From a personal perspective, I usually choose to comment or guest post on blogs that I like, that are well-written, and that provide informative material close to my own industry.

The thing is, it can be a challenge to pick out the best sites to either comment on or guest blog for, as there are so many available to choose from.

I’ve found a few tips out along the way to help you pick the best sites to get involved with, to bring you traffic and show your commitment to commenting.

Use Google to find the best sites out there

As a first port of call for hunting out sites of interest and value, Google is always the place to start. It is speedy and accurate, and brings you the hottest sites relating to your industry.

Depending on what you know about your niche, you can use Google for two things.

The first is simply to help you find sites in your industry by searching specifically for subjects related to your field of interest and expertise.

Secondly, you could search for things like “blogging” or “guest posts” to find sites that want your content, related to your own business.

Go on a niche browsing journey for your industry

Many sites in your field of business will make it clear that they accept blog posts on their site. Therefore, all you have to do is simply browse around the top sites in your niche and see which ones do.

Look for text like “write for us,” “become an author” and “submit your article”. These are all indications the site wants guest posts, so click on these buttons or send the blogger an email.

The chances are they will be delighted to forge a new contact, and you are well on your way to enhancing your network through regular comments and posts.

Use Google Blog Search, which does what it says on the tin

Google Blog Search, is quite obviously, a blog search engine. By using this tool you can easily find blogs that are accepting guest posts in your chosen area.

If you type something you may have typed into the regular Google search box such as “niche guest post” or “niche article by” then you should find some interesting results.

If you remove the niche section it’s possible you’ll find a lot of sites that offer guest posting, but few will be relevant. Take a few minutes to identify the best ones out there, and get commenting.

Get in touch with the authors of your favorite blogs…

Every blogger should know at least ten other writers in their community well enough to have built up a great online relationship of reciprocal help and support.

If you don’t, it’s worth starting your search as soon as possible.

Most guest blogging opportunities come from a direct request to one writer from another, with common or shared interests and aims.

It’s well worth using your existing relationships to offer to write for people, and submit quality content. It’s a win/win situation, as they get good content, and you raise your profile. Perfect!

Guest blogging and commenting is great to enhance your profile online. You get to show a new audience the kind of content you’re capable of writing, and broaden your exposure, opening yourself up to new opportunities.

How have you found blogs to comment or guest post on?

Please share your views in the comments below. Thanks.

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Post from: Blogging Guide

How Do I Know What Blogs To Comment And Guest Blog On?

Its ranking algorithms and crawlers are encrypted to ensure that the top rankings are given to only those sites that provide useful information to the browsers and continually update their content to provide the latest data on a subject.

In its quest to provide the best results to its users, Google is rather unforgiving when it stumbles across some black hat Search Engine Optimization techniques used by a few web masters to trick its ranking algorithms.

As a result, such sites are either banned by Google or, if less menacing, attract a Page Rank penalty.

If you are launching a new site and do not want to be relegated to the ‘Bad Neighborhoods’ – the label used by Google to tag sites that use illegal optimizing techniques, it is advisable to steer clear of methods such as stuffing keywords in your content or HTML code, plagiarizing content from other sites, using hidden text and links in the home page or other pages, and using doorway or robot-generated pages and misleading page titles.

As already mentioned, it is equally callous for a site to use link farms to build back links for their pages.

Thus, it is always a good idea to double check a link request that you get before hosting it on your site. Using such precautionary steps will prevent your site from getting in to the bad books of a search engine such as Google.

A site can also get banned from Google Adsense if it uses unscrupulous methods to generate clicks on its pages.

For now, we have listed some of the most common and deceitful optimization techniques that some websites use to secure higher engine rankings and end up getting banned from Google.

It would do you a world of good to keep away from such back handed modus operandi to get a better search engine placement.

Spamming:

One of the most common terms in Internet parlance, spamming is defined as the abuse of electronic messaging system to send unsolicited bulk messages to an indiscriminating group of people. Some of the most popular forms of spamming are email spam, Instant Messaging spam, more popularly known as IM spam, newsgroup or forum spam, spam indexing – spam targeting search engines, online game messaging spam and spam targeting video sharing sites.

If you do not want to be tagged a spammer, stay away from all of these and focus on the content of your site to help you get a higher search engine ranking. Moreover, spamming is a criminal offence punishable under law in various countries and you can be charged with several criminal counts such as mail fraud, wire fraud and e-mail fraud if you resort to this technique.

