Why should you not use tables - Web Design Tips

Before answering the question why should you not use tables I would say the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to make search engine spiders understand your website.

If your website is properly coded it will not stop search engine spiders to crawl efficiently the text and links in your website. Your website's high quality score depends on the good code.

Now lets move onto analyze why should you not be using tables in your website.

If you are using tables in your website code the content is deep down within nested tables. Search engine spiders find it very difficult to crawl the content inside the tables. Search engine spiders never index if your code has more than four nested tables.

To ensure good page display and proper code stop using tables and write a code that enables the search engine spiders to efficiently crawl your website and get ranked on top positions in search engines.

77 free tools for SEO and website research

Source: http://seo.lioney.sg

Looking out for free SEO tools Visit http://seo.lioney.sg/

Here goes the highlights of few important tools.

http://seo.lioney.sg/ provides

Link Tools

Backlink Checker - Find out how many total backlinks there are for any one website.

Link Analyzer - Analyze incoming and outgoing links.

Link Suggestion Generator - Generate links that relate to the keyword/topic of your choosing.

No-Follow Finder - Scan a website to find nofollow links to various other sites.

Keyword Tools

Keyword Density Checker - The Keyword Density Checker tool extracts keywords from a website and determines how often they occur.

Keyword Suggestion Generator - Check keyword results and get suggestions.

Search Engine Tools

Google Indexed Pages Checker - Check how many pages Google has indexed for one website.

Robots.txt Checker - Check for and view the contents of the robots.txt file for any website.

Spider Viewer - Discover how spider bots view your website.

Source Code Tools

CSS Validator - Validate your cascading stylesheets with the W3C CSS validator.

HTML Markup Validator - Validate your HTML/XHTML code against the W3C Markup Validator.

Webpage Size Checker - Check the size of any website's source code in bytes, KB and MB.

Website Speed Test - Find out how fast your website loads.

For more free tools visit - http://seo.lioney.sg/

Why should you bookmark your newly designed website

Social bookmarking is considered as a way to

• Introduce your website
• Drive targeted, traffic to your site
• Gain backlinks
  

Not many bookmarking sites pass on the link juice. Some bookmarking sites use the NoFollow attribute. However user generated meta data such as title, description, tags and the category is extremely powerful and highly valued by the search engines.

Other advantages of Social Bookmarking

• If your site is newly launched and is bookmarked by your friends or colleagues then search engine bot can find them easily.
• A site with multiple bookmarks by multiple users is more powerful.
• If your website receives more votes across social bookmarking sites your site is of higher quality.
• Pages of your site that is not existing in site navigation can be easily linked from bookmarking sites. This allows search engines to index your website deeper.

Bounce Rate - Page Load Factor

A visitor is expected to wait 3-5 seconds to check your landing page as 3-second usability test is related to the page load factor.

Page Loading Time: One of the important factor for bounce rate is your landing page loading time. Flash based websites generally takes longer time to download as they need to download a large quantity of data. If the visitor has to wait for a longer time before experiencing content/visuals they are more likely to bounce.

FTC Cracks Down on Deceptive Online Marketing Tactic - ClickZ

FTC Cracks Down on Deceptive Online Marketing Tactic - ClickZ

Google Real Time Search

75 Most Bookmarked Twitter Applications

http://www.viralnetworkers.com/forum/topic/show?id=4523559%3ATopic%3A155

1- twittervision
2- twitterfeed
3- twhirl
4- tweetscan
5- twistori
6- twitter-search
7- tweetdeck
8- twitpic
9- hellotxt
10- twitterrific
11- twitterholic
12- tweetstats
13- twellow
14- twitturly
15- twitter-grader
16- twitscoop
17- quotably
18- twitterlocal
19- monitter
20- twubble
21- twittearth
22- grouptweet
23- hashtags
24- tweetburner
25- twitbin
26- twittercounter
27- tweetlater

Twitter Tools

Tweetzi

Real-time Twitter search tool for finding useful information.




Twitterfall

Twitterfall helps you keep track of current Twitter trends. You can create your own customized search that can include the twitter accounts you personally follow.

TwitterFollower

From the name you could guess it is a service that helps you connect with Twitter users and increase your follower count.


Twitscoop

Twitscoop allows you to search and follow tweets that's hot in real-time. It also allows you to send tweets, recieve tweets and find new friends instantly.

Feedera - Your Personalized Daily Twitter Digest

Feedera delivers your personalized daily Twitter digest to your inbox.

Why do you need Feedera?

Feedera delivers the top videos, photos and links shared by your friends and this will avoid information overload.

Feedera calculates the feedscore for every top story based on the total number of tweets and the overall popularity across the web.




