OpenSourceTemplates.org, which has a Page Rank of 6 has a list of “Sponsorship Friends” at the bottom of their page. The links doesn’t contain any sort of ‘no-follow’ tags and it points to different sites with different anchor text. Dell has a link there with the anchor text “Business servers” and it points to the dedicated landing page of dell’s business servers – http://www.dell.com/business/servers. Some other links that are found on the page are: “Raymond Rail watches” – http://www.jurawatches.co.uk , “Web Hosting” – http://www.webhostingmadness.com etc. So as you can see these are all irrelevant links for the OpenSourceTemplates.org, so they are likely to be “paid/sponsored” links.

And this is not the only site which links to dell’s landing page for server. After going through their link profile in Yahoo Site Explorer I have found tons of home page links from High PR sites, all linking to dell’s server page for keywords like “servers”, “business servers” etc. Below is a small list of sites that I checked:

The list doesn’t end here. I just got board looking at the links, as they are so many! So you can check it urself using BacklinkWatch or Yahoo Site Explorer.

Why Do I think these are Paid Links?

• All these links come directly from high PR home page with a anchor text that dell would love to rank for! Unfortunately they still don’t rank for the term “servers” in the top 10 but most of their competitors do!
• Since they are yet to rank for that term in the SERP they have are spending money on Paid Search.



But I’m sure they would love to take that cost off if they can get ranking for that term. (Even if that costs them a bit to acquire those nice juice High PR paidlinks).

• Links that are surrounding those Dell.com links are ‘not related’ to the site’s theme. Often they are – “cheap video games”, “cheap cellphone”, “web hosting”, “Alcohol Rehab Programs”, “search engine optimization” etc. By looking at it one can easily say that all those are paid links
• The placement of those links makes it obvious that they are ‘paidlinks’. Most of the links that I found are either on the sidebar or on the footer (with small text). And most of the sites called their link section – “sponsored links” which itself refers to links that has been paid for.
• None of the links that I have seen actually points to Dell.com Home page. All of them Points to their dedicated landing page for dell’s business servers. If this was done by a link spammer, who is probably trying to hide his ‘other’ paid links by listing some of the ‘good quality’ sites – He would have never linked to a ‘sub page’ of the domain with a perfect anchor text.
• I don’t believe that Dell’s competitors will try to harm their link profile by getting all these paidlinks on their behalf. Because Google is still not perfect at detecting paidlinks, so I’m sure dell’s competitors won’t spend any money to give dell a chance of an unfair advantage.
• None of these sites are low quality or spammy in any nature. All of them have tons of incoming links and high Pagerank. But I guess, they just decided to sell links (Eh, who doesn’t love cash?).

My Advice to Dell

• Don’t Buy links. There are many other ways of getting ‘legit’ links that can help you with your ranking
• Do more keyword research! “Servers” is very generic and a single term keyword. Even if it may have a lot of searches it may not have the highest conversion for Dell. I don’t think that customers who are interested to buy servers, would simply search for ‘servers’ in Google. When acquiring links (natural/paid) try to vary your Anchor text. Keyword like – “network server”, “Small Business server”, “home server”, “database server” etc are more targeted keywords and are likely to bring you customers that are truely interested in buying your server. Google’s Keyword tool is an excellent tool that can help you to find good relevant Long-tail keywords.
• Don’t send everyone to one single landing page. Dell should create separate landing pages for each of the different types of server with relevant information about the servers, benchmark results etc. All those landing pages should also be optimized for its respective keywords. (e.g. Keywords in Title Tags, Body, Headers etc). For instance, you have acquired a lot of links with anchor text “business servers” to this page – http://www.dell.com/business/servers. But the phrase itself doesn’t appear on your site’s title or body. (*Well it appears only once in the lower bottom body).
• If you are really into buying links, do it more discreetly so that it doesn’t become obvious that dell is buying links. (*check out some of the resources listed below)

Resources Related to Paid Links / Buying Links

8 Ways to Buy Links Without “Buying Links” – Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz.org

Thinking about buying links? 30 tips to save you from failure – Brian Chappell

Buying links under the radar so Matt can’t find them – Jim Boykin

How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer – Aaron Wall, SEObook.com

Jim Boykin: Paid Links Aren’t Worth It To Me – We Build Pages

The Art of Buying Links Under the Radar – Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz.org

John Scott on Link Building – V7 Network Blog

Buying Links is Hard Work – Search Engine Watch

Here comes a Bonus (~lol):

How to report paid links – Matt Cutts

So whats your view on Paid Links? Share in comments!

So long story short – Ragan Communications, a PR & Marketing firm recently covered a presentation done by John Spagnuolo about “SEO” in general. The reason the I’m linking to a cached page of Google, is because the actual article has been ‘moved’ and has been added under Ragan Select (Where readers need to pay a Membership of $279/year to read the content). This is what I hate about PR companies, they just can’t deal with a criticism can they? Instead of any ‘protest’ or ‘debate’ they just prefer to ‘hide’ under the table.

But anyway, If you think I’m going to bash Ragan just like how Jack Leblond did on his article, questioning the credibility of the company — then you are wrong.

Let me start by saying that with all due respect, I completely disagree with Jack Leblond on this one. I think whatever advice John gave away on the article were all valid and the reporter Michael Sebastian also did a good job in covering it.

Regan is not a SEO Company. As far as I can tell they don’t provide any “seo services”, they are just a marketing/PR firm. So I don’t think it is wise to question their credibility here, because the article that they delivered for their readers were accurate and its indeed some of the best practices that any new website show follow. Now whether or not they follow those ‘mentioned steps’ on their own website certainly should not involve their ‘credibility’.

Code Bloat

Many of the on page factors that Jack highlighted has very less or ‘no’ importance in search ranking today. For instance, Jack mentioned ‘code bloat’ and how Regan has so many javascripts, internal css codes above the content. But Google along with other search engines at 2008 are very smart and can distinguish between javascript, css, flash, video and the text content. And since Regan are ranking OK for their pages, why should they even bother changing that ? Have you ever looked at CNN or Dell? They also have a lot of so called code bloat, but aren’t they ranking well in the SERP?

Yes, I agree that if content is first sourced it definitely helps the crawler to get all your content first before it see’s anything else. However having said that, for a mid-scale site like Ragan I don’t think this is a big issue.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords have been dead for a long time (R.I.P). It was not mentioned in the article. And the meta keywords that Jack referred to in Regan’s site are probably auto generated by their CMS. Since search engines became smarter and they dont’ really want you to tell them what keywords your page is related to, I don’t think putting anything in the meta keywords is an issue. Certainly those keywords are not helping them, but its not doing any harm too. What John suggests in the articles are all valid points – content is king, have your keywords in side your title/content etc.

