Have you tried to outsource your social media campaigns? Link building, bookmarks, creating viral content etc?

No? Well, if you decided to, then you’re unlucky. Because, once you have decided, and you have the budget, it won’t be an easy task to find the best guy around. In fact, there are so many SEO’s and SEO gurus that you get sick of them so easily.

During my early days, I had contacted some DP forum SEO experts for contract work and with my limited budget, I really had no choices but to go for the cheapest guy. And DP forums as you know has quite a lot of them. Interestingly, many of them were “we do everything” guys who could do everything from link building to directory submissions to content writing. Everything at damn cheap prices. In fact, with my limited budget, I could manage to get a link building campaign that would run for three months, collecting over 500 one way links or more, directory submissions to 1000 directories, and they promised to write articles on any topic you suggested provided it’s under the sun.

Funny isn’t it? Of course DP forums isn’t the right place to find quality people, but if you are ready to do a huge compromise on the quality, you can find some really damn cheap vendors there.

The point I’m coming to is that, it’s alarming to see how many companies work today under the SEO umbrella. They do everything from A-Z, at damn cheap prices. I’m not sure if they are a good bargain but the fact is that many clients prefer them and the money is rolling. As a matter of fact, there were many situations personally, where I had to suggest another cheaper service because the client is adamant on the price. Many clients are happy that way too.

There are many guys around, both freelancers and professional teams who are ready to do custom packages for you. My advice to people who are looking to hire SEO’s and SEMs is that

- Never go for a company who promises everything, it’s highly likely that they don’t have the expertise.
- Never go for damn cheap prices, the service too would be of less quantity and you can’t question it.
- Never go for companies/freelancers who does not have a proven track record/references.
- Never go for the “look” of the site, appearances are deceptive.

But having said all these, there are real good talents too out there. It’s just that they aren’t either seen or talked about. Just google for SEO companies in your locality and you’ll get enough of them.

There’s a new company around that offers some very good services at competitive prices. Nitin Jain is the man behind the company and his company offers everything from link building to social media management. Pretty interesting.

They have an attractive services range and though I haven’t tested them, it sounds like they’re promising what they can deliver. Nitin believes in credibility publicity and has also offered an affiliate program here (No, that’s not my affiliate link, you know I never do that exercise).

Why I selected Nitin, is because he has been in contact with me for quite some time and I think he’s passionate about whatever he’s doing and that should reflect on the services. I’m not sure if they’d be able to pull off everything from link building to directories to digg to blogging…sounds like a little too much to me but, he says those services are put up there because there may be people who are interested in them and he don’t want to lose out.

I wish there are more people like him come up and start their own services companies like Submit comfort. My only concern would be that they should maintain the professionalism that will match the quality of their services. There are many other services like Submitcomfort, that are lost in the sea of frauds and wannabes. If you know one guy or a company, do let us know and I think rather than shooing them away, talk about them and find out as to who’s genuine and who’s not.

Hey easy.. take down that frown on your face. This article is nothing about any black hat SEO techniques. Well, it has got shades of grey, but it is fair  and it is completely legitimate.

Hmm, let’s put it this way. It’s about manipulating the SERPs to your advantage using the SERPS itself.

Example: You have a keyword that you want yourself to rank high on. Unfortunately, there are lot of established sites which rank high for that particular keyword. So, the chances of you breaking into the top is bleak and it may take several trial and error methods and indefinite time.
But you have this cool new way by which you can simply break into the top 1, 2 or 3rd position and if you wish all of them for the same keyword. Sounds interesting? Hop on!

I’ll call this method “Carbon Copying SERPS”.

It goes like this. Take the keyword for example “free wordpress themes”. This keyword has a high traffic volume.

If you do a search on Google for “free wordpress themes” then it would give you all the established sites on the SERPS. Please don’t mistake when I say established sites.

I mean the ones, which has an advantage of

- having it’s content propogated more quickly,
- having the maximum number of incoming links,
- having more references on anchor texts with the keyword
- with an older domain name etc.

