Rank your site in the Search Engines using Free Blogs

If you are inexperienced in SEO than you may not understand how to rank your site in the search engines using free blogs and other web 2.0 properties. This method works very well because you are able to generate your own related content and place a hyperlink to your site using the url in the anchor text for the keyword you’re trying to rank for in the search engines.

1. Anchor Text
anchor text -> niche marketing
url -> http://nichetitans.com
This would be an example of anchor text used in a link to help rank this site http://nichetitans.com for ‘niche marketing’ in the search engines.
2. Related Content

It is best to create related content to the keyword you are trying to rank for in the search engines. For example, if you’re trying to rank for the keyword ‘marketing examples’ then you want to create a blog post or article that focuses on examples of marketing or a related topic that mentions the keyword you want to rank your site for in the search engines.

3. Free Blogs

Essentially any respected web 2.0 property such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, squidoo.com and other free blogs can be used to rank your site in the search engines. These sites allow you to register and create your own content and host it on their site.

Do You know the Importance of Updating your Blog Regularly?

Blogging can be a productive part of any search engine optimisation campaign. It has many advantages including helping businesses to communicate with their target audiences more effectively and driving targeted traffic to websites.

There are many different factors to consider when using a blog within an SEO campaign and how often you update your blog with new content is one of the most important for consideration.

Blog readers expect blogs to be fresh and regularly updated as a blog is supposed to have new content added to its pages on a regular basis. This is so over a period of time, more and more information is added and the blog developed. This is the basis of blogging and is important. Blogs are supposed to be up to date and recent and the only way to keep this being the case is to regularly create new blog posts.

If you regularly update your blog with relevant content related to your business subject, this will keep your readers returning. If you don’t create new content, there will be nothing new for them to read and so they will visit an updated blog instead. Encouraging your readers to return is of great importance and will help relationships with your potential customers to develop. The more they visit your blog and read what you have written, the more they will know about your company and what you offer.

Updating your blog regularly is also hugely importance when trying to gain exposure for your business through high rankings. The search engines are constantly looking for new content available online. The search engines have a responsibility to provide their users with the most up to date and relevant information as possible. Therefore, they must remain informed of as much new content as they can so they are able to offer their searchers the best results. The web crawlers look for new online content and will visit pages featuring new information regularly.

If you can get the web crawlers to keep returning to your blog and exploring your content, you will be more likely to have your content ranked highly in the search results. This could mean more traffic to your blog and to your website too.

If your blog is correctly linked to the website of your business, this will also encourage the web crawlers to visit these pages. This will increase the potential for other high rankings in the search results too.

Updating your blog regularly is of utmost in search engine optimisation and is something all the most successful bloggers do. You need to be creating new content continuously for your blog if it is going to be effective within your campaign.

At SEO Consult, we know how to use blogs successfully as part of a search engine optimisation campaign. We can provide you with useful tips and assistance and our professional writers can even create high quality content suitable for your blog. Work with us if you would like to have a successful blog for your business.

Video - Fundamentals of SEO Copy Editing

I recently came across a great and simple video which outlines how to conduct SEO copy editing as opposed to SEO copywriting.

SEO copy editing allows you to fix the existing copy on your website pages to include more key phrases in the copy. This will make the website friendlier to the search engines and users.

SEO copywriting, on the other hand, is where you start from scratch with the copy of the page. You must create content geared towards the customer including calls to action, tone and feel of the site, while also throwing in keywords and keyphrases for the search engines.

The key is to know when to use copy editing as opposed to copywriting. In the video, the presenter suggests to only edit copy on pages of your site that aren’t crucial to the sales process (do not edit your home page – you are better off starting from scratch and completely re-writing the copy). Pages on your site that might benefit from some copy editing are information pages such as FAQ’s, press releases or blog posts. While these pages are likely to be performing well now, they may do even better with some additional key phrases.

The video is present by SEO copywriter, Heather Lloyd-Martin. So without further ado, here is the video for you to learn more.

Top Six SEO Myths – Believing Them Will Get You Nowhere

Every business owner wants Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to work for their site. However, the field is constantly changing, and it’s hard to know what advice is still valid.