Stuffing Keywords in Alt Tags

Alt Tag for Images are basically needed for two main reasons – 1) So that the search engines can find your image via the image search, 2) User Friendliness – Browsers which can’t display images should be able to display the text to the user.

Over-optimizing and stuffing keywords in ur images is not really going to help Ragan or anybody else

Page URL Structure

Search engines are getting better at crawling dynamic URLs. Ragan has over 4k+ pages indexed in Google so I don’t think they have any problem with that.

Many big websites are still doing well, even after having 8-12 parameters in their URL.

Page Title

I agree that Regan can probably do better in their titles. But I have seen a lot worse than that. Its all a matter of ‘personal’ preference. For example, some companies, prefer to have their “Brand Name” on every page title because of branding purpose. So not everything done ‘on the page’ are for SEO purpose.

What to take away from this article?

You need to really focus on building the trust of the search engines first. Once you have built that trust & credibility, you can climb your way up in the rankings and sort of ignore the ‘little things’ as long as it doesn’t give user any bad experience. None of the things that were highlighted by Jack has anything to do with User Experience. They were all meant and targeted for the search engines.

Once you site reaches a substantial level, it sort of the Search Engine’s Job to crawl you site properly. Google itself is nothing. What makes Google useful and valuable is their search results (relevant pages/sites). Now if they fail to actually crawl sites and give their users what they want, Its Google’s failure ultimately.

Suppose the top 100 News sites (on all topics) team up and decide that they will stop using “Title Tag” and use something else. Do you think Google will stop crawling or ranking those sites? Google will soon have to adapt to that change and the demand of the users.

So many websites doesn’t have “Meta Description” tags but still Google Manages to show the generated snippets of those site in their results page. Images without alt tags are still showed in Image Search based on the texts around the Image or the file name of the image.

What does this show? When ‘not enough’ people are following something, search engines always came out with an alternative way of handling it for their OWN Sake! Because without the search results they are not even worth a penny.

Best practices are ‘best practices’ for the mass market, but that doesn’t mean every single one has to follow those ‘best practices’ at every level. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, the game has certainly changed over the years. Now we have Universal Search, Localized Search, Personalized Search blended inside the traditional 10 plain links. So companies needs more than just “On Page Optimization”. Ultimately Your site’s credibility and trust is the most important factor in today’s ranking.

Disclaimer: I have absolutely No affiliation with Ragan or the writer of the original article.

But later I did some extensive research on this and got my answer. Do I want to share the info with you? Hell yeah!

So here goes -

I tested this on 3 different domains, all with good organic rankings. Domain 1 has a Private Who is enabled, Domain 2 had its Registration info public and lastly Domain 3 was registered under someone else’s name in Godaddy and that person did a free push to my account which resulted in all the registration info to be changed under my name.

I don’t really wish to go into much details here, but based on my analysis I can say with confidence that -

1. Changing Domain Registration Info won’t usually hurt rankings (with all other variables being equal).

My Analysis: If your Domain Registration Address is in “India”, it might help you to rank well in Google.in. However I believe that Google checks this either periodically (long intervals in between) or it is set during the initial discovery of the website. But of course this is not always the case!

Domain Registration Info doesn’t only include Name/Address but it also includes the Registration & Expiry date of the domain name. Domains that are old (and has ZERO backlinks) tends to do well in competitive market and domains that are registered for a longer period of time is also believed to be rank well in the Engines. If someone registers a site for 10 years, it clearly shows how much dedicated that person is to that website…so its less likely to turn out to be a Spam site. (Makes Sense right?)

So if you can do a smooth transfer without the domain being dropped it is less likely to hurt your rankings and it should hold on to it’s old trustrank & pagerank. However If the domain actually drops, then there is a high chance that the any past authority that the domain may have had will be lost.

2. Moving from Private to Public (or vice-versa) doesn’t make any significant increase/decrease in ranking.

My Analysis: Based on the results it was clear that a Private Whois doesn’t have any direct relation to ranking. But if you have been naughty in ‘past’ and continue to show your true character, it won’t take Google’s Web Spam Team much time to track down all your sites (if you don’t have a Private Whois) and penalize them manually.

3. Sometimes your domain’s WHOIS information doesn’t matter

My Analysis: Majority of the cases that I have personally seen, A Domain’s locality was taken directly from a webmaster’s Google account. When you register for a Google account it sort of automatically sets your Timezone & Country based on your IP address. So if you are from Finland and you have added your website in Google Webmaster Tools or Analytics, in no time Google will start to recognize you as a webmaster from Finland and it will give you higher presidence for searches performed in Finland and other nearby locations. So if Google thinks you are from Finland, your US domain registration info won’t save you. Google Webmaster Tools also has a page where you can geo-target your website as well. But I personally haven’t tried that so I’m not sure whether its effective or not.

So in conclusion I’d say that some of these things are still very unclear as different webmasters tend to come up with their own facts & theory. Whatever I stated above is what I could figure out by doing my own set of testings.

So what do you think? Does changing Domain Registration Info has any impact on rankings? Share in comments.

Yes thats right! It looks like Gmail Team is finally coming up with their own set of themes that Gmail users will be able to click-n-change! I guess most of the Gmail users will find this new addition very useful as users were kind of sick and tired of seeing the same ‘plain-boring-simple’ interface over and over again. My Gmail window is open almost 24/7 (as long as my laptop is turned on…), so you imagine how excited I am to hear about this cool new feature of Gmail!

Right now, I still don’t see the feature under my account. But I believe Google is rolling out this feature slowly to all of its users.

Update: Ok the news becomes official as Gmail Engineer, Annie Chen breaks the news today in the Gmail Blog that over 30 odd themes has been launched today for Gmail. I have looked through their theme database and I must say that their collection is substantia. There’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can even rain on your inbox, and fun characters to keep you always in good company.

How to Activate Gmail Theme

In order to activate these cool Gmail Themes and fully customize your Gmail Inbox, Log on to your Gmail account and then go to the Themes tab under Settings. Google be rolling out these themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see them yet, check back soon!!

That totally contradicts with what I wrote in my complete Linkbuilding tutorial and most importantly it contradicts with Google’s Webmaster Guideline as well as Microsoft’s very own guideline.

This is what Google has to say about participating in Link schemes:

…some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

This is what Microsoft’s guideline says (Important part in Bold):

..Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results
The following techniques aren’t appropriate uses of the Live Search index. Use of these techniques might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index….. – Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Yahoo also takes a similar stance about Link exchange –

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted: … Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity (link schemes)….

Now I wonder why would Skip Chilcott of Microsoft would publicly recommend participating in Link exchange scheme (a semi black-hat technique) and also endorse certain software/firms for that purpose.

