Saturday, December 26, 2009

20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To By Loren Baker

Reference: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

Gaining exposure for your blog is critical to building a following, readership, and revenue. Besides the basic SEO steps of adding compelling and keyword friendly titles, URL structure and descriptions (along with the basic Wordpress SEO plugins) basic link building for blogs begins with listing them in blog directories.

Personally, I love launching a new blog, or adding one to an existing site, and watching the high valued links roll in. And as we know, BLOG = Better Listings On Google.

There are many paths to consider when building links to your site or blog such as link baiting or blogroll link swapping, but few are as easy to implement and cost effective as submitting to blog directories – and good link juice is essential to a healthy growing blog.

Let us take a look at 20 popular directories worthy of your consideration.

1. Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs. A link from here is majestic and well deserved.

2. Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for in a snap!

Thursday, December 24, 2009

8 Reasons You Need to Stop Ignoring Twitter - By Chris Crum @Webpronews

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter's place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.

1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships

Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Handling Legitimate Cross-domain Content Duplication @ Google Webmaster Central

We've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we're announcing our support of the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element.

Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

Choose your preferred domain
When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves.

Reduce in-site duplication
Before starting on cross-site duplicate content questions, make sure to handle duplication within your site first.

Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don't forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

What Google's Real-Time Search Means to SEO, PPC & Reputation Management - By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

It seems that over the course of the entire year, we've been waiting for Google to get real-time search. Now it's here. If you have ever had a hard time finding a direct relationship between social media and search engine marketing, it doesn't get any more direct than this. Real-time search results (from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources) right in regular SERPs.

While "real-time search" has certainly been a buzzword this year, the concept itself has been around for a while longer in some capacity. Sure, the concept of searching Twitter has been around for quite some time now, but even as far as Google is concerned, freshness has been a factor of great interest.

"Google has been working on real-time search for years," as Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out. "In the spring of 2006, the story goes, Google launched Google Finance onto the Web and was promptly dismayed to find that the service didn't appear in a Google search for its own name later that day. It was after that, and a few other similar experiences, that Google engineers created an algorithm called QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness. QDF determines when results for a query need to be augmented with the newest content available, in addition to the content with the highest PageRank."

Friday, December 18, 2009

Things to Consider if Page Speed is to Become a Ranking Factor By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google's Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world's most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it's not hard to see why Cutts' suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.

While many webmasters are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are also plenty of people who do take issue with it for a variety of reasons. We've had some interesting comments from readers on the subject. Here are some of them:

So, we all have to pay for the most expensive hosting now or we won’t get found in search engines. I won’t be able to host on my own servers at work now. It went from paying for backlinks with huge advertising corporations to get sites PageRank up, Now we have to go with even bigger corporations that can afford to have a massive pipe connecting to the Internet. I don’t think Google mean to, but they are squeesing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations – Be careful Google!

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Firefox SEO Toolbar Plug-ins - By Addme

Every AddMe newsletter is a must read, this issue is not exception; a 3 part series about SEO tools, resources and browser plug-ins. This article talks about some of the more popular Firefox SEO plug-ins.
Search engine optimization is a cost effective form of website promotion, often best outsourced to the professionals as they have access to the latest tools, resources and not to mention years of experience.

This newsletter opens up the world of SEO, and sheds some light on what the SEO companies use to help optimize your website.

One of the main tools used in the search optimization industry is the web browser, how else are you to analyze reports, view webpages and delve deep into search engine results.

Firefox is quickly becoming one of the most popular web browsers, slowly overtaking internet explorer which for me is a welcome change.