Every day a new SEO myth is born and unfortunately, not all old SEO myths die off. To help you avoid some of the more common SEO and marketing pitfalls, here’s my list of the top 6 myths that you can safely steer clear of:

1. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you : I think this idea comes from the conspiracy theorists who want you to believe Google is evil. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data. Mr Google himself, Matt Cutts, has gone on record to say his team doesn’t get access to Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics team doesn’t have access to their information. So they don’t use Google Analytics against anyone.

2. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings : This is false. SEO expert Stephan Spencer suggests that Google won’t give a URL any more “juice” just because you include it in your sitemaps.xml, even if you assign a high priority level to it. Google will use your sitemaps file for discovery and potentially as a canonicalization hint if you have duplicate content.

3. Submitting your site to search engines increases your ranking : Submitting every page of your website in Google and Bing by using their submission forms will neither help you speed up the indexing nor improve your rankings. The search engines use web crawling technology that continually scans the Internet to find and rank pages.

4. PageRank determines ranking success: This is the most widespread myth in SEO. PageRank is a number which treats links like votes to determine how important a website is. However, it doesn’t have a direct correlation with search results, despite being calculated by several of the same signals.

Having a high PageRank is nice but it doesn’t automatically mean high rankings for everything, and it certainly doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get tons of traffic and sales. More important is building a site which meets consumer needs. That means functionality, information, ease-of-use, and relevance.

5. No-follow links are useless: “No-follow” was introduced as a way of linking to something without passing any value onto the site. Although the traditional meaning of no-follow was that the search engine crawlers didn’t actually follow the link (ignore it and move on) that isn’t what actually happens.

The crawlers do follow no-follow links, and crawl the content, but they don’t always pass on value. This means that there is still value in the links, because they can increase crawl rate and indexation.

6. Keep a High Keyword Density : The search engines don’t care how long your pages are, there’s no specific number. The goes for keyword density. There is no magical number of keywords you should have on each page on your website, you have to use your judgment. Your copy should be persuasive, informative and punchy: you’ll only serve to limit your copy’s punch by simply stuffing keywords into the text.

There are plenty more myths that need to be debunked, and I’m sure our team will revisit this topic again in the future.

Top Tips for Better Twitter Marketing

Perhaps now more than ever, it’s time for you to use Twitter to build your audience and promote your business.

The Twitter buzz has eased a bit with all the talk of Google + and Facebook, so those who are still using Twitter (and there’s millions of them) are a more captive audience.

For those of you wanting to know how to use twitter more effectively for your business, here’s my top tips for making it work!

Focus on Your Target Market - The first step is to understand who your target audience is. Communicating and engaging with the wrong people is a waste of time and effort.

Acquire Twitter followers - Now that you know who you want to be engaging with, you need to get out there and start acquiring followers. A good place to start is the people in your industry that have large spheres of influence. They’ll have large groups of followers that you can follow to start the engagement. The larger your audience, the more likely you’ll find potential clients from your twitter marketing efforts.

Engage with Your Twitter Followers - Effective Twitter marketing is all about engagement! NOT just broadcasting! The best way to cut through the clutter is to start discussions, ad value to conversations and share information. Just “pushing out” content alone will see you lose your captive audience.

Engagement takes on various forms; at the very least ensure you’re replying to your mentions, answering questions, using hostages, mentioning others in your messages.

Build Authority - One of the bets parts of Twitter is how quickly you can build your perceived authority in an industry. With some selective following and sharing and commenting on poignant industry information, you can quickly build your personal or business profile in the twitter sphere.

Be Captivating - You have got 75 characters to get your point across…so dig deep and make sure you’re using your most persuasive writing skills to capture your audience’s attention. You need to make sure your content stands out from the clutter.

Be consistent - More often than not, small business owners go at hyper speed for 2 weeks, twitting 100’s of times a day and then give up, because they don’t get immediate results. The key with twitter is to be persistent and measured. It’s rarely an instant ROI marketing channel – so take your time and keep focused on the long term bigger picture.