To beat them in a short span of time is difficult.

And you have a fairly new website for which I assume that the following points are ticked off.

- Is indexed on the SERPS.
- Has a decent level of authority for content.
- Has good content and some fair amount of link juice.

Now, what we would do is go to all the established sites, and research on what their content is. See if we can trace a pattern out of it.

Have they provided images?
Have they listed the themes in numbers?
Have they done SMO?
Have they written enough textual content? If yes in what pattern?

Research on as many as the metrics as possible, mostly on site optimization metrics. Because this is the only area where you’d be doing some homework.

Now goto your blog and start designing .

- Design a layout that gives maximum leverage to on site optimization factors.
- Make a list which is SEO friendly. (Food for thought*)
- Make a list of all the best sites on the SERPS, offering “Free Wordpress themes”.
- Give them thumbnail images or snapshots.
- Write SEO friendly textual content on the list for the thumbnails. (Again food for thought*)
- Use extremely attractive headings. (Food for thought*)
- Package it really well.

By now, you should have a SEO friendly website, with a SEO friendly design, with the best content on the selected keyword, with the best compilation and the best copy.

Now go to and fro on the content, MAKE SURE there is no duplicate content on the copy at all. Redraft the content and make it a attractive package.

Now, submit the article to the social media sites. Digg, SU and the like. This is easily said than done.
In fact, to be honest with you, this is the catch of this trick. There is no guarantee that everyone who did the above steps exactly will make it to the top unless they do the social media part correctly. I can even say, one who does the social media submission part correctly will win.

Some interesting points here.

- You might have designed a great copy, but you suck at SM. You lose.
- You have extremely good content, something like the WIkipedia, there is no Viral marketing flavor in your copy. You still lose.
In fact, the offsite optimization part of the game will be taken part of the Social Media while you sit back and relax.

So, essentially what you’ve done is -

Selected a keyword, picked the best sites that has ranks high on it, studied the pattern, created a list from it, made excellent on page SEO factors to support it, fed it to the demons !

So, it’s not all that grey as I suggested right? And there is a bit of that retarded SMO thingy too. Having said it, I’m not sure if this will work for all keywords. It does for certain type of “numberable” content though.

Wondering what’s it?

Well, at DailySEOblog, I’ve tried my best to keep away from personal stuff. Simply because, I never wanted to disturb my readers and clients. So this idea of starting a new personal blog clicked! For a writer, getting an opportunity to write is like getting high on hashish. And that’s why all of us like blogging isn’t it? We can create platforms of our own.

So I have a personal blog now. It’s Manikarthik.com, and you’ll see a lighter side of me there.

I’ll be sharing jokes, travelogues, places and basically all the interesting stuff. If you’ve been bored listening to my SEO, SMM, marketing bhashans, come over to my personal space (well, not really personal right?). It’s like inviting you all to a Saturday night get-together at a favorite food joint.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed.

OK, So what about the money..Mani ?

I’m giving away $250 this season, and there’s a competition you can win. It goes like this.

It’s going to test your SEO link building and offsite optimization skills. So only the best-hardcore SEO’s who think they are really game for a battle need to take part.

The subject would be my personal blog, (which is brand new).

What you have to do

1 - Pick a keyword of your choice that is suitable for the website. It could be something like Mani Karthik, SEO India, Best SEO India, well, it’s your choice to select what you are comfortable with. You can use SEO tools to pick the keyword but make sure it’s relevant to the site.

2 - Let me know what keyword you’ve selected through comments here, so that everyone knows about it. (Don’t email please). You might want to pick keywords first so that there is no duplication. Each contestant will be assigned a single unique keyword. Incase there are more than one contestants for a keyword, variations of the keyword will be assigned to you by me.

3 - You have a time of maximum, 60 days. Ending March 29, 2008 you have to submit your results as to what is the position the site have achieved, because of your efforts, for the particular keyword that was assigned to you.
Of course, the progress of the competition will be monitored through out the schedule.