Why Do I strongly discourage Link Exchange Schemes

Search Engine has become competitive and more useful for people (like us). We heavily depend on search engine to find useful & relevant information everyday. The reason we find ‘search engines’ useful is because – It allows us to find what we are looking for in a quick time. But as more and more people starts to ‘game’ the search engine, there will be more ‘spam’ and ‘low quality results’ in the respected engines. One way of stopping that spam is to, making sure that the Search algorithm doesn’t take ‘certain’ attributes into consideration that can be artificially manipulation (E.g. low quality links). Google (The primary engine that I personally uses) has taken several measures in past and has discounted those ‘bad links’ from counting. They have discouraged and taken necessary action to prevent webmasters from gaming the search ranking using those ‘shady SEO techniques’.

Even though I may not 100% agree to what Google does (they do have some strict ruling about a lot of things), I do agree that Reciprocal Linking or participating in automated link exchange program does not benefit the user at all and it just benefits the webmaster to game the whole system! And if search engines are gamed, then it will lose it’s usefulness.

And when such ‘shady advice’ comes directly from the Sr. Product manager of Microsoft, it just makes everything clear to me that why Live Search has been so far away in producing anything but good results!

Update: Skip Chilcott has created another post, identifying the mistake he made in his first post. This time He has asked a colleague over at Live Search to share some expert advice on linking best practices. [ I'm really looking forward to that post ]

What Kind of Link Exchange Are Possible White Hat?

• Links that helps the user to find more useful information on that particular subject.
• Links that are not promoting or giving Link juice to a site that is spammy in nature
• Links exchange that are primarily meant for Traffic and not for “search engine ranking”
• Links that you would want to recommend to the search engine because of their quality and value to you and your users

Natural Link building techniques that many Search Experts recommend:

8 Ways to Buy Links Without “Buying Links”, Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org

Should I Avoid Link Exchange / Link Trading Hubs?, Aaron Wall – SEObook.com

The definitive link building strategy, Web Credible

101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website, Aaron Wall – SEOBook.com

Link Building Tutorial – A Complete Walkthrough, Saad Kamal

Five Link Building Strategies That Work, Brian Clark – Copyblogger

This guide was already being used internally within Google to optimize their own sites such as Youtube, Orkut and so on. I have personally gone through the guide and I must say that it’s a very basic 101 type of guide that any SEO newbie should read. Its very well written had contains a lot of illustrated examples & screen shots.

I have created a small one page summary that basically covers everything that is written in the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

• Always create unique & accurate Page Titles - Page title should accurately describe the page’s content. Webmasters should make sure that their titles are unique for each page. The Title should be descriptive but not extremely lengthy. Don’t stuff your title with only Keywords – write a title that will benefit both the user and the search engines.
• Make use of the “description” meta tag – Google clearly states that Meta tags such as (Meta Description) is not dead! Meta description should accurately summarize the page’s content. Webmasters should write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw the description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. Don’t fill up your meta description tag with only keywords and avoid writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page. Try writing unique descriptions for each page, if your site is really big try to generate description meta tags based on each page’s content automatically.
• Improve the structure of your URLs – Try to use words in your URL. – URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them. Don’t use lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs. Avoid choosing generic page names and using excessive keywords. Provide only one version of your document, if you accidently happen to have multiple version of the same page, do a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL
• Make your site easier to navigate - Create a naturally flowing hierarchy – Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Try to use text for navigation and its a good practice to put an HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file. Have a 404 page that is user friendly.
• Offer quality content and services - Practice writing easy-to-read text as users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow. Break your content into logical parts so that the users find the content they want faster. Use relevant keywords in your content and take help of the Google Keyword Tool where necessary. Write fresh, unique content and avoid re-writing or copying existing content from the web. Always create content primarily for your users, not search engines
• Write better anchor text - Always write descriptive anchor text, The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about. Use keywords in your anchor text and use anchor text for your internal links too.
• Use heading tags appropriately - Take advantage of the HTML Header tags H1, H2, H3 to break down your content for easy scanning by your readers. Give some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use those heading tags appropriately.
• Optimize your use of images - Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text for all images. Avoid using generic filenames and stuffing in excessive keywords in the alt tag.
• Make effective use of robots.txt - Robots.txt is not enough to block your sensitive or confidential material. So take appropriate security measures for your confidential information.
• Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links - Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed or pass your page’s reputation to the pages linked to. Avoid using no follow for links in blog comments or other sites that you don’t trust. You can nofollow all of the links on a page by using “nofollow” in your
  robots meta tag, which is placed inside the tag of that page’s HTML.
• Promote your website in the right ways - Blog about your new content or services to get your users excited. Use appropriate offline promotion, social media to promote your content. Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center.
• Make use of free webmaster tools - Google provides a lot of free tools for webmasters inside Google Webmaster Tools to help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site.
• Take advantage of web analytics services – Use Web analytics programs like Google Analytics that can be a valuable source for identifying your users, the content that they are reading, the source of traffic etc.

My Two Cents

Its really good to see that Google is genuinely trying to help the webmasters to succeed. If you are new to SEO, I strongly recommend you to Download the Full 22 Page PDF of Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

External Links (Links coming from other sites) was (*and still probably is) one of the major contributor of any Search Engine Optimization effort. Obviously links alone can’t help you to rank well in the Search Engines, but they do play a “major” role to push your ranking up to the top.

What is Link Building?

Link Building is basically the process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings.

Why is Link Building Important?

Link building is absolutely essential for your SEO campaigns because currently majority of the search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo etc.) uses link popularity as a metric to judge the quality of your website. An incoming link from a 3rd Party site works like a “vote” or “recommendation” towards your site. So say if 500 people are linking to you from their websites, you can look at it as — 500 people has recommended your site.

Are All Links Treated Equally?

This is a very common question among the Webmasters. Well, The answer is “No”. Each website has their own “reputation profile” that enables them recommend other websites. Now when a high profile website links to you, their link value is much higher compared to a low profile website who is probably new in the market and doesn’t have any reputation to spare for you. A perfect example of this would be, Suppose if CNN links to your website, that particular link would be more trusted and will be more valued by the search engines due to the fact that CNN is a authoritative website and their news/stories are trusted by everyone. So if CNN links to you it gives an indication to the Search Engine that your website is also of high quality and value.

Which Sites are Worth Getting a Link From?