Image Source: http://feedera.com





To start receiving your personalized daily twitter digest, Visit http://feedera.com

Web Based Competitive Intelligence Tools

Google Alerts

Google alerts lets you track competitor's company, their employees, product launches,new features, blogs, public profiles, photos,videos and more.

Yahoo Site Explorer

You can find who is linking to your competitors using Yahoo Site Explorer

SocialMention

By entering your competitor's name or keyword SocialMention will help you track how many times the term was mentioned in different in blogs and social media websites and it allows you to export this information.

Twitter

You can follow your competitors and their employees on Twitter. You could also follow the people your competitors follow.

Twitter Search

You can create and save twitter searches to track competitors keywords, product names and more.

Quarkbase

By submitting your competitors URL quarkbase lists you the most popular pages of your comeptitors and the websites where they have been distributed and the number of subscribers and more.

Compete

Compete lets you know the unique visitors, keywords to a particular website.

SEO for Firefox

Firefox plugin from Aaron Wall that gives you information on a site's PageRank, number of links at a certain page, popularity in social media, directory listing and more.

copernic.com

Copernic will search for new content on your competitor's web pages and then sends you an email on what is changed(keywords, new product pages, etc).

Why should you optimize your video for search engines

A recent study by comScore revealed that in October 2009, more than 167 million viewers in the U.S. watched an average of 167 videos each, while YouTube (YouTube) reached 1 billion views per day – or 41 million views per hour – in the same month. - Online Video viewing study.

From the study it is clear that online video viewing is increasing. Video's are definitely an effecient way to promote your products or services.

The use of videos to market your products/services on the Internet is a great way to impact your prospect customer.

What is the importance of optimizing your videos for search engines?

Optimizing your videos for search engines helps you reach your prospective customers 10x faster.

Tips for Optimizing your Videos for Search Engines

• Use keywords in the video title and description and link it to your web pages.
• Use anchor text for the links from other pages of your website.
• Use proper extension for your video files.
• Create short videos say 2 minutes.
• Create video sitemaps and submit the sitemap to the video and the content search engines.
• Include RSS Feeds
• Include a share button that enables visitor to share your videos with popular social networking sites.
• Distribute your videos to video hosting sites like YouTube, Yahoo!Videos and more
  

Find below the list of video distribution sites:

• YouTube
• DailyMotion
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Metacafe
• Revver
• Blip.tv
• Veoh
• Viddler
• VimeoPlus
• Sevenload
• VideoJug
• Zoopy
• MSN Video
• Break
• eBaums World
• Scilpo
• Howcast
• 5min
• Graspr
• i2TV
• GrindTV

Word of Mouth Analytics

Meteor: measure & activate your online earned media from Meteor Solutions on Vimeo.

Meteor's Key Features Helps:

• To determine the impact and reach of your earned media traffic
• To understand which sites, ads and users generate the most word-of-mouth for your site.
• To create experiences that directly rewards visitors for sharing your content

Source: meteorsolutions.com

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

Do you think your business doesn't need a social media strategy?

Interesting Presentation - Must Watch!!
"My Business Doesnt Need A Social Media Strategy"

View more presentations from Nick Bowditch.

Crown Peak launches New Content Targeting and Testing Tool

Cown Peak's new online marketing tool lets you create and manage the content and your campaigns through a easy-to-use interface.

Detailed listing of the tool's features - Source: www.crownpeak.com

Manage Testing

1. A/B, or A/B/C or A/B/C/D (you get the idea) all the way through Multivariate testing built right into the product. Test content wherever it lives: your Web site, landing pages, microsites, email, display advertising or social networks.

2. Get split test measurements in real time and know exactly which version of your content or which campaign is actually driving results.

3. Promote or demote content, pages or versions based on defined success metrics like page views, conversions or clicks.

4. Simple, easy-to-understand reporting gives you exactly the info you need to quickly make creative and content publishing decisions.

5. Syndicate and distribute “champion” content to provide ongoing SEO benefits.

Ad Testing

1. Track and manage content in flash or static banner ads or in social media as well as the impact of change on the click-through or conversion rate.

2. Optimize advertising content in the same, easy-to-use interface that you utilize for all your Web content management.

3. Combine ad testing with landing page testing to know exactly where and how to optimize conversion rates and content.

Segment and Target Content

1. Easily create “playlists” of criteria to create your audience segments.

2. Target all kinds of content – from single snippets on a page to the entire page to groups of visitors based on audience criteria you define.

3. Target content to audience segments based on implicit and behavioral criteria such as referring URL, geography, time of day, ad campaign etc.