Points to note.

- Based on which keyword ranks me higher, the winner will be announced. For example, if the keyword, “Mani’s blog” ranks higher than any other keyword, it would be announced the winner.
- Incase there are more than one keyword that ranks number one, for instance both the keywords “Mani Karthik” and “Mani’s blog” ranks number one, the winner will be decided on the quality of the keyword.
- If it’s confusing still, it will be open to readers to select which is the best keyword.
- Keyword selection is totally up to you, but it should be related to the site and should be approved by me prior to the start of the competition (in comments).
- The results will be checked on Google.com and not any regional domains.
- Prize money will be sent through paypal ids only.
- There will be no control over the onsite optimization factors for the contestants. I’ll be making regular posts on the blog during the competition time.
- You can adopt any white hat strategy you like like reviews, link building etc. As long as it’s not black hat, it will be approved.
- Contestant should provide details of link sources on demand, though it may not be necessary.

So, there you go.

Time to prove you SEO skills and test out what you’ve learned over the years form DailySEOblog. This is going to be a litmus test for all of you SEO’s/SEO wannabes out there. I’m sure only the best would win, and if I find your work really worth it, you’d even get into a contract with me. So make sure you win the contest at any price!

The current stats of the blog are as follows.

- Not indexed on Google.
- No incoming links.

So what are you waiting for? Get set…go !

Vishal has a doubt on linking strategies.

Google does not show any backlinks for his site - www.b2cjewels.com. He has submitted articles in forums and directories, he has also ensured good interlinking of pages.

So he’s wondering why the links are not showing up.

The second question is - while interlinking pages, is it better to link with the complete URL (www.example.com/url.htm) or just the pages - ..url.htm?

Well, Vishal, you have backlinks indeed. Search for google blog search and you can find 8 links to your site.

Seems like you have attempted to backlink from lot of expired domains or spam sites, I really don’t know how this could’ve happened, it could be spam robots who picked up your URL, or had you submitted them yourself? It is not looking good either way.

What you really need to work on is get contextual link from related authority sites. A few of them that comes in regularly will do the trick. I also noted that your site is up from 2005, so it’s high time you had some good quality incoming links.

Now, regarding the internal linking, the types of links you referred to are respectively called Absoulte links and Relative links. Absolute links will carry the whole URL with it while the relative links will carry only the respective correct path. See more info here.

In SEO, I prefer Absolute linking even though both are the same in Google’s eye. But using absolute linking is better because,

• It is easier to manage as there are less chances of error/broken links to appear when moving documents/pages.
• There are more occurrences of your domain name in the code, which is good.
• It is more recognizable to visitors and are likely to bookmark, provided the content is worth it.

So, go ahead with more absolute links, and directory submissions. Bit if you are really looking forward to a solution to your back linking problems, you should try article marketing and more contextual authority links.

These days, importance is given to link building than anything else in SEO metrics. Out of the various factors considered today as must have’s for SEO, link building stands out. At the forums and discussion boards, there is always someone who’s looking for outsourced SEO’s who can work on link building for their site. Many are preferring cheap SEO’s too. Hmm, though it looks murky, I’m not of the opinion that link building should be outsourced to any cheap SEO.

If you take a look around, you’ll see that out of all the bloggers, only a few say less than 10% even consider outsourcing link building. The majority of them handle it themselves. And they are good at it. May be there’s something you can learn here.

1. Link building is not tough as it seems like.
You have no clue why your site is getting a better PR, or a better position. That doesn’t mean that your link building campaigns, if at all any, has gone wrong.
Probably it means that you’re not doing it right. I’ll get to some tips of how to do link building successfully down the article.

2. Link building is not easy as it seems like.
Having said that, it’s not something everyone can focus on. Many of us do a one man job at the site, writing content, tweaking template etc. In between all this, link building goes out of focus and remain down the priority list.