Submitting multiple URLs:

A number of web masters try to attain a higher page rank for their site by submitting several URLs for a particular site. This is one of the oldest tricks in a spammer’s book. By doing so, a spammer intends to get multiple search results for the same page, which in turn is expected to spike up the ranking of the site.

Submitting the same URL more than once in a month is also considered spamming by Google and other popular search engines such as Yahoo and MSN. By doing so, a web master runs the risk of getting his or her site banned from future listing on the search engine.

Cloaking:

Another popular black hat SEO technique, cloaking refers to having two different versions of the same page. While one of the pages is optimized for the search engine spiders that crawl through it to adjudge its content relevance, another one is optimized for the human user. Thus, in effect, the site has two different pages, one meant for the search engine and the other for the net browsers.

The trick behind this is delivering the content on the basis of the IP address of the visitor. This way, a particular page has different content in its page than mentioned in its search engine description. Pornographic sites to get traffic and to trick search engine crawlers to get a higher page ranking often use this spam indexing technique.

Using Doorway pages:

A different form of cloaking, doorway pages refer to having a homepage stuffed with highly competitive keywords that are meant to deceive the human visitors. Since a page loaded only with popular phrases does not make any sense to a reader viewing the page, the web master redirects him or her to a different page that though comprehensible is not as informative or keyword rich.

Doorway pages are known by many different names such as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages and entry pages.

Using spoofing, redirects or Meta Refresh:

A number of sites have a Meta Refresh tag that automatically redirects visitors to a different page. This tool is often abused by spammers to take the browsers to a page that has content unrelated to the typed-in key word in the search box. Given the blatant misuse of this feature, a number of search engines, including Google, are apprehensive about web sites that have a fast meta-refresh rate.

Google also views sites that use JavaScript to perform the redirection function with suspicion. Thus, it is best to steer clear of these redirection tools and stick to legitimate server-side redirection if your site’s content and structure calls for the same.

Using hidden text on the website’s pages:

Using hidden text or keywords on a page is a big no-no with Google. This is usually done by minimizing the keywords to unreadable proportions, including it behind an image or by changing its font color to that of the background.

Thus, these keywords are invisible to the human eye but are picked up by search engine spiders as that crawl through the page to check its keyword density. A number of webmasters also use keywords on doorway pages to boost their keyword density. However, once found out by Google, this is a sure shot way to get banned from its listing.

Using hidden links in the pages:

As already stated in the ‘Choosing quality link partners’ section, it is very important to ensure that you engage in back linking only with credible sites that do not use any black hat SEO methods. Using hidden links, in the same way as hidden keywords, will definitely have a negative impact on your site’s rankings and can get it banned as well.

Links can be hidden in a site in the same way as text – by using CSS tools and techniques, setting the font size to zero or by changing its color to the background color. If detected, Google crawlers will red flag your site and it will be dropped from the search engine listings faster than you can imagine.

Thus, having a text or link that is meant exclusively for the search engine spiders is construed as intended deception by Google and banned from its search index for the benefit of its users.

Generating links from Link Farms:

As already mentioned in earlier posts, getting inbound links from link farms or directories is tantamount to committing a hara kiri on the Web. Google classifies Free for All sites, link directories and classifieds as link farms as they exist solely for the purpose of providing links to the sites listed with them.

Whether created through automated programs and services or manually, linking to these directories is considered a form of spam indexing since the link exchange is driven by the greed for links for getting a better page rank rather than linking to high quality and relevant sites to add to the surfing experience of the browser.

Though a web master cannot do much to monitor the back links that he or she gets from other sites, it is better not to give reciprocal links to a particular site until you are certain of its authenticity. Entering into linking partnerships of dubious nature can also get your site into trouble and might even end up in getting your site banned from Google. You can also be fined for associating with such sites by a drop in your page rank score.

Selling page rank:

One of the easiest ways to hurt your page rank or to get your site banned from Google is by selling it to other sites. Quite a few web masters buy links from high-ranking sites to boost their page rank. However, Google sees this as a violation of its quality guidelines and has already issued a warning to web masters to refrain from this practice or else bear its consequences that range from imposition of a penalty on their page rank or banning them from the search engine’s index.

Having multiple identical sites:

Creating multiple identical sites or interlinking your website with spam pages that contain the same or very similar content is not seen favorably by Google as it is done in the attempt to cheat its spiders into ascribing a higher ranking. It is a common occurrence to see webmasters list identical sites in the search engine under different domain names to increase traffic. Also known as mirror sites, these receive the boot as soon as discovered by Google crawlers. This brings us to another popular spamming technique – creating multiple domains.