4. Easily re-use targeting groups for any new snippet of content you create.
   

Automate Content and Campaign Management

1. Schedule both tests and targeted content to go live and retire on specific dates

2. Automatically direct your visitors based on rules you establish such as time of day, referring media (e.g. ad vs. email or organic vs. paid search).

3. Use workflow to trigger email notifications of campaign milestones such as number of conversions, or temporary promotions.

4. Automate approval processes of content before it goes live.
   

Run The Whole Site Or Just Part Of It

1. Unlike other systems there’s no software to install or manage on your servers, it’s completely on demand.

2. Use the CrownPeak Online Marketing Suite to control your entire site, or just plug in a few snippets of code for your "persuasive content" and use CrownPeak as a marketing layer on your existing infrastructure.

Presentation Distrubution Sites

SlideShare - Allows you post presentations and distribute your presentations to LinkedIn, Facebook, and other popular social networks.

Google Presentations - Allows you to post the presentation and share the presentation.

Zoho Show - Zoho allows you to post the presentation like other sites. Zoho Show offers chat services during presentation making it more interactive.

The Twitter Tutorial

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Twitter Tutorial

View more documents from David Griner.

Promote your blog on Facebook

NetworkedBlogs is a facebook application that lets you promote blog on Facebook. This application works on profiles and your facebook pages. With this application you can import your blog feed to your profile page. You can promote the blogs you like as well. Create a network for your blog on Facebook with this application.

Google Introduces Adwords Comparison Ads

Google introduced a new feature of AdWords called AdWords Comparison Ads. With this feature Adwords advertisers can now compare their offers easily and get more valuable qualified leads. However this feature will be available only for limited number of advertisers in mortgage/refinance space in select U.S. states.

To read the complete story follow the link - http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-adwords-comparison-ads.html

Robots.txt Tester to test RSS/Atom Feeds

clipped from googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items. In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it's important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

List Of Video Distribution Sites

• YouTube
• DailyMotion
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Metacafe
• Revver
• Blip.tv
• Veoh
• Viddler
• VimeoPlus
• Sevenload
• VideoJug
• Zoopy
• MSN Video
• Break
• eBaums World
• Scilpo
• Howcast
• 5min
• Graspr
• i2TV
• GrindTV

TwitterFeed now offering FaceBook Integration, Real-Time Publishing, and Google Analytics Tracking

For beginners TwitterFeed.com is a free service that allows you import RSS feeds and automatically post a tweet on your Twitter account.

Twitter has recentely announced their newly released features. This feature includes FaceBook integration. With this feature you can now publish your RSS feeds into Facebook. TwitterFeed provides track statistics and you will be able to view traffic from FaceBook.

With their new Google Analytics Integration, TwitterFeed includes special 'UTM' tags within each post so that you can understand traffic patterns from Twitter and FaceBook.

Optimizing Images for Search Engines

• Save your pictures of products/news/events related images in one folder and ensure that the folder is not blocked by your robots.txt file.
  

• Use the Alt, Width and height attributes of the IMG tag.
  

• Use a caption, be more descriptive about the image
  

• Add images to articles and press releases. This will help you get direct links to image from websites.

Classifieds Submissions

Here goes the list of classifieds sites for submitting your website...

whynotad.com
thomasnet.com/
olx.com
pennysaverusa.com
recycler.com
buysell.com
sell.com
classifiedads.com
traderonline.com
kudzu.com
domesticsale.com
usfreeads.com
craigslist.org
backpage.com
livedeal.com
gumtree.com
adpost.com
buysellcommunity.com
inetgiant.com
adlandpro.com
freeadlists.com
esofthub.com
make-money-work-from-home.com
pedrosplaza.com
adsanddeals.com
recoupgear.com
phclassifieds.com
phoenixmetroclassifieds.com
pixel4less.com
probikeoutlet.com
psdplace.com
rosevalepark.com
searchforks.com
inetgiant.com
adlandpro.com
808classifieds.com
recycler.com
salespider.com
usfreeads.com
adquest3d.com
chooseyouritem.com
splut.com/
bestadforum.com/
buysellauctiononline.com
webcosmo.com/
websitetrafficforum.com/
usscope.com/
cweb.net/
clickstarter.com/
usedflutes.com/
latimes.com/
freelocalclassifiedads.us/
pressmania.com/
canetads.com/
freeukclassifieds.co.uk/

Feel free to add to the list...