Twitter is not a set and forgets marketing strategy, so don’t think it’ll be a silver bullet to your marketing needs…but with a well planned and strategic approach, it can really help you build your business.

How SEO and Social Media Add Up to Online Marketing Success

Social search, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.” Some marketers have claimed that social search is doing away with traditional search methods and that SEO is dead in the water because of it.

But social media and social search are not the magic bullet to online marketing needs. They are just one more piece in the growing arsenal of Internet marketing tools available to SEO professionals. SEO and social media should not exist in separate silos, vying for online dominance. In fact, SEO and social media marketing can be intertwined to create more online brand presence for companies than they could ever do alone.

Here are 3 examples of how social media and SEO work together-

Social promotion of content generates natural links: According to Twitter, around 25% of all Tweets contain a URL. In March 2011, Twitter was seeing an average of 140 million Tweets per day. That’s 35 million Tweets every day with a link in them! Twitter has become a go-to source for breaking news and is a favorite social network among consumers for learning the latest about their favorite brands and companies. By publishing your content and promoting it on Twitter, you are encouraging your network to not only check out your content, but also pass the link along to their network in the form of a reTweet. The more times your content is shared, the better it looks in the eyes of the search engines.

When it comes to Facebook, many marketers will say that the more Likes your company page has, the better. While Likes are important, they are starting to be overshadowed by the number of Shares a piece of content has. Someone could like your Facebook page in order to get a promotional deal. Plenty of them will unlike your page just as fast and never bother to return. So what is a Like really worth? When someone Shares your content by posting it to their Facebook wall, they are broadcasting to their network (and the search engines) that this content is valuable in some way, whether it be informative or just interesting. The recent Facebook-Bing integration pulls this information into the search results when a user conducts a search and affects the SERP based on what that user’s social network has to say.

Social networks drive traffic: If you want to drive traffic to your company blog, posting snippets of each new post to your Facebook wall and to the LinkedIn groups you are a part of is a great way to do just that. But posting the first paragraph and not the whole thing, visitors have to leave your Facebook page for your blog in order to finish reading the post. You have a much better chance at converting a visitor once they are on your blog or main site than when they are just sitting on your social profile. A well-optimized social profile should encourage visitors to check out the main site for more information. Think of your social profiles as the gateway into your site. Someone who is checking out your social profile has already pre-qualified themselves as a well-targeted consumer. Driving them to your site is the next logical step in getting them to convert.

One of the main goals of SEO is to drive targeted traffic. Social networking is about connecting with your audience. When the two work together you’ll see a steady stream of well-targeted and engaged visitors coming to your site.

It has to be mentioned that social profiles should drive traffic back to the main site, not the other way around! Why would you want a potential customer to leave your site to like you on Facebook? Promoting your social profiles shouldn’t be a main goal of your site. Keep the “Connect with Us” buttons out of prime webpage real estate.

Social networking increases online brand presence: Search for your favorite company by name. Hopefully their company website ranks number one in the SERP, with popular internal pages filling out the first page. But chances are (if they are active in social media) their Facebook page and LinkedIn profile, along with other niche social networking sites, will also pepper the results. Just like any other business profile, social networking profiles can rank in the search engines, increasing your company’s online brand presence. Many searches will also show links that have been shared by that company’s Twitter profile or posted to their Facebook wall. The new Google +1 also shows who in your Google network recommends links.

Social media and SEO professionals shouldn’t be squabbling over whose authority and practice is more important. The two disciplines are more closely related than you might think. When you combine your SEO and social media marketing, you’ll create a much more powerful and comprehensive online marketing strategy.

Five Free Social Media Automation Tools

Social media is probably already a key part of your marketing strategy. But as many of you will attest, doing social media marketing effectively is a rather time consuming process. And when time’s a commodity that many small business owners lack, it helps to have tools to streamline the process.

Here is a short list of social media automation tools that will help you use your time better. My favorite free social media automation tools:

Social Oomph: This is a service that has a free version and a paid version that helps automate and schedule your social media. You can schedule your tweets; create a bigger Twitter profile and more. You’ll need the professional version to be able to schedule and post to your pages and profiles of Facebook.

