Stumbleupon is no doubt the best targeted traffic source available today. But unfortunately there is very less information on how to use or utilize stumbleupon to the maximum. We all know that some people do it better, while some are awesome with SU. There are no secrets, buy some lesser known or lesser used features on Stumbleupon that helps the power user.

I might sound like a fool if I said that nobody knew about these, so these are likely to be known by some while it might be news for the rest. Let’s see.

1. Quick stumbles with “From the page” review
   You can highlight any text from any page and clik the “review” button, so that the text will automatically appear with a “From the page:your text” format in the review column. When discovering a new site, just highlight the text and click thumbs up. The text will automatically fill in.
   So hereafter, no need to write reviews for each submission.
2. Increase your productivity with shortcuts
   Go to “Toolbar Options” and assign shortcuts like “CTRL+S” etc to thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. This will make your stumbling easier.
3. Subscribe to Tags not just topics
   You can subscribe to tags as well, not only to topics. It is done via the ‘tag page‘ (it’s also accessible through Preferences ? My interests) by choosing a tag and clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button on the upper right of the tag’s page.
   Since there are more tags than topics, and tags are likely to be more relevant to the crowds tastes, it’s a good idea to subscribe to them.
4. Thumbs up images in jiffy
   If you come across images on a site, right click on the image and select the “Stumbleupon Photoblogit” menu. It wil quickly add a rating for the image. No need to find the images URL and then go rate it. Two clicks saved!

Hope you’re already aware of Image Optimization. Designers out there may immediately think about the gif format and image compression, but this is clearly not anything related to reducing image size.

SEO and images are a bit old school I agree. Gone are the days when you had to insert keywords into your ALT tags and get a better rank than your competitor.
In fact, Google has changed it’s algorithm to filter out these “weeds” who’d do anything and everything from stuffing keywords to title spamming to get a better rank.

Though I agree that Search Engine Optimizing your images won’t give you any edge to directly push you over the top of the SERPs, I stick to the idea that they are not completely negligible.

Why do you still need Image Optimization then ?

- Accessibility
- Better end user experience
- Valid code
- Helps the overall impression on your site

Accessibility is one crucial factor many of us ignore while designing websites. And may be..it’s completely fair from our perspective. But coming back to design basics, if you are not taking care of it, you are not doing things right. It’s like leaving the html tags open, and you may still argue that your text is showing up on the browser, so why should you close it? You know that a good code must have the html tags closed.

Better user experience - Imagine you block all the images on the browser because you want to save some bandwidth and cut down your internet bill, and you visit cnn.com only to see that you can’t see the images in there. Instead everything appear all white. You won’t be able to even make out what the content or story is all about. Had the images carried an ALT tag, users could easily make out what the image is all about, even if didn’t load on the browser.

Valid code - As the first point said, valid code is essential for SE optimized pages. you have to follow a W3C compliant structure, in order to get the trust form search engines. Now for that to happen, there is no way you leave image optimization unattended.

Helps the overall look and impression of your site - You like flowers and colors, and everyone else does too. You like websites that has images to decorate it while a few others prefer to remain plain and pale. If you want to look good - be good.

Now, if you are thinking that you don’t have the time to go edit all ALT tags on your pages and add Title tags in it, here’s a wordpress plugin that will help you do it in a click. It’s called SEO Friendly Images.

Here’s what it does.

- Adds ALT tags acording to your preference on all articles.
- you can select whether to add the post title OR the image name OR both as the ALT tags OR Title tag OR both.
- Ensures W3C valid code for the images.

To see it in action hover your mouse on the image above.

Download it here.

It is old school SEO, which says a 6% keyword density has to be maintained in a well written SE optimized copy to make sure that the search engines pick up the keyword from the rest of the text. There has been no or very less changes to the keyword density algorithm that webmasters still follow the 6% keyword density rule. Here are some free seo tools that will help you to determine the keyword density of any webpage of any text article you’ve written. Some of them are stable and advanced while some are just another tool to use in case the popular onces fail.