Black Friday is the New Cyber Monday

clipped from www.ysmblog.com Which post-Thanksgiving shopping day gives the biggest online bang? While most people identify the day after Thanksgiving—or “Black Friday”—as the biggest shopping day of the year for in-store sales, some new Yahoo! research shows that the day of turkey leftovers may actually be turning into the new “Cyber Monday.” The Yahoo! Network Insights team looked back at last year’s consumer patterns to help marketers improve their sales during this critical time of year. Online advertising effectiveness on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the Monday after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest day for online sales—was analyzed and compared to data in the preceding four weeks of November. For more details, please see the complete post on the Yahoo! Advertising Blog.

For Yahoo Advertisiers - Sponsored Ads now appear in Filtered Search Results

One of the key features of Yahoo! lets users filter results by website. Starting Oct 8th, the sponsored ads appears for those filtered search results.

Highlights from Jeff Hecox post in Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

What does this mean for advertisers?

All advertisers will still get the same chances at clicks before any filtering takes place. But those advertisers whose sites show up as a filtering option will get further opportunities for clicks when their ad shows up in the narrowed results—without any competing ads. And the ads may be more relevant to consumers, as our systems take the user’s choice into account.

(FYI, the domains our system uses to filter results are chosen based on a number of factors, such as their listings’ quality, popularity and user response.)

The filtering option, along with the other cool features added to Yahoo! Search last month, is designed to increase relevancy and user control of the search experience. And when results are more relevant to consumers, that can translate to a better return for advertisers.

Twitter Search Tools

Areaface - Areaface lets you search for Twitter users in specific city or town. Areaface loads recent tweets from a particular location you click on the map.





TwitterJobSearch.com - Lets you search job listings that have been advertised via twitter. You can sort the search results by setting filters like date, job title, salary, location.

How google handles the robots.txt file?

Google Making Ajax Crawlable

Google Paid Link Policy

Buying or Selling links violates Google's Webmaster guidelines and it can have a negative impact on your website rank in search results.

Use "No Follow attribute" that will let the search engine know that you don't want them to crawl the link and give credit to the link that your linking..

Example:

Anchor Text

If you are concerned about page rank, then think about having any paid links on your website.

Twitter Tools for Local Businesses

Local businesses might find these tools and applications useful in finding their audience on Twitter.

1. Twitter Search allows you to begin your quest for people on Twitter. Search for your business name, your location, and for keywords related to your products and services.
2. Advanced Twitter Search helps you find people and conversations you may be interested in within the radius of your choosing for any geographic location.
3. Twellowhood offers a simple tool to drill down by map to find other Twitter users in the towns or cities of your choice.
4. Localtweeps maps Twitter profiles to locations through ZIP codes to facilitate local connections among Tweeple. It helps you find people on Twitter near you and helps them find you.
5. TwitterLocal allows you to filter the tweets you see by location. It lets you keep track of as many location-based feeds as you choose by picking a location and setting a radius around it.

Source: clickz.com

Steps for dealing with duplicate content within your website.

# Recognize duplicate content on your website.
The first and most important step is to recognize duplicate content on your website. A simple way to do this is to take a unique text snippet from a page and to search for it, limiting the results to pages from your own website by using a site:query in Google. Multiple results for the same content show duplication you can investigate.

# Determine your preferred URLs.
Before fixing duplicate content issues, you'll have to determine your preferred URL structure. Which URL would you prefer to use for that piece of content?

# Be consistent within your website.
Once you've chosen your preferred URLs, make sure to use them in all possible locations within your website (including in your Sitemap file).

# Apply 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible.
If you can, redirect duplicate URLs to your preferred URLs using a 301 response code. This helps users and search engines find your preferred URLs should they visit the duplicate URLs. If your site is available on several domain names, pick one and use the 301 redirect appropriately from the others, making sure to forward to the right specific page, not just the root of the domain. If you support both www and non-www host names, pick one, use the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools, and redirect appropriately.

# Implement the rel="canonical" link element on your pages where you can.
Where 301 redirects are not possible, the rel="canonical" link element can give us a better understanding of your site and of your preferred URLs. The use of this link element is also supported by major search engines such as Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo!.

# Use the URL parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools where possible.
If some or all of your website's duplicate content comes from URLs with query parameters, this tool can help you to notify us of important and irrelevant parameters within your URLs. More information about this tool can be found in our announcement blog post.

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog

How to get free traffic to your website

• Building links is the efficient way to get free traffic to your website.
• Having a site with quality content and keywords
• Developing a blog with keyword rich posts and building external links
• Getting links from websites that is the same theme as yours
• Creating articles and distributing them in article directories
• Getting links from trade associations, directory websites

Have any questions regarding link building, search engine optimization write to me.

How to Get More Followers on Twitter?

Post more tweets on Twitter. The more active, you are your tweets appear on Twitter Public Timeline. So your tweets will help you get followers.

