Top Five Linking Mistakes You Did Not Know You Were Making

External linking is an essential part of an effective SEO strategy. It is also, arguably, one of the most challenging aspects. Take a look at five common mistakes SEOs make when developing a linking strategy.

• 1. Judging a Site's Authority by PageRank Alone:

Good link building strategies aim at getting a links from a diverse array of websites and as with most things in life, all websites are not created equal. How do you judge a good website?

The answer is authority. PageRank is a popular metric used to judge a sites authority. However, pagerank can be misleading. It is unclear exactly how a sites pagerank affects a sites position in the SERP. PageRank is also only updated about once a quarter, if that. Don't completely ignore pagerank but be aware of its limitations and use additional factors to measure a sites authority. SEOmoz has two helpful metrics, mozRank and mozTrust. Also look at how humans view a site, start by looking over the comments, user ratings or anything else that will tell you how internet users judge the site.

Here are some additional questions to ask yourself:

•    Does the site feel like a trusted site?
•    Does the site have readers who take the content seriously?
•    The site has authority, but is it a relevant site to my website/client/topic?

• 2. Building Links with Only One Keyword or Keyword Phrase:

The goal of successful link building strategy is a natural link profile. If 1,000 people link to your site it's probably safe to assume that they won't all use the same keyword phrase.

While most SEOs may know this, if you aren't conscious of it with each link you will, like most SEOs, use your primary keyword as much as possible. Keep track of the anchor text that you are using, make sure that there is a mixture of anchor text containing: brand name, website address, secondary keyword phrases, click here etc. This also opens up the opportunity to link with secondary keywords to interior pages of your site.

• 3. Aiming for a Billion Links!

How many links does a site need to be competitive? Your competitive research holds the key to determine this. If your top competitors average 1,000 links, aim for what you need to be competitive. Set your goal number of links 2-5 percent more than your competition.

This way you can maximize the efficiency of your SEO activities and properly scale your link building techniques. If you don't set a goal number based on competition you could be spending too much time on link building instead beefing up the on page optimization or focusing on social media.

• 4. Only Link to Your Homepage:

Attract links to a variety of pages on your site. If you have a good internal linking structure linking to any page will increase the overall pagerank of the system; strengthening all the pages in your website. Additionally, it will help you rank for more keywords and drive more traffic to your site. It also forces you to think of the user; will linking to an internal page provide more value to the target audience for the content.

• 5 Analyze Competitors Backlinks Who Don't Rank for your Target Keywords:

Often the top five competitors in an industry may not be the top five sites in the SERP. Conduct a search for your terms, analyze and review the linking activities of the sites that show up in the top five positions.

For the overall marketing direction it is good to review the on and offline marketing activities of the industry leaders. But only through focused, competitive research based on the most visible sites in the SERP, will you get a sense of what linking activities your site needs to be competitive.

External linking is constantly changing, but if you focus on building a balanced link profile that helps Internet users find the valuable content on your website then you will come out ahead in the long run. Kelvin Newman wrote a link building book called Clockwork Pirate that offers a complete list of linking techniques and the best way to approach them.

Some link building mistakes harmful for PageRank

Link popularity is the most valuable factor that every search engines consider when deciding your website Page Rank, Maximum people has taken to posting their back links all over the internet. However, gaining link popularity that increases your page rank is really not as easy as it sounds and most people who has no idea about how Pagerank works. Creating links that are either useless, or even harmful for their webpage. If you are making link popularity avoid some common link building mistakes.

1. Getting link from non-relevant Pages: Search will consider whether your link is relevant to the visitors of your webpage that they are placed on or not. So if you are creating the links of your webpages which are related to web design on websites that deal with high end electronic goods, wrestling or cooking, you can be sure that the links will be trashed by the search engine, harmful for your website Page Rank. So create links on that sites that have your website related.

