The SEO Galaxy

1. Start a controversy. Just remember not to cross the line.
2. Start a contest. Make sure to end it too.
3. Give away free goodies. People love them.
4. Write about other bloggers to interest their visitors to read your blog. Keep it positive.
5. Dress up your blog often (By dress-up I mean tweaking the design)
6. Interview other bloggers and post the interview.
7. Write about your personal life sometimes.
8. Ask questions to your visitors.
9. Share some secrets.
10. Celebrate your birthday with your visitors. Think of innovative ways for doing this.
11. Celebrate your blog’s birthday too.
12. Write something funny or disgusting. (Don’t make it a habit)
13. Make a bumper sticker with your blog’s name and stick it on your car. (Just make sure you drive often)
14. Write an e-book and distribute it to your visitors for free.
15. Introduce a commission based affiliate program.
16. Tell your visitors about your latest fad or obsession.
17. Post interesting pictures of your pets.
18. Congratulate the top commentators occasionally.
19. Encourage sharing of opinions.
20. Donate for a cause or become a volunteer for a non-profit organization. Ask your visitors to join you.
21. Put your blog’s ad in the local newspaper or the yellow pages.
22. Hold blog competitions.
23. Create polls.
24. Hold an auction and let people bid for something useful (For example, advertising space on your blog).
25. Write about your blog achievements.

26. Share your hopes and aspirations about your blog.
27. Start an award distribution system.
28. Make contact with your local visitors and hold a get-together or a bloggers’ meet.
29. Start a blog comic strip.
30. Dig up some old article that you wrote on your blog which became famous and start a discussion.
31. Try and get a photograph clicked with a real celebrity and post it on your blog. (Hold on Tiger..don’t rush to that Photoshop button!)
32. Post videos that will help your visitors learn something new. Also submit them to video sharing websites like YouTube.com.
33. Write about your hobbies and interests. (For example, if you like cooking, post a new recipe)
34. Post about one of the weirdest thing that you ever did.
35. Get featured in a print magazine.
36. Buy a paid review from any famous blogger(s).
37. Brand your blog with a catch phrase along with a logo.
38. Distribute T-shirts or merchandise with your blog name on it.
39. Join Yahoo! Answers and put a link on your website to your answers.
40. Keep a track of websites that pick up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.
41. Do surveys and publish the results to your visitors.
42. Build tools that your visitors might find use for.
43. Start a newsletter.
44. Podcasting is another good way to make your blog popular.
45. Publicize your blog to your friends and relatives and let them do some work for you.
46. Be active in Social Bookmarking websites.
47. Share Link Love and you will get it back.
48. People like to read about Web 2.0. Write about it.
49. Write about something that’s already famous.
50. Last but not the least, be yourself.

As the web expands beyond more traditional means of getting traffic via search engine optimization and paid advertising, social networks and related data management services should become an important part of your online search marketing strategy. Learning how to use blogging can help you create authority, connect better with your customers and lift your visibility in the search engines.

We know that search engines are making changes to accommodate for shifts in the marketplace, as well as a more internet-savvy community. We can see this by the way the top search engines change results and test those changes on the user community. Google’s universal search layouts, for instance, embed data from video, news and podcasts in the natural search engine results. Additional services, such as personalized search, are available that allow for search engine results swayed more toward user preferences or behaviors.

Universal search results represent an issue for search engine optimizers since less screen real estate is available for traditional text listings. You may find your listing pushed off the first page if you aren’t watching and executing better than the competition. Social media optimization is something you should look into now, if you haven’t already.

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Home > E-Business > Search Optimization > 6 SEO Blogging Tips

Jon Rognerud: Search Engine Optimization

6 SEO Blogging Tips

Blogging can help you acquire traffic and elevated search positions.
By Jon Rognerud | August 27, 2007
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6 SEO Blogging Tips
Blogging can help you acquire traffic and elevated search positions.

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As the web expands beyond more traditional means of getting traffic via search engine optimization and paid advertising, social networks and related data management services should become an important part of your online search marketing strategy. Learning how to use blogging can help you create authority, connect better with your customers and lift your visibility in the search engines.

We know that search engines are making changes to accommodate for shifts in the marketplace, as well as a more internet-savvy community. We can see this by the way the top search engines change results and test those changes on the user community. Google’s universal search layouts, for instance, embed data from video, news and podcasts in the natural search engine results. Additional services, such as personalized search, are available that allow for search engine results swayed more toward user preferences or behaviors.