Multiple domains:

Creating multiple domains or using multiple domain names to reach the same site is not a good idea if you want to get a high page rank in Google. Often, webmasters own several domain names – including misspellings and hyphenated versions of the main site – with identical or similar content that redirect the browser to one page. This is done with the intention of increasing the traffic in the page.

However, by doing so you will end up doing more harm than good as Google spiders will see right through this strategy to get more traffic and penalize or ban your site. If you own multiple domains on the same topic, it is better to develop unique content for each of them and then interlink them to get targeted click-through traffic.

Though one of the main benefits of owning multiple domains is preventing the competitor from capitalizing on your name and branding efforts; do not be tempted to use black hat SEO techniques while interlinking them to improve your page rank.

Excessive links:

According to Google’s Webmaster’s guidelines, a site should not have more than 100 links on any given page. Though a site will not be penalized for having more links than the recommended ceiling, its page rank score might drop due to excessive linking. Moreover, a page with over 25 links does not contribute much to the visibility of the link partner. As has been stressed so many times before – quality rather than quantity should be your catchword while securing links from various sources.

To conclude, the best way to get a good page rank in Google is by adhering to its clearly laid out quality guidelines and resisting the urge to use any of the above-mentioned techniques to cheat its ranking algorithms. Remembering these ‘Don’ts’ while optimizing your site for Google will serve you well in the long run.

This is the last post in this series on ‘Link Building Campaign’. I hope you have enjoyed the series.

You can read the previous Link Building Campaing posts here:

• Link Building Campaign: Why Is It Important

• Link Building Campaign: What Makes A Strong Backlink

• Link Building Campaign: Factors To Be Aware Of

• Link Building Campaign: Past, Present and Future Of Back Links

• Link Building Campaign: Choosing Quality Link Partners

• Link Building Campaign: Ways To Get Back Links

What’s your view on these steps? Have you fallen foul of such techniques?

Please share your views in the comments below. Thanks

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Link Building Campaign: How To Prevent Getting Banned From Google

With links becoming more than just a way to get around the web, it is important to choose the right link partner.

While most webmasters set out with a dream of having a number of high quality inbound links from related sites that divert qualified click-through traffic to their site, thus boosting their search engine rankings, their idyllic notion about link building is shattered as soon as they kick start the exercise.

But the catch here is in selecting quality link partners.

Since this can be quite a task for new sites or novice web masters, quite a few of them seek professional assistance for this job.

One needs to consider multiple aspects of a web site before choosing it as a link partner.

To begin with, getting links from some sites will not be of any help for your link building purpose. In fact, you should be careful to avoid some black-listed sites completely as linking to them can attract a penalty or in the worst case even a ban by the search engine.

Some simple steps that you can follow to build a successful linking partnership are:

1. Minimize the linking to non-relevant websites even if they have a high search engine ranking.
2. Avoid linking to websites that use black hat SEO techniques such as having hidden links to a links directory on their home page.
3. Stay away from sites that have over 25-30 links in a page. Categorizing the links does not help either, as your link will get lost in the crowd of other links.
4. Try to avoid getting too many links from web sites with low search engine placement, as this will not prove to be of much help to your cause. In case you receive a request for back links from the web masters of some of these sites, exercise discretion and select those links that you believe will help in boosting your page ranking in future.
5. It goes without saying that partnering with a penalized site or a site that has been banned by the search engine will lead you nowhere in your quest for a higher page rank. It will only attract bad reputation.
6. Under no circumstances should you tie up with Link Farms. As these sites are like a directory tree that are literally overstuffed with as many links as possible, they are of no value in optimization. If truth be told, search engines consider this as spamming and linking to such sites will hamper your credibility and can even attract a penalty or ban.
7. Avoid linking to FFA or Free for All sites. Such sites do not have credibility and allow all and sundry to leave a link to their sites on their pages. Google considers their sites as spam and their links are of no value in ranking algorithms.

The secret behind an effective link building campaign is working smarter rather than harder. Choosing quality over quantity should be your aim while scouting for link partners on the Web.

The next post in this series will discuss ‘How to prevent being banned by Google’

What’s your view on these steps? Have you fallen foul of such techniques?

Please share your views in the comments below. Thanks

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Link Building Campaign: Choosing Quality Link Partners

This is the first one and it simply outlines why a Link Building Campaign is important.