3. Link building is not about commenting and directory submission alone.
Many of us count link building practices limited to directory submission and commenting. Well, honestly that’s only 10% of the whole process. There is a whole lot more in link building. Let’s see further.

Let’s clear some common mis conceptions about link building.

Last, day I asked a question, what are your link building methods?

And the common answer many agreed on was that - Exclusive content and natural linking will help you more than anything else. 

Josh Spaulding says that, since he deals with niche sites, he believes in natural linking though he submits his blog to directories.

Josh is right. If you have a niche site, and if you haven’t marketed in properly, it is highly unlikely that it will get noted by others and hence the link building will be fairly okay while not helping the site much. In such cases two things can help.

1. Directory submission and  2.Social Media Optimization.
If you submit the site to some quality directories, it is likely to get some attention and traffic(Not all does give it, you have to chose wisely).It would help you get some Google juice atleast, again it’s only a better alternative to waiting for your content to get noticed.

Social Media Optimization is the thing! If you are clever enough to create a remarkable(in the right sense of it’s meaning) article, which is likely to get noted by others, then things happen really quick! People notice your blog and favour it with links. Just what we wanted.

Nitin Pai is of the opinion that, natural linking is the best way to get links.

Here too, the uncertainty in when you will get the incoming links and attention is something that will put us off.Again, SMO will help you out here.

Rajan and Mohan is also of a similar opinion. They say that the content itself will bring you links if it’s exclusive.

So what we can learn from this discussion is that taking into consideration, the uncertainty and ambiguity in waiting for the spotlight to feature your content, taking a step forward and creating those killer, viral articles optimized for the social media, would help you more than anything else in building links.

• Agreed that content is king and exclusive content will bring you natural links but optimizing your site for the social media is the right weapon to hunt for links. It’s a fool proof strategy. Waiting for natural links to come is vague.
• Links from commenting does not help you get a higher page rank.
  I heard some one say that he builds couple of links a day through commenting to ensure that his page rank is better the next update. It’s a wrong idea. Commenting on blogs can only bring you traffic, and backlinks on Yahoo and MSN but not Google, unless if the blog is “Nofollow” free.
• Links from forums don’t help you at all.
  I know many of you will disagree with me on this. I can explain.
  Just answer the following questions and you will agree with me.

  - How many links can you gather from a forum?
  - If you are getting signature links at a forum, many others would. Isn’t it?
  - If all of us link to our sites from one single forum (or as many which provides sig links), wouldn’t Google put them all in one bracket ?
  - What’s that you’ll get from a forum that other’s don’t?

  Do you get my point now? From my experience, if you rely solely on forum links, they don’t give you any exclusivity at all. If you know of a forum that allows signature links, probably everyone will. Though it carries some weight, when everyone starts getting incoming links from common domains, they does not give you that edge over others. This is more applicable in the case of sites that fight for positions on the SERPs. For the small time amateur blogger, who just needs an incoming link for the sake of it, it works fine.

So the point here is that, handling link building campaigns yourself may not give you the desired effect because you are not specialized in it. But if you are very clever, there’s nothing stopping you. From my experience, hiring a so called “cheap SEO” doesn’t serve the purpose if you are looking for quality links. Many of them I know rely on forum links, directory submissions and at the most article submission. Beyond all these traditional methods, I’ll rank Social Media Optimization as the right weapon. If you can find someone who’s good at it, he can give you quality links than a cheap SEO. Remember, links are not just about numbers, it’s also about quality. Fifty incoming links from forums/directories is equal to five quality contextual incoming links.

I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

I must admit that I agree it’s a professional SEO who should do all the work on optimizing a site, but it’s also true that many of them can be done by the site owner itself.

Irrespective of whether he’s a techie or not. Agree or disagree? So you’ve heard all those Jazz and Jargons on SEO, keywords, meta tags, links, H1 tags, density, anchor text and what not? Phew, quite an overload for a newbie or a non-tech site owner. This goes out to all the non SEO educated people who wants to do that 5-10 things that will make their site SEO’d for Google. Just do them and sit back, you don’t want to mess with it anymore. Here goes.