1. Keyword Density Cloud Analyzer - Finds out which are the keywords that are used most like in a tag cloud format. Gives the keyword count and the density in percentage.
2. Keyword Density Checker - Checks the meta tags and the text on page. Gives a list of keywords as well as keeyword phrases (keyword combinations) with the count and keyword density percentage.
3. Keyword Density and prominence tool - This Keyword density tool has more options whereby you can decide if the meta keywords are to be analyzed or not, and also if there’s a particular word you want to monitor. Also gives an idea about other SEO elements like ALT text and outgoing links text.
4. Keyword Density Comparison - This keyword density tools helps to analyze two URLs for their keyword density and does a comparison on them.
5. Keyword Density Tool - This guy does a keyword density check showing the number of times a keyword is repeated with the density in percentage.
6. Keyword Distribution Check - This tool helps you to find out the keyword density and distribution. Shows keyword cloud and count, but no percentage occurrence.
7. Keyword Density Link Analyzer - This tool is a bit different from others in that, it also has an option to check the ALT tags and links.
8. Keyword Density with SEO elements check - This tool helps you to check all the elements on a page like ALT, Title and headings with their importance and weightage.
9. Keyword Density Checker - This one has the extra option of emailing the results to an email id.
10. Density check with meta option - Checks keyword density with option of including or excluding meta content.
11. Keyword Density Checker with option of number of keywords - This tool does the keyword density check with the option of limiting the number of total keywords analyzed.
12. Keyword Density check with selected bots - Checks the keyword density of a document with additional option of selecting which search engine bot to crawl like Google and a few others.
13. Yet another KW density analyzer - Yet another one in case the others fail.
14. Keyword Repetition check - Checks the number of times a keyword is repeated.
15. Keyword Density Analysis tool - Does a fairly simple keyword density check.

I always thought that making the most of friends is the last word in getting popular on SU, back when I started using it. Over the time, there were even more myths like this one that I found were time wasters, and needed immediate attention. Infact, many of the things that I thought were “normal” was actually harming me in making the best of SU.

Let me share a few with you.

1. Clean up your friends list , remove all with no or less activity.
   I was under the impression that the more friends you have the better. Wrong.
   Be very careful when selecting friends. The basic idea is that the stumbles you do are passed on to your friends as well, which is how the traffic is generated. Now, what if out of the allowed 200 friends, 199 are accounts that haven’t even logged in the past weeks together? The stumbles you make doesn’t travel and the traffic is null.
   So go to your friends list today and remove all of them who doesn’t have any activity or less activity listed.
   Check out their number of stumbles and reviews received.
   Set a number for minimum stumbles required to be your friend, anyone who goes below should be avoided. This may sound harsh but if you don’t it defeats the purpose. As an alternative, you can add those “idle” profiles to your other social media like facebook. They probably will fit better there.
   Ex:- I was surprised to see Amit Agarwal’s profile (a top blogger in India) to be an inactive one. Removed him from the list, and added him on facebook.
2. Join the groups that suits your profile better.
   Unlike Digg, there are lot of groups (yep, active ones) on SU that you can join in and start making friends. There are weird topics available to throw in your opinion on starting from Windows hacks to IPL Cheerleaders. Get involved in them, there are lot of active people out there who’d love to meet new people.
3. Talk to top stumblers who are online now.
   Earlier, I used to send messages to other members I befriended on SU, but would not get a reply. The problem was that they never were online. So if you want to make conversation with that top stumbler (may not be a right choice), you better talk to the ones that are online. SU shows an updated page for live stumblers. Make use of it.
4. Add relevant tags to your already stumbled stories and delete wrong ones.
   Man, in the hurry to stumble stories, I should admit that I had even used wrong tags on some stories. Big big mistake. Abhijeet told me the other day, importance of tagging stories rightly on SU. And he was right. If I would tag a story wrongly, it wouldn’t be accepted by other stumblers and would be considered as close to spam. So stumble the stories properly, so that your friends can have a better SU experience and least not screw the whole system.
5. Don’t be a fan of someone who refuses to befriend you
   You knew that popular blogger, so you’d add him as a friend, and until he accepts it you remain a fan of his. Not good. It only makes sense if you are mutual friends. He may or may not see the stories you are stumbling but, if he has not accepted you as his friend then the story will not go viral (chances are minimum). Had it been his friend, you could have got a few stumbles extra, now that the fan is “inactive”, you miss it. So what’s the point in being a fan? Drop him and get a new friend.
6. Don’t change your avatar often, make it universal
   The avatar is your identity. So make it as exclusive as possible. I’m not sure how you should go about it, it depends a lot on creativity and one’s taste, so there are no limits to what you can do and there are no thumb rules as well. The point is to make a unique avatar so that people recognize you quickly. Least said, please don’t use the default ghost image. That sucks! And there are a million others who look like you.
7. Add all those 200 friends
   Just in case you have not added all of them, do it today. Pick the best, those who are active, who are open to friendship and those who share similar tastes as you. Find them and befriend them, when you have 200 slots why not make use of them?
8. In the about section, add your URL. Yep just one.
   In the about you section ( Top near your name in the default layout) if you add your blog URL, people can easily make out what you are. Give the most important link there, if you have an active blog, list it, or you can also give other social media profiles here. The idea is that, while interested people visit your profile they should check your URL and decide quickly as to whether to befriend you or not
9. Use the “Send to” option to let your friend know of a new story
   So when you wanted to share that wicked story you found the other day, what would you do. No no… please don’t tell me you’d send a mass mail or IM them, use the bloody “send to” button it’s been there for a while and you’ve not been using it. The beauty about it is that, while you send the message not only do you make sure that the guys is visiting the site but replying to you with a thumbs up/down. You get him engaged which is the best thing.

