Best techniques for on page optimization
Jack on February 21st, 2010There are few people that have access to the internet today that are still ignorant of the importance of search engine optimization for all websites. It is simply not possible to get visitors to come to your website without having a high ranking in the SERPS. People are not patient enough to wade through hundreds and hundreds of search page results when they are searching. It is a fact that most people will not even go over to the second page to find what they want.
The reason you have a website is so that people can come to your site, otherwise why bother creating one. SEO is the light that points the way for the search engines to find you and index your web pages. For the search engines to take notice you have to use the best on page optimization techniques possible or you will never rank well enough on the search page results to generate any traffic. For your website to stand out enough to be noticed by the search engines, you cannot simply optimize your home page. You have to use every technique to maximally optimize each and every web page within your website. When you do this well, you have the potential of driving your target audience to your website in great numbers.
Relevant keywords
Using relevant keywords cannot be stressed enough as this is a critically important aspect of your on page optimization effort. This means your chosen keywords must be inserted in a balanced manner across each web page. You must never sacrifice readability with the overuse of keywords. The search engines will see this as a spamming technique and penalize you for this. Thus if you want a high concentration of keywords, you need to bring in more quality and relevant content; you then keep it balanced.
Internal links on every page
When you use internal links on every page in your on page optimization you keep your site visitors on your website. You can put internal links within the content of a page and even have internal links pointing to different places on the same web page of your website. Internal links not only whisk site visitors along easily to different web pages on your site, but also appeals to the search engines and this in turn helps your ranking.
External links
An on page optimization technique that can never be neglected is external link building. It is important to the search engines that you have both internal and external links and this will influence your overall ranking position. Each part of the optimization you do on page must fit together perfectly like the pieces of a puzzle. If you neglect one area, you create a weakness that will unbalance your SEO efforts and no business today can afford this. You need to be able to stay competitive or you will lose out. You need as many site visitors from your target audience as possible as this leads to more clients and increases the profitability of your business.
How Inner Linking Can Increase Page Views, Engage Visitors and Build Links
Ajay Kumar Singh on November 21st, 2009One of the many untapped tactics for building a great website has been that many website owners do not cross link between their posts and content. You will see many blogs use a related and popular posts section, which is one of the smarted tactic any website owner can utilize to increase page views and engage their visitors. When people land on your page for the first time, they don’t know exactly what to expect and where to start, this is where inner linking helps.
Inner linking doesn’t have to be simply creating a related and popular posts section; it can also be within the posts themselves. Search engines reward websites which include deep linking to other articles because it helps visitors find more information that is relevant. Inner linking should be a part of every websites SEO plan.
The following will be 3 ways of utilizing inner linking to build page views, engage visitors and build links.
Inner Post Link
This method of inner linking is quite an easy technique to do; it’s simply linking words within a post to another based on certain keywords. For example, within this post the word build links is mentioned, this could be made into an inner link pointing over to a relevant link building post that was previously made. Because visitors will notice that you’ve created a link based on the keyword, they may follow through after reading the current post to learn more about that particular subject.
Inner linking on posts is a very effective strategy to increase your page views. A great use of inner linking will also help engage your visitors as they stay on your website longer and learn more. The more you can show a visitor that there is a lot of information they need on your website, the higher chances they will tell others, thus increasing your Search Engine Optimization through increased visitors and inbound links.
The Related Post Link
On most website and blogs, after the visitor has completed reading the article, a list of related links is displayed. The great thing about related posts is that it allows the user to find other posts within the same subject without distracting them as inner linking within the post sometimes does. These related links can either be manually chosen or there are many plug-ins available on blogging platforms.
Remember, a visitor that is engage within your website has an increased chance of telling others, building you additional links and helping your Search Engine Optimization.
The Popular Posts Section
A popular post section is sure fire way to make people fall in love with your website immediately. Because visitors that first land on your website don’t know what all they can expect, showing them a list of popular posts can help them hit the ground running. Often, visitors will bookmark or subscribe to a website solely based on the popular post section, as they find the website to be very valuable to them.