Don't tweet regularly on a personal level and you may end loosing followers. Provide some useful tweets like information, news, education etc to your followers.

If you have your profiles on Facebook, MySpace etc..Use it enhance your followers list. If you run a blog add the twitter gadget and ask them to link to your profile. Add your twitter profile to your email signature, guest posts, etc.

Twitter Tips for beginners

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform limited to 140 characters similar to blogging.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is one source to keep yourself updated with the current events, industry news because it would be a pain to visit all the blogs you read on a daily basis.

Another way of using twitter is to share your links. You can write a text commenting on a topic of your interest and then provide a link to an article or video for the twitter users to know more. Twitter has many useful links related to business, political etc.

In the next couple of posts, let's see

• How to follow and get followed on Twitter
  
• Twitter tools
  

Google does not use the meta keywords tag: Mat Cutts Video

There has been a debate in the SEO Industry. Few believe meta tags plays important role in search engine rankings. The official post was published in the Offical Google WebMaster Blog.

Twitter User Demographics and Usage Trends

• 72.5% of all Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update per day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers
• 92.4% follow less than 100 people
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity (see the report on analysis of top-5% users)
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston
• Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com.
• TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people.
• 0.29% of overall Twitter users follow more than 2,000 people.

Click: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ for full report

Tips For Optimizing Time Spent In Social Media

21 Must-Follow Tips For Optimizing Time Spent In Social Media: OnlineMarketingBlog

1. Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.

2. Unfollow those who don’t add value or aren’t important to your network. This tip isn’t for a brand or company seeking to make themselves accessible to the world at large, but for you as a marketer personally. How many times have you logged into Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed – even just after a few hours of being away – and felt totally lost in the conversation. Unless you’re going to devote your life to watching the stream, make sure that who you’re following is actually worth your time.

3. Unsubscribe to all RSS feeds that aren’t unmissable. RSS is the perfect, simple way to keep track of relevant feeds, but over time your reader can become bloated. We’ve all logged into reader and seen Google display the euphemistic “1,000+ unread items” before. This isn’t very fun – so be sure to keep your subscription signal-to-noise ratio positive.

4. Learn to skim. As marketers, there just isn’t time to read everything fully. Learn to skim past the noise and recognize when there are conversations and content worth your time to read carefully. On the flip side, make your own content scanable to entice readers to skim. Done properly, this should increase engagement and draw people in deeper.

5. Establish a set of trusted sites to read frequently. No matter what niche you’re interested in, you absolutely must identify the trusted, valuable sites in that area. Read their content carefully, as in many cases, those at the top are the conversation starters for those in the tail. In other words: Following the leaders can keep you at the forefront of the greater conversation.

6. Audit your time. Calculate how much time you spend daily in different areas of the social web. It adds up, and no one is immune to losing time. Carefully audit just where your time is going and realign efforts to the areas that make a different in achieving objectives.

7. Automate where it makes sense, but do so carefully. Setting up feeds to auto-tweet when you add new content to your blog or share something in Google Reader may make sense. But careful not to automate things like direct messages, something that may irk those on the receiving end.

8. Analyze how people react to the content you create or share. Look at what content archetypes your community reacts to, learn from them, adjust and sharpen as you go forward.

9. Realize there is no information overload. Learn to navigate the unstoppable river of real-time and become a chief signal officer.

10. Become a search ninja. Search really matters to be ultra-successful in social, and knowing all the specific Google operators can help you get to what you need for your marketing efforts fast (such as content creation that requires research).

11. Consolidate your network presence, AKA the Seth Godin strategy. You don’t see him on Twitter. You don’t see him on Facebook. You see him on his blog, and he’s trained us all to go there and subscribe to get content. A diversified presence is not necessarily a better play if your ideas are remarkable.

12. Learn the ebbs and flows of content in a niche and what networks, sites and users matter. Get an understanding of how your corner of the web works, and in time you’ll develop an understanding for how it functions at the macro level.

13. Develop an efficient routine for your time spent in the social web. This will allow you to know how much time each set of tasks and updates take and allow you to become more efficient each day. With that said, as marketers it is also important to understand that we all use the web differently. So if you’re going to do this for efficiency’s sake, continue to explore other tools, trends and options. You can be efficient with your core functions but still experiment.

14. Make your processes simple. No one is going to argue against copy/paste being the best social media tool. There’s a reason for that: It’s dead simple. Make your time spent on social media as a participant and contributor as simple as the idea of copy-pasting content.