2.Creating Text Links “Click Here”: Search engine spiders use the text on your hyperlink to know about your website and this will plays an vital role in determining your website Page Rank as well as your SERP. By creating hyperlinks that only “click here for more information” or “know more here”, means you are telling the search engines that your website is about clicking and knowing more and that is where you will be ranked high instead of getting high search engine rankings for your own domain. So use relevant keywords in your text links.

3.Creating Links On High Pagerank Pages That Already Have Hundreds Of Links: It is right that the high PR of a page linking to your page, the higher value assigned to the link by the SEs and the higher will be your page Rank. So the value what you get from a page that links back to your webpage is determined by the formula, Page Rank of linking page / number of links on that linking page. But it is equally important to pay attention to the denominator of the formula, since a highly ranked page with lots of back links may finally giving your page lower value than a page with lower rank but lesser links.

4.Creating Links On Dynamic Pages: Which web pages are created dynamically these take ages to get indexed, and in all probability, so creating link on such a page will never help in improve your page rank. Identify dynamic pages by URLs with special symbols in them (&,? etcetera) and don’t waste your time by not creating any links to your site on such pages.

5.Creating Links On Pages That SE Spiders Cannot Crawl On: The whole point of building link popularity for increasing page rank is to make your site accessible to search engine spiders. However, search engine bots have not become smart enough to read pages generated by Flash or JavaScript. They are also unable to read text links placed within frames, so it is a complete waste of time creating back links on sites that are either Flash generated or framed, since these links would be totally ignored by search engine spiders.

6. Creating links on No-follow pages: Creating link on no-follow page will never help for increasing Page Rank because your link not getting the Page Rank value from this site. So, don’t waste your time to creating backlink on such pages like maximum blog commenting link is no-follow link. Identify the no-follow link by viewing page source where is use rel="nofollow".

Role of Link Baiting

Link Baiting is an important part of SEO and can spell the difference in the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. While some people consider it a somewhat underhanded practice, it is simply a creative method of building links.

To the uninitiated, link bait is any content or feature within a web site that is designed to lure viewers to place links to it from other web sites. Link baits can come in many forms. They could be free tools, an article, an image, a puzzle, an invitation to join a contest – there really is no limit to what you can use.

Link baiting drives SEO results as this is a speedy and easy method of building links. It gets your website the attention it needs as more and more people learn about what you have to offer. If your link bait is very good, people will continue referring your links to others and this is really akin to having other people do your work for you at no cost! Of course, an increase in traffic volume may potentially lead to higher profits.

Link baiting is also one of the factors that can increase your search engine rankings. The number of backlinks attributed to your site increases your chances of appearing in the top results page of a search engine. Now if your links are picked up by well-established websites, that will do even more wonders for your reputation.

The potential of earning long term results through link baiting is also a significant advantage of this technique. If your content is compelling enough, people will keep referring to your site for years and years to come. When you actively use link baits, you are building up an image, a reputation for providing useful data to the public. Even if you use link baits for special or seasonal events only, this doesn’t necessarily mean traffic generation ends once the event has concluded. A well thought out link baiting scheme leads to sustainable traffic, not just one time visits that won’t be duplicated once the curiosity has worn off.

For link baiting to contribute considerably to your SEO strategy, remember that your website must have a strong backbone and that backbone comes in the form of superior quality content.

Unless your website has something truly useful or relevant to offer, no amount of backlinking will boost your rank or maintain traffic over time. Link baiting sounds very easy but it requires strategic planning for it to be effective.

Five Things You Need To Know About The Google Webspam Team

1. They won’t penalize you over one tiny thing

With all the technical expertise that goes into creating and maintaining it, it’s tempting to view Google as an unfeeling, unthinking robot – one that responds to certain stimuli in certain ways and can’t be bargained with. In reality, Google is built and used by humans – just like the rest of the internet.

For that reason, the Google Webspam team aren’t going to penalize your site just because one well-meaning webmaster created a site-wide link to your domain without realizing that’s not best practice in the world of search engine optimization.