CNN is not the only authoritative site on the Internet, the above was just an example. There are thousands of other quality sites that have high authority. Now you may ask – “How do I determine the quality of the site”. Well below are some of the easy metrics that you can use to determine a site’s quality:

• Age of the Website: The older it is, the better. Old sites are likely to be more Trusted by the Engines.
• Page Rank: Even though I pay very little attention to this myself, But it is some what a good metric to determine the quality of the site. The only Page Rank that is visible to public is the Google Toolbar PR. Its a number between 0 to 10 where 10 denotes the highest quality and 0 denotes the lowest. The Toolbar Page Rank is updated every 3-4 months and its just a partial representation of the Actual Page Rank (an proprietary algorithm of Google to determine a site’s quality & rank them accordingly).
• No. of Pages Indexed : This is another metric that I like to use to determine whether the site has a good search engine presence. If a site has thousands of pages indexed in Google, its an indication that the site has been in business for a long time and it some what trusted by Google. To find out how many pages are indexed, simply go to Google Search and type the following command – site:www.domain.com. This should show you all the pages of domain.com indexed in Google.
• No. of Incoming Links : Since “authority” & “trust” flows from one domain to another via links, its important to see who is linking to the domain that you are testing for authority. There are many tools out there that can help you to check the link profile of any domain. e.g. Yahoo Site Explorer, Backlink Watch etc. The easiest way would be to type link:http://www.domainname.com in Google or Yahoo and it will show you a list of websites that are linking to that domain. Do note that Google often shows a lot less links compared to Yahoo. So if the site has a lot of good quality incoming links, then its likely that a link from that site will give your website a lot value.
• Traffic: Traffic is often a good determinant of a quality website. To check how much traffic a site gets, you can use tools such as: Google Trends for Websites, Compete, Quancast, Alexa and so on. Remember, these tools are not 100% accurate and may not display the traffic information of all domains. (Websites below a certain traffic threshold is not being monitored by these services.)
• Others: There are many automated applications out there that can help you to determine a site’s quality/authority on the web. E.g- SEOmoz Trifecta Tool.

How Do I Get These Links?

There are basically two types of link building, the first type is Organic (a.k.a Natural Linkbuilding) & the other type is “Artificial Linkbuilding”.

Organic Link Building

Organic Link building basically refers to the natural link building where you generate tons of Free Links naturally over time because of the value your site provides to the community. Below are some tips for you to do well in the Organic Link Building –

• Write Quality Content – If you don’t write quality content, you can’t expect people to link to you. This is the most important step in your organic link building process. Next time you think of creating a content for your website, try to imagine how your content can benefit the users and whether its something that people would want to ‘link to’ from their own websites/blogs. When I write “content” i don’t mean only text content, It can be anything – videos, pictures, applications etc.
• Start a Blog – I have seen many small-medium businesses to have a website that is purely static and commercial in nature and they go to different SEO consultancy firms hoping that they can just pay and get 10,000 links in a day or two. Unfortunately thats not how the web works (…not anymore..). Google along with other search engines have strict ruling about paid links which has made it harder to artificially manipulate the searching rankings just by ‘buying links’. Now If you have a e-commerce store and you may be wondering why the heck would someone link to my website naturally? — Well, I certainly agree they won’t! But what if you have a blog attached to your store where you can review the most popular product of each of your category every day and also stick some of the testimonials of your previous customers? Do you think that would give some value to the community? Of course it would! Product reviews are probably among the most searched things on the Internet. No matter what you are selling (e.g. Web hosting, Hair Dryer, Camera) and where you are selling from (e.g. Online / Offline), product reviews play an important part in the customer’s decision making process. There are thousands of brands that are selling the same product with identical features and your online store probably sells dozen of those brands. Now if you can help your customers to choose which one would be the best for their own requirements then definitely it would give them some value. By no time, you will see that you will be ranking on the search engines naturally for some of the Long tail keywords (e.g. Nokia N95 Phone Review, Nokia N95 Battery life) and at the same time you will also attract a lot of natural links from other bloggers & websites who finds your content useful.
• Take Advantage of Social Bookmarking & other social Networks – This is another important step of natural link building that is often overlooked. Social Bookmarking is often called one of the greatest sources of “traffic”. But do you know that its also a solid source of attracting links? If your story gets popular or gets a substantial amount of votes in any of the big social bookmarking sites such as – Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx – Your content will automatically get a lot of attention and many of them will actually ‘write about’ it on their own website and give your site a link. Now because your story reached so many hands in the first place, it created an opportunity for itself to be read by other webmasters on your similar niche. But if you were only writing at your blog and not taking advantage of the social bookmarking sites, it would probably be never seen by them on the first place. So try to increase the reach of your content as much as possible, when you write a post – shout it at Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Frindfeed and at the same time circulate it via the popular social bookmarking sites. If you have followed step 1 (which was – Writing Quality Content), your article will be taken well by the social media and you can hope to generate some good links for your site.
• Write about Industry News – This is partially covered under blogging, but I have added it as a separate point to emphasize on it’s importance. Some bloggers think that its practically useless to write about the latest news because there are many other news sites/blogs out there who are covering it already. But what everyone tend to forget is, You can’t be sure whether your readers have actually gone to all those news sites before coming to yours. There has been cases where a reader might land in your site first and see a interesting news that he haven’t heard elsewhere (Even though it was probably out in 200 other websites). So once he goes to his own blog and writes about that, its very likely that he is going to link to your story. Why? — Well its like a blogger’s code of ethics, if I hear a story from “Source A” first and then from 20 other sources, generally I’d link to “Source A” as that is how I got the news first.
• Freebies – Freebies can often get you a lot of links. For instance – Free Video Tutorials, E-books, Templates etc. can attract hundreds if not thousands of links if they are of good quality. If you are good at programming, you can develop small web applications or widgets that you can give away for free in your website. For example, one of my client who was in the diet industry made a BMI calculator (A calculator to calculate your Body Mass Index). He promoted it via different health forums and within weeks he generated over 400+ unique backlinks from other diet related websites and blogs. Many people also give away free themes, plugins that attracts a lot of natural links. Remember, when you do something useful for the community You wont have to ask for a link because in most cases they will naturally link to you. If you are good at designing, you can design wallpapers, Generic Logos, Cartoons etc. to attract links. Just make sure that your mindset is to Help the community with your own unique abilities and in no time you will be rewarded with a lot of links!

Artificial Link Building

The name might sound a bit dodgy, but I have my reasons for calling the following kind of link building artificial. Basically in my own dictionary, artificial linking refers to links that can be manipulated. So Link requests, directory submission, article submission, paid links etc. all falls under this category.