As you increase your RSS reader and people visiting your website, you will also increase your chances of back linking to improve your Search Engine Optimization.
Using inner linking, as you can see, is a great way to engage your visitors without much effort. Creating posts with linked keywords, related articles and popular posts sections will make people find your website more appealing and worthwhile. Building a great inner linking strategy should be on any Search Engine Optimization list, as it will surely help you in the long run.
5 Strategies For Using Facebook With Your SEO Campaign
Jack on November 11th, 2009Facebook is a social networking site millions of people use every day. Facebook has become so important from mainstream use that Google and other search engines now give great placement to specific pages and profiles of users. Because Facebook has such a high rank for search engine results, now is the time to jump on board and create your very own Facebook page and harness the power of facebook to get your website in top 10 ranking on Google.
A Facebook page gives you two benefits, brand identity and a link back your website which will be helpful in SEO. While you continue to build your online image using Facebook, you will also increase your visitors and search engine placement. Facebook claims over 120 million registered users, the same people that are out there looking for your information and products.
The following is 5 strategies for using Facebook to help your Search Engine Optimization campaign:
Choose an appropriate name
The first thing you should do when creating a Facebook account is to give your account a great name which relates to your company or message. Additionally, Facebook users are able to claim their names in the form of URL’s, this would look like www.Facebook.com/MyCompany. Choosing an appropriate name will help clear any confusion with your fans and friends; although you may also want to use your personal name to build a personal image.
Fill your ‘About’ and ‘Info’ pages with highly optimized keywords
Within your Facebook profile, you have the ability to fill in an about and Info section. Use highly optimized keywords within these areas to help users find you when they search. Google will also take note of your specific keywords and begin to rank specific pages within its search index with you keywords, linking back to your Facebook account.
Use Facebook for Branding
Perhaps the best use of Facebook is for personal branding. Fans and friends may already know what services and products you offer, but they may not know the real you. Use Facebook to help share insightful opinions, funny stories and helpful tips to your user base, which in turn will help improve your online image and credibility.
Post relevant and buzz worthy content
Facebook uses the ‘Wall’ and ‘Live Stream’ to display anything from pictures, links and status updates. If you find an interesting link or want to post your own links within this area, feel free to do so. Although Facebook place displays these links as ‘no-follow’, the increase traffic to your website is sure to help with your conversion and Search Engine Optimization.
Start a Facebook Ad campaign
One of the best untapped markets for ad campaigns is Facebook. Creating a Facebook Ad campaign takes literally minutes but there are many great features, most importantly the ability to specifically target age groups, interests and geographical areas. You could use your Facebook Ad campaign to drive more visitors to your site, perhaps to buy a product, subscribe to a service or comment on your blog, all of which will help in your long term SEO efforts.
Now that you know these 5 strategies for Facebook, get out there and do it! If you’ve never entered the world of Social Networking it can be a bit scary at first, but the return you see from engaging your visitors and contacts will help your website extraordinarily. Including Facebook as a part of your Search Engine Optimization campaign is a great choice for any website looking to gain extra search engine placement.
3 Social Bookmarking Websites You Can’t Ignore for SEO
Jack on October 31st, 2009With the rise of the web came an immense amount of information being created. It’s impossible for one person to keep up to date with every possible update to the millions of websites, which is why the rise of social bookmarking sites has been such a success. Social bookmarking sites allow users to link content they find useful or entertaining in which the other users rate and promote these links if they also find them to be worthwhile.
Using social bookmarking sites to promote your content is a smart and rewarding act for your SEO. Each of these social bookmarking sites has millions of users and visitors each day. A story which makes it to the front page can send you thousands of new visitors, build you dozens of inbound links and increase your SEO. The following post will take a look at 3 social bookmarking websites you can’t ignore.