If you’re taking a responsible approach to link building and SEO you don’t need to worry about attracting a less than ideal link here and there. The Webspam team are here to save us from spam, not make the web a flawless place.

So stop fretting over the occasional bad link and instead channel your efforts into getting

Common SEO Mistakes That Can Make Your Website ‘DEAD’

Effective Search Engine Optimization definitely helps in finding your website. While there are certain guidelines, if followed can help your website rank high among the top websites in the search engine and also gives an outstanding rank ahead of all your competitors. On the other hand, there are certain mistakes which can kill your website, hence leading to the path of failure. Since SEO is a long term process, so any mistake if made may take months to reverse and get back your SEO back on the right track. So, SE Optimizers should be alert enough before committing these mistakes.

Here are some of the silly seo mistakes you must circumvent in order to prevent your SEO campaign from being executed.

SEO Mistake #1 Aiming Keywords based on Search Volume

This is the most common mistake a SE Optimizer can easily make. When choosing keywords which suits best for your website’s content, it is important to remember that search volume is alone not the most important thing you should always think of. Other factors also need to be taken care of before targeting your keywords such as keywords must be relative to the content. Secondly, the intention of the visitors must be taken care of.

SEO Mistake #2 Fails in understanding the SEO guidelines properly

This mistake is often committed by amateurs who want to think something creative and in order to think something out of the box, they mostly turns up with ideas which violates the guidelines offered by most of the search engines. Therefore, it is essential to know that violating the guidelines might results your website being banned from a search engine.

SEO Mistake #3 Focusing mainly on quantity over quality in link building

Links are just like the bread and butter of SEO, but having more and more links would not help you much if they aren’t good quality. While the Google Penguin update which was unleashed on April mainly encourages websites with clean and natural links and therefore it has become more important than ever. So, it is highly recommendable for the se optimizers to stay away from unrelated sites, link exchanges and other low-quality sources and should focus on building quality links from related sources. It is better to be alert while exchanging links as link exchanges with banned websites is definitely frowned upon. It is more valuable to get twenty great links in the long run rather than making hundred spammy links which would definitely get your site in snagging condition.

SEO Mistake #4 Creating Web Page without a Title

Title reflects the content of a webpage. A webpage lacking a title is just like a body without a face. It makes your content unclear and hazy. Therefore, it is always advisable to add proper titles to your content as it is definitely beneficial for your search engine optimization.

SEO Mistake #5 Using Duplicate Content or Poorly Written Content

Many SEO companies offer a large number of articles on various topics which have been copied from other sources. This can have a serious effect on your website. Readers as well as search engines do encourage fresh and unique content. Search engines also doesn’t like content with keyword stuffed in it. So, it must be kept in mind while writing. Many of the search engines take serious actions against such sites, which provides poorly written content and also not well-optimized at the same time.

SEO Mistake #6 Using too many Images and Flash Animations

This is true that images and animation do make your website look catchy to the eyes of visitors. However, using splash pages with flash animations and big size images would increase the load time of your site, resulting in the evasion of all your visitors and increasing the page load time. So, it is always better to use relevant images and flash animation that describe the content without much overdoing it.

SEO Mistake #7 Unsuccessful in updating your Social Media sites with Innovative Posts

With the evolution of social networking sites, it has gained a lot of importance among people and also in the eyes of search engines. Creating unique content is the foremost step you need to promote in your social media sites. As social media marketing is a great way to interact with your visitors, so make sure that every time you are updating your profile, you start it with fresh and exclusive post.

SEO Mistake #8 Making Use of Page Cloaking

This is a frequent tactic which is often being used by optimizers. It is meant to separate the pages which people will see and which will be crawled by spiders. However, we must avoid in making use of Page Cloaking as it can be one of the reason which can kill your website. A common practice of many is to cloak pages which are rich in keywords to attract search engines spiders while it is being hidden from visitors. However, it must be keep in mind that search engine spiders would want to index and reference the same pages which web users can see. But if cloaking is detected, then your website may have a chance of being banned altogether.

