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.

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Old question, Isn’t it ?

Page Rank is still a mystery, (well,it better be that way..) and the recent hype and hoopla have created an aura around the magic green bar.

Come whatever, but the same old questions keep on repeating. Does number of outgoing links affect page rank? Does the content on your site affect page rank? And we have today’s topic - Does age affect page rank?

When we talk about age, is it the age of domain or the age of the content? Or is it the age of the incoming links?

Well, “everything”, would be my answer. Let’s see in detail.

Age of domain - According to Google’s metrics, domain names that are registered for a longer period of time are supposed to be more authoritative. So, if you are looking for getting Google’s appreciation, register domains for a longer period, say 5 years or so, and that would give you an edge over others.

But what we are interested here is the age of the domain at the time of page rank assessment. If you are on blogspot, this doesn’t affect you as Google will take into consideration the Blogspot domain name. So this point is of interest only to the self hosted, domain name holders.

Google do take into consideration the domain age, when deciding the page rank of your site. So what’s the catch? The older the site, the better the rank.

Does only age of the site determine page rank? No. Of course, there are the other factors like site content, inbound links etc. But age of domain does plays an important role.

So if you want to sell a web site of your’s probably you can market it because of it’s age factor.

The title may bring a frown on your face, I know.

After the Google page rank slap, a good part of blogosphere is keeping away from buying and selling links, at least in public. Of course, there are deals happening underground. But I guess, smart people will always find a way out. And I personally don’t think that buying links is bad. But it must be done with a right purpose.

The reason why google hates you buying links is that, when you buy links from all over the place without looking into any ethics, there are chances of you corrupting their algorithm or chances of giving the crawlers wring information about your site and others. That’s it! They don’t have any problem with you ranking high in the SERPs if you have great content and information.

Where can buying links go wrong?

Buying links from all over the place is the main villain. Webmasters are crazy for links and they buy links from everywhere possible, thinking that every link will count in increasing their PR or relevancy. Wrong!

More than helping you, link placed at irrelevant places will harm you in fact. Let me illustrate with an example.(See figure)

In this example, Site A and Site C are linking to Site B. Site B bought these links from sites that were selling text links at cheaper rates but with high PR. Site A and Site B boasted of the following while selling links.

- High PR (7 and 5).
- Many ad slots available.
- Any anchor text.
- Premium placement at homepage, above the fold.

Now, honestly, none of these really helps the link buyer. A high PR is fine but, many a times this may be a forged PR. Either they might have done the redirect trick showing you a false PR, or they might have bought few links from top domains. But irrespective of what the PR is, it really doesn’t matter to the link buyer because;

- Anybody can buy links from them.
Which means that anybody who can spare 5 bucks can buy a link for any anchor text from them. So you end up having a link with guys selling online poker and viagra.

- There are many more links available on the page.
Since there are many more links at the page linking to totally unrelated sites, your site relevancy is diluted.

So ultimately what happens is that you end up being in bad neighborhood.

So how does it affect Google? After all I have a PR7 incoming link isn’t it?

Great question. Yes indeed you have a PR 7 incoming link but Google also checks for other factors on the page that linked to you.

- Google checks how many outgoing links are present on the page that linked to you.
- Google checks how many incoming links are present to the page that linked to you.
- Google also checks the anchor text of the links that are present on the page that linked to you.

Now what will Google find? Okay, let’s say the first two checks are OK. The page has numerous incoming links from high quality sources (practically, this is not likely though), and the page has only a few outgoing links from the page(say 10).

Now, what’s going to hurt you most is the anchor text in the links to other sites. Since these guys were link sellers, many guys would’ve bought a place from them for cheaper rates. So what do you end up with? (See diagram) Your link “Make money online” is placed along with “Free online poker” and “Free gambling” or “Mesothelioma” and other sites.

Now, that’s bad. It gives google an impression that your site is also related to those keywords. While actually it’s not. So when Google comes to know that you guys are totally unrelated, it can easily make out that you bought the link. Penalized! Kaboom!