Hoot suite: This is a fabulous tool to use for Twitter. You can pre-schedule your tweets, monitor keywords, and assign admins and more with this app. It integrates with other apps like Ping.fm too so it is a very useful tool.

Twitter feed: Twitter feed is not just a feed for twitter as the name might suggest. It’s a great way for you to syndicate content (that’s available in a feed) to your other social media profiles…e.g. your latest blog post shared on twitter, Facebook etc.

Gist: I’m only new to Gist, but it’s already proving very useful. Gist combines the information you provide into consolidated Gist profiles. The great thing about Gist is that you can program it to keep track of certain important contacts so that you can monitor them across their social networks and never miss making an important connection. It works online and in your Gmail and Outlook mail.

RSS: Combined with Google Reader RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a very powerful time management tool so that you can read what you want, all on one page. It keeps you from having to move from site to site to read what is important to you. In addition, you can set it up with keywords combined with Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you.

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Free Blog Directories Submitting Your Blog

We help blogs in their promotion campaign by submitting their blog into high PR and latest launch blog directories. This helps blog in gaining PR and helps them in increasing their search engine ranking at a cheap price.

Blog Directories are just like Search Engine Optimization directories, only difference is that they accept blog instead of website. Our Directory main aim is to list every kind of free blog directory available on internet and helps users in promoting their blog.

Check out the list of free blog directories given below.

1) http://www.blogskinny.com/

2) http://www.blogtoplist.com/

3) http://www.weblogalot.com/

4) http://www.answers.com/main/new_blogger.jsp

5) http://blo.gs/ping.php

6) http://www.bloggeries.com/

7) http://www.bloggapedia.com/

8) http://www.blog-connection.com/

9) http://www.fuelmyblog.com/

10) http://www.blog-search.info/

11) http://www.superblogdirectory.com/

12) http://www.blogzoop.com/

13) http://ham-blogs.net/

14) http://www.blogzoop.com/

15) http://www.superblogdirectory.com/

16) http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html

17) http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php

18) http://buzzerhut.com/

19) http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php

20) http://www.blogged.com/directory/

21) http://www.bloghints.com/

22) http://www.myblogdirectory.net/

23) http://www.blogarama.com/

24) http://blogstreet.com/directory.html

25) http://www.blogadr.com/

26) http://www.blogsweet.com/

27) http://www.highclassblogs.com/

28) http://bloghints.com/

29) http://www.blogdirectory.info/

30) http://www.blogupper.com/

31) http://findingblog.com/

32) http://blogit.a1weblinks.net/

33) http://www.bloggerhq.net/

34) http://www.topblogarea.com/

35) http://www.submitblognow.info/

36) http://www.freeadlists.com/classifiedads/

37) http://www.blogsroot.com/

38) http://blog-collector.com/

39) http://food.totalblogdirectory.com/

40) http://www.topblogdirectory.info/

41) http://www.bloggingfusion.com/

42) http://www.blogio.net/

43) http://www.myblog2u.com/

44) http://findingblog.com/index.php

45) http://www.today.com/

46) http://www.blog-gurus.info/

47) http://www.blogdumps.com/index2.php

48) http://www.blogicas.com/

49) http://www.freshlinkmedia.net

50) http://okayblog.net/directory/

Seven Tips on Matching Your Online and Offline Marketing

Just about every business has a need for both online and offline marketing tools. Online marketing may consist of website, a blog, and social marketing efforts such as a Facebook page, Twitter account, and a LinkedIn presence. It is incredibly important for all marketing efforts have a unified look.

I have outlined seven handy tips that will help you to integrate both aspects of your business, and blur the line between your offline marketing and online.

1. Use the same messages and slogans: If you have a particular business slogan, or catch phrase, make sure it appears on any marketing that you do, whether it is offline or online. This will allow your marketing message to remain consistent across the board. If you have slogans running in specific offline campaigns, you can also have these appear on your website as the offline campaign is running.

2. Have a consistent look and feel: Your offline marketing should match with your website, and other online marketing. This can apply to colour schemes, logos, fonts on headings etc. Matching these up will keep your brand consistent, and make it easier for customers to recognize your business.