SEO Mistake #9 Lacks in Updating Data

Creating a Website is not the final thing, when it comes to search engine optimization. If the content used in your website is not updated, then it won’t help you much in getting a higher rank on search engine. Staying up to date on the content is certainly imperative to give your site an advantage over others.

SEO Mistake #10 Abortive of Using CSS

CSS is a tool which helps you to reduce the size of your pages, thus reducing the time it normally takes to load. However, it helps you to concentrate on the text which search engine spiders normally feeds on. Therefore, CSS definitely plays a vital role for your website and should not be unnoticed in the optimization process, as it enhances the visibility of your web pages.

Thus, if you have been commending any of the above mistakes and were just naive about the impact that you had on your website. Going through this post would surely help you a lot in implementing the required changes and correcting your website as needed through the search engine optimization process and it would also definitely help to make your website visitor-friendly and search-engine friendly at the same time.

original:SociablWeb

Top 10 On-Page SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.

In this article I'm going to describe the 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.

Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?

Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your title tag.

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt

Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.

Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:

• Beginners Guide To Robots.txt Files
• Robots Text File - robots.txt

3. Proper Use of ALT Tags

The tag should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read tags, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

Here's some more information about alt tags:

• Don’t Optimize Your ALT Tags For Google!
• Why you should care with the image ALT attribute

4. Anchor Text of Links

The anchor text is the text inside your tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.

So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.

Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

More articles about linking:

• Free Link Building Tips To Market Your Website Online
• How To Get Quality Links The Competition has

6. Proper Use of Header Tags

,

tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using

tags as a paragraph or using

class="title"

to display the title of your page or something.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:

• only use one

  tag per page

• you can use as many

  -

  tags as you like in your pages

• search engine crawlers only read basic html(no css what-so-ever)

More articles about header tags:

• How To Use Tags – Proper Use Of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements
• How to optimize keywords in header tags.

7. Importance of the First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.

If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible

An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.

Use tools like:

• Are My Sites Up?
• Link Validation Spider

To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.

9. Use SEO Friendly URLs

The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.

Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).

More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:

• Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs
• Optimize Your URL For Search Engines

10. Site Usability

If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.

How To Gain More Blog Traction With Less Effort

The average blogger spends around 3 hours on getting his article read. Recent studies from blog polls show that the outcome is about 40-80 visitors a day.

So, how can you create more traffic for your blog, without wasting critical time you could use for creating good content?

In this article i will give you some tips and tweaks that help you get more traction with less effort.

1. Don't prostitute for views

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes

We could also call this the “Don't be angry at friends that don't like to read your articles” rule.

Everyone has this one friend who completely ignores your social media activity.

This doesn't mean he/she doesn't like you, it just means that a given topic might not be that interesting to him/her or just there's just no time to engage in it. So, don't make reading your articles a favor, find the people who appreciate your writing.

If you want to attract a certain group of readers, write something they care about and then share it with them.

2. Link building is dead

Back in the old days setting links on your website created huge traffic on your blog. This way of SEO is dead. Since the new Google penguin update (release April 24th) it seems like Google doesn't care that much about link velocity any more. They are now confident enough to prefer good written content on certain topics to articles with a lot of interlinkage. This is something many SEO people in my surrounding noticed when their SEO businesses started struggling last month.

There is no need for link spreading anymore, being particular about what and where to spread matters again. So stop the link spamming.

3. Get your articles on Newsgrape

If promoting your content consumes so much time, why not let somebody else do the job for you?

The Newsgrape platform has a wordpress plugin to automatically sync your content with a large community without having duplicate content issues.