So are you trying to say that I should not buy links at all? Come on Mani, you must be joking!

Well, I am.. kind of. I’m not trying to say that you should not buy links at all, but just that you should be really careful with it and smart in selecting who links to you. Having said that, keep in mind that Google does not like you buying links.

Buy them the smart way.

Buying links doesn’t mean you going to text-link-ads and hunting for sites with PR5 and 7, neither does it mean that you’ve to go under the radar in those forums. You got to be smart!

Now, you browse a lot don’t you? You visit other sites from your niche which have similar content as your’s right? Find out which guy has the maximum traffic and a good PR. Write to him asking if he’d be interested to link to you. May be instead of a text link ad which juts out of his template, you can go for a relevant link.

For example, you have a blog on Acupressure, and you ave a friend who writes on medical information. This friend can put a footer link or where ever he can adjust some text, making sure that it doesn’t show off as a “paid link”. Probably he can make the text relevant looking like -

This blog features articles on medical treatment tips and terminology. There are interesting articles on Acupressure(your link) and ayurveda (another guys link) too.

Now this is a smarter way to place links. The links are relevant and does not corrupt the algorithm a well.

To sum up, here are the points that you should keep in mind while buying links. (I don’t personally think that it’s a good idea, but if at all you have to buy links, then make sure that these points are taken in to consideration.)

- Do not buy links from link farms which will sell links to anyone and everyone.
- DO not buy links from sites that are not related to your niche. Buy them from related sites.
- Make sure that there are not many outgoing links from the page, probably a few will be OK.
- Make sure that the text link does not stand out awkward, but wrap it up in a paragraph where the link is placed in between, with relevant text.(See above example)
- Do not share links with junk sites like poker and viagra sites.
- Do not buy links from very new sites, go for sites that have been there for some time and have some authority to brag.

And, if you are looking for traffic alone,make sure you add the “nofollow” attribute, Google is OK with it. But if you are looking for some link juice and PR, don’t add the “nofollow” attribute,but keep in mind that relevancy of your links is the primary concern.

Are you on the 3rd / 5th page on Google for your desired keywords? Like, you blog about “How to make money online” and you don’t show up on the first page on Google? Pretty bad situation isn’t it?

Well if you are worried that you are not on the first page of google for your keyword, whatever that is (make money online, earn money blogging or whatever), there is nothing to worry about yet.

Because if that was the case, only 10 people or websites only would be making money on the Internet. I wish if Google had more pages listed in the first page, but hey those guys did some accessibility research and found that 10 is the right number of websites to be shown on their results page.

So keeping in mind that you have 10 spots to compete, let’s see if you can still make money on the internet.

• Do you check your referrals log for longer keywords?
  I’m sure all of us would get a decent amount of traffic from keywords like “Free windows xp hacks tips india” and the like. These are combination keywords. Now, how do they manage to get you traffic?
  They don’t have heavy amount of traffic - Meaning there aren’t many people who’d search for such a long keyword. May be just one or two. But the point here is that when ever there are one or two searches made, your website would be on the top.
• How much traffic you make from these combination keywords?
  More than how much uniques you get in a month totally, see how much of it has got to do with “combination keywords”? There should be quite a handful for even the non-serious blogger.

Now, focus on these combination keywords. For a starter, these keywords are great options to work on. Especially if you have nothing to invest in blogging but pure content. Write as many articles as possible and generate a good amount of textual content on your blog. Now, this will make sure that when a crawler or a visitor comes to your blog, there would be enough content for him to get a taste of.

How to convert this traffic to money?

Okay so you have a decent amount of traffic from “combination keywords”. And they form 10% of your total organic traffic (from google). Now, watch these referral keywords carefully from your statistics. there could be gold mines like, one particular keyword that is often repeating.

For me I get a decent amount of traffic from the keyword “Wordpress”. Honestly, a huge part of my traffic is from combinations of this keyword others like - wordpress seo, wordpress tips,wordpress seo themes etc.