Some say, the Page Rank of your blog is the make or break factor for it.

They go on to say, the Page Rank or numeric value that Google assigns to a blog denotes its importance on the web and plays a deciding role in its visibility in the top search displays for the optimized keywords.

And an important factor of your Page Rank score is inbound links to your site.

As inbound links play a vital role in the calculation of the page rank of a site, one needs to understand the importance of link building for improving their page ranking and subsequently drawing more traffic.

Link building refers to the process of securing inbound links to your blog from various other websites and other online sources such as press releases, newsletters, social media, e-zine articles, blogs and directories

The more trusted or high-quality links a site has, the higher the Page Rank and that can improve the placement of your blog in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Why have a link building campaign?

With the information superhighway, as the Internet was once referred to by former US Vice President Al Gore, being revolutionized by the day, link building has become an integral part of every site’s online marketing strategy.

However, link building in itself is not enough, the trick is in generating quality inbound links that add value to one’s site.

Some of the main advantages of having a link building campaign  are:

• Proper link building can help the site get quality traffic from relevant sites, which in turn will help your site become a part of the core searches for the targeted keywords

• Having a number of high-quality inbound links improves the page ranking of a site as it is considered to be offering a valuable service to the reader.

• Link building not only helps in enhancing the visibility of a site, but also adds to its credibility if the inbound links come from popular or respectable sites.

• Link building is also an effective strategy to obtain a wider search engine exposure and to get indexed by them to secure a higher engine ranking.

• Link building helps save advertising cost and time as your having inbound links from well-known sites is an effective means of marketing one’s site in the online space.

The next post in this series will discuss ‘What makes a strong backlink?’

Do you have a Link Building Campaign?

How do you build your inbound links?

Please share your views in the comments below. Thanks

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Link Building Campaign: Why Is It Important

Why?

I want my blog to load as fast as possible and I’ve been hearing some great positive comments about W3-Super-Cache.

I don’t want people to close my site because it loads too slowly.

Plus Google are now saying they are using site speed to help determine search rankings. Read more here:

Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

A good blogging friend, Antti, has been writing a series of blog posts to help speed up your WordPress blog.

Some of what Antti detailed I was already doing but I had not installed W3-Total-Cache and today I did.

The results: my blog home page now loads 25% faster.

Not bad, eh?

If you want to speed up your blog, check out Antti’s series. It will take you about one hour to make the changes required:

WordPress Speed Challenge – Make your WordPress blog faster!

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Get Your Blog To Load Faster With W3-Total-Cache

Just because we:

• Add the Google XML sitemap plugin

• Verify our blog via Google’s Webmaster tools

• Add numerous blog posts each week

• Ping numerous directories

• Add internal links

• Build external backlinks

BUT…have you ever looked at the stats to see exactly what Google has indexed on your blog?

You may be surprised with the difference.

As of today, I have 342 different URL’s in my site map.

Google has only indexed 271.

That’s a difference of 71.

Seventy-one of my blog posts / pages have yet to be indexed by Google.

But how do you find out which ones?

With this software tool…

Check out the video and see how easy it is to determine which of your blog posts and pages are not indexed by Google.

When I first ran the tool on this blog I had over 120 of my posts un-indexed. But you can see from the results below, all the most recent blog posts and pages HAVE BEEN INDEXED:

But I do still have 71 ‘old’ blog posts not indexed.

Why have the most recent ones been indexed and the older ones haven’t?

I can only put it down to another tool I have been using recently…I’ll tell you about it later this week.

But for now, if you want to see which of your blogs’ posts are not indexed, grab this inexpensive tool:

http://www.webuildyourblog.com/index-checker.htm

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Are Your Blog Posts Indexed?

If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

A big part of SEO, that most people often overlook is the actual website structure.

While it’s easy to see the title tags, H tags, and keywords, it’s much harder to determine how well your website is set up for search engine spiders.

SILO stands for “isolation”.

I know you were probably thinking of large corn silos, which I guess kinda makes sense. For example, say you have two big piles, one pile is corn and the other is strawberries (BTW, I’m not a farmer). You probably don’t want to mix those two crops together, so you put them in silos. When the farmer goes into each silo, he knows exactly what he is going to get.

Treat a website the same way. Put your website content into silos, or better yet, in categories.

After you read this, you will probably go back to your website, or blog, and say to yourself… “This is impossible, how can you link all my blog content without crossing over categories?”

The answer is with nofollow attributes. You will still maintain your human organization, while telling the Google bot what content is important and where to go.