Digg
Digg is the king of all the social bookmarking websites online today. People come from all over the world to keep up with current events, find entertaining articles, look at pictures, watch video and find rare content they may not have been able to discover themselves. Smart website owners utilize websites like Digg to help promote their content by submitting their pages to Digg. Depending on the quality of your article, it could either be hit or miss, some submissions make the front page while others are lost in the thousands of other links submitted each day.
However, Digg has such a high Page Rank and is indexed at such an alarming speed that creating a Digg submission will shoot your link very high on the search engine results. If you had trouble reaching top ranking for your targeted keyword, submitting your page to Digg will help you reach very high results literally hours. Creating an account is very easy; you could even use your Facebook login information.
Using Digg correctly will help increase your visitor count while building valuable inbound links when these visitors further promote your pages via Twitter and other social networking. Your SEO campaign should include Digg as one of the sources to bring new traffic.
StumbleUpon
Unlike Digg, StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site for users to submit interesting articles to allow other users to discover them either from the StumbleUpon website or by “Stumbling”. The main appeal of StumbleUpon is the ability to “Stumble”, as mentioned before, which allows a user to press a button to take them to a random website based on preferences they choose. StumbleUpon is a great source of gaining new visitors and increasing your search engine rank while improving your SEO.
Submitting your pages to StumbleUpon, within their correct category, has the potential to send you hundreds, if not thousands of new visitors to your website.
Delicious
Delicious is yet another social bookmarking website. Delicious has been around for quite some time, so it has a great Page Rank and has built a user base of over 5 million. Much like Digg and StumbleUpon, you are able to submit websites and web pages to Delicious.
Correctly tagging your submission is important to make sure it’s relevant to the information you provide. Often, you may want to tag your submission with a popular tag, so it will show up in these results without getting lost with all the other links. Delicious can send you a massive amount of new visitors, and as mentioned before, this will increase your Search Engine Optimization as your page will be linked to and regularly visited.
Every website owner should utilize the power of social bookmarking for their Search Engine Optimization efforts. Each account takes only a few minutes while the submission process takes even less. If you become active on the community, you will also help to build your reputation. As you increase your exposure of your website through social bookmarking, you will see a very nice increase of visitors and search engine rank, the goal of your Search Engine Optimization .
How Articles Gala can be helpful in SEO
Jack on October 29th, 2009Perhaps you’ve heard this around the local SEO circles: “You should write articles for Articles Gala!” Well, I’ve come to tell you that this is still one of the best strategies for your SEO strategy. Although you may be asking yourself why you should write for a different website when you could be placing the content on your website, the rank and exposure of Articles Gala may be something you don’t have at this time, using Articles Gala will help more people see your article than your own website.
Using Articles Gala will help your search engine placement along with SEO campaigns, and it’s quick and easy to boot!
Why Articles Gala?
Because Articles Gala has such a high rank amongst websites, much of their content is quickly indexed and show in top results for specific keywords. By creating a short and helpful article for articles gala, you will be able to include a link on each article. The immense readership of Articles Gala means your article will be read by many people and if you’ve included great content with your article, could send people back to your website, boosting your own search engine placement and visitors.
Instant Approval Article Directory
Articles gala is on of the very few instant approval article directories and all of the articles are approved instantly. This is very helpful in getting your article populated on various search engines in no time. It also helps to get top 10 ranking for your web site which you are promoting.
Links from the article content
Articles gala is one of the very few article directories which allow linking from the article content. This gives the link a lot of value than the links in the author/resources boxes. Most of the article directories such as eZine etc don’t allow linking from the inside the content. Adding a link at the bottom or resource boxes is of no use. This is one of the best advantages of Article Gala.
You can get about 3 links from the content of the article which can be utilized for the deep link building.
What Should I Write About?
That’s a tricky subject which ultimately needs to be answered by you. When thinking of a new article, think of which keywords and subject you plan to talk about, to best target your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Articles Gala can be anything from tips, how to’s, lists, reviews or news. If you sell products on your website, use Articles Gala to write a short how to on the usage of the item, then place a great link back to your website for interested readers to learn more.