Universal search results represent an issue for search engine optimizers since less screen real estate is available for traditional text listings. You may find your listing pushed off the first page if you aren’t watching and executing better than the competition. Social media optimization is something you should look into now, if you haven’t already.

Content Continues Below

Blogs are a great first step. WordPress is a popular option that has an open source development community and several cool and powerful plugins. You get an RSS feed infrastructure and a place for embedding not only text content, but also video streaming and audio podcasts.

To take full advantage of social media optimization, here are six things you should do:

1. Set up your WordPress blog.
If you’re running a business and want to start building your own authoritative blog, I recommend using a trusted hosting partner like GoDaddy.com. It takes about 10 minutes to set up. Apply for a Linux-hosted account, since WordPress isn’t compatible with Windows. Unless you have a unique domain set up for this, I suggest adding the blog as a directory of your domain: your-site.com/name-of-blog-with-keywords. TypePad and the Movable Type blog system are other free services. Blogger.com–Google’s platform–is free, and Yahoo! Small Business has a variety of options to select from as well.

2. Add content.
Add a blog post once every week or more to start. Frequency is important to search engines, and users will come to expect regular updates. When you add content, make sure you add the tags and category. Tags and directory structures help show the search engines what your post is about. To get ideas for content, look up article directories EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. If you copy the entire text, include the author’s bio box and be aware that Google may catch you for duplication of content. A better way is to start with the article ideas, change the content and make comments about the article, while still referencing the original author.

If you have more money than time, have someone from RentACoder.com, Elance.com or Guru.com write it for you. You can also look into private label rights articles, but watch for duplicate content there, too. eBay has a lot of these types of articles available, but try to make them your own. If you’re in the B2B arena, you hopefully have good marketing and information-based materials you can reinvigorate for your blog.

3. Manage RSS feeds.
RSS is an easily tracked and managed XML-based file structure that allows compatible web systems to read the data. Get an account with Technorati.com and update them with your site feeds–also known as pinging. You can also use FeedBurner.com and OnlyWire.com to help distribute content and PingOMatic.com and Pingoat.com to alert systems that you’ve made a new post.

4. Promote your blog.
Always leverage the search engines when you can. Conduct solid keyword research to find out what people are searching for within your niche. Use the Overture search tool and look for longer keyword phrases rather than starting with the most competitive keywords. Include these keywords in the titles of your posts.

If you’re active in the online community, visit related forums and other blogs to exchange dialogue and links. Make sure to tag everywhere and try to get a listing on Digg.com, as well as del.icio.us, reddit.com and MySpace.com. Educational content, such as “how to” articles, tend to be very popular.

5. Leverage podcasts and videos.
Podcasts are a simple way to provide more detail and personalization around your company or service. The MP3 format can easily be streamed for listening on the web and from your blog. You can podcast your files and even manage them via iTunes. You also can stream video into your visitors’ homes and let them watch it on their Apple TV, a recently announced product.

6. Optimize your WordPress blog.
A blog should be optimized for users, search engines and income, in that order. A professional-looking blog is important. Look for clean sites–a white background works well–at the WordPress Theme Viewer site. Some of the themes are less SEO-friendly than others. Add a form to capture names and e-mails to build your e-mail list. For SEO, change your permalinks to this custom option: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and enable the customizable permalinks. This is a search-engine friendly URL that’s commonly used.

As I mentioned earlier, WordPress has a number of powerful plugins to consider. Here are some to start with:

* Google Analytics–tracks everything on all pages
* Chicklets–an array of social media tags for your users, including RSS reader icons
* AdSense Deluxe–for publishing ads on your site
* Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress–creates a sitemap for your site
* Akismet spam filtering–filters link spam from blog comments; requires WordPress API key
* SEO Title Tag–easy optimization of title tags across your WordPress blog
* Ultimate Tag Warrior–incorporates the tag name into title pages on tagged pages
* Podpress–everything you need for podcasting

More plugins are available at the WordPress plugin directory.

After you’re set up, follow the basic rules for long-term success:

* Do not use Black Hat SEO–unethical techniques–to stuff keywords and duplicate content in your blogs.
* Provide value through quality content. If you’re selling something, don’t be pushy. Try to provide educational and constructive comments on products, services and competitors.
* Use the chicklets you see on many blogs, including a big button for your RSS feed, so visitors and search engines can easily get to your data.
* Place strategic AdSense components to generate money for yourself, while still providing value. Don’t feel bad; big companies do it, including news outlets like CNN. Match the text and color with the layout of your site. Over time, you may get a check from Google.