One of the things that gathers moss as we go along is the site design. And it’s even worse with blogs. Wordpress unfortunately has got lot of plugins and frills available for free, that we all keep on adding them until one day we find that it’s all biting back on the blog.

For instance, all the styling and the plugins we add, do you have any idea how much extra junk is added to the code? You might want to check today. Code ratio, Page size, and a lot of stuff get affected, and the funny thing is that you never notice it but is under the impression that they are all doing good for your blog. Let’s de clutter the blog with all those unwanted fancy stuff and allow that fresh rush

1. Plugins and widgets
   How many new plugins have you added recently? It’s great if you can keep track of all the plugins you installed and uninstalled by keeping a document log about it because, not only does it help you to keep track of things but also help you to find out what went wrong. Sometimes, when you come across unexpected errors, most of the times it’s due to a new plugin you installed or it’s non-compatibility with another one. If you have non-running plugins at this time, go ahead and delete the plugin file from the directory.
   Or if you have been running a stupid plugin that you don’t use, remove it and you’ll save quite a lot on the code size.
2. Check for duplicate meta tags
   Although meta tags are not really important in getting ranks on the SERPs, they are still important in attracting visitors to your site. Check your “site:www.yoursite.com” search on Google, and you can see the title tags and meta description for all the pages indexed.
   There are instances like using two plugins UTW and HeadSpace or UTW and All in One SEO, which results in duplicate meta tags and description. See which plugin is causing the duplicate content and delete it or change the settings accordingly.
3. Check your page size
   Use this tool and check your page size. Make sure you have an optimum page size so that it doesn’t take ages to load your page on a slower internet connection. Most of the times, there would be additional codes added to your pages by various plugins and widget scripts. Use the tool to find out how much time it takes to load your page and is it under acceptable level or not.
4. Check your theme on various browsers
   Whenever I talk about cross browser compatibility issues, there’d be someone who says that we’ve done it all. And I ask them how far they’ve done it only to know that they’ve tested the theme on Firefox, IE. Opera and may be Safari. That’s the end. Well, that’s not what we are talking about here. your blog is viewed by numerous type of people on the internet and you got to check if they are all able to see the website/blog the same way or not. For this you have to check the blog/site on various browsers/ resolutions and with and without elements such as Javascript, flash etc. Also there is an array of web browsers available and things doesn’t end with FF and Opera.
   Fortunately there is a nice tool available that will help you check our blog on various browsers and give you screenshots of it. So you can see yourself if there are any problems with it. Here is the tool.
5. See if you have any broken links on your site
   Go to Google webmaster Tools and find out if there are any broken links from your site. They don’t do any harm but it’s always good to keep them away. Either use a spider crawler to emulate the crawling and find out the broken links, otherwise use Google webmasters to find it. The less broken links the better.
6. Optimize your images
   No I’m talking about ALT tags LOL. Check as to how many images load on your homepage ans see how much time they take. You can use the same tool I mentioned in the first point. If they take too long to load, optimize them by converting to gifs or smaller Jpeg versions.