What happens with your article:

1. Newsgrape connects your articles with similar ones. Meaning: If somebody reads a topic connected to yours, they will see your article pop up at “related articles”. Cool about that: They are more likely to be genuinely interested and appreciative of what you have to say.

2.

Newsgrape informs readers with certain interests that articles have been written about those given topics. This means, if you write something of popular interest, you have the chance of attracting over 5000 currently active readers on the site.

4. Automate your social media appereance

Its good to have a constant information flow about your website going on out there. But don't waste every single day on setting up new facebook and twitter updates - use tools to automate your appearance. Of course there are thousands of plugins for wordpress, but i will give you two powerful tools you can use with any blog:

Twitterfeed  - is the most automated system to do so. It creates twitter, LinkedIn and facebook updates by crawling your feeds. You can customize your updates a lot, for example how often and how many articles it should publish and define prefix/suffix etc.

Buffer - You have a productive week ahead of you? Fill your Buffer with twenty to forty updates, define the frequency and you are set to go.

Of course you can connect your social media accounts with Newsgrape as well.

To wrap it up

Don't prostitute, no SEO bulls%*&, connect with distributors and last but not least automate your social media appearance.

original post>>

4 Ways to Manage Your Reputation in Youtube Search Results

If you have a YouTube channel, you are probably obsessed with generating some good traffic and spreading your videos. The chance of making a viral video is a tantalizing fantasy, and one that more and more people are realizing now that social media has become a central part of our society.

Thankfully, it isn’t that hard to optimize your search results. It is all about increasing your reputation and searchability. Here are four ways to do that.

1. Optimize Your Videos

SEO is just as relevant on YouTube as it is through standard search engines. Yet, when people think of optimization they are usually putting it into the context of standard content like text, maybe images. Video doesn’t generally factor in to their thinking. Really, you should be using the same general concept for your videos. For example, relevant keywords are one of the most important parts. What would you use to search for your video? Target “long tail” and local phrases in tags. If your video is about Georgia business profiles, you should include this as a tag.

Keep in mind the target age and other demographic information for those you want to see it. Based on these factors you might want to change the language somewhat, such as from formal to slang, or include both. Be descriptive, but without trying to “sell” the video like you might other content. Just try to draw them in by promising entertainment. If you need some help, you can try one of the many tools made to help you come up with optimized keywords for videos. YouTube has one of their own.

2. Get Your Community to Help

When you are part of a community or like minded or related individuals, you automatically have an invaluable resource for spreading content. It is this element that has led to a great deal of viral videos or memes being created. That doesn’t mean you should go around begging your community or website readers to share you out. Instead, you should engage them, especially in an interactive way. You see examples of this all the time, with large companies that host competitions through their YouTube channel that asks for submissions. Which will immediately give them something to search for. But an example of how this is done for a website itself, check out MyBlogGuest’s Create a Video Screencast competition (the result is this playlist).

3. Make the Most of Playlists

Playlists are insanely helpful for drawing interest on YouTube. Especially since you can search for playlists themselves, widening the results for users who want to see more than a single video. If you have a series or competitions, this can be even more helpful. They are very simple to make. You just start to group your uploaded videos together into a customized playlist. They show in strips on your main channel under your favorites link. Users can then click on it and play all videos, or search through them. They can also search for the playlist itself, and if you attach keywords to your videos a playlist search will bring up any that have that term.

4. Promote Your Channel

Finally, we have some good old fashion promotion. Once you get the hook in, people are more likely to go searching for the video they saw, or more like it. This will be achieved through any basic marketing means, such as social media sharing, link building, affiliates and anything else you might wish to use.

Conclusion

It takes some time and effort, but you can optimize your YouTube channel’s search by building a reputation through standard SEO tactics. Don’t fail to take advantage, or you might miss some incredible chances at creating a viral sensation!


original: SocialbleBlog

SEO Tactics For The Post-Penguin/Panda Internet

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a field of internet marketing that’s constantly in a state of flux thanks to Google’s massive influence over the entire Internet. On more than one occasion, Google has rolled out algorithm updates that punish SEO practices that were once widely accepted. In the aftermath, webmasters are left with seriously reduced page rankings, web traffic and revenues.

