Yahoo Answers is an interesting place to get quality traffic from. Have you been using the service yet?

Well, it’s a nice service they’re running out there and is the only service (apart from flickr) that I regularly use from Yahoo.

On Yahoo Answers, people ask all sorts of crazy questions. Yep, really crazy ones. I’ve seen some one ask - “Where are my car keys?” But that’s an interesting observation. It could be a meaning less one now, but 10 years from now, similar questions would make more sense.

Now, how is Yahoo Answers a good tool for generating traffic?

The modus operandi is like this.

- You enroll as a member at Yahoo Answers. This means that you can ask and answer questions. There are no criterions that screens if you are a qualified authority or not (which is both good and bad.).

- There are different categories in which people ask many questions. You select the one/ones that you are more interested in, and think you can answer.

- Go through the questions asked there and answer them.

You earn points for each question answered. And if the person who asked the question like your question, he may select your answer as the best one and you could win extra points for it. And you have a ranking system based on the total points you earned, where you get to jump levels as you score more.

Now, why Yahoo! Answers? 

- There are lot of novices over there, who are genuinely looking for quality information.
- Yahoo has an option to provide a link (nofollowed) to your site while answering a question that serves as a reference to the answer. 
- Lot of people are asking questions - while only some of them are answered completely.

I think this is a place where lot of potential subscribers come. A novice or a person who is genuinely interested in solving a problem is more likely to subscribe to your feed than a learned guy (who you found on another blog.)

So, if your site has good and informative content, it’s a great model that works.

Find your target audience —> Answer their queries —> Invite them to the source of information —-> Get them subscribed.

Aren’t you misusing the service Mani?

Not really. Well, the idea of Yahoo Answers is a meeting place for knowledge seekers and knowledge providers. If you do it the right way, obeying the staff guidelines, it is a great place to gain knowledge.

Here are some suggestions that will help you earn a good reputation.
- Answer only relevant questions, that you think is within your knowledge level.
- Be specific to the question and give in all the details and sources that is relevant to the question.(Not everything that you know)
- Never give your site link if it doesn’t have any information about the question asked.
- If some one has already answered before you, don’t repeat the answer. Probably give the guy a thumbs up.
- Appreciate efforts from others, never get into arguments.
- Feel free to give the link from another site that you think has the information the questioner is asking for.
- Obey the staff guidelines.

Essentially, Yahoo Answers is a good tool to generate some quality traffic, if you spent the right time on it, answering some quality questions. Don’t expect a huge traffic but it will trickle down slowly as you build your reputation. And, whatever comes in would be quality traffic and the conversion ration will be excellent. Try it out setting a goal on Google Analytics. 

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Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.

Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.

All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.

Wondered how to check your blog looks like on various browsers for operating systems like mozilla, safari, flock, etc and at different resolutions?

You might ask your friends to do it for you, but when you have a free online tool that checks your blogs look on various resolutions on various browsers, why go for the tedious way?

Browsershots is a cool handy online tool that helps your blog to be seen on many browsers like Firefox, SeaMonkey, Navigator, Galeon, Opera, IE etc. The good thing is that it throws up previews of your blog on the above mentioned set of browsers on various resolutions and on various operating systems like Ubuntu, WIndows XP, Windows 2000, PLD etc.

It’s a fantastic tool, that’s free and completely genuine. Check it out here.

Well, it may happen without your knowledge most of the times, and if you really look for it, you’ll find it. (Damn, I’m sounding like a preacher now.)

Yes, indeed. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it in my earlier days of blogging. But as it grew on me, I could sense some pressure building up. And that’s right here with me as I write this post.

What is the pressure, is it the stress?

Well the Wikipedia definition for stress is  -

Stress is the condition that results when person-environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy, whether real or not, between the demands of a situation and the resources of the person’s biological, psychological or social systems.

So, that explains it. I constantly get’s questions asked to myself while writing an article.

• Will this article be of interest to your readers?
• Does it make sense?
• Would you run out of topics to blog on?
• Is it of the quality that will make it popular?
• If it get’s popular, would you be able to write a second part to it?
• Are there any errors in the points that you mentioned?