As they say, write for humans, optimize for robots

Some simple rules for silo websites:

1. Keep your categories separate. Use nofollow attributes when linking between categories.

2. Link to posts, not categories or tags.

3. Link often between posts. Most people only link from new posts to older posts, but I suggest you go back to older posts and add updated links to your newer posts. Older posts will have more pagerank too.

4. Try to keep the categories on the same topic. Remember, every page in your website should have a different title, meta tags, headers, etc… When organizing your silos, make sure you have distinct keywords that follow everything in that category.

For example, let’s say you are blogging about cars. You will set up a silo for trucks, cars, and motorcycles. This is very high level, in reality you will want to get much more “niche”.

Take the truck silo. Your title should “All about trucks”, your category slugs should be “trucks”, your meta keywords should have “trucks”, and most importantly, all the posts in this silo should have “trucks” in the title and permalink.

Again, this is very high level, but hopefully you can understand the strategy.

5. Learn to use tools to analyze your website content. Google webmaster tools will show you everything you need to understand how Googlebot spiders your website.

I can fully understand that maintaining a silo structure for your personal blog might be tough, since you probably blog about a wide range of topics, but it can be done.

If you flip websites, or manage highly targeted niche sites, this is a must to learn.

This is a guest post by Matt Dunlap who is a website developer that specializes in dynamically creating large networks of niche WordPress minisites.

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Post from: Blogging Guide

What is the SILO Website Structure?

Which one is the best? Who  knows?

But wait for it…another WordPress SEO plugin is being created by Yoast.

Do we really need another one?

If it’s being created by Yoast…then YES!

Yoast’s reputation on WordPress SEO is second to none and if he is now entering the market with his own SEO plugin…then it is worth watching…very closely.

I shall be.

Yesterday Yoast blogged about Video Site Maps and how his SEO plugin will have it covered.

Check out this short video with Matt Cutts (Google) talking about the importance of video site maps:

I’m eagerly waiting for the release…are you?

Do we need another WordPress SEO plugin? Please share your views in the comments below.

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Post from: Blogging Guide

WordPress SEO Plugin: Do We Need Another One?

Inflexible

Free WordPress themes tend to very static and have very few features. You often cannot change the design or layout and it can take a lot of technical expertise to change things.

Hidden Code

Many free WordPress themes have ‘hidden’ or embedded code built in. The code is added by the creator to either link back to their site or even worse, they add links that they have sold. This can be demanding to your Google ranking and blog’s search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

You are definitely restricted to what you can do with free WordPress themes when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. The premium WordPress themes normally have all the SEO you need built in.

When I first started blogging I did start with a free WordPress theme but to change things was so cumbersome and ‘clunky’. It took me ages to just change the layout. Within a day I moved across and purchased the Flexx premium WordPress theme and have never looked back!

This is how you can get a premium WordPress theme for free…

As an extra bonus, when you join the Income Blogging Guide Course, we will install a WordPress Premium Theme on your blog for free.

WordPress premium themes make the managing of your blog much, much easier. They are more flexible. They make changes to your blog much easier. They save you time and they improve the Search Engine Optimization of your blog.

And that’s why so many people buy them and rave about them.

But you don’t have to buy the WordPress premium theme…we will and we’ll install it for you as well…all for free, after you join the Income Blogging Guide Course.

The premium WordPress themes on offer for free are:

The Headway Theme (value $87): Click here for more information: Headway Theme

The Flexx Theme (value $79.95): Click here for more information: Flexx Theme

We also have the Thesis Theme on offer for just $40 (license fee) including installation. If you were to purchase the Thesis Theme yourself it would cost you $87 plus installation.

You can have one WordPress theme of your choice installed on an existing blog or a brand new blog for free…the choice is yours.

Andrew

P.S. This premium WordPress theme is just 1 of 5 free bonuses when you join. Here’s the link to see all the details:

Income Blogging Guide Course

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Premium WordPress Themes For Free…

This is the 8th video in my new blogging guide series and I show you how you can increase makje it easy for your customers to make contact with you.

The previous videos in the Blogging Guide video series can be found here:

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 1 – 4 (video)

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 5, 6 and 30 (video 2)

Blogging Guide: Google analytics tutorial

Blogging Guide : How To Write An About Page

Blogging Guide: The Pages Google Expect To See

Blogging Guide: Improving Your WordPress SEO

Blogging Guide: Increase Your Traffic and Google Crawl Rate

Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: How to Add a Contact Page for Maximum Effect

If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Wordpress is one of the best platforms for blogging. People have options to choose between Blogspot, Wordpress, Drupal and many more blogging platforms. My favorite is Wordpress for many reasons like it’s support, flexibility, SEO and scaling it to maximum limit.