Now, if you notice, “Wordpress themes” is a much sought after keyword, and there are lot of people working hard to get on top of google for this keyword. But also keep in mind that people don’t search google just with the same keyword. When they try searching once for “wordpress themes”, they get the same 10 results all the time. Getting bored or not finding the right information, they will move the next combinations like “seo wordpress themes” or “wordpress seo friendly themes” etc.

We should pick up these combinations from the stats. So if you noticed that one particular keyword from the combinations in your stats, pick it up and write more articles on it.

Also,make sure that in your template, you have the related posts plugin ready. So that when these combination keyword searchers visit your blog, they find some relevant article on your site and they don’t get disappointed.

If you are on blogger, tweak your template so that links to other articles like the ones dealing with your “keyword” is available for the visitor to refer. You may create a template much lie Amit’s so that, all your best articles are featured on the homepage always.

Also, make sure that on any chosen article page of your’s (single post pages), there are links to other articles that deal with the same keyword (here “wordpress”).

Why do this?

When Google scans your webpages, they pick up all the content information. And when there is a search for these “combination keywords” on google, it looks for matches on your pages.

For example - If there is a search on google for “Wordpress seo themes india” (huh what a combination!!), google looks for pages in your website that has all the words in it (provided the search is not a exact one). So in your article page if these words are scattered all over - one word in article, one word in a link on the sidebar and another word on the title - google still will throw your page on the top search results(since this is a combination keyword, this will not happen for top keywords).

So here the idea is - If you focus your efforts on the “combination keywords” and write articles around it, you can enjoy a decent amount of traffic from them. Now, if you ask me, this is more worthwhile for a starter who may not be able to cash his efforts on the top sought keywords like “earn money online”. So until you get 10k inbound links, work on these “combination keywords” and start getting your momentum. It will put you in good position before reaching the top results.

One of my client insisted that he stick to the the theme he was using, while I was keen on changing it. The reason - though the site is a delight to the eyes, it was miserable in terms of SEO and other standards. I had a bad time convincing him why he should change his theme. And some tools helped to show him that the theme which was close to his heart is not actually helping him but hurting all the while. So I thought I’d share the tool with you. Here are the most reliable, valid and sensible online site validation tools available. Hope it helps you.

- Dr. Watson’s site validation check
Dr. Watson is a free service to analyze your web page on the Internet. Just give the URL of your page and Watson will get a copy of it directly from the web server. Watson can also check out many other aspects of your site, including link validity, download speed, search engine compatibility, and link popularity. It rolls many features into one, so if you are looking for a single stop for checks, this one is the place to be.

Checks done on -

1. Page load time check - Yes
2. Syntax and style analysis - Yes
3. Word counts - Yes
4. Spelling checks - Yes
5. Link checking -Yes
6. Search Engine Optimization check - Yes
7. Incoming links check - Yes
8. Source code -Yes

- W3C Markup validation Service
Checks the entire markup, HTML/XHTML etc for syntax errors and suggest corrections. It comes from the big daddy W#C group, so this is going to be ruthless! (I found 206 errors on DailySEOblog while Problogger.net had 265 erorrs, so you can imagine..) This is an exclusive standards check for the document, so other checks are not available.

Checks done on -

1. Syntax and style analysis - Yes
2. Source code -Yes

- SEO Consultants Validator
This is a HTML/XHTML/CSS validator tool. It checks if there are errors, suggests the changes with reference to the exact line number in the code and provides satisfactory results.

Checks done on -

1. Syntax and style analysis - Yes
2. Source code -Yes

- XML Validation checker
This tool checks if your XML file is well formed and valid. It checks for spaces and syntax errors, while pointing to the line number at which the error was spotted.

- Robots.txt checker
This tool checks if your Robots.txt file is valid. Thought it may show some exclusions you’ve done as errors, they are good pointers to check if the commands will be misinterpreted or not. Good one!