Google Penguin

That’s exactly what happened last spring when Google rolled out their notorious Penguin update. From Google’s perspective, Penguin addressed a major problem caused by websites who linked to dozens, even hundreds, of other sites in hope of raising their rankings on search results. This created major headaches for end users, who wound up having to sort through dozens of low quality results in order to find something of value.

For webmasters, Penguin created headaches of a different sort. They suddenly found that

Guest Posting Etiquette – Some Must Follow Tips

Guest blogging is picking up buzz. Mainly because guest posting is best way of link building and provides instant result. However, as in every process some etiquette should be followed. This post deals with etiquettes that are required in guest blogging.

Many believe that guest posting etiquettes should be followed by guest bloggers leaving out publishers. Guest bloggers are equally important as publishers (provided the content is of high quality). Content are not tapped from thin air. It requires effort and the effort is put by the guest blogger. Therefore, publishers should follow some etiquette too.

Etiquette for Guest Bloggers:

Read the Publishers’ requirement:

The crucial step in guest blogging is to know the requirements of publishers. Every publisher will have different needs. A certain publisher might demand for specific topic while other might be open to ideas. It is guest blogger’s duty to meet all the requirements of the publishers. If publisher demands for 700+ word article provide the same.

Contacting publishers:

Not all accept guest post right away. Some prefer to be contacted and pitched regarding the post. Even if you are sending post to a community member like My Blog Guest it is crucial to know the publisher. Of course, if the publisher had invited to send guest posts then its okay.

Provide Unique Content:

The most common complaint from publishers is that guest bloggers provide either spin content or copied content. It is understood that for guest posting purposes unique content is mandatory. I would like to emphasize that not only the content should be unique but also the whole idea.

Responding to comments:

After a publisher has published a post, it is the duty of guest blogger to respond to comments. A guest blogger might not be available all time. However, a guest blogger should ensure that he visits the post regularly and stays abreast with the discussion. The best way to do this is by signing up for comments notification/updates.

Etiquette for Publisher:

Here are some etiquette for publishers

Respond to email:

Many publishers will fret and fume at this topic. Their argument is that ‘it is hard to reply to every email’. Yes, it is hard to reply to every email but reply should be made. Have you ever sent a guest post to Problogger? Staffs of Problogger, without fail, reply to every email. As a publisher, you should respect the time put in by Guest Bloggers.

Intimate of changes:

Publishers should inform regular contributors of the changes. For instance, if you had promised to provide 2 links and later decided to cut into 1 link, do not forget to notify your contributors.

Changing the links:

Some publishers consider themselves as smart. They promise dofollow links and after a month change dofollow into nofollow. Such practices are unethical and indicate disrespect towards guest bloggers. Moreover, it is the duty of the guest bloggers to check regularly and ensure that the links are unhampered.

These were some of the simple rules for guest bloggers and publishers. If you have something to add either as a guest blogger or publisher then you are welcome.

original:SociablWeb

When to Outsource SEO and When to Keep it in House ?

SEO is important business these days. All too often, there is little supply to meet the current demand. With increases in the costs associated with other forms of web marketing, it has become almost a necessity for businesses to incorporate SEO in to their marketing plan.

Unfortunately many companies know very little about SEO and assume it will be cheaper for them in the long run to hire someone "in-house". In some cases, it may very well be. For most, however, overlooking the benefits of outsourcing SEO can be costly.

Why is it better to outsource?

SEO is an ever changing business. One has to know when and how to find new information. An SEO firm is more likely to be aware of changes to search engine optimization protocols than an in-house individual. An individual will likely spend the majority of his or her time developing and implementing your SEO strategies. Outsourced SEO professionals must perform these same functions while constantly studying the industry, staying current with changing trends and familiarizing themselves with the latest SEO techniques. This is a simple necessity SEO companies that wish to survive.