So as long as I’m going to be asked these questions, I think the stress factor is always going to be there.

But it’s just not bloggers right? Everyone goes through it, the news reader, the ceo, the stock broker and the police man. And bloggers are the one group of geeks that stay on the edge all the time, so it’s quite natural.

How does it affect you in blogging?

Positively. You see it’s natural for a blogger to undergo stress, after all, you are competing with the rest of the world to make it to the top. So, I think it’s a good sign to have stress. The point is that you shouldn’t let it grow bigger than you. You got to have a command over it. Once it gains over you, you collapse and things go haywire. So make it a point to keep it to a minimal level and make it a positive virtue.

What can do to get over it?

Getting over stress is easy for bloggers compared to other fields of work. Simply because bloggers have a lot of options, a lot of them. Take for instance the questions I asked you earlier.

Will this article be of interest to your readers? - Just rephrase this question. What is the worst case scenario if your readers don’t get interested in it ? They may not leave comments. They may write a comment criticizing you. What else? Cancel your subscription? Yes may be. But in that case you can write a better article next time. Something that explains the readers who not to be stupid and write stupid articles that make you lose your subscription. You caould take the example of the first post too.

So it’s basically about making the best of whatever you’ve got. If you got a bad writing style, show it to people and say - this is how you shouldn’t write your article. You just passed on some information to them. And, they’ll appreciate it.  

Another way to go about it is to get proactive.

Foresee what your goals are and what the bottlenecks are. Make a comparison, study it well and start gathering resources that will get you over the situation. So when the time comes, you’ll be pretty much comfortable with what you are doing.

So essentially, stress in blogging is pretty much natural, but bloggers are at the luxury of having more options than others. Get proactive and study your weaknesses, you’ll be safe when the testing time comes.

Twitter is gaining on…Chris loves it Darren loves it John TP loves it..so why should you wait? Hop in.

There are a number of plugins available for twitter today, but out of them honestly only a few makes sense. Here’s a list of the best twitter plugins for wordpress.

1. Alex Kings plugin or Twitter
   Undisputedly the number one twitter plugin for wordpress.
   What is remarkable about it
   Allows you to post your tweets as a new post each time you tweet, automatically on your blog.
   Great plugin, lot of functions, easy to handle.
2. Twitter update plugin for Wordpress
   This is probably is the opposite of Alex’s plugin, this one lets you tweet out your latest posts on twitter, while a new article is being published.
   What is remarkable about it
   It takes the burden off your shoulders of self promotion to your followers.
   What could go wrong
   Your followers may not like you “only” self promoting your articles all the time.
3. Twitter sidebar wordpress widget
   This one is for the ardent twitter fan who does not want to do self promotion but get alerts from people whom he is following while he is busy blogging. It adds a small widget to the sidebar of your wordpress blog that will display all your latest tweets and updates.
   What is remarkable about it
   You could stylize it however you want using CSS and make it not look like a widget at all.
4. WordTwit Twitter plugin for Wordpress
   Pretty much a straight forward wordpress plugin that will display all your recent twitter tweets from friends on Wordpress.
5. Eat It - Twitter plugin for Wordpress
   Twitterpress is a simple plugin to update your twitter account automatically whenever you publish a new post from your hosted wordpress blog. It’s not very layman friendly, but would be something geeks would like.
6. Twitt-too wordpress twitter plugin
   This is a rich twitter plugin that will help you to integrate twitter to wordpress with ease. It allows you to update your twitter account with tweets directly from your blog. The display is cool it even has your avatar shown.
   What is remarkable about it
   It is completely AJAXified, making it a breeze to use it.

Other great Twitter tools - For desktop, iphone, browsers etc.

In case you are a die hard Twitter fan, you might enjoy this collection of Twitter tools.

• Twitteroo - A desktop application for Windows that helps you to twitter right from your desktop without requiring to vist the twitter website and logging in.
• Twitbin - A firefox extension that helps you to tweet right from your favorite browser.
• Facebook Twitter plugin - A twitter plugin for facebook.