- Page load time checker (around the world)
This is a sleek tool which checks your sites page load time as from different parts of the world. This test based on the fact that Internet connections are at different speeds around the world. It shows the file size dealt with at the respective places and the time taken to load the pages. Interesting one!

- All in One website validation check
This website does not check all the factors on site validation but provides you links to the appropriate sites where the check can be done. Includes tool such as XML/HTML validity, CSS, Links and structure validity.

- RSS Feed validator
This tool helps you to check if your RSS feed validates against the standards and throws up warnings at places where necessary.

- General Conformance check
Checks your site for all the general standards and see if there are rooms to improvement. It checks for the XHTML and CSS compatibility.

- Quality and Accessibility check
This is an awesome tool that checks your pages for accessibility, metadata, page content, links, browser compatibility issues, search and navigation issues and a check on W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It gives you very detailed error details and suggestions which you will not be happy about This is an awesome one!

Link building is an off-site optimization process SEOs can’t live without. Honestly, this is a tedious process. Because, what we all need to work on are one-way links. There are lot of reciprocal link building softwares available today, but many of them are equal to spam. What these reciprocal link builders do is - find out sites from a category(which you select) that are open to link exchanges, and spam their inboxes with link exchange requests. Many a times, this strategy will not work as the emails end up as spam.

Now, there are genuine softwares that will do this in a better way. Find you one-way links that will help you increase your ranks on the SERPs.

Link Assistant is one such software. It has the following features..

Now there is a thin line here. If you automate this software completely, it will become as equal as spam.
Here’s how it works.

- Select a category of websites with which you’ll like to exchange link with. It’d be good to search for websites that are in the same niche as your’s. 

- Find your link partners by searching for  sites that are offering link exchanges in this category.

- Select from a list of potential linking sites and finalize their list taking off the weeds from the list. You can hand pick them or the software will filter them out.

- Now, the site will make a list of all the selected websites and create a page with all of them listed. So basically you are creating a link directory of all your link exchange sites. We are doing this because in the next step, when we ask them to link back to us, we need to have placed their link in the first place.

- Link Assistant has a set of email templates, from which you can select one and add a bit of your personal touch and automate the software to send emails to all your potential link partners.

- The next step is to wait. Since we have send our email requests to all our potential link partners, we will wait for them to link to us.

- Next, Link Assistant will check if your link partners have linked to you according to your request. If they haven;t you can pull them off your link directory otherwise keep them.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a thin line between spam and genuine email here. Link Assistant can be easily mistaken for spam if you don’t use it properly. BE careful when selecting partners whom you are emailing and also when selecting email template. I think customizing the email to give your personal touch will help much.

I don’t recommend using this software completely automated but yes with a bit of hardwork it can be useful to you.

- Find link partners by using the software. Select a category of websites you are interested in and ask the software to find the qualifying websites to you.

- In the next step, visit the sites manually and see if they are really genuine and if they fit to be linked with. First ask for one-way links bye sending them personalized emails. It won’t work, then you can go for link-exchange.

Link exchanges are not recommended by Google therefore I don’t recommend you to do this at all. Instead use this software just to find potential link builders. Beyond it, the software is as good as spam.

Well, I personally is of the opinion that all SEO softwares are basically bull-shit, at one point or the other, you’ll find that the one you are using it is negatively affecting you. But Link Assistant is the best spam, I’d say! So it’s a matter of using these softwares wisely. This one has a fully functional version available for trial for 15 days. So give it a try anyway and get rid of it!

I’ve always wondered - “How did they make it to the top?” If someone could tell me the 10 ways to make me a popular blogger and make everyone link to me. I read and I read but it’s all the same s*** everywhere. B

So what does it take to become a popular blogger, accepted and trusted by everyone (well almost) ? I’ve found some traits interesting, from every blogger that I followed. Some were common, and some unique. As a blogger I think we should absorb the best ones, from the people who made it big. Here are a few i gathered, let’s see if you will disagree with me.