The biggest advantage of Wordpress over any other blogging platform is it’s search engine optimization capabilities. By default Wordpress is 70% search engine optimized but to make the most out of it, we need to optimize more.

Photo credit: FLICKR

Here I will be sharing 5 basic tips to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines.

Wordpress Permalink Structure:

Wordpress permalinks are not even close to search engine friendliness.  By default wordpress permalink is domain.com/?p=123 . To make your permalink search engine friendly, you need to change your permalink to pretty permalinks.

Permalinks which I prefer are:

• /%postname%.html
• /%postname.

One simple reason why I avoid category/postname or yyyy/mm/dd/post-name permalink structure is, both have their down side.

The first one (category/postname) will create a post duplication issue if you use 2 or more categories per post.

The second one (yyyy/mm/dd/post-name) will not let you recycle your content in future.

Once you have written a few articles, changing your permalink structure is never suggested. This will break your post completely. Use plugins like Deans’ permalink migration plugin to change your permalinks. Follow expert guidelines on how to change your Wordpress permalink structure without breaking your blog.

Sitemap Submission :

Sitemaps are recognized by search engine robots and it will help search engine bots to quickly crawl your web-pages.

In static websites we use many online tools to create sitemap, but in Wordpress we can achieve it with a plugin call Google XML sitemap Generators. This is a one step process and once you have activated and created your sitemap, you can find the sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

Once you have created your sitemap, the next step is to submit your sitemap to major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Robots.txt:

Robots.txt files are very effective at blocking search engine crawlers to parts of your blog which are not important for search engine. For example your admin pages, your affiliate links  and so on.

A smart robots.txt will give you a great boost in search engine ranking, as you will let only useful links to be indexed and blocking search engine access to useless pages.

Meta Title, description and meta keywords:

Though Google have made this official that they don’t care about meta keywords and meta description I still believe they do hold importance in search engine ranking.

Meta title, description and keyword works in two fold in Wordpress: Site wide and on single post/pages.

Despite any domain name, if you have a good knowledge about SEO and keyword research, you can optimize your blog quickly and effectively.

In Wordpress you can take advantage of plugin like All in one SEO to optimize your blog for search engine and for your visitors. You can add meta description, meta title and meta keywords for site and for single posts. If you are not using it, you are missing a great chance to rank your blog well in search engines.

Wordpress SEO plugins:

I already mentioned SEO plugins above but there are many other essential SEO plugins which you should install on your blog.

Here are some which I recommend (apart from 4 SEO Wordpress plugins):

• Robots meta wordpress plugin
• Google XML sitemap plugin
• Robots meta plugin
• Ping optimizer Wordpress plugin
• SEO smart link Wordpress plugin
• RSS footer
• No Self ping Wordpress plugin

Along with it, I also suggest you read my other guest post on 4 Wordpress plugins you should try today.

The above mentioned points are not complete, many other factors also helps you to SEO optimize your blog. One of them is backlinks. Which you can easily achieve by commenting and writing guest posts on other blogs.

Do let us know what steps do you take to optimize your blog for search engines?

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Post from: Blogging Guide

5 Basic Wordpress SEO Tips: Everyone Should Follow

This is the reason why a lot of people are now using this social media marketing networking tool.

LinkedIn is now used by many not only to find jobs but also in hiring somebody or a company. Know how to optimize your use of LinkedIn to be able to help you be found by people and thus make your product or service known resulting to more sales.

Here are important links I found regarding useful tips and techniques on how to improve search engine optimization with your LinkedIn profile. They are worth investigating.