1. 
   

   Selecting a keyword

   Selecting a keyword is the first and foremost step to SEO. If you don’t have a keyword ready, you are doing SEO like searching for something in dark. Your keyword forms the vital part of your structure, they are the building blocks, so you got to decide what they are. One important thing to note here is that when selecting a keyword, you got to see how much competition you’ve got already. For a keyword like "Weight loss", there is already immense competition, so unless you have the time and money to fight them, it’s better you dodge them and select a new keyword of your own. For example, if your site is on outsourced jobs, you probably have to narrow it down to "Outsourced jobs India" or to your locale, so that you create a niche of your own. Makes sense right? Ok, now you have one or two keywords ready, and you are sure what search terms on Google do you want your site to rank high for. So let’s move ahead.

2. 
   

   URL Structure

   If you are on Wordpress or not, your URL structure should be SEO friendly. When I say SEO friendly, I mean they should be in a presentable form to the Google spiders. Let’s take an example. Non SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/82u83nbdfbdfhcat?12hhre SEO friendly URL - yourdomain.co.uk/88e-free-dvd-rentals?12uk As you might have noticed, the second URL carries more information about your website than the first one, which is a more machine friendly one. In wordpress, this is pretty easy to do. While, if your site is on a CMS/coded, like Joomla,Mambo, or PHPbb, V Bulletin etc things can get tricky. There is a solution to each and there is no one rule that goes for all of them.

3. 
   

   Onsite content

   Honestly speaking there is quite a lot that goes in here, and it would be difficult for a non-techie to comprehend, hence I’ll talk only about the bare essentials. The textual content on your website (select All, CTRL+A) should be able to give the spiders some information about your site and the products. This is vital. If you can’t do this, then there is a lot you are compromising. So tweak the landing pages textual content so that your keywords are sprinkled evenly. Don’t over do it. A text to keyword ratio of 5-6% is just fine. You can repeat this on all the pages at your site, and make the textual content in them optimize for the keyword. This will help in the overall worthiness of your site. Remember…don’t over do. It may lead to trouble.

4. 
   

   Others onsite factors

   I’ve put all the other onsite factors to one category because each of them are not significant on their own but makes an impression when combined with other factors. These are - Image ALT tags - Not really worth, but may help sometimes. Change all the ALT names, descriptions and Titles of your images to a sentence that related to the keyword and the content. You may be easily tempted to stuff all your keywords into them, but that is not good at all. It can harm you if you over do it. H1 Tags Make sure that there are H1 tags in your code, and ensure that your keywords and related clauses are embedded in H1 tags. Spiders pick up content from the H1 tags, and consider them relevant to your site. Again, don’t over do it. STRONG Make sure that you don’t use BOLD element in your HTML instead, either replace them with STRONG or find a work around. BOLD is only visual while keywords in STRONG are absorbed by the spiders. So if you can combine H1 tags and STRONG tags, that is great. If you run into trouble by highlighting unwanted words, use CSS to tweak it and clear the junk out.(Bonus tip ) Footer Text Utilize the footer text, it carries some level of importance on some search engines, because that’s the last thing they see on your site. Make sure that instead of that boring copyright text it’s something related to your keyword that you write. Makes more sense.

5. 
   

   Off site factors - Incoming Links

   All of you know that incoming links help much in building your authority. Also I often see lot of wrong ideas floating around regarding link building. Some wrong ideas about link building that I found popular are. - Link exchanges give you authority - NO they don’t. It’s a worthless exercise. - Google Page Rank decides your rank on Google results - NO it doesn’t. I can rank a PR1 website over a PR 5 with less effort for a selected keyword. - If some porn site (bad neighborhood) links to you, you are in trouble - NO it does not. It will not help you and it will not harm you either. - If you get anyone linking to you, it’s good - NO, you should be selective as to who links to you (if at all you decide who links to you). - The more the links the merrier - NO, It’s not the numbers but the quality of the links that matters. More link building tips here.