 12 habits of successful bloggers you should copy 

1 - Read more than you write ( Courtesy Darren Rowse )
I found this habit of Darren, very interesting. We bloggers spent a major part of our time tweaking, and writing contents for our blog isn’t it? And with a popular blog like ProBlogger, anyone would assume that Darren uses most of his time with his blog, writing content and tweaking the design. But it was interesting to know that Darren spends most of the time reading than writing.
That is indeed a great habit for a busy man like him. I guess it’s about keeping you updated and “in the loop” with the blogosphere.

2 - Respond to emails (Courtesy Darren Rowse )
Another habit of Darren that I admire. Even though he’s a celebrity, if you send Darren a genuine question/suggestion on email, it would most probably be replied. This shows how passionate he is and open to ideas. I think we all should keep this as a reference point and copy it in to our lives.

3 - Social media (Courtesy Pete Cashmore)
Every popular blogger is the super star in a social media network. A look at their friends number itself will make you feel like the silliest living thing on the planet. Well, it’s not magic that got them those many friends, but hard work. Popular bloggers are social media enthusiasts they talk to people, they are open to discussions and ideas and this reflects in their friends number on facebook or orkut. So go out talk to people and build your network, it’s a powerful tool.

4 - Be the first to jump in ( Courtesy John Chow )
I learned this from John Chow. John jumps first into any affiliate marketing or money making tool that comes in (or so I guess). And this is exceptionally good because if the tool takes off, he’s probably going to sit on top of a gold mine some time from now. All he needs to do is sign up at the first place. So be the first to jump into things, most of them are free, so what’s keeping you waiting?

5 - Ask questions ( Courtesy Darren Rowse )
Another one I loved about Darren. He always asks questions and manages to spark off discussions on the “seemingly” silly topics. It’s very easy for bloggers to “feel” that they are masters of the trade and asking questions only will degrade their status. Of course not!

6 - Be friendly ( Courtesy Michael Martine)
I love to talk to friendly people, and so do you right? To me, it’s not the knowledge level or celebrity status of a person that makes me respect him, but his willingness to be friendly and share the same frequency with you. Many a times, you have people who have enormous amount of knowledge but would never come down to your level and share knowledge with you. It’s a frustrating situation. But there are some very pleasant personalities like Michael Martine, who are very friendly and supportive. The interesting thing about talking to such people is that they are willing to share the same frequency with you, and they’ll share knowledge with you. It’d be a win-win situation than a one-way process. I wish more bloggers be this way, and it’d be lovely to network with them.

7 - Either be seriously good or be evil ( Courtesy Kumiko )
I learned this one from Kumiko. And she’s very right. People like to listen, hear and sometimes do evil. So if you are all set to grab people’s attention, either be seriously good or be damn evil - the smart way. Either way, do it the appealing and smart way. (Being evil doesn’t mean harming someone, but being smart.)

8 - Show off your money ( Courtesy John Chow )
I don’t think everyone will agree with it, but I have to agree that some guys do it best. Like John. This man flaunts his money like none does and hey, that’s his USP. So if you want to help people make money, come on first show me how much you got? (A good lesson to all those “money making gurus” on blogspot.)

9 - Give attention to details that others may miss ( Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
This is a simple yet very effective in convincing readers. A good example of this would be DI’s Amit Agarwal. Amit’s “WOW” factor in his posts are the simplicity. If you look at his popular posts, all of us would feel unanimously say - “Damn! Why didn’t I think about it earlier?”
That’s exactly what makes the man popular. He has keen attention to details and he brings up all the tips and tweaks possible for even the less important applications.
Paying attention to details finally pays off !

10 - Be consistent (Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
I think every popular blogger would agree with this one. Think about it this way, was Darren popular when he started his blog? Was Amit aware that he’s gonna be featured on the cover page of a national weekly? No, isn’t it?
So the point here is - Consistency. If you have the passion in you, keep it going and success will automatically fall in place.