How to Get Most Out of LinkedIn? by ProgrammerWorld.net

http://faq.programmerworld.net/misc/get-most-out-of-linkedin.htm

Ten Tips to Use LinkedIn for SEO by Abacin Forum

http://forum.abacin.com/post/4034/Ten-Tips-to-Use-LinkedIn-for-SEO

Leverage the Power of LinkedIn to Improve your Google Ranking by LuisoLivo.com

http://www.luisolivo.com/leverage-the-power-of-linkedin-to-improve-your-google-ranking

LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks: Do More with your LinkedIn Account by Labnol.org

http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/linkedin-tips-tricks-tweaks-do-more-linkedin-profile/3158/

How LinkedIn can help you Get Higher Search Engine Rankings by SecuritySelling.com

http://securityselling.com/blog/2009/10/09/how-linkedin-can-help-you-get-higher-search-engine-rankings/

10 LinkedIn Tips to Optimize Your Profile by SEOptimise.com

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/09/10-tips-to-optimise-your-linkedin-profile.html

10 LinkedIn Tips to Grow Your Business by Simple Web Toolbox

http://www.simplewebtoolbox.com/10-linkedin-tips-to-grow-your-business/

How do you use LinkedIn? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Improve Search Engine Optimization With LinkedIn

This is the 7th video in my new blogging guide series and I show you how you can increase your traffic and Google Crawl Rate.

The site I refer to in the video is:
www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-ping-list

The previous videos in the Blogging Guide video series can be found here:

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 1 – 4 (video)

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 5, 6 and 30 (video 2)

Blogging Guide: Google analytics tutorial

Blogging Guide : How To Write An About Page

Blogging Guide: The Pages Google Expect To See

Blogging Guide: Improving Your WordPress SEO

Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: Increase Your Traffic and Google Crawl Rate

In this blogging guide video I show you the simple steps you must take to improve your SEO including the optimum set-up for the All-in-one-SEO-pack plugin.

Plus…see where my blog comes in the Google searches for my main targeted keyword phrases.

Do you have the All-in-one-SEO-pack plugin installed and set to exploit Google?

Please share your views in the comments below.

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If you want to see my video on keyword analysis click here:

The tool I use for keyword research and helps me on the first page of Google

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: Improving Your WordPress SEO

Can you remember when you were a kid, and you used to like having stories read to you?

Even if you knew the book inside out, there was always something a bit magical about having someone read it out. Stories are one of the best bits about communication – we all like to hear them, and there’s a familiar structure about them which we automatically respond to, as we’ve been doing it for years.

Think about some of your favourite comedians.

What do they do to pull you in to a joke?

They tell a story. They start out on familiar ground, describing a situation or place until you can visualise it, and then they introduce various elements to keep you engaged. The laugh they get at the end is elicited in part because they’ve pulled you along with them, only to surprise you at the end.

Writing for blogs is a similar process.

Here are some tips for telling stories in your blog, to keep your blog readers onside as they read your posts…

Set the scene

It can be confusing when people ‘meet’ a new blogger for the first time. Your reader is faced with your writing without any introduction, and has to quickly get used to your writing style and deal with any unfamiliarity about your writing before they can relax.

Setting the scene really helps to get your readers on board, as they can immediately picture where you are taking them, and follow your style more easily.

Instead of launching straight in to your main points, take some time to explain what you are going to say, where your experience has been learned from, and what it has meant to you.

Create empathy

People don’t really respond to dry, inhuman information. It really helps if you generate understanding through empathy.

Ways to do this include adding in a personal anecdote to your writing, using colloquial language and putting your personality out there. Think of blogging in the same way as you would making friends with someone for the first time.

Let your personal qualities shine through in your writing, to generate loyal readers.

Introduce humour

Nothing sells a blog entry like making someone laugh. Even if the joke is entirely at your expense, it’s worthwhile!

Tell them something they didn’t know

Giving your readers valuable information, or surprising them with a few interesting facts will take your writing to the next level. People enjoy doing things that are worthwhile, so it makes sense to let people come away from your blog feeling as if you have changed their opinion about something, offered some new facts, or challenged their existing views on a particular subject.

Back up any data you introduce, and show your readers where to go next for more information.

Invite input

Storytelling at its best is a two-way communications process. Instead of telling your readers everything, why not elicit their feedback? Rhetorical questions such as ‘What do you think?’ or ‘Can you remember when…?’ draw your reader in and invite them to leave comments.

Make it easy to follow

Jargon and abbreviations turn people off instantly. No-one wants to feel as if they are out of their depth when they visit someone’s blog.

Keep things simple, well-structured and clear from the first paragraph, or you’ll send your potential customers and readers scurrying back to Google to find a new source of information.

Bring your story back to the beginning

In every good story, all loose threads are tied up and there is a happy ending. Think about where you started your entry, and the themes you introduced, and then come back to them at the end.

This leaves your readers feeling satisfied that you have taken them on a small journey and then brought them safely back to where they started from!

We all like to hear stories, don’t we?

Can you remember when you last read a great blog story? Share your views in the comments below.