First off a clarification. Links aren’t everything that can get you higher ranks on Google.Yes, links can be the most weighed metric, but it definitely is not the single thing that will help you get ranks.

Somehow, there are many people who are adamant to believe that links are everything. These days, webmasters are very particular about link building and some of them have even collected some dirt and dust in the whole process that it annoys you.

By dirt and dust I meant some common misconceptions about link building. Here goes.

(These ideas were collected from numerous “SEO gurus” who claimed that they are “Link building experts” on a couple of Google groups.)

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.

It is unfortunate to know that many SEO’s agree to the above and in rare cases even get confused.

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.

Completely wrong. Aaron Wall might have referred something along these lines in his SEO book (which was released years earlier mind you.), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it in these times of SEO 2.0

Sure the volume of links are a great metric that will push you forward but, more than the number it’s the quality that matters. 100 links from different directories is not good while 10 contextual links from blogs can cut the competition.

- Directory submission is the secret weapon.

Did you know that Google keeps an eye on the most popular directories and keeps them off the authority brackets? Aaron did not mention it in his book, as a matter of fact. Directory submissions are only a push factor to your ranks. I think a well crafted mix of backlinks from some real good contextual text and some “respected” directories will make it an irresistible combo while backlinks from directories alone is futile. 

- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.

Last day I got contacted by a link building expert on chat. He asked me if I had a PR4 website, I said yes and he demanded the URL (To test if it’s really PR4). On approval he told me that he’ll give me a backlink for which I have to reciprocate another. I denied. He offered me two links for one. I denied again to which he replied - “OK, I’ll give you 3 links”. On denial again he got frustrated. He asks - “Why? I’m giving you three links from different sites and that also theme based !! You won’t get a better offer than this.” :-p

The funda was that he had a network of websites in his belt and every time someone offers a link he goes for a three way link exchange.

Three way (or for that matter any link exchanges) will not work. They are simply a waste of time.

- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
Sure it does. But what is the meaning of themed websites? One version is that websites which belong to the same category as your’s are themed websites.

Perfect! It is true that getting links from a site that is similar in content to your’s make sense. But I believe the “theme” thingy should come down to a more refined level. You should talk about the paragraph of text surrounding your link to the “themed”, the keyword proximity and keyword density is what should make your link themed. So, rather than finding a site based on it’s category as listed in the blog directory, it makes more sense to hunt links in similar or related content.

So there you go. Getting links to your site is not a mechanical process, it’s largely natural. As the SEO 2.0(more on that in the next posts) rule goes, a compelling content is your biggest link bait. And of course you can cement together your site strength with other factors such as directory submissions and link building etc. But solely relying on artificial methods to link building is retarded.

Very interestingly, two emails that came in recently to my inbox from the contact form read similar in content though they were from different readers. Both of them requested a free review of their blogs.

One wanted to know the SEO basics that he needed to tweak while other was asking if directory submissions will do him any good. Both of them makes sense, but it hit me with another idea.

Wouldn’t here be many others who’d be interested in their blogs review? If I could find time, I could go through all of them. But due to time constraints, it might make more sense to review at least a few ones.

So, if there are any bloggers out there who want a free consultation on their blogs SEO, do let me know.
You could also let me know by placing these badges on your blog. I could work in preference with those who place these badges on their sites. Feel free to select one. Once you place the links, make sure that you have those questions ready for me. Drop me an email with your site URL, and I should be able to answer your question.

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I hope you’ll ask me meaningful and specific questions like - What keywords to rank for or What link building strategies to opt for. Rather than questions like “How do I make it to the top of Google?” In which case, you’ll land back here.

This has come out to be an one-stop SEO guide for all you wordpress users out there. I’m not sure if I’ve covered all the topics but I’m sure that these are(in fact all) the basic, essential steps all you wordpress users out there should follow in order to make sure that you have your wordpress blog on steroids. I’ve kept in mind all the SEO metrics possible that will make your blog SEO friendly.