• Link Requests / Exchange – This is probably the most common form of artificial link building practice that is ongoing. I hate to say, but personally I find this method really annoying as I probably receive over half a dozen of junk emails every day asking me to link to their site. Now what is wrong with asking for a link? Well, of course there is nothing wrong until you spam the crap out of me! Does this method works? Yes, To some extent (as long as I don’t click the “delete” button over your face). What kind of link requests webmasters often ignore:
  • The ones that starts with “Dear Webmaster…”
  • When you mention “PR” in your Email
  • The sender has no idea of what Link building actually is. The email is impersonal and spammy
  • You are asking for a link to your Viagra/Insurance/Health related website where my website is about Gardening!
  • Your website has a horrible design and usability, and 100s of keywords are stuffed all over the place
  • Your website has no valuable information but only contains affiliate links & banners
  • Your website is new and is not even indexed by any of the search engines
  • Your website has more outbound links than the number of quality content

  But I personally Ignore “All” link request/exchange offers. And here is why:

  • Unless your website can provide me a lot of traffic, It’s of no help for me
  • I don’t really care about who is linking to me, but I am very cautious about who I link to (because thats the thing that really matters when it comes to Link exchange). If your website is spammy in nature or practices black-hat, my own site might be penalized because I’m recommending a “junk” to Google saying “its good”.
  • I believe natural one-way links are much more valued.
  • Most of the link requests that I have received are all not ‘related’ to my sites and I personally haven’t found a single site that is asking for a link to be of any quality.

  What Kind of Link Request / Exchange Works:

  • If you have a blog, you can ask another blogger to put you under his blogroll. For personal blogs it works really well, for blogs on a particular niche, you will have a better chance of inclusion if you send requests to only blogs that are on your niche.
  • Since link exchange is something that is “Mutual” and for benefit of both parties. Next time you fire that “Link to Me” email, Ask yourself – If you were the owner of that website, would you link to your site? Do you think your site’s quality is equivalent to his website? If you are asking for a link or blogroll inclusion from a high profile website, you are likely to be ignored because its likely that webmaster just doesn’t see any benefit of linking to you because probably your site doesn’t give any additional value to his readers
  • If you have any online product/tools that is beneficial for a certain industry, you can ask other bloggers on your niche to review that on their blog. (You can also do the same to return the favor). This is a very solid way of getting both links and traffic.
  • If you are truely passionate about a particular niche/subject and you have created resources pages (something like Wikipedia) that covers every detail of that subject, You can speak to some of the bloggers who are currently writing about that subject to give you “feedback” on your content. And once they see that your resources are very comprehensive and good quality its likely that they will link to you.
• Directory Submission – If you have ever been to any Webmaster Forum, you have probably seen tons of people asking/providing directory submission services. What is Directory Submission anyway? Well, It basically refers to submitting your site to Web Directories (something like yellow pages for web). Now let me ask you this — Even since Yahoo & Google has came out with their search engine, do you ever go to any directories to Find websites? Most likely you don’t! Because ever since the search has emerged, people hardly need to go anywhere else to find a website.I’ll admit that I do browse directories (Yahoo Directory in particular), but that’s just me. There are actually some cool things you can do with Yahoo Directory that I’ll probably cover in another blog post. But for now all you should know is at some point (probably 3-4 years back), web directories did ‘matter’ because of traffic & links. But nowadays there are just too many low-quality directories out there that gives you little or no benefit. So stop wasting your time and submit only to those directories that are of any quality. Some notable ones are: Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, BOTW etc.
• Article Submission – Submitting articles to different article directories can also get you some links. Most of the article directories will allow you to include a Author Bio, where you can include a link back to your website. Some article directories will also drive traffic to your site. However personally I find including content to my own site more useful than writing elsewhere. If your site is new, you should add more quality content to your website first and then maybe you can write some additional content for the article directories. Some good article directories are: Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare etc.
• Guest Blogging – You can write blog posts for other blogs on your niche as a Guest blogger. Not all the blogs will accept post from guest bloggers, but you can always try your luck by contacting them. Just like article directories, you can include your author biography at the end of the article which often allows you to get a link back to your site. If the readers like your post, they are likely to follow the link to your blog. So this is both good for traffic & link juice.
• Press Release – Distributing Press releases is often a good way to create an initial buzz. Writing effective press releases can get you a lot of links and also coverage in a wider media. But if you don’t have any professional experience with writing press releases, its better if you hire a professional to do that. There are lot of places where you can submit your press releases, some of them are: PR Web Direct. PR.com etc.
• Widgets / Footer / Plugins – Create a useful widget, plugin or a wordpress theme that others can use on their sites. And perhaps you can have a link on those back to your home page. But there has been a case where a site was heavily penalized by Google for overdoing this. Read what Matt Cutts (Head of Google Web Spam Team) has to say on widget bait.
• Give Away Award Badges – You will often notice that a lot of websites out there do a tremendous amount of work by making a top 10, top 20, top 100, top 250 list of blogs/tools/services of a particular niche. Occasionally they also give away awards to these websites and the proud winner can display the award as a “badge” on his own website. So say if you are a Web Design Company and have made a list of top 100 Web Design blogs, and given them a badge to display this award with pride, you can surely get about 80% of them to put it on their website. Thus you will be getting a lot of relevant & quality links back to your company’s website. Some of them may also ‘blog’ about it and thus you can also receive some targeted traffic back to your site.
• Start an Affiliate Program – If you start a lucrative affiliate program and manage to get a lot of affiliates under your wing, you can automatically get a lot of links because of the fact that all your affiliates will be linking to your website to promote your products/services. So if you have 1000 affiliates under you and considering 80% of them stay active, you will be getting about 800 links easily from this.
• Buying Links / Paid Links – The reason I have put this at the end is because this is something that I don’t recommend. Some may argue with me and say that buying links may ‘still’ work (and of course it does as long as you can stay under the radar), but the search engines are becoming smarter everyday and I believe its best to play things naturally. There are lot of sites out their who will openly or discreetly sell you links. If you have already decided to go alone in this path, below are some tips and some alternative ways of ‘buying links’ that aren’t too ‘shady’:
  • Instead of buying links directly from the site, think of a way to sponsor the site and in exchange you may take a link back. For example if you have a business of Plush toys and you are trying to get a link from a High profile toy blog/forum, instead of buying a link, you can consider holding a contest where you can give away prizes every month to their readers. Obviously since you are sponsoring the contest, the website holding the contest will likely to put your logo/banner on their site that will also link to your store directly. This way you can get both link juice and also some targeted traffic & leads.
  • Avoid buying likes from Footer, Link pages etc. If they put your site along with 10-100s of other low-quality, unrelated websites then probably its best for you to Pull off your link from there.
  • You may ask the top-notch bloggers of your niche to write an article on a detailed comparison of your product with your competitors. You can probably pay the blogger a review/research fee for this task.
  • Donate money to the open source initiatives. There are many open source projects out there that requires funding to run, and for a small donation like $20 – $100, they will list your name/company name in their website and often give you a juicy link. W3C previously had a page of PR 9, where people could get them listed for a $1000 donation. Now I believe that have changed their policy and made those links “no-follow”. But there are still a lot of open source software/services out there that accepts donation in exchange for a link.