15. Use only the essential tools. With a constant slew of new apps being developed, it’s easy for marketers to get shiny new object syndrome. And while you should be trying new things out, you should get to the point you’re only using the tools daily that are essential to your core purposes in the social web.

16. Don’t multitask. If you want to do things like develop killer blog content, you have to turn off Twitter, walk away from email and focus. Social media makes it all too easy to multitask, but the results of your efforts will be sub-par compared to those who focus.

17. Cross-pollinate content sharing. Do things like sharing StumbleUpon or Digg links in Twitter – encourage users from one network to share content in another. Get creative with how you do this and make it subtle or even invisible.

18. Embrace imperfection. Part of social media means, well, being social. And our social interactions are by their very nature imperfect. Some of the best blogs on the planet are hardly perfect, but that’s not what makes them compelling.

19. Eliminate busy work. Identify where the valuable, creative opportunities are that resonate with your key audiences. Now focus there – the rest may be busy work that can be trimmed.

20. Qualitity over quantity – more participation does not trump higher-quality participation. As the social web continues to grow, this will only become more important.

21. Limit distractions. No one is going to deny that social media itself can be a distraction if you aren’t careful with your time. But limiting distractions by following the other tips listed and staying focused can make all the difference at optimizing time spent in the social web.

Avoid Duplicate Pages - Tip for Wordpress users

Source: Tip posted by Jeffrey in think-press.com

If you are interested in improving your search engine rankings, this one is for you. One of the criteria Google and other website index engines will ding a site on is duplicate content. The trouble is, with WordPress, many of us are duplicating content without even knowing it. But the good news is, there’s an easy fix.

The issue stems from the many, many ways WordPress allows the reader to access a particular page. Let’s say we innocently publish a simple post call “Innocent Simple Post.” In doing so, we’ve likely created several different possible URLs:
http://www.yoursite.com/archive/innocent-simple-post
http://www.yoursite.com/tag/innocent-simple-post
http://www.yoursite.com/category/innocent-simple-post

Of course, this depends on how your WordPress is configured, but you get the idea. Google and other search engines will see several distinct URLs, but each with the exact same content. Then the power of one page is distributed over three pages. Better to have one strong page, then several weak pages. Essentially, all we need to do is tell Google and the others to chill out and only index one page.

First, if you are not already running the All-In-One-SEO plug-in on your site, get it and install it directly. (This is one of those core plug-ins, no blogger should be without.) Second, let’s tell Google and the others to knock off all the silliness. Log into your WordPress admin, click on Settings, then click “All in One SEO.” Near the bottom of the page there are some checkboxes for “Use noindex for Categories,” “Use noindex for Archives” and “Use noindex for Tag Archives.“ Checking one of those will tell site crawlers and spiders to ignore pages under each respective umbrella. Pick two of those three boxes and check them. Personally, I’d say leave “categories” in there as that is the most valuable keyword of the bunch, but there is some debate on that. Now “Innocent Simple Post” will only be indexed once and its content will be deemed more valuable than it would have had it been distributed between “three” pages.

Remove duplicate pages in your website

Duplicate Pages is one the technical issue that will lead to crawling problems. If you have content on your site that appears at different URLs in the same site, then search engine will not index that page.

This is a common problem with CMS or any ecommerce websites that uses dynamic URLs.

When search engine crawlers index these pages they spend more time comparing the pages with same content on your website and they might not have much time to access pages that are non-duplicates.

Take some time and remove duplicate pages.

Let's discuss more on tips to avoid duplicate pages in the next couple of sessions...

Free SEO tools - IV

Bad Neighborhood - Text Link Checker Tool

This free tool helps you to scan the links on your website and to identify whether you are linked to any bad neighbourhood and it also flags possible problem areas.


dnScoop - Domain Name Value, History, Stats Tool and Forums

This free tool tells you how is your domain name worth. Use this tool to check and verify before you sell your domains.

SEO Tools - III

Here goes my 3rd list..

Check Server Headers Tool - HTTP Status Codes Checker

Free tool to check your server to make sure that proper HTTP Status Codes(200,301,302,304,307,404,410) are being returned in the server headers.

Keyword density analyzer, and keyword placement & prominence analysis

This free tool analyzes the URL for the keyword density, prominence and its position in the search engine. This free tool also lists down the adwords cost for each keyphrase.

Meta Tag Analyzer - This free tool helps you analyze your web pages. This tool is more helpful for the webmasters to analyze their web pages.

Free SEO Tools - II

GoogleRankings.com - Check Google Page Ranking

This tool helps you to check your search engine placement and page rankings in google. You can type in the keyword and the URL of your website to checking your page rankings in search engines.