The power of image search is often undermined. Most of the SEO research revolves around text search and a lot of material is available on the internet as well. However very few people have researched image search SEO. This article gives the top 10 tips on how to do SEO for image search. Note that I am not saying that the world is moving towards image searches. Still a handsome majority (more than handsome perhaps) does text searches. So the focus should always be SEO’ptimzing for text search. As a parallel activity you should also do image search SEO.

The reason I say image search is powerful as it will give you some low hanging fruits in increasing organic traffic to your website. Not a lot of people focus on image search SEO you will find lesser competition on getting to top results in image search. If you think image search SEO is ‘kind of similar’ to text search SEO, stop reading this article now; go to Google Image search and search for the term ‘yahoo’ there. You will be startled to see that not even a single link on first page is from yahoo. To contrast the search algorithm of text search, search for the same term ‘yahoo’ on google search and you will see expected results. Forget yahoo, even searching for the term ‘google’ in image search doesn’t return google as the first relevant link.

So this demonstrates the capabilities of image search. Since the text search SEO tips are totally different what do you need to do for image search SEO. Here are top 10 tips to do image search SEO:

1) Image file names: First and foremost is to have good and descriptive file names for your images. Most of the images from cameras come out in a alphanumeric format and they are not at all SEO friendly. Change image names to reflect the contents of the image (i.e. keywords that your image is targeting should be reflective in the image name). Be descriptive with the name. For e.g. if you have image of a sunrise you want to index, add peripheral data like sunrise-at-alpine-mountains.jpg instead of a simple sun.jpg or sunrise.jpg

2) Include a short two line description just below the image. The description should be indicative of what the image is all about (in other words what keywords your are targeting in image search).

3) Do not forget the all important HTML tags in the IMG tag. ALT attribute is a must. Remember search engines dont have eyes :), so give them all clues for your image. Equally important is the TITLE attribute. Use 7-8 good keywords in both the attributes. For example something like this is a good img tag:
img src=”/hyundai-i10-leather-interiors-beige.jpg” alt=”Hyundai i10 car with beige leather interiors” title=”Inside Hyundai i10 car with leather interiors in beige color” width=”600″ height=”400″

4) The image should be between relevant text. So if you have an image of a car, the contents just before and after the image should be talking about cars. Relevant content around the image is the key thing.

5) Try to wrap text around the image using style=float. Of course it should look natural on the page. If the image is large or the layout doesnt allow this, you have much more reasons to follow tip 4 i.e. wrap the image with the contextual text.

6) Empirical evidences are there that images on the top of the page (not header) are given more weightage in image search results.

7) Places where you are not allowed text descriptions (photo galleries etc.) should always follow tip 3 and additionally use the Title and Meta tags of the webpage to describe the image and target keywords for SEO.

Description of the image should be in H3 or Bold tag to have more weightage.

9) Be aware of image hijacking by google search. Image hijacking is where you dont display the image on your webpage, but have the image url embedded somewhere. Google thinks that the image is from your webpage and returns your domain name for the image in search, even though you dont have the image on your server or never showed it on your webpage! Not sure if this is a bug or feature :).

10) Follow other SEO guidelines that you usually do. This list is over and above what you have been doing.

You will be surprised to see how image search gives you an alternate source of traffic without hindering your regular SEO efforts! So keep up the creative juices flowing. Let me know if you find additional tips on image search.

People on the internet have started blogging and have used a free way to do it by using Blogger.com owned by Google.  Everyone has analyzed and optimized Wordpress to boost their rankings in every aspect, but left blogger/blogspot users looking for tips.

Welcome to Blogger Seo Tips Part 1. I will be covering what blogger settings you should choose before we start to optimize your blog.

Blogger Settings:

1. Title: Title of your blog, make it short and simple
2. Description: The description should include your keywords that you are aiming and should be a complete sentence.
3. Add your Blog to our listings?: YES
4. Show Email Post links?: NO; nobody uses them, they just lower your keyword density.
5. Send Pings: YES
6. Date Header Format: Choose the one with the less text, ex: “8.9.07?
7. Comments: Show, but delete the unrelated/short comments
8. Backlinks: Hide, no need to share your PageRank value, is there?
9. Enable Post Pages?: YES, so that each of your posts can attract different visitors
10. Archive Frequency: Weekly. Its better to have the least number of posts on a single page.