Okay, let’s continue with this tomorrow, meanwhile, do your initial checks first.

That’s the most frequently asked question to an SEO. A very simple question to which the answer may not be very simple. To be honest, this question triggers a chain of answers and theories in me, none of which would be of interest to you. let me try and put this as simple as I can.

Ranking number one on Google is not an easy task. Many SEOs fail to get a top rank (even a number one listing) because they just do the basics right and nothing beyond. SEO has grown beyond H1 tags and strong tags. The reality is that if you just get these basics right, the chances of getting a top rank is difficult, especially when you are targeting competitive keywords.

Essentially, to get a number one rank (or a page one listing) on Google, you have to be very strong in analyzing your competition. And when you are better than them, you rank better.

That’s the story in a nutshell. Analyzing your competition and fighting the way up is indeed not an easy task either. A bird’s eye view of the whole process looks something similar.

- Finding out who and which are the sites that are ranking top 10 for the targeted keyword.
- Finding out all the SEO metrics about them.
- Finding out their quality links.
- Finding out their onsite optimization strength.

Beating all those metrics in a very natural way is the key to success. Of course, it may vary as to how much time it takes and how high you get. Sometimes, Google even thinks that sudden increase in the SEO metrics is artificial so even if you’ve done everything white hat, it may take some time before Google let’s you rank high. But once they find that you are not black hat and everything is genuine, it’s just a matter of few days before you make it to the top.

Although, beating your competition is the right way to get a top rank on Google, you have to make sure that, you don’t end up doing the quick fixes and shady stuff or you are taking a big risk.

This week, we’ll be focussing on onsite optimization strategies and quick fixes that will give you a shot up the ladder. Less time, quick work and immediate results are what we are talking about.

Today, let’s discuss twelve super quick fixes for your blog that will help you get that extra boost on the search engines. If yours is a well indexed blog, I’m assuming that the results should show up in a week or less on the SERPs. Ok, so here goes.