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Master This Technique and Get More Blog Readers

In this blogging guide video I show you what I believe are the essential pages that Google (and your visitors) expect to see on your blog. To create these pages will take you less than 10 minutes…so it’s certainly worth the effort.

Do you have them on your blog already?

Are you going to add them to your blog?

Let me know by sharing your views in the comments below.

You can see the previous videos by clicking here:

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips – general settings

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips – improving the security of your blog

Blogging Guide: Google analytics tutorial

Blogging Guide : How To Write An About Page

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: The Pages Google Expect To See

In this video I show you how to write one of the most important pages on your blog…your ‘About’ page.

While creating this video, I even learned something that I can add to my existing ‘About’ page.

I hope you learn something…let me know by sharing your views in the comments below.

Links to the ‘About’ pages I refer to in the video:

About Michael Dunlop

About Yaro Starak

About James Schramko

About Chris Brogan

About David Risley

About Jeremy Shoemaker

You can see the previous videos by clicking here:

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 1 – 4 (video)

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 5, 6 and 30 (video 2)

Blogging Guide: Google analytics tutorial

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Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide : How To Write An About Page (video)

When you start a blog, you want traffic. Everybody likes traffic. If you have got traffic you will at some point be able to convert that traffic into money. Of course it will take time.

But don’t sit there and wait and hope that the traffic will just come, randomly.

You have to work to get the traffic, or at least to get the big amounts of traffic. You really don’t have to do that much to get traffic, you just need to do it every day, or at least as often as possible. That would give the best results.

1. Highlight Your Best Posts on Squidoo

Squidoo is a highly visited site that can drive targeted traffic your post.

What I often do when I see a post is going to be popular; I try to write around 300 words about the post, the same topics, though I don’t reveal all the details about the post. I just write about it, tell them a bit about the concept, benefits and my view point.

Users come to your blog to read about your view point on the subject

I write a great call to action, to make them come to my original post, where I reveal the details about the post.

Google loves Squidoo, being present on Squidoo will also help rank your post on Google bringing some traffic to your blog.

2. Write Good Content

This is quite obvious, people come to your blog to read your content. If people like your content they will visit your blog again or subscribe. It’s a no-brainer.

You have heard that one before, it really is true. If you write a blog post and you really don’t think this topic suits you, then save the title and maybe the description. Then maybe after a couple of weeks it, return to it, change it and make it into a better article.

In that way you will only say something when you really have something to say. It will be an uninteresting read if you really have nothing to say.

Good content should be written consistently, and consistent content will over time bring you traffic through RSS readers, search engines etc.

3. Using Social Media Sites

Social media sites are always a great way to generate traffic, especially when you interact with your community.

Being helpful and just interacting on social media sites will go a long way to getting traffic to your blog. If you do that you will get more influence in the social media world. This refers to sites as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, other people’s blog, forums. Every social media site in general.

4. Interact on Forum Threads

Interacting on forums by replying to forum threads or starting a forum thread gives you that extra edge of being perceived as an expert in the subject. Forums are a great way to channel your expertise and you become a useful forum resource.

Add your signature  to your link, which means that you will get a link to your blog. This is a cool and easy way to get traffic.

5. Guest posting

Guest posting is one of the most under utilized tools to generate traffic. Not a lot of bloggers use this to their advantage. Apparently bloggers don’t find the time to write one more article each week. If you really are under a major time pressure then start writing one less article to your blog every week.

So you replace the article you should have written to your blog, but you use it as a guest post elsewhere. You don’t have to do that every week. Maybe every second or third week.

ZK is a blog consultant, he generally does not guest post but if given an opportunity makes the best of it. You can also follow him on twitter

Post from: Blogging Guide

5 Ways to Make a Better and More Well Visited Blog (or just 5 Ways to Increase Traffic)

In this video I show you how to install and use the free tool Google analytics plus some explanations of the various elements built into the tool.

You can see the previous videos by clicking here:

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 1 – 4 (video)

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 5, 6 and 30 (video 2)

Here’s video number 3:

Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: Google analytics tutorial

Remember my recent guest blog post entitled, “43 Blogger Tips – What you should do after installing WordPress“…well I thought I would go through each tip and show you how to implement each one on your blog.

The blog post covers 43 tips on how to increase your visitor numbers, make your site more secure and quickly get index by Google.

Here’s the video covering tips 1 to 4:

Post from: Blogging Guide

Blogging Guide: Blogger tips 1 – 4 (video)