6. 
   

   Sitemaps

   Now, assuming that all the above steps are taken and optimized without overdoing it, you are ready to submit your site to Google. For this create a sitemap. Remember, this is the final step, so you want to go back and make sure that you haven’t done anything wrong like overdoing keyword stuffing.

7. 
   

   Promoting your site

   Now that everything is in place, you can start letting the world know that you have a great website. Two simple strategies I’d recommend here are - 1) Submitting to Directories and 2) Submitting to Social bookmarking sites. When submitting to social bookmarking sites, make sure that a powerful user notices your site. And don’t immediately sign up for an ID and submit your site. It doesn’t work that way. I can help you submit your sites, provided they have quality content if you can add me as a friend at my social networks (see right hand panel top). My recommendation is Stumble Upon, it gives you great traffic. I’m not allowed to add any more friends on SU myself, as I’ve reached the 200 limit, but you sure can add me.

So there you have it, the simple 7 steps involved in making your site successful, right from basic SEO to promoting it. If you are comfortable with it, start with Step 1 today and put your site on steroids. Make sure that things are natural and steady any rush can lead to disappointment. If you have any doubts meanwhile, feel free to ask me or hire me if you wish.

Google today announced that webmasters could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host.

So let’s say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, e.g. sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml. Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would get an error because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from www.example.com. So how do we solve this? Well, if you can “prove” that you own or control both of these hosts, then either one can host a Sitemap containing URLs for the other.

Google is talking to other search engines so that they too follow and accept this cross-submission sitemap procedure.

Read full story here

Okay Google is against link purchases. But fortunately they are not against advertisements.
In the Google guidelines, it’s clearly mentioned that blogs or websites should not go for the following..

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Google is OK with you selling advertisements on your blog, but provided you have the “nofollow” tag attached to the links sold on your site. Well, this is to ensure that their algorithm isn’t being corrupted, just because you link to the wrong sites (spam and irrelevant sites) for money.

I have a new ad spot sold here. You might have already noticed it. The Submit URL here, link seen on the right side panel. The link will take you to a cool web directory, SubmitURLhere.com

Daily SEO blog members have a privilege at this directory. You can have a 25% discount on the rates while including your website there by using the promo code “dailyseo” (without quotes) at check out.
Submit URL here is a part of the Webmaster’s Cavern group and is a SEO friendly directory. Make use of the discount today!

Are you tired writing articles on your blog ? Can’t find topics to blog about? Losing out on the frequency of posts on your blog ?

Worry not. There are plugins to your rescue. Confused? Well, you should be. We’ve heard about numerous ways to help you write more articles on your blog.

Allow guest blogging, find more topics, ask questions to readers etc… Well, we have a brand new option now.

Allow visitors to submit posts/articles to you. Yes, allow all visitors (including all of them without any registration what so ever) to submit posts to you.

You know that your readers have a lot of contributions to make, but they don’t have a platform to express it. At the moment what they have is a contact form or email contact with you. If you are allowing guest blogging it again requires one to register first and then apply for a position etc. This filters down content and finally only a few make it.

But how about letting everyone contribute articles to you? Cool isn’t it?

This plugin does just that! It provides a submission page where in just like the ‘contact me’ page, users can submit articles to the admin of the blog.

The articles get saved as drafts in the dashboard where from the admin can publish the articles if found good. You can even allow special users to directly publish the posts. And you can also ban IPs from posting.

My only concern is about spam. Luckily, the submissions are saved as drafts only (except for the trusted users) so you can very well delete spam from the dashboard. but if there are too many of them (like how they normally are), then it may go into a waste-of-time exercise mode, deleting spam manually.

But this seems to a good plugin to increase the number of posts in your blog and as well as give privilege to users and gain their confidence by allowing them to participate in the blog. A must try for people running out of ideas to blog.

Download the plugin here
Test page here