1. Add an H1 tag to your headings and titles.
   Check your blog theme. Select your article title, and view “selection source” (use FireFox for this) and check if the title is put within an H1 tag. If it isn’t you will have to tweak your template and stylesheet to get this done. Make sure that every title is within an H1 tag.
2. Use of <strong> tags.
   You already know that strong tags are best weapons to highlight keywords to search engines. But have you been using it properly? Again select your article text, and view the source code. See if there are strong tags used at all. Strong tags should appear whenever you bold any part of the text. And the reason why you do it not only because you want to highlight a part of the text visually but tell to the search engines that those are your keywords.
   I wouldn’t really recommend you to use strong tags for each end every keyword you use in the article. Use it wisely and carefully. If you have been using them too frequently, slow it down.
   And, if you have been using bold tags instead of strong tags, convert all of those bold tags to strong tags, by tweaking your CSS.
   I would suggest you to use strong tags for phrases like “windows application download here” or “mac v\s windows article read”.
3. Don’t annoy readers with strong tag
   Now that you are using optimum number of strong tags, make sure that they don’t hinder with the readability of your blog. It looks awkward when every keyword appearance in your article looks in bold and readers would not get any clue on why the text is bold. Use your CSS wisely and make sure that all the strong tags inside the articles does not jut out as bold text, rather it should only look so in the source code.
4. Use “rel” tags for your links
   Rel tags are relatively not popular and this is the reason why I would insist on them. Rel tags are not used for normal external links but tag related items. So it means that using more tag elements would help, so use it wisely.
5. Use “title” for hyper links, internal and external
   The title tag too is not used wisely by bloggers because when you insert a link, people don’t really care to fill in all those details, instead only paste the URL. I’d suggest that you use “title” tags for all links internal and external as it gives quite a lot of information for the search engines about what the link is about. Be descriptive using the title tag with as less as 3-4 words, that might be the best practice, but feel free to tinker around ad find your best formula.
6. Use of “Nofollow
   No follow tags are not just for advertisements. You can use them wisely to design your page rank. Check all your external links (use a spider simulator or google webmasters) and filter out all those links (or the necessary) with nofollow so that you retain your page rank. Don’t use nofollow on all the external links, that will make google to flag your blog. Instead, may be check all those low PR pages on your site and analyze if there are lot of external links from them. If they are huge in number, reduce the juice flow by limiting with “nofollow” tags.
7. Rewrite your categories
   Categories and tags are great sources of content for search engine. So make sure you use sensible and worthwhile category phrases. A category like “Chocolate biscuits” makes more sense than “Biscuits”, so rewrite them and make them more descriptive so that search engines can elicit more information from them.
8. Avoid duplicate content or minimize it.
   We’ve made numerous reference to this situation. Use all those strategies like cutting short the article length in homepage, using nofollow etc to curb duplicate content issues.
9. Footer text tweaks
   Rewrite or rearrange your footer text if you have one with worthwhile information. If you have a copyrighted theme, you may have to keep the copyright information, but also make sure that you add information that gives you that extra mileage. More information on footer text here.
10. Page size
    Check your homepage file size now with this tool. If it’s on the higher side and takes time to load, you got to cut it short and use light weight code. Sometimes, when the theme is not CSS, XHTML valid this happens and particularly when you are using a fancy theme, it is common. I’d suggest that you cut it down and use good healthy CSS to trim down all those frills and tweak the code to a normal size so that, the page loads quick and makes crawlers indexing quick and easy, not to mention the readers pleasure.

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 -

AdSense is indeed a fine tool to generate some cool cash online. The problem with many young bloggers is that they simply don’t use the AdSense units to optimal use. By optimal use I mean, getting the maximum from the ads using the least resources.

Many bloggers end up just adding the AdSense codes and just earn a few bucks from it even though there is good traffic. The problem here is that they are not able to make use of the traffic and use the ads in the right way to get the clicks.

Well, after all, all AdSense gurus say is  - put the ads in between the articles, mask them, use all the allowed ad units etc. Well, who doesn’t know that? Here are few AdSense plugins for wordpress I found interesting. Now, I can’t possibl tell you how and when to use it. That’s left for the clever guys, but I’ve found luck with most of them. They increase the revenue and also make managing ads a whole lot easier on AdSense.

1. AdSense Deluxe plugin that makes managing multiple ads easier
   This is a ultra cool plugin that helps you to add the adsense code anywhere in your post/theme. Very much manageable and configurable.
2. AdSense manager that helps you manage ads from one interface
   This AdSense plugin helps you to manage several ad-codes from one place and manage them wisely even allowing you to inject it at places without code editing. Cool.
3. AdSense plugin that injects code automatically
   This adsense plugin does not use the tag replacement way, instead it automatically adds adsense codes to older posts, in a finger snap.
4. AdSense plugin for sidebar
   This plugin lets you add the adsense codes to your sidebar and not the articles. Just copy paste the ad-code to the text area in dashboard and voila! it appears on the sidebar.
5. Add AdSense codes inline between posts
   yes, this plugin basically does that. it allows you to add the AdSense code in between articles, between the lines neatly.
6. AdSense plugin that allows to add images next to ads
   No..No..No, I know it is illegal, but this is not it. This plugin helps you add images next to your ads and also adds a line in between. This is legal according to google TOS. Update: This is against Google TOS. Sorry for the wrong information.
   