There are few individuals who will be able to successfully perform the many functions associated with SEO well. An SEO firm likely has several individuals on payroll that specialize in one particular function, be it link building, writing , optimizing etc. These individuals are able to perfect their craft and are usually more adept at their position than a single person wearing many hats.

Time is another concern with in-house SEO. Will one individual be able to optimize multiple pages, write content, tags, build links, run reports and perform other SEO tasks in a timely fashion? One person can only do so much. In the online business world, time is money. Most companies can do in a matter of days what might take an individual weeks to do. Many companies who use in-house SEO personnel spend more than necessary to get the same amount of work done in a longer amount of time.

What about cost? Surely the cost of hiring an individual is substantially less than the cost of hiring a company, right? As I stated in the last paragraph, time concerns and individual expertise will make outsourcing cheaper. Having one individual do the job of five is rarely a good idea. You wouldnt ask your auto mechanic to take a look at your broken television, would you?

In any case, is outsourcing the right move for you or your company? Whether you choose to outsource or not, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Do your research by performing a simple cost/benefit analysis on what outsourcing versus in-house SEO will cost. In some cases, in-house SEO maybe a better option, especially if you require little in the way of SEO and would be hiring an individual who canperform other tasks.

A resume can say a lot and mean nothing. A resume talking about rankings is meaningless unless you have all the information. Top rankings for phrases no one is searching for means little, and shouldnt be used as a guage of someones abilities.

Whether you hire a SEO company or individual...what is their contribution to the SEO society? Do they share their knowledge? Set trends? It is better to do business with someone that shares their ideas and insights than one who simply learns from others. Innovative techniques are only developed by innovative individuals or companies.

What do others say about the company or individual? Ask for references and check them.

For small companies, in-house SEO can be the best option. The company has time to grow into their SEO. They can see how it works for them and then branch out. Large companies, on the other hand, can lose a lot of ground using an individual over a company. Choosing a competant firm would suit them best.

To know more, visit - http://mrseonewz.blogspot.com

3 Online Branding Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Branding properly can build your business at an alarming pace. You can gain your target market’s trust, improve your visibility and increase sales quite quickly if you brand yourself effectively. Unfortunately, many people take all the wrong steps during the branding process.

Many rush mindlessly ahead, desperate to generate sales, so they plaster their business link all over Facebook Groups, twitter and Google Plus. These practices are repelling, meaning that you scare away people who might otherwise be interested in your opportunity.

Check your energy. Do you feel confident, about yourself and your opportunity? If you don’t, take a step back. Either build up confidence in yourself and your business or select another opportunity, because you can’t build a successful, thriving brand while lacking confidence in yourself and the business you attempt to grow.

Lack of Clarity

Branding newbies usually have zero clarity around their campaign. The brand message

Top SEO Tips for Web Designers

Today most web designers do more than just design the look and feel of a web site. They often play a major part in writing the front end code. This means that a big part of the SEO or Search Engine Optimization responsibilities should fall on the designer. However, there is a large number of web designers that don’t understand this subject well enough to create a site that is fully optimized for search engines.

In this article, I want to share some quick and easy SEO tips for all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.
Tip 2: When building the front end of your site, make sure to use semantic code. By using descriptive tags to structure your pages, search engines will be able to read and have a better understanding of your content. This will also make the process of styling your site much easier and cleaner.
Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.
Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.
Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.
Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.
Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.
Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.
Tip 9: Replace JavaScript sin navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can use some of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu and over all website design.
Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.
 Tip 11: Search engines place a high importance on links. So when linking to relevant content, be sure to use a word that describes the content. For example, if you were giving your reader a link to learn more about Photosop, use something like “Learn more about Photoshop” as opposed to just “Learn More”.