The idea is to - “Put your wordpress blog on an SEO Auto pilot mode and keep writing articles that has a very high possibility to make it to the first page of Google, every time you publish them.”

The process of blogging on WordPress can be dissected in to three parts.

1 - Creating a powerful SEO friendly custom wordpress theme.
2 - Using all the power tools to catapult you ahead of others.
3 - Writing killer articles that are SE optimized.

How to create a custom SEO optimized, unique Wordpress theme?

Some people may argue that Wordpress is SEO friendly by itself, therefore you don’t really need an SEO. If you ask my opinion on this I’d say, both right and wrong. Right because, Wordpress is SEO friendly. Wrong because every Wordpress blog is SEO friendly.

Image this, everybody has a Bazooka to fight, so what makes the difference? Only the guy who has a better one will stand out. Similarly, only the guy with a unique custom wordpress theme can win over the others.

1. Selecting a SEO friendly wordpress theme for your site.
Check this first. Your theme holds a lot of importance in deciding your search engine ranks. Really. There may be sites that get away with it using a stupid theme or no theme at all, but remember, those sites are supported most of the times by other SEO factors that a common blogger may not have. Your theme, it’s layout structure, number of images used, code validation all should be taken into consideration while making a selection. Here’s a detailed structure.

- Select a theme with a SEO friendly layout. So that crawlers don’t find it difficult to find the content on your pages.

- The content should be clearly highlighted on the pages.

- The HTML and JavaScript code if present should limit to the first 15-20 lines of the source code. The first part of the source code should predominantly contain the content of your article.

- The whole HTML code of your pages should be completely valid. Use W3C Validator tools to check this and follow the recommendations accordingly.

- There should not be any/or very less flash and AJAX content on your template. If at all they are present, let them be in the footer/sidebar or below the fold. I don’t recommend it for the header. Resources - How to do SEO on flash enabled website, How to SEO with AJAX.

- Header of your theme is a good real estate for SEO. An image is fine, but in my experience I’ve seen that if text is placed in the header (either alone or combined with the image) with the necessary importance given (clue), it weighs more than the other text on your page. So select a theme carefully.

- When you select a theme , do a simulation test on the demo site. A simulation test is one that gives you an idea of how your pages would be seen by crawlers. In the search engine simulation test, if the results show the text featured on your theme demo, it means the theme is good for search engines. There are some themes in which we can see the text visually, but in a simulation test, no or very less text appears, keep away from such themes.

2. On site Optimization for Wordpress
On site optimization for wordpress is one of my favorite topics, simply because there is always a new concept that emerges out of the blue.

• SEOing Wordpress Title Tags - A very often repeated topic this one. Still I find that many bloggers don’t implement it. In this tweak, the best option is to use the permalinks in the <category><post-title> format. Although, I find that adding the date option impresses Google. It also helps the users to find how old the post is.
  Resource - Title tags and Wordpress SEO
• Interlinking your blog posts is an excellent way to spread the Google juice evenly.
• Optimize your categories - Categories on wordpress is an excellent resource for SEO, not many people have discussed this if I’m right. But there are some tweaks that we can do to optimize it for the search engines.
• SEO’ing the footer text - This is yet another SEO factor not many have discussed, but something that I find has a good scope. It may not work well for all themes as some themes eve completely ignore the footer. But if you use some wise tricks(clue) to give it the right kind of importance, it will help you get that extra mileage for your keywords.
  More onsite optimization tips or wordpress can be found here.

3. Put your wordpress blog on steroids.
A wordpress blog is SEO friendly by default, but adding some power tools to it can make it 10 times as effective as a naked blog. In fact, there are a lot of power tools available online, and many of them are scrap. The wise strategy is to pick the best ones that really fit your blog.

Here are 7 power tools that will catapult your wordpress blog from ordinary to a super blog.