Creating the Link Bait
At the bottom of each article is what each person interested in writing for Articles Gala should be focused on, the resource box. Within the resource box, authors are able to include links to destination pages or where they receive their information. When writing your article, try to lead the reader a bit so they feel like they should read more by continuing through the link. Craft your resource box with great copy writing to persuade the reader to click the link. A single article has the power to send thousands of visitors to your website, ultimately increasing your page rank and search placement.
Promote Your Article
Finally, promote your article just as you would for any other piece of content you’ve created. Get on the social networks and tell people about this great article you’ve wrote. Go to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon Newsmarking, and Reddit to add your article to their aggregation service, further increasing the exposure. The more people you can tell about your article, the more people will read, hopefully resulting with a click on your link, increasing visitors.
Whether you are an article writer and provide Article Writing Services or simply submitter offering Article Submission services, Articles gala is an excellent way to boost your profile.
Articles Gala is an addition to any website owner’s SEO toolbox. Writing regular articles with great copy writing in mind will help drive additional visitors to your website. As more visitors come to your website, you will see an increase in search engine placement and help with your Search Engine Optimization.
5 Excellent Link Building Strategies That Never Fail
Jack on October 27th, 2009Some link building strategies are timeless. Having a great link strategy is a great way to increase the top ranking for your website or blog. The following are relatively easy link building strategies that always give you results.
1. Build a Top “X” list
Although the “top 10″ list has been done an infinite amount of times, top list are still some of the most highly visited pages on a website or blog. The combination of an information and quantity of topics is always appealing to someone that is looking for an educational or entertaining read. The great thing about list posts is that it helps summarizes certain areas of interest which you may not be able to keep up with compared to others.
When creating a list post, don’t just throw everything together. Pick and choose what specific topic you plan to write about and begin research which other websites and blogs have very well written articles and posts. Add a bit of an opinion to each of the items to tell why you chose these from the hundreds of other possible articles.
Finally, create a great title that will hook your readers in. Use the number followed by a word which immediately intrigues the reader, then hit them with the information. A well crafted headline should tell your reader what they can expect but also entices them to read it all.
A few example list headlines:
- The 10 Most Shocking Advertisements for Around the World
- 5 SEO Tips You HAVE To Do This Minute
- 3 Reasons Why Your Business Will Fail This Year
2. Submit Your Content to Social Bookmarking Sites
A great way to build traffic and regular readers is to submit your content to the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon NewsMarking and others. People use social bookmarking sites to help find interesting content which would otherwise be a hassle finding through search engines alone. The social aspect of it comes from the ability for users to share and recommend links to one another.
Submit your articles and posts to social bookmarking sites, but don’t forget to further promote these among your friends and current readers. Although there are hundreds of social bookmarking sites, it’s best to focus on a handful to maximize your SEO strategies.
3. Create a Great Video
Video is very important to the web, it allows users to sit back and enjoy. Much like how television captured the world, video on the web is increasingly becoming a major interest. Recently YouTube announced that people watch over a billion videos each day, yours could be one of them.
If you write a product review post, take the extra time to describe it on camera and upload it to video websites, it’s as easy as that. Branding yourself with video helps users see who you really are, not just how the text flows in your website and posts. Literally attract eyeballs and tell them to visit your website or blog.
4. Review a Major Product
Staying on top of trends will make you a major player of the online world. Because people are always looking for the latest and greatest information, trends can start overnight and be gone by the morning. Tools such as Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz and Twitter Search are great ways to keep ahead of the curve.
By staying up to date and knowing your audience, you could review a major product that is about to be launched. People will be scouring the web for reviews, pictures and video when an item releases to see if it lives up to expectations. If you position yourself at the right time with a video or written review, this mass of people will come to you.
5. Using Articles Directories (correctly)
Websites such as Articles Gala, eZine Articles, GoArticles and ArticleBase are what are called article directories. Writers and content creators are able to post their work to these highly trafficked websites with a link back to their website. The reason why so many people use article directories is because they have high rank in search engines, something your website or blog may not have at the time.