I have pretty much tried to cover all aspects of Link Building. I thank you for taking the time to go through this long article. If there is anything that I have missed, please reply in comments and I’ll update the post.

Also check out some other great resources / articles related to Link building that I have found useful:

• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website : SEOBook.com
• Five Link Building Strategies That Work – CopyBlogger
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies – Search Engine Watch
• Advanced Link Building Strategies – SEOmoz
• A Big Roundup Of Link Building Tool – Search Engine Land
• Link Building Basics – Search Engine Roundtable
• Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques – Search Engine Roundtable
• Link Building for Blogs – Top Rank Blog
• Link Building Best Practices Q&A – Eric Ward
• Link Building & Determining Link Quality – Search Engine Journal
• Old VS New Link Building Strategies – SEO Smarty
• Quality Link Building : Social Links, Reciprocal Links and .edu & .gov Links – Search Engine Journal
• 15 Link Building Tips for New Websites – Dosh Dosh
• The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love – Problogger

Do you have any link building resource/article that you would like to include in this list? Send me an email at – me[at]saadkamal.com or simply give me a buzz at twitter – www.twitter.com/saadkamal.

Subscribe to My Blog via Email

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And for those who don’t know Stephen – He is a Internet Marketing Guru and also the founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. He is a journalist and also a professional Speaker. He is often invited to speak at different search conferences. Read his full bio here.

So what do you think of the above video? Is there any comments that you would like to share?

Update: Some of you have asked for the presentation slides, so I’m including a direct link to the ppt file – http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/seo-mistakes.ppt

In that article I briefly touched on “finding a niche” and “…using keywords in Title” and someone emailed me last week to ask – “How to Find the Right Keyword(s) for a Blog?“. Well I basically gave her a brief answer already, but as promised I’m covering the whole “Keyword Research” topic in more detail here in the blog. If the post gets too lengthy please bear with me – I promise that by the end of the article you will become a Master of the Basics of Keyword Research & Optimization.

Before I continue, I advice you all to Subscribe to this blog (Free) by using the Email Subscription or RSS Subscription (..Located on the top right hand corner of this page…). The reason I want you to subscribe is, I’ll be covering some great topics here and I don’t really want you to miss anything!

What is Keyword Research?

In regards to Organic/Natural/Paid Search, Keyword research basically means researching for words that are supposedly going to be used by your customers/readers/visitors to find your website/blog/business/product.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Well, If you can know what your customer is looking for, its easy for you to sell them the right product. If a person is looking for a Dish washer but ends up in an online tire store, he is less likely to make a purchase.

So if you are selling tires online you need to know what ‘keywords’ or ‘search terms’ searchers use to search for your product online. For example are they searching for ‘tires’ or ‘wheels’?

- Car Tires <> Automobile Tiers ?
- Snow Tire <> Winter Tire ?
- Bridgestone Tire <> Firestone Tire ?

How would you know? How can you differentiate between all these keywords? How can you tell which one is more “important” or better (in terms of search volume).

Well all these questions can be answered when you will do a proper Keyword Research. Now since my target audience is Bloggers & Small Business owners, I’d like to give an example of how Keyword Research can actually help a blog to become successful. Lets say you have a technology blog and you write about all sorts of technology news, tutorials, how-tos, tips & hacks. You only get about 100 visitors a day and most of them are from your own community of friends. You don’t get any significant amount of traffic from search engines because most of the things that you write about are either “too general or common” (there are thousands, if not millions of pages on the same topic), or you just don’t know what people are interested in the technology arena. You only write about things that ‘you feel’ is important, but not necessarily the whole blogosphere thinks the same.

So after you did some basic keyword research, you noticed that people in your area of expertise/interest are searching for the following – (The amount of searches shown are from Google Alone! The figure will be even bigger if you consider the other engines on the market)

facebook group – 18,000+ searches/mo
Vista Theme for Xp – 33,100+ searches/mo
best free antivirus – 22,200+ searches/mo
backup iphone – 22,000+ searches/mo

And all these search phrases has “minimal” amount of competition in Paid + Organic search. (I’ll write about how to determine competition later in the article).

Now with the above data you created few ‘top-notch’ blog posts (I just made up some example titles)-

Target Keyword: “Facebook Group”

- How to Join a Facebook Group?
- How to Create a Facebook Group?
- How to Make a Facebook Group Popular?

Target Keyword: “Vista Theme for Xp”

- Top 20 Windows Vista Theme For Xp
- Beautiful Windows Vista Theme for Windows XP
- Collection of Windows Vista Theme for XP

Target Keyword: “Best Free Antivirus”

- Best Free Antivirus for Windows Vista
- Best Free Antivirus for Windows Xp
- The world’s Best Free Antivirus Review

Target Keyword: “backup iphone”

- How to Backup My Iphone?
- How to Backup your Iphone using Itunes?
- How to Backup Iphone Data?
- Iphone Backup Tutorial
- Free Iphone Backup Software

After writing the posts, you promoted them among your community and also via the social media and soon after they got indexed by google and some other major search engines, you got some decent ranking for some of those terms. As a result you to get an additional 10-20 thousand visitors / per month from the search engines. So from only an average of 100 visitors per day, you straight away jumped to 600 visitors per day! Now just think what you can accomplish, if you are always doing keyword research when thinking about writing your next blog post.

How to do Keyword Research?

Now that I have convinced you (I hope~) that keyword research is very important, let me go straight to the steps that you need to perform in order to do some basic keyword research.

Step 1: Brainstorm for Keyword Ideas & Topics

As easy and lame it may sound, the best keyword ideas can actually come from your own brain. Because you are a human being and you would certainly know it better how another human thinks. Try to put yourself in the shoes of a searcher and “THINK”, what type of queries he may use to search for ‘things’ that are under your hood. Give attention to things that you yourself search for. If it takes you little bit of ‘extra’ time than usual to find what you are looking for then – Wala! You got yourself a keyword that is probably not very saturated. Some other ways of generating keyword ideas may include:

- Looking at other blogs on your niche and tracking what they are writing about. An easy way to do this would be to search for “your-niche” + blog in google and see who are ranking in the top 30. E.g. If you write about gardening, you can search for gardening blog in google. Some other nice keywords to find gardening related blogs would be to search for: gardening blog directory, blogs about gardening etc. You can also search for “gardening” in the major blog directories like: BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, BOTW, Yahoo Directory

A search for “gardening blog” returns over 631,000+ results

- Go to the popular Blog Search Engine & Networks like – Google Blog Search & Technorati and find out what is HOT in the blogosphere.

- Look at the respective categories in some of the big social media and bookmarking sites to find out what is popular and what is liked by the readers. Some big social media & bookmarking sites includes: Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Propeller etc.