PRChecker.info - Free Tool to Check the Google page rank for any web page, web site or a domain name


Keyword Suggestion Tool - This free tool is a combination of Wordtracker and overture. The tool helps you to find how often phrases are searched for and you can get keyword suggestions from the results.

Free SEO Tools - I

Backlink Watch - Backlinks Checker Tool Backlink watch tells you the count of your inbound links. Type the URL of your website and you will get the complete information about the backlinks pointing to your website. This tool also shows the anchor text, pagerank, outbound links on that page and nofollow flag for your inbound link.



SpyFu - Spy on your adwords competitors and organic keywords competitors. Type in a keyword (or) domain the tool lists down the list of keywords the domain is ranking for in the organic search listings and Google adwords.




Popuri.us - Quickly check your site's Google PageRank Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Google backlinks, Yahoo Backlinks, Technorati Links and more.

Free SEO Tools

In the next couple of sessions I would be posting reviews on free SEO tools ( the collection which I use)...

XMLECHO - Google Sitemap Generator

XMLECHO is a free online XML sitemap generator. You have to register to create sitemap for your website. The tool does not have any page limitations.

XMLECHO service will be terminated on 10 October 2009.

Google Updates from SEOROUNDTABLE

Source: seoroundtable.com

• Google Releases First Public Search Update Preview: "Caffeine" Update
• Possible Google Update - August 2009
• Google Loving Keywords in URLs Now?
• New Set of Google Penalties & New Siteslinks
• What's Going On With Google UK's Search Results?
• Google Adds Rich Snippet Testing Tool
• Google Site Reconsideration Form Not Working For Many
• Google PageRank Distribution Data Not Available For Many in Webmaster Tools
• New Google Sitemaps Error: "Duplicate URL" Warning
• Google Webmaster Tools Now Reporting SSL Certificate Errors
• Google News & Google Webmaster Tools "Pending" Sitemaps Bug
• .ME Domain Names Can Now Be Geo Targetted In Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Webmaster Tools API Bugs

Free Directories - SiteProNews.com

Source: SiteProNews.com

• Google Local
• www.yellowpages.com
• Yahoo Local
• Yahoo Yellow Pages
• www.superpages.com
• www.yellowbook.com
• www.atlantaataglance.com
• www.your nearest big city.com
• www.big city chamber.org

Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

Good Article by Chris Crum - Article Source: webpronews.com

5 Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

• Use Keywords in your title and updates that you may share in Facebook, Twitter and more.
• Talk About timely events
• Have a lot of followers/friends/subscribers on social networks or blogs.
• Promote conversations on your blog or a social network.
• Include Calls to Engagement.

To read the complete article, Click Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

Yahoo Search Marketing - Precise Targeting - Recent enhancements

Demographic targeting: Select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites by age and gender, and automatically adjust your bids when we find a match for your targeting preferences. Demographic targeting lets you take advantage of Yahoo!’s wide user base and deep understanding of our audience. It uses a bid adjustment model, so you can you specify a premium bid amount for desired audience segments, without losing other traffic volume.

Ad scheduling (dayparting): If the people you most want to reach are only online at certain times of the day, or your business is only open during certain hours, you can select the time of day and day of the week during which you’d like your campaigns to run. This lets you schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or your account’s time zone. Ad scheduling can be applied at the campaign or ad group level.

ZIP code-level geo-targeting: This gives you more control over how geo-targeting is used in your campaigns. You can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. Our dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

Here goes the link to the short tutorial that explains in detail how each of the above feature works:

To read the complete post, Click Enhancements to targeting features help advertisers get more relevant traffic from Content Match

Inside Adwords - Tips for keyword management

In the Keywords tab you have several tools that help you focus on what matters to you.

First, you can customize columns to show only the metrics you care about and in the order you want. You can then use filters to focus on keywords that match a certain criteria. For example, you might only want to look at keywords that aren't converting well. Filters let you hone on what's important. You can find examples of good filters to try in this Help Center article.

And once you know what you're looking for, you can put AdWords on the look out. Using custom alerts you can tell AdWords what changes are important to you and be alerted when they happen both in your account and via email. For example, using filters you identify your best converting high volume keywords. You could create an alert to be notified if the conversion rate on those keywords drops compared to last week.

If you're working through a My Client Center account, note that you'll need to log in directly to an individual AdWords account to set custom alerts for now.

Changing many things at once

Once you've found what's important, the new interface makes it easier to make bulk changes to your keywords. First off you can select many keywords at once and click Edit to open up all fields for editing. To save time, you can do this all with your keyboard: select keywords with X, move up and down rows using J and K, and press E to get into edit mode. If you want to select a consecutive list of keywords, select the first keyword then hold the Shift key, and then click the last keyword you want selected.