11 - Live on criticism (Courtesy Amit Agarwal )
Criticism and bad mouthing is the part of the game. No one would be popular without hearing abuses and criticisms. Or ask the blog celebrities today. They would most happily agree that through out their career, there were criticisms, bad mouthing swearing even. But the idea is to keep the flame burning, come what may. (A good lesson for young bloggers who fret over monthly AdSense earnings and Google PR)

12 - Link Voraciously (Courtesy John TP )
We all know it’s about the network ! Let me give you an example. John TP. This young man is not very common in comments or networking (John this is only an example, hope you will take it in the right spirits) so once I thought he’s not social. But looking at his posts, I found that John links voraciously, to every possible resource. And he even writes posts to refer someone or a tool. That’s a great virtue if you ask me. Because, you may not be good in socializing but linking to fellow bloggers and resources makes you equally popular. (This is a lesson to all those bloggers who think 24 times before linking to someone. Spare me, I think only thrice )

There must be a couple of other habits too that makes a blogger popular but I’m leaving it to you. We all know there are no “Top 10″ rules (Like the digg lists) to fame in the blogosphere, it’s all common sense and hard work. We all have the answers in us, it’s just that we are not speaking about it.

Rajesh asked me this question - How does some sites manage to get their pages listed beneath the snippets in Google search? They appear in groups and all the pages/navigation structure appears there. I can’t get my blogs pages appear near the snippets.

Rajesh is talking about Google Sitelinks (See screenshot).

Sitelinks are the group of links to the pages or navigation links in your blog/site that appear right beneath the snippets, or site description text during a google search.

As you might have noticed already, sitelinks appear only for certain sites and not everybody gets the privilege to show them. It appears for almost all high traffic sites and authority sites.

To answer Rajesh’s question, there is nothing at the moment we can do to make the sitelinks appear for your site.

Meaning, Google says it’s completely automated. That is information like, which sites are eligible to show sitelinks, how many sitelinks are to be shown, which are the pages that should appear at the sitelinks, are decided by the google site crawlers and there is very little a webmaster or SEO can do regarding it. Read Google’s theory here.

Okay so as usual, Google speaks from it’s own perspective with no or less help to webmasters. But from our observations, we can make calculated guesses though, can’t we? Here’s what I found.

• Only websites with huge traffic seem to have been displaying sitelinks.
• The links listed in a sitelink are mostly the most-viewed pages in a site.
• The links are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
• In sites that have sitelinks, the category pages or the navigation structure is universal or repeated many times, this may be a criteria for Google to understand that these links help reduce the user’s navigation time.

As Google says in it’s explanation, their algorithms pick up short-cuts that will help reduce user’s time in finding pages on a site. This could be a pointer to the navigation structure. But you can’t completely rely on this information.

If you take Yahoo! for example, in the sitelinks that were shown to me, I got the following links (see screenshot).
Mail - The best web-based email! My Yahoo! Finance Games Radio Sports and Movies.

So clearly, all the links in the navigation menu are not included in the sitelinks but yes, the one’s that are shown clearly are the ones that either have the maximum page views or are the most popular ones.

So that could be one pointer to us - The pages/links in the navigation menu with the maximum clicks or page views will be picked by Google to include in the site links. But again, this is only an assumption and a calculated guess.

As of now, Google does not give us any information on how to add sitelinks to our sites, to help searchers find more information from your sites. I’m unaware if this is a “premium feature” available to some sites, but Google does take feedback from you on this. That is if you have sitelinks appearing for your website, and it is wrong the way it is shown right now, you can let google know of this and get it corrected. See how to do it here.

Sporting a dashing image like this one in your posts really helps much to get the attention of readers.

Many a times, people search for images on Google Image search or Windows Live image search and simply pin up the image on the articles.Many a times, the images don’t fit well into the articles, and some “photoshopping” may be required to crop and fit it. But bloggers who write articles on the fly, may not have the time to photoshop an image, so rely to online image sources.

Here comes the role of image and text generators. They are very helpful for bloggers because they help to find the matching images and incorporate the appropriate text in them, with ease!