• 1. Headspace Wordpress SEO - This is an extremely good plugin for Wordpress that I found very effective. It is even better than the much hyped All in One SEO plugin. It is a bit hard to manage this as there are more options in it, but this is far more effective than All in One SEO.
  2. Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps are an essential for your wordpress blog. You can either create a manual one here or use this plugin. The plugin creates an automatically updated sitemap whenever there’s a change in the site, like an article or a page edit.
  3. Homepage Excerpts - Duplicate content is a big issue on Wordpress. The same content is shown on one or more places on Wordpress and hence the chances of duplicate content and supplementary pages are more. But using this plugin will reduce the chances of duplicate content on wordpress as the homepage content is cut short.
  4. Social Bookmarking - Getting your sites content to travel and propagate is a key factor to getting popular. And what more could be better than social bookmarking? This is a best social bookmarking plugin I’ve seen in the recent times and the X number of them that’s been released.
  5. KB Linker - Extremely useful plugin. You know that internal linking is one of the best way to spread the Google juice and increase the authority and importance of pages. This plugin lets you to select a keyword and whenever there’s an occurrence of the word in your articles, a link can be automatically placed to the keyword. Use it to link to your articles and it increases the internal linking drastically.
  6. Kill supplemental results - There are more instances on Wordpress that increases the chances of supplemental results than you thought of. Homepages, Archives, articles the chances of getting supplemental results on a naked wordpress blog is higher. Use this plugin to decrease the chances in autopilot mode.
  7. Bunny’s Technorati tags - If you are looking for backlinks and traffic from Technorati blogs, you must have this plugin. I’m not a Technorati enthusiast, so I’ve not used them on this blog, but yes, I’ve tested it on other blogs and it works fine.

There are lot of SEO plugins available at the moment, but the truth is that you don’t have to use them all simultaneously. Many of them do the same purpose but some do one task better than other. In the above list, you can safely use all of them together without any clash while serving the purpose of SEO’ing Wordpress.

Now, that more or less completes the “Ordinary to Super blog” power tools that you need. But more importantly there are a few things that you should keep in mind or keep away from.

What you shouldn’t do to SEO your wordpress blog.

1. Say NO to Link Exchanges.
   Link exchanges are a waste of time. Unless you have a product that’s difficult to sell and get inbound links to like a P standing up thing, you really don’t have to do a link exchange. The links you acquire doing a link exchange is not really worth the effort as a one way link. So focus on your content and let the links come in because you have awesome content.
2. Avoid Wordpress themes that has lot of JS code especially in the first 50 lines.
   The first few lines of your blog when scanned by a crawler, is checked for vital information about your blog. Whether you have meta description tags or not, you need to have some information in the first few lines (speculated it’s 30, 50 and 100) of your code.
3. Do not tag one article in more than one category.
   It’s not a good idea to tag your article in more than one category. It is in a way fooling your readers and increases the chances of duplicate content. More info here.
4. Do not display the Archives links on the homepage OR use the Archives section.
   Archives increases the possibility of duplicate content. Either don’t use them or use the page specific meta tags to no follow/no index them. Headspace plugin can handle all this.
5. Do not use plugins that clash with each other.
   In the frenzy to get everything and not lose all, you install all the plugins only to find that nothing works out. I can give you an example. Using Headspace and Google XML Sitemaps with All in One SEO is not a good option. Especially if you are controlling the Robots.txt from Headspace, it tries to control Robots.txt, while All in One SEO too tried to write it. Which calls in a clash. So make sure you know what you are doing when installing plugins that serve the same or similar purpose. The best way out would be to have an in depth look into all the details and monitor what’s happening.

I hope I’ve covered all the bare essentials to SEOing your wordpress blog. If you follow the above steps, I can guarantee you that you’ll have great platform to blog. Now, it depends on what you write and how good you write that will decide how your ranks are on the SERPs. That’s something you should learn yourself, I don’t think anyone can train you on it although can give you pointers on concepts like keyword research and copy writing.

P.S - You’ll find numerous articles on the net googling for “SEO wordpress” but many of them were written long ago and does not reflect the new ideas and concepts pf the trade, which is what made me write this article. Hope it helped.

Is that a new term you heard? Dangling pages?