7. Increase revenue with AdSense referrals
   This plugin adds a neat “Install Firefox” button on your blog that has your referral code in it. So whenever there’s someone who visits your blog from another browser other than Firefox, it throws up the button (not to FF users). You can earn up to 1$ per referral.
8. Revenue Sharing Ads with AdSense
   This plugin helps Admins and a certain number of users with privilege to share their AdSense ads and revenue from it.
9. Simple plugin to rotate between any number of ad codes
   This is great if you are using other ads along with AdSense. When users get different ads each time, there is an increased possibility for attention and clicks.
10. No code edits, easy installation - Same stuff
    Well, this is no different plugin. It helps you add AdSense codes without no code edits. All configurable from the dashboard.
11. Target your ads effectively
    This is a cool plugin that gives you more control over how ads are triggered on AdSense ad units. It helps you with section targeting feature in a more configurable way.
12. Make money from Google referral ads
    This is a cool plugin if you are looking to earn more revenue from the Google AdSense referral scheme. It simply keeps throwing up different referral ads to the readers on the blog. Simple and effective, if you have the right crowd.
13. A plugin to selectively display the AdSense ads ( Super Cool )
    A great plugin that allows you to decide whom the AdSense ads should be shown to. you can decide from search engine traffic, direct hits, older posts etc. lot of options and a brilliant idea to increase your revenue.

In a reply to this article , Krishna asked a doubt in the comments section.

(a) What is the difference between category and tag in wordpress?
(b) How do we use it effectively for SEO?

That’s a very good question(s) there. I believe many of us had it in mind but did not quite ask it out probably.

Let me try to answer.

We have to see this in two perspectives.

i) The functionality/usability perspective
ii) The SEO perspective

If we take the functionality perspective, on the first look both tags and categories look alike.
Because, they do the same job.

Tags and categories, both are used to label or name articles and arrange them.
If a user clicks on a tag/category URL, he is taken to a page with relevant information.

And there ends the similarity.

Take the usability perspective.

When are tags used?

Tags are used when you have an article that’s already written and you want as many descriptions to it that will associate that article to various topics.
Ex:-  In an article about Michael Jackson, I may use tags like “king of pop” “MJ” and “Michael jackson”

These tags are one-word descriptions of the most important aspects of the article. I’d say - they are tentacles you gift your article so that it can reach out to other social media channels out there on the web, like Technorati for instance.

On Wordpress, tags are used to label a particular article with the most prominent keywords or commonly recognizable words.

Coming to Categories,

When are categories used?

Categories are used to arrange a set of articles that falls into a common label by a common name.

For example, ten articles that I wrote about artists can be fled under the category - Pop. In the Pop category, there would be articles about Michael Jackson, Madonna and MLTR.

Differences in usage

• Tags are used to label important commonly recognizable keywords/topics in a single article. While categories are used to arrange more than one article into a common label.
• Tags are written once the article is written, while categories are made even before the articles are written.
• All categories can be tags but not all tags can be categories.

Ok, so let’s now take the SEO perspective.

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’d have understood that while using categories, file only one article on one category. Filing a single article into more than one category increases the chances of duplicate content hence avoid it instead use one category for one article.

And that’s why tags are here. Tags allow you to use them on more than one article and make things simple. No long sidebars with long category lists, no or less duplicate content issues and no confusion.

So in the SEO perspective, both tags and categories pose a threat of duplicate content if used un necessarily and in the wrong way. But if you use them properly, then the duplicate content issues are minimized.

URL - Both the categories and tags have the same structure.
www.domain.com/tag/post and www.domain.com/category/post

But category will have more importance and page rank in Google’s eye rather than tags just because Category comes in on a higher hierarchy while tags comes down in a lower level.

So essentially, categories and tags serve the same purpose. But they support different entities. While an article can be multiple tagged, it is not adviceable to multi categorize an article. SEO wise, if they are used as per what they are really intended to be, they pose no threat but otherwise, they may take you to trouble.