3. Incorporate your web address into all marketing activities: This sounds simple enough, but is commonly overlooked! By having your web address on everything, you dramatically increase the chance of website traffic, and sales leads. There is no point having a website if no one knows it is there!

4. Target the same customers: If you know your offline marketing is targeting a specific demographic, then you can match the online to hit them from both fronts. An example of this might be through specific targeting in AdWords, or targeting by age in Facebook advertising.

5. Use keywords in your offline messages: If you have specific keywords attached to your website that you are targeting, and trying to rank for, you can use these same keywords in the copy of your offline marketing. This will allow for a consistent message, and strengthen the relationship the keywords you are using has with your business.

6. Link offline advertising to online landing pages: Instead of having the standard URL of your webpage attached to an offline promotion, you can add a URL that when customers type in, will take them to a specific landing page that relates directly to the advertisement they have seen. Again this will provide a stronger correlation between what is being viewed offline, and what is being viewed online. The same message can be presented in two different formats.

7. Plan ahead: The key to matching your offline and online marketing is to make sure that your plans incorporate both together. If you focus on just one, you may find later on that you missed a great opportunity to leverage one side of the marketing to the other.

A key component of marketing is to ensure that everything remains consistent. Though there are great differences between offline marketing, and online marketing, the two provide the same benefits to the company; building your brand and getting your message out to customers.

The Best 23 WordPress Website Plug-ins for SEO Optimized Websites for 2011

Keeping your website and blog visitors engaged is paramount to success. Check out these 23 WordPress Plugins to zoom your SEO, audience engagement and brand in 2011.

The world of wordpress plugins is vast and often the biggest challenge for new site owners is researching and discovering which plugins are worth installing. Given any list of favorites is going to be subjective; I have listed the ones that are “MUST INSTALL” plugins for the wordpress websites.

SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Yoast’s all in one SEO plugin should be one of the first plugins you install. Provides an extensive range of SEO and site management function.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a Google, Yahoo! and Bing friendly XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your website.

SEO Smart Links SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Tracking site performance is vital, and this plugin makes it easy to integrate Google’s great analytics package.

Speed

W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin.

WP Super Cache – A static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing PHP scripts.

Functionality

Redirection – Redirection is a plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

Exclude Pages – This plugin lets you manually exclude WordPress pages from the navigation menu.

WP Contact form – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you.

Social Networking

Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.

Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Simple Facebook Connect Makes it easy for your site to use Facebook Connect, in a wholly modular way.

Facebook Comments for WordPress Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. Supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts, recent comments

Simple Twitter Connect Makes it easy for your site to use Twitter, in a wholly modular way.

Monetization

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart Very easy to use Simple WordPress Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin. Great for selling products online in one click from your WordPress site.

WP e-Commerce WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

AdSense Now! AdSense Now! gets you started with Google AdSense. No mess, no fuss.

Awesome Google Adsense Awesome Google Adsense is the easiest way to show Google Adsense ads in your wordpress. It’s awesome you don’t need to copy and paste codes.

Media – Videos, Images and Audio

All in One Video Pack Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

WordPress Video Plugin A filter for WordPress that displays videos from many video services.

NextGEN Gallery NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features.

FancyBox for WordPress Seamlessly integrates FancyBox into your blog: Upload, activate, and you’re done. No further configuration needed. However, you can customize it

Degradable HTML5 audio and video Short codes for HTML5 video and audio, with auto-inserted links to alternative file types, and degradable performance (lightweight Flash and download).

If you use any plugins worth sharing, add them via the comments below.

Eight Tips to get higher ranking in Google

Do you own an SEO company and are wondering how to increase the ranking of your website in the Google search engine result? Then the first thing you should remember is that without quality content your website has no chance to get any fair treatment from Google. We bring you some effective tips on how to garner Google trust for your website.

• Remember the purpose of your writing is to inform the readers. Make it as clear and concise as possible with no attempt of beating around the bush.

• Make it a point to upload only the contents backed with important details. Ensure your content has minimum 500 words as thin content website usually gets labeled as “content farm” by Google.