It probably got popularized by Andy more than anyone else, and I think there is some sense in the concept.

Dangling pages can be described as -

Links that point to any page with no outgoing links.

And according to Google’s docs -

They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

A better description is also over here

OK, so Dangling pages are the ones that -

- updateAre not accessed by traffic/users
- Does have incoming links to it.
- Does not link to any page internally/externally.
- Does not carry any weightage what so ever.

Let me clarify something. Dangling pages are not the same as supplementary pages. Supplementary pages are a different scenario probably because they have the least importance in comparison to other pages on a website. They may pass juice and links. They get indexed but are not shown on the normal search index, while dangling pages may be shown.

When I worked with Alamy.com they had almost 60% of their individual HTML pages in the Supplementary Index, which were not preferred to be shown on the normal search index by Google. But none of them were Dangling pages. They all had severe interlinking done, and sometimes even relished links from outside.

But there were dangling pages too. There were pages and files in the live site, that were never used or linked to. They probably were installed for testing purposes and later not used. But they were indexed and Google thought they were scrap.

It could happen to your site too. In blogs, it is highly unlikely that there are dangling pages unless you have a poor template and a very poor linking system.

How to avoid dangling pages in a blog?

• Interlink pages as much as possible.
• Let there not be a page that does not link to any other page internally or externally.
• Let there be a universal navigation bar or linking structure that will ensure that even the most unimportant page get’s into the linking network.

So essentially, dangling pages are not good for your site/blog. Remove them or reduce their occurrences. Sometimes even an important page can be mistaken for a dangling page if the navigation structure fails to update the links.

Have you thought about it? If yes, this article is for you, if not quit at once.

When I first started a blog on a blogspot account, I was in a very bad shape, to be honest.
Just like you, I was in the learning phase of the blogging phenomena.
I picked a free template, tweaked it a bit to suit my preferences, and added all the possible plugins.
And when someone told me that content is the king, I wrote content daily. As anybody’s guess I struggled to find content. I’ll list down the things that really bothered me at the time of blogging.

• Content
  - Somebody would’ve already blogged about the content that I thought writing of.
  - It was difficult to write long paragraphs about something very silly.
• Audience
  - No comments
  - Confused over who I’m writing to.
• Returns
  - No incoming money.
  - No appreciation.

Content was the major concern. When people told that you should find traffic rich keywords, I found it difficult to write on “Mesothelioma” and “Asbestosis”. And when I managed to find some interesting topics, others would’ve already blogged about it and it would dishearten me.To top it up, even when I wrote about some topics that I was comfortable about, there wouldn’t be any response from the readers (if at all there were any). I think it’s a phase all young bloggers go through when they start blogging. Despite all this events, it was not an easy task to climb up the ladder.

But, down the line, there are some things that I think worked out in making the blog a success. And let me be honest with you, there is no rocket science involved. To bring you all that in a capsule form, here goes.

• Content is not the king. Consistency is.
  Well, content might be. But I think being consistent in delivering articles to your readers plays a more important part than the content itself.
• There is no topic on steroids. Your passion in your steroid.
  You don’t need to write on mesothelioma and asbestosis. You write from your head but make sure you have the dedication and passion all the way. It shines through.
• You will or cannot make everybody happy.
  Success doesn’t mean that you will make everyone happy. A more important thing is to make everyone talk about you. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t something that you need to work towards but something that comes along.
• Nor will you get followers overnight.
  Followers doesn’t exist. It’s a wrong term. What I’d be interested to know is, the number of people whom you managed to develop an interest in.
• Success does not come with money.
  Success isn’t money. It’s the measure of how close you are to your personal goals. This is my personal perspective, it should differ for you.

So there you go, all that blogging taught me in three years in a capsule form.

The point I’m trying to make here is that, blogging is a profession/career/hobby/whatever that is very slow in delivering results. It’s probably not for the stock broker kind who wants a return the very next day. It climbs slowly and steadily. Yes, the returns are there but it comes as a surprise and you can never invite it to you. Sweet isn’t it?