- Go to the relevant category of some of the popular news providers and see what the media is talking about. For example if you are have a Technology Blog, you can check out the following: e.g. Google News, Yahoo News, BBC News, MSN Tech, CNN Tech, CNET, NY Times Technology, BusinessWeek, Wired, Forbes etc.

- Go to the relevant category of some of the popular RSS aggregator portals that shows you posts of all the popular blogs in one single page. Most of the time I use: PopUrls & Alltop.

- Look at the trends of a given topic/keyword in a trend engine like – Google Insights. Input your term, choose a time frame of last 90 days and click on search and it will show you how popular the keyword is and most important it will also give you some related keywords at the bottom left and some raising searches at the bottom right. For instance a search for “Vista Themes” shows me a nice list of some other related keywords that have good amount of searches:

- Use a Keyword Research Tool like: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker or SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter a general keyword and the system will automatically suggest you a lot of additional keyword along with the number of searches it receives every month. For instances, I searched for “mountain bike” in Google’s keyword tool and this is what I get:

Step 2: Record Your Findings

So after going through all the various sources mentioned above, you must have gotten a hand full of keywords that you want you to optimize your site for. But before even going into that, you should save everything that you found in a spreadsheet.The advantages of using a spreadsheet for keyword research is just too many, but for now all you need to know that its easier to export yours keywords from a spreadsheet to external applications for further analysis and because of their structured tabular nature, its very easy to read keyword data from a spreadsheet rather than any other typical application. Microsoft Excel is a popular choice of desktop spreadsheet application. But my personal favourite is Google Docs and Spreadsheets. You can also use Zoho Sheet which is very identical to MS Excel.

I have created a simple keyword research spreadsheet that you can look into and follow accordingly. Don’t worry about those additional columns (Searches, Competition), I’ll explain them later in the article.

Step 3: Refine your Keyword List

Now that you have a list of keywords on your niche, you can further analyze them and bring out the cream. So the main objective of this step is to figure out which keywords are most relevant for your blog and which are likely to bring you traffic/conversion and which keywords would be easier to rank for. So this part will involve competitor analysis, checking for pay-per-click ads etc.

- Check for competition of each of your keyword in Google. If a term is very competitive, it would be useless to optimize your new site/blog for that keyword because its likely to be very hard to rank well for the term. So how do you check competition? Its very simple, Just go to google.com and type in your keyword in “quotes” and look at the number of results it returns. Even though there is no magic number, but from my experience (and only from my experience) — IF the number of results returned is less than 75,000+, its a keyword that you can easily target with a brand new website/blog. But of course If you already have a reputable site with moderately high PageRank and good backlinks, you can even target a keyword that has over 500,000+ competition. So lets check for the competition of a dummy keyword – Mountain Bike Gear.

According the Google, the keyword – Mountain Bike Gear has about 25,000+ competition thus it would be a relatively easy keyword to rank for. Now how do we determine whether its a profitable keyword? Simply check the number of ads running on the right hand side of Google search when you search for “mountain bike gear”. It seems like a lot of advertisers are actually paying money to show up their advertisement for this keyword so very likely its a profitable one. But to get more accurate information, cross reference this with the result you get from Google’s Keyword Tool. If the keyword shows a lot of searches then definitely its a keyword that is worth ranking for.

- Complete your keyword research spreadsheet that you created in Step 2. Fill in the necessary columns like – searches, competition (organic) & competition (paid). You can always scrap out the keywords that are either too competitive or has very less amount of searches. All keep this list up-to-date and check your rankings for these terms on a regular basis.

Step 4: Keyword Optimization

So now that you have a list of solid keywords that you can easily rank for, you need to complete this final step which is – Keyword optimization. Now how can you optimize your website/blog with the keywords that you just discovered?

- Firstly, you need to determine your approach. If you are doing this keyword research just to figure out what to write for your “next blog post” then apply the following:

• Make sure your Post Title contains the keyword or Phrase. The shorter the title the better
• Try to mention the keyword at least once within the opening of your article (first paragraph)
• Don’t stuff your article with the keyword(s) – instead use synonyms and other keyword variations (e.g. PS3 / Play Station 3/ Sony PS3 / Sony Play Station 3 – All refers to the same thing)
• If you add a relevant picture, make sure the picture “title” and “alt” tags have your keyword.
• Add unique Meta Description for your Posts. Include a short keyword rich opening of your article within 160 char or less.

- If the sole purpose of this Keyword Research was to find a niche for your new online business or blog then do all of the above and in addition do the following:

• Make sure your site’s title has your main keywords. Don’t stuff too many keywords!
• Write a unique keyword rich meta description for your site
• Add a lot of relevant categories on your site that can target each of your main keywords individually. Make sure all the category pages has it’s keyword title properly written
• Start adding unique and useful content that are keyword optimized in all those respective categories

You have Now Mastered the Basics of Keyword Research & Optimization!

Yes finally, we have come to an end. I know this post has been really very long and I actually wanted to break the whole post in smaller parts. But I realized for any newcomer to the SEO world, it would be better if I put up everything in one place for easy referencing.

This is by no means a complete keyword research guide, but I believe this tutorial teaches you all the basics that you need to learn to start Keyword Research & Optimization. There are lots of advanced stuffs that I plan to release later this month.

If you have any questions, dobuts or feedback, I’d appreciate if you shoot them in comments. If you want more help in keyword research & optimization, you can always email me at – me[at]saadkamal.com.

Good Luck with your Keyword Research!

So Today I have decided to share some of the simple tips that anyone can implement in order to “Optimize” their blog and get good ranking in the search engines. Please note that this tutorial is not only limited to ‘blogs’ but any website that exists on the web. However the article has been written for bloggers in mind so some of the things may be a bit different for other types of sites.

Step 1: Know Your Self – Select a Niche – Set a Goal

The first step is to know yourself and your blog, so that you know exactly what you are writing about. Many bloggers just blog about their daily ramblings (like a personal diary). So if you are a blogger who only keeps your journal for your daily ramblings you are probably witting about – what you had for lunch, how much did your kitty ~poo~ today (jking) etc….

Is there anything wrong with that? Well absolutely not! Its your blog and you can write about anything you want. However the problem raises (especially among the asian bloggers) when it comes to “earning money from blog” or “getting international traffic”.

Unless you have a selected a “niche” (or many niches) that you are comfortable talking about, its very hard to attract traffic just by writing about ‘random’ stuffs.

For example – if you are a female blogger and you are particularly interested in fashion, your posts can be targeted for the fashion world. Your daily ramblings that you put up in your blog will then be more “fashion” related. E.g. new cloths you bought, picture of the latest shoe you saw in the mall etc. Similarly, if you are a car freak, your blog posts can be slightly partial about cars, racing, modifications, sound system and so on. A blogger can choose as many niches he/she wants like- politics, food, cooking, fashion, pets, lifestyle, dining, travel, technology etc.