• Conduct thorough research and analysis before proceeding with the content. Never ever copy or reproduce content from any other website. Your originality is important to win you a higher ranking in the search result.

• Incorporate relevant videos or images in your content to make it user-friendly. Ensure you have proper rights for the use before choosing any of these.

• Make provisions for your content to be shared on the social networking sites to the maximum limit. Google considers the website with distinct presence in the social site as a really creditable one.

• Upload new articles as often as it is feasible. Google tends to overlook stagnant websites and give priority to only websites that constantly update contents.

• Encourage comments from your users. These comments help to secure a better rating among the readers and facilitate the website to gain credibility in the search engine.

• Provide essential link-ups to other pages of your website on individual pages. This helps the users to explore more of your website enriching their knowledge through you.

Any website that lacks identity of its creators ranks low in the reader’s trust. To obtain high ranking of your website in the search engine result, you need to have quality content as well as high trust factor. Let your readers know about you in the “Home” or “About us” page of your website.

You may be approached by a number of link building companies asking for their client link to your website in return of some fee. Do not fall to the temptations of these link schemes as these go against the Google quality guidelines. By linking their client websites, you run at the risk of connecting to such websites that have low or no connection to your own website. This raises a question on your editorial merit thereby removing you from the good-will list of Google.

How to Check for Website HTML Errors That Impact SEO

The official rules for writing HTML are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you don’t follow these rules for your website, will you be penalized by the search engines?

Although it doesn’t have a direct impact on Google rankings, W3C validation is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability.

Previously you mentioned that w3c validation isn't a ranking factor. Some people took this to mean that coding errors can't affect SEO. Many don't believe that. Can you give some examples of HTML errors that CAN affect SEO? Google’s Matt Cutts explains more in the video below.

Google crawls all sites, irrespective of coding. But there are some occurrences where sites aren’t indexed because of syntax errors.

If you’re website passes W3C validation then it will be very clean coded and most importantly easy will be easy to update in the future.

To help webmasters ensure their websites coding is correct, W3C has provided a number of free online validation tools. Here is a list of these tools and some others from 3rd party providers:

• W3C Markup Validation Service
• W3C CSS Validation Service
• W3C Link Checker
• W3 Schools Web Page Validation
• Multipage Validator

While the tools provided by W3C are likely to be the most accurate, I would also suggest testing your site with the online tools provided by 3rd parties, just to be thorough. If there is any discrepancy between the results, then it might pay to take a closer look at your HTML code.

If all of this content is flying over your head, then I would suggest sourcing a website developer/coder to take a look at your site.

In an effort to judge site authority and quality, its likely that Google will include W3C validity in their algorithm in the future; so now would be the time to get your code up to scratch.

Meta Descriptions and Titles – Important for Optimize in SEO

Meta descriptions and titles are probably the most important thing for SEO within the HTML of your site. These two tags allow you to have some control over how search engines like Google display your website.

“Meta tags” refer to specific HTML tags that appear in the area of the page.

See how the title and description tags appear within the page? They will only work if placed in that area. From the standpoint of someone viewing your website, the Meta description tag is completely invisible; it is used exclusively by search engines. The title tag can actually be seen by your viewers in the browser bar at the very top of your screen. There is also the Meta keywords tag, but this tag is ignored by most major search engines (Google included). Right now we are going to focus on the two most important Meta tags for SEO, the Meta description and title tags.

Google places great importance on Meta description and title tags when your website is being indexed. Taking advantage of these tags gives you a huge advantage over your competitors. Having worked with many small businesses as an SEO consultant, the vast majority of people do not make use of these tags. Clients pay me thousands of dollars to get their website on the first page of Google for specific keywords; sometimes all it takes is making good use of their Meta tags!

