channels. They are not out there to buy somethign from you. instead they are out there to learn from the internet, from you. So give them something to learn, if you have the resources pass them on, if you don’t pass it on from other useful resources.
5. Be Regular
   Imagine you were with your friends, wouldn’t you be spending time with them daily? And not approach them when you have something to show off?
   The same formula works here. Be a frequent participant in all the social medias that you want to be popular in. Many of them shows the last login time details so others can easily judge from your login patterns as to whether you are a frequent member or not. If you are not, they probably will take you for a spammer, and I think they have all the right to believe so.
6. Be generous, pass information
   While in the community, make sure that you are a generous person. A generous person is someone who will share value with others without a second thought. In a community others give respect to you based on whether you are generous or not. No matter where you get it from, if you are someone who provides valuable conent to the community, then others will accept you and respect you as a master, yes , even if the information you passed on was not really yours.
7. Buy ideas never sell
   Communities are for everyone, for those who are buying and selling. But make sure you are always on the buying part. At least for a major part of your time. Because there are more sellers in this world than buyers. So when everyone is looking for a buyer, be one, so that you have their attention. At a later point, may be, if they find you interesting, you could be a seller. But let that not be your point of interest.
8. Never promote yourself
   Do you have a product to sell or  service to offer? I’d suggest that you keep away your marketing strategies away from the communities. The problem is that the social media community is so sensitive that they can easily make out a marketing guy and a contributor. So don;t act smart trying to sell your product/service by promoting yourself. That’s for the community to decide.
9. Adapt to the customs
   Every social media site out there is a community. And every community has its rules and customs just like in real ife. So in order to get in to one you got to gel to their customs first. If you stand apart from them, you’ll probably end up being an island. You don’t want that to happen.
10. Its almost like real life
    See communities on social media just like real life communities. They are not a bunch of robots out there. They are indeed a bunch of clever guys like you sitting at eth other end of the world. So try to make friends with them treating them just like you are meeting a real person.
11. Make friends
    Forget diggs or stumbles. During your initial days in the social media, make sure you make more friends than anything. Communicate to them through comments, groups etc and make yourself comfortable with the community and learn what’s happening there. Sit back relax and study tha patterns. Don’t do the mistake of going ahead and digging your favorite story in the very first day. There’s no problem as such but had you submitted after making some friends, it would’ve got a better visibility.
12. Never beg
    One of the mistakes I see people repeating time and again is to beg for votes. Well, I’m not talking about you letting know your friend about a new submission or shots. But begging someone , a stranger may be, to vote for you. This creates a negative impression about you to the other perrson and although he may digg your story, the next time you approach him he’ll avoid you. Because you are not passing any quality or value to him.
13. Develop niche groups within
    This is one of the very effective strategies I’ve seen people use in social media communities. Develop small interest groups within the community so that you can share and communicate with the like minded people. Although, please do not confuse this with closed communities. I’m totally against closed communities, they are no good for the sharing purpose. Let your communities be open so that like minded peple can jon and communicate within.
    
14. Reply and respond
    I understand that you have no interest in responding to shouts on email or IM, and yes you may be completely true. Why do you want to reply to those emails, after all you have someone whoting eery minute. But hey, let me tell you, if you does not reply to any of them - fine, nothing bad. But try responding to each of them. Yes respond to every shout you receive and see what happens. I can assure you that, you’ll have at least 10 guys daily adding you as friend on the network. And that’s not a bad thing. All those guys add you as friend because they respect your actions and they see value in you. So I’d suggest that you try reply and respond to every little nudge that you get on the network.
15. Quick guys are smart
    You knew it already. Quick guys are smart. Here in the social media, being quick means being being qucik in responding, being quick in digging stories up the top, being quick in all the activities in the community.
16. Be the first
    if you got to do exceptionally good in the community, one short cut to getting poplar is to be the first in submitting breaking news or interesting stories. If you pick up the best happening story first, others are sure to follow. but this is no easy task, you got to keep a hawk’s eye on the news that is of interest to the community and act quick once it’s out.
17. Believe in quality
    It’s all about quality. If you have 1000 submissions with all of them stories that have been heard before, no one’s going to even bother talking to you. but if you have a couple of breaking stories and interesting, exclusive ones, that sure is going to earn you the respect you deserve.
18. Give before you take
    Essentially the point to keep in mind is before you start thinking about your returns, learn to contribute and share. Don’t count your returns on the very first day. It’s a natural process of getting popular and doesn’t happen over night. Once you have your basics in place, it will automatically throw you up to the top.

I’d love to hear your contributions/additions to the above points.

1. A spider with meta head (green) and body from Xponex.com

2. A robot with big round eyes and square head from Webpro.com

3. A robot with small head and huge body from Seomoz.org

4. A robot with head and body combined to a smaller form from Seomoz.org

5. A cute looking dumb robot with block head from Labnol

6. A happy go lucky robot doing the Google dance from Jim Boykin

7. A bacteria like small robot from Contestblogger

8. An ugly looking spider from Blogoscoped

9. A sophisticated robot with “n” number of hands from Battellemedia

10. An advanced robot with a body that resembles an inverted bucket from Auinteractive

At the Mumbai Barcamp, while talking to the audience there was a gentleman with a genuine doubt.

“Ok, so you tell me that Google will penalize you if you sell links. But how the hell would Google find it out when I’m not talking about it?”

Interesting perspective huh? So many of us are scared about the Google ban and have not sold links at all (or have not publicly told so) and there’s this guys who challenges Google asking how does it find out if he’s selling links?

There is one school of thought that says that Google traces you down from links on other websites that sells links.
Some others say that it detects you from the TLA database. (Weird!)
Even some say that Google has it’s own spider to do the job of detecting if the blog it’s on is selling text link ads.

Hmm, that sounds like lot of guesses. In fact, the last theory is pretty much believable comparing the other two. Google might have a robot or a specialized one that detects elements on a webpage that associates it with selling text link ads.

What could those elements be?

- Lot of emphasis and repetition of keywords like “Buy this ad” or “Text link for sale” etc.
- A sales page where there is a quote on the text link prices.
- Inclusion of totally unrelated, standalone, non contextual links on the site sidebar/footer.
- Presence of links to poker/pharma/porn/malware sites.
- Hosting of your website on a shared host that shares it’s IP with an already banned site.
- Excessive use of outgoing links to non contextual sites without the use of nofollow attribute.
- Public announcement of text link prices through RSS feeds/Newsletters.
- Presence of affiliate links to text link ads and brokering websites.

Dave did a better guess in finding out how easy is it for Google to find out all the websites that sold text link ads.

He says - Do this search on Google

How hard would it be for Google to write a script which basically does this…

open folder : http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/

Search for TLA_ which would return http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/tla_44565.php

Now, if that is the TLA plugin, you are doomed.

I strongly recommend all readers to refrain from practices of selling links on your websites, even if you do and want to make some cash, nofollow them so that it doesn’t corrupt the Google algorithm.