While in edit mode, you can pause keywords, adjust your Max CPC, change the destination URL, and switch the match type. You can also copy bids and destination URLs to all rows. We've also recently added the ability to raise all applicable keyword bids to their first page CPC. From edit mode, just click Prefill all CPCs to first page bid.

You can also use spreadsheet editing to make bulk changes. Spreadsheet editing lets you work with your keywords as if you were using a spreadsheet. You can use formulas, copy and paste, and even find and replace. You'll find spreadsheet editing by clicking More actions then Spreadsheet edit. Remember that spreadsheet editing can only be done within an ad group.

To read the complete post, Click Inside Adwords

Actual Page Rank / Toolbar Page Rank

Google sends out its Googlebot to crawl URLs and it caches a copy in the Google Server. Then this server compress and stores the crawled web pages into a database.

An Indexer parses the web pages in the database and saves the links in the anchor file. From this anchor file google generates the backlink(inbound) links database that is used to calculate Real PageRank.

Google updates your backlink count on a monthly basis. When the count is updated you will start seeing a change in your webpage rankings as your website is given a credit.

The toolbar PageRank is a logarithmic scale of 10. This is only a scale of real pagerank. And the real pagerank is the only factor that is used to determine Google's search engine listings.

Here is an example to derive a toolbar pagerank:

Real PageRank	Toolbar PageRank
1 – 10	1
10 – 100	2
100 – 1000	3
1000 – 10000	4
10000 - 100000	5

External Ranking Factors - Part 1

The quality of back links(inbound links) plays a major role in determining the page rank. The main factor that influence Search Engine Ranking Position is the quality and the number of relevant inbound links otherwise known as link citation, link popularity.

Link Citation/Link Popularity

Many people consider the number of inbound links but you should be considering link importance as well.

Link Citation otherwise known as citation index is used by search engines to evaluate the inboud links to the site.

Let's review the Actual Google Page Rank and Google Toolbar Page Rank in the next couple of sessions

Internal Ranking Factors - Part II

Navigation

If your site has a navigation menu, use keywords to link the pages listed in the navigation menu.

Keywords in URLs

Use keywords in the URLs to gain a good search result position

Number of Pages

Keep adding new pages and information to your site. Publish news, press releases, articles, how-to-articles, tips and resources, etc. This will help for gaining rank.

Optimize for one keyword/page

Try optimizing your page for one keyword phrase. Keep the numbers less dont try to optimize a page for 5-10 phrases.

optimizing your home page

Optimize the home page of your site for important keyphrases. Home page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists.

Internal Ranking Factors - Part 1

Internal and External ranking factors influence your position in search engine results. Let's review the internal factors.

Title Tag

Most important tag for Search Engines. The targeted keywords you choose must be used in this tag. Important keywords must be placed in the title tag.Limit the length of the title as the search engines displays the first 50-80 characters of the title tag.

Description Meta tag

This tag should be brief but it should be informative as this appears in the search engine results. It must contain keywords that is displayed in the title as well.

Keywords Meta tag

Keywords meta tag does not influence the search engine listings. Most people ignore this tag. You could use the keywords used in the page content.

Keywords in links

Use your targeted keywords in the inbound and outbound links this can slightly improve your page rank.

ALT attribute in images

The "Alternative Text" of images that are linked to other pages is counted by the search engines. You should use the keywords in ALT attribute.

Content on a page

The page content must have 500-3000 words. More number of words increase the search engine visibility.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density is a measure of keyword expressed as a percentage. For example if you are using the keyword "software" 6 times on a page containing 100 words then the keyword density is 6%.

The keyword density is one of the critical factor. If low, the search engines may not consider. If high, search engines may think spam. High keyword density or low keyword density will lower your webpage position in the search engine listings.

Keyword Placement

The targeted keyword or keyphrase must be closer or in the beginning of a paragraph so that it appears more important. Use the targeted keyword in H1 & H2 tags. Search Engines pay more attention to these tags.

Keyword Research Tools

Before writing a web copy for your products/services you have to select the right keywords. The keyword selection depends on on the factors such as your target market, keyword search volume, keyword popularity.

Let's review the keyword research tools that will help you to select the right keywords.

Google search based keyword tool- You can use it for free. But it is more useful for your paid campaigns as it lists data like monthly searches, competition, bid suggestions, keywords in your URL, Keyword categories, etc.

SEMRush - Using this tool you can get the list of keywords for your site and discover competitor sites. The only disadvantage of this tool is you cannot use the tool for local keyword research because it only uses google.com.

Let's review about more tools in the forthcoming sessions.