How to Optimize Meta Tags:-

You are going to be surprised at how simple this really is. First I want to introduce the concept of relevancy. You want your website to be as relevant as possible to the keywords you are targeting for Google searches. Keywords in certain areas of your website are given more weight than others. The most prominent area on your website for keywords is your Meta description and titles tags. So you want to make sure every single page on your site has these tags. Also every Meta description and title tag should be unique otherwise Google might flag your website for duplicate content. That being said, here are the guidelines I follow when optimizing Meta tags:

• Make sure every single page on the website has unique Meta description and title tags.
• Make sure every Meta title tag is no longer than 60 characters in length and every Meta description no longer than 160 characters in length.
• Fill each Meta description and title tag with as many relevant keywords as possible.
• Make each Meta description and title tag describe the page very closely. This means I don’t just stuff them full of keywords; I actually make sure they all make sense and are relevant to their page.

How to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Ask

Sitemaps are a useful tool that lets search engines find pages they may have not known about. Submitting sitemaps makes your site and its contents indexed easily as it provides search engine crawler comprehensive information about your site. Sitemap submission bridges the distance between your site and search engines.

Moreover when you make any changes in your website, these changes are easily tracked and indexed by search engines via your submitted Sitemaps. Once you have enabled the Sitemap feature and published the Store Editor, you can then submit your Sitemap file to Google and Yahoo. You will need to copy the link to your Sitemap file and then go to the search engines to add the Sitemap.

The way of submit your Sitemap to Major Search Engines

1. Google.com - Free submit sitemap:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

2. Yahoo.com - Free submit sitemap:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

3. Ask.com - Free submit sitemap:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yoursitename.com/sitmap.xml

Social Sites added to Google Realtime Search

Google only included its social search results in real time search, then Twitter feeds started making an appearance and now Google has upped the ante by including a range of new social media sites to its real time search.

Sites now included in real time search include Quora, Buzz, Gowalla, Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz, FriendFeed and TwitArmy. This indicates that Google has finally realized the importance social signals in making search a better experience.

The update was actually first noticed by one of the sites themselves. Activities on the Quora site, including asking questions, adding answers, voting answers and submitting posts are now being indexed.

Bing also has been reported to be doing similar social research, and including social feeds like status updates and links shared from fan pages on Facebook and Twitter feeds. Given that Bing has a better relationship with Facebook it is expected that Bing will be able to integrate Facebook Open Graph data into its search results.

What other social sites you would like to see included in Google relatime search results? Feel free to share your suggestion below.

Top Three List URL Shorteners are best for SEO

There’s been plenty of discussion around URL shorteners and their impact on SEO over the last few months.

Well Google has officially come out and confirmed that “link value” through URL shorteners is preserved as Google treats them similar to a 301 permanent redirect.

Good news for all those people who use URL shorteners and more importantly, it means that much of the link building being done through social media will have long term benefits for your SEO.

So with this in mind, which are the best URL shortening services for SEO?

Goo.gl: This one is direct from Google. Goo.gl’s short URLs are always 301 redirect making it fast secure and perfect for SEO. It also provides a great range of stats about the clicker. Google automatically removes spam links from its database, so it’s building trust from users.

TinyURL: One of the most popular URL shorteners available. It is the default shortener for many social media tools such as Twitter. While Tiny URL doesn’t provide click stats, it does allow you to customize your URL.

Bit.ly: bit.ly, like tinyURL has been around for a while and is the trusted default for many tools. It offers a simple one click shortening service with a simple URL tracking feature. This means you can now track Bit.ly shortened URLs by just placing a ‘+’ after the URL. And it also provides URL customization.

So they’re my picks for the top three. Google’s link shortener is obviously my favorite for SEO as they understand the importance of linking from a search indexing perspective.

How to make a Dazzling Blog Web Title for SEO

The main purpose of a blog title is to grab the attention of the reader. The title should be compelling enough to make the visitor read the entire post. You need to write a blog title which is both search engine friendly and attention grabbing. If you lose the balance, you may rank well in the search engines, but due to a shabby title- no visitor will enter your site.

A title forms the first line of every search result and is the first thing a visitor sees about a website. In fact, many visitors enter the website upon reading the title and without so much of a glance towards the description.