Gerard from The Generator Blog has quite some cool generators listed in his blog. Awesome work!
I managed to pick a few that may be of interest to bloggers.

• Dylan Message creator
  This one creates a movie where a series of messages(10 of them) is shown on each sheet the man is holding. A little heavy stuff, but cool!
• T-Shirt with slogan generator
  Give any word and the generator will give you a slogan corresponding to it written on a T-Shirt and a nice babe!
• Airline Sign generator
  This one writes your name on an Airplane. Neat and classy one, but better the name/message be short!
• Make angry Tom yell out whatever you want
  Enter some lines of text and get “Tom yelling at you” those lines.
• Generate a Neon sign
  Create a neon sign board with your name glowing up!
• Award/Trophy generator
  Generates a badge with a trophy image and your desired text. Great for quick awards!
• Wedding sign board generator
  Create a neon glow wedding sign board with your text written on it. Cool one !
• Zidane - Materazzi conversation video subtitle generator
  Write your own sub titles for the Zidane - Materazzi video, use your creativity!
• Create an Official seal
  With your text and company name on it.
• Convert RSS to Gif
  This generator converts your RSS feed entries to Gif format.
• Convert text to image
  This generator can convert any text file to an image document with the given parametres like image width and height
• Create Zombie like text image
  With this generator you can create a zombie like image(font) out of your text.

Many of these generators are not exactly image generators, but flash based programs, so you may want to use the “Printscreen” option to capture the image and use it in your articles.

Image courtesy -Thilak

From an SEO perspective, it may be very important to take note of the new changes in the algorithm and the page rank degradation which has become the most significant now. Many or all of the page rank degradation reported have been the result of Google misunderstanding your site. Like Darren’s Problogger degrading to a PR 4, which have not sold any text link in the near future.

Let’s find out what could’ve happened.

• Use of Labels
  Many popular sites thought that Google will find the purchased links if they will use labels like “Sponsored links” and “Text link ads” hence they turned to less “findable” labels like “Cool Links and “Resources”.
  Truth is that, Matt Cutts and Google were already aware that text link brokers recommend buyers to mask their links using non-recognizable labels like “Cool Links” and “Suggested Links”.
  Probably Google included both “sponsored links” as well as “Cool Links” to their filter list.
• Inclusion in the Text-link-ads network and active participation in it.
  Google might have thought, instead of crawling a site and then deciding whether this guy is selling links or not, why don’t I go to the market and get hold of all the sellers there (A nice place is Text-link-ads).
• Use of texts like - Buy links here, Place your ad here, Text links at US $X, in your copy/template would have given Google crawlers a clear indication that you are selling links, while you may not have actually.
• Articles or posts that talked about “purchasing links” and “importance of Google page rank”.
• Actively taking part in Paid Reviews and encouraging users to order it.
• Selling other forms of advertisement on the blog
  Google might have assumed that,if someone is willing to sell image ads on his blog, then he’s also likely to sell text links.

All the above are assumptions on the Google crawlers thinking, keeping in mind they are pretty new to this area - to find out who exactly is guilty of selling links from their sites. My guess is that Google thought of all possible ways to get hold of the “culprits” and just went about catching anyone it found on the way who were likely to sell links on their sites.

But Matt had already warned us right? There could’ve been some precautions taken by those active link sellers. Let’s see what could’ve been done to stop Google misunderstanding you.

• Could’ve totally quit link buying and purchasing.
• Could’ve added the “no follow” tag to all outgoing links.
• Could’ve taken off the “provocative” labels like “Sponsored links”
• Could’ve reported to Google about what you’ve done.
• Could’ve sold more editorial links (like reviews) rather than odd-looking short text links.
• Could’ve refrained from writing non contextual articles linking to un-related sites.

Well, now that Google has taken the drastic step, there is very little that we can do. But Matt and his team needs to device more clear and precise strategies to find out who actually are buying links, who were buying links and who doesn’t buy links any more. What’s happening now isn’t fair at all.