So you should ask yourself, what are the topics that you are more comfortable to talk about? Whats Interests you? Once you have gotten that answer, slowly sail your blog to that direction.

No, You don’t need a new blog or a domain to do that. You can start writing ‘on your niche’ in your existing blog. And I’m not staying that because you choose fashion, you can’t write about “politics”. Remember, Its your blog so you are the Boss. You can write about absolutely anything you want. However if your writing has a particular focus, it would be easier for your readers to categorize your blog as a part of your respective niche. Even fashion and politics can be blended together if you are creative! (Think about it…)

So once you have selected your comfort zone, set a target for yourself. For example, how are you going to measure your success? It can be in terms of No. of visitors, No of RSS subscribers, Earnings from Blog etc.

Step 2: Optimize the Title of Your Blog Home Page

This is probably the most important “on-page optimization” factor that is the most easy to do. The title of your blog is what everyone sees on the top of their browser when they visit your blog. For search engines its the most important determining factor of what your blog is all about. So for instance, If your name is “John Doe” and you want everyone to find your blog when they search for your name in Google, you MUST put your name “John Doe” in your blog’s Title Tag. So You can perhaps format your title tag like – “John Doe’s Blog” or “John Doe – Recipe Blog” etc.

Bad Title Examples:

“My Daily Ramblings”
“My Blog”
“My Blah Blah”

Why are the above bad Titles? Because no one is actually going to search for “My Blog” in google. You should put something in your title that you think people will search for. Try to get some of the important keywords in your title, such as – your name, your blog’s name, keywords from your niche etc. So If my niche is digital cameras & photography, My title can be:

“John Doe: Digital Camera Review Blog”
“John Doe Digital Camera Blog”
“Digital Photography blog by John Doe”

……and other combinations that makes sense.

Step 3: Meta Tags Optimization

Even though not all meta tags are not as important as before, Meta Description tags are still very useful and a determining factor for increasing your chance of ranking in the search engines. So sometimes Title tags can’t do it alone, if you also optimize your Meta Descriptions tag, you have a higher chance of succeeeding.

A blog’s Meta description should contain a brief description of your blog focusing on the areas and niches that you often write about. This small piece of text can be considered as a selling snippet, if a reader finds it appealing he is likely to click and go inside your blog to find out more information. But if your Meta Description is too generic and isn’t written too well then there is a good chance that your blog will simply be ignored even though its probably ranking well in the search engine. Check out an example of a good meta description:

Now Why do I call the above a Good Example? Because:

• The meta description is descriptive enough for a reader to know what to expect from the blog.
• It contains important keywords – For instance, the name of the photographer is specified (e.g. Laura Novak), The type of photography is also described (e.g. Wedding & Portrait) and her locality is also specified (e.g. Wilmington, Delaware).
• The meta description automatically appeals to someone who is looking for a wedding photographer in Wilmington. So If the searcher sees this result in the search engine.

Of course this description can be improved and further tweaked, but I guess you already got the general idea of having a good meta description.

Important things to include in your Meta Description:

• Include your Selling Point– Tell your readers what they want to hear through your site’s Meta Description, and you will definitely get some advantage over others in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). For instance – if you blog about digital camera and photography then including a phrase like “Digital Camera Review & Advanced Photography tips” may result in more clicks and visitors because your description will exactly match the flavor of search performed by the user.
• Keywords – Including some of your keywords (E.g. Wedding Photography, Photography Tips, Camera Review) will give you some advantage in Google’s relevancy algorithm.

Step 4: Structuring Your Content

Another important thing is to structure your content so that its becomes more readable. Important text should go in top and less important text should go in the bottom. Usage of Bold, Italic, Heading (h1 tags) is a must. If you properly structure your content, it will be more readable for your readers and it will also help the search engines to determine what is more important. For example, when you write a new post, always choose the Post title carefully. Whatever you choose as the title becomes the Header of the particular page and it appears in “big letters”.

So if your post heading reads “I am Bored…” and inside the post only the first two line is about ‘why you are bored’ and after that the whole post is about How to cook cheese macaroni…Its just not going to work! Ask yourself, How do you usually read a newspaper? Do you start reading from the left and read every single word? No – we usually “skim” a newspaper and we look at the heading and if the heading interests us, we read the news beneath the heading.

Blog kind of works in the same way, if you have a poor heading you can’t expect people to read the whole entry. Similarly a Search engine will not consider your Post very related to “cheese macaroni” unless your heading has the words inside. So a Post title “How to Cook Cheese Macaroni” is better compared to “I am Bored….”.

Things to Remember:

• Always use short Post Titles. Think of something that people may use to search for that particular post and use it as your title.
• Always Use Header Tags (h1, h2, h3) effectively. If you have a big article, break it down into different sections and give each section a sub-heading.
• Use Bold, Italic where necessary. Its often good to highlight important words so that they are easily noticeable to your readers as well as to the search engines

Step 5: Image Optimization

No matter what type of blog you are running, You must use a lot of images! Human eyes love images and its often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Its actually true! If your blog has a lot of images, it would be a lot easier for you to engage your users. Moreover You can get additional traffic from Image search engines like (Google Images). When You are putting an image in your blog, you must optimize it for the search engines so that the search engine knows what the image says… (Search engines are dumb and so they can’t see inside images…yet).

Some Important Image Optimization Elements:

• Alt text : ALT text or Alternate Text is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but short. You can use your relevant keywords as ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt text is used in place of that particular image.
• File name : always use meaningful file name for your images, use names like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “DSC24045.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to the ALT text.
  Image Title : always use the title tag in images which will show the title as tool tip when a user moves his mouse over the image. Example of an image with title tag: [img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description” title=”Title of the Image”]
• Image Linking : Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “view an Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view” as the anchor text.

Step 6: Keep your blog Up-to-Date

Search engines loves fresh, new content, so always feed them! Not only your blog will grow automatically if you always add something to it; search engines tend to come and spider your website more often if they always find something new. So you will have a higher chance of ranking high in the search engine if you keep on adding fresh, quality and unique content.

If you follow the 6 steps that I mentioned above, you blog will already be considered as one of the Search Engine Aware blogs. You will definitely see some improvements in your ranking as well as traffic.

Those of you who are using Blogger, Xanga, WordPress, Typepad and other blogging platforms and doesn’t know how to change “title” or meta description, I’ll definitely try to put up separate instruction guide for all of you. But there are hundreds of good resources already available on the internet, and you can simply do a Google search to find them =)

This guide is no way complete and its very basic as I have particularly wrote it for Newbie bloggers (especially those who have absolutely no idea about SEO). So if you run into any problem you are free to put your questions in the comments or you can always email me at – me[at]saadkamal.com.