Tips for Writing an SEO and reader Dazzling Web page Title:

• The title should not exceed 65 characters. A Major search engine like Google displays only 65 characters in the search result. You may exceed the title, but take care to include all the important keywords in the front portion.
• Try and keep the title as a sentence rather than many short keywords. The visitor will find this more interesting.
• Separate phrases, keywords with a |. Using a | works much better than a comma or semicolon.
• Include all the related keywords aesthetically into the title. I have come across so many search results wherein the title is stuffed with keywords.
• Always write the title before the content. You will get a clear perspective of what you want to write about in the blog. Writing a blog without a title is like cooking without knowing what the end preparation will be.
• If you have to optimize an e-commerce site, do not enter the title for all the web pages manually. Set up a template for each category and ask the website programmer to embed it into the website.
• The most important of all: Ensure that your Title tag makes sense and reflects the content of the web page. Your title tag gets the visitor to enter the website and should deliver what it promises.

Best WordPress SEO Plug-ins for Small Businesses

In the world of computers everything gets an acronym and this one basically just means that your blog or website is set up in such a way that it is friendly to Google and the other major search engines. It allows the search engines to find your content and return your sites in their results when people search for things online.

If you are using a WordPress blog, which is what I recommend to all my clients, you have the benefit of a massive library of plugins to help you with your Search Engine Optimization. In the old days we had to do all of this by hand by going into the code of a site and changing things around. Now we have great plugins to help us.

Search Engine Optimization plugin is free and is easy to download from the WordPress site. When you download it you will need to go into the options page and make some minor setup changes and then every time you make a post or create a page on your site you will be able to list the keywords, create a summary description of the post and make keyword rich titles.

The next essential plugin that you should have is called XML sitemaps. This plugin allows you to create a sitemap for your blog that is friendly to the search engines. Site maps are very important because these are the quickest way for Google to index your site and learn what all is available from you.

We are much more inclined to watch a video than we are to read pages and pages of an eBook. So when you have photos on your site you need this plugin. This plugin will allow you to attach what is called metadata to each of the photos that you put up on your site. So if you have a photo that is associated with a post that you have made the photo will get the title and keywords associated with it as well.

This will allow this photo to show up in Google Photos and allows your blog to have better Search Engine Optimization in general. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images and it is free.

How to Make Money with Google AdSense 2011

Google’s AdSense is an attractive revenue making opportunity for small, medium and large web sites since a long time now but it’s against the rule of Google’s AdSense if you are running any website only for AdSense earning for which you need to include a few Affiliate links or sell your own product, too.

Make sure the color of the ads should match the color of your website so that the ads appear as the part of your website. Whenever a visitor clicks on the Google ads on your website you get paid a portion of the advertising revenue. AdSense Earning Tips are:

• Choose a topic of the website you are comfortable with.
• Right at least 100 unique articles of 500 words each.
• Launch your website with 100 articles and regularly add 1-2 articles per day to your website.
• Put your ads above the fold and in the content.
• Optimize your website according to the search engines.
• Review Google Adsense Terms and conditions regularly and make sure that your website is compliant with them.
• Never click the ads on your website and never tell anyone to do so.
• Focus on the Search Engines’ traffic and traffic from other related websites.

How to Make Money with Google AdSense

Google Adsense is an advertisement application. Website owners can put Adsense on their website and generate cash when the ads are clicked on by visitors. There are many ways to make money with Adsense, all you need is a lot of traffic to your website and you should start making some money.

The idea is to build thousands of individual blogs, so let’s take Blogspot.com and create 10 blogs a day over the next 100 days. That would be 1,000 blogs. Now each blog can talk about maybe the next SEO, Google AdSense, Link Marketing, Web Development etc. You want to talk about hot topics and different types of blog that people will search for.

You can also create a Facebook site, Twitter, You tube if you want to go the video route… there are many different ways to get each blog out there.

After you build the blogs and start submitting them, the best place to put the Adsense code is in the middle of the blog. So think of an eight line paragraph, put the code right in the middle and on the left hand side as well.

Now that you got your marketing going, you got blogs piling up; your code set… the only thing you need to keep doing is just repeating the trend. If you can average just $5 a day on each blog, multiple that by 1,000 and that is $5,000 per month.