However, spamming these directories can be harmful to your brand. Too many links to your website within a short period of time sends ref flags to search engines that something may be up, which could result in you being dropped from the search engine index. Writing concise articles with a call to action link is the best practice for your article submission skills.
As you can see, these are 5 of the most timeless link building strategies you could easily utilize for your search engine optimization. Each one of these link building strategies take no more than a few minutes to do each, but the benefits will last for months or years to come. Try to focus on one of these link building strategies until you’ve developed a habit of doing each, and then dominate.
How to Optimize for Bing
Ajay Kumar Singh on September 26th, 2009Bing, the new avatar of MSN, is fast becoming as one of the popular and emerging search engine. Bing’s market share has increased, for the first time, to double digit and it keeps up going upwards.
With rising popularity we can’t miss the Bing. Apart from optimizing for Google, which everyone prefers, we should also optimize websites for bing in order to get traffic from Bing.
How to optimize for Bing?
Optimizing for Bing is no more different than optimizing for Google. Basically you have to follow the same rules and adhere with the common SEO guidelines. Following are some of the basic guidelines which you should adhere with in order to get Top ranking on Bing.
Content
- Always write unique, original and interesting content.
- Avoid duplicate content. Check your content with copyscape for any duplication
- Use simple and readable sentences
- Don’t stuff a lot of keywords
- Keep keyword density to be somewhere between 2.5% to 5%
- Use header tags H1, H2 etc
- Group content into paragraphs
- Use only well-formed, HTML code
- Use W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your website for any HTML/CSS error
Title and Metatags
- Use unique title and metatags (Keywords and Description) for each page within your website.
- Bing’s new guidelines clearly emphasizes on the title and metatags and if you don’t adhere to it then your website will not be listed in search results
Sitemaps
- Create Sitemap for users in .html which is good for navigation
- Create XML sitemap and submit to Bing webmaster Center
- Bing now allows up to 50,000 URLs in the XML sitemap (previously it was 10,000),
- Keep the size of XML file to be maximum 10 MB compressed.
URLs
- Keep URLs simple
- If you have dynamic URLs then use mod_rewrite or other methods to convert them into SEO friendly URLs
Inbound Links
- Get good quality links from relevant website
- Use meaningful anchor text
- Directory Submission – Submit your website to DMOZ, Alexa, and other good directories which are the easiest way to get free incoming links
- Article Writing- Write articles and submit to best articles websites such as Articles Gala, ezine, goarticles etc.
- Avoid link exchange as they are no more effective
You can submit your website to Bing from the following link:
Above are some of the suggestion for Bing SEO. Participate in Bing Webmaster Center User Forum in order to keep up to date with the latest developments.
Best free Blog Hosts
Ajay Kumar Singh on September 10th, 2009Being an Internet marketing guru I ‘ve to utilize as many free blogging platforms as possible for link building, website promotion and other promotional activities.
I’ve been using free blogs since long time and came across a lot of problems with some of the free blogging platforms.
Some of them are frustrating, some are nightmare and others are useless. There are no other resources which give you an honest and real feedback about blogging platforms.
This post is my attempt to provide honest and unbiased reviews for various free blogs which will save your time.
Following are some of the best free blogging platforms. I’ve tried to cover as many free blogging platforms as possible. If you think I’ve missed any then drop a comment. All of the following free blogs are based on my own experience with them.
I’ve personally tried them, and have done regression testing ;) to test their tolerance limits.
Free blogging platforms are ideal for blogging and for SEO to get free links in less time and less cost. Free blog tools also allow you to create your own website/blog without knowledge of html coding or web design.
1) blog4everyone.com
Even though Blog4everyone is just born it is one of the most FREE and most tolerant Free Blogging platform at current date.
Unlike Wordpress.com blog where your blog gets banned immediately without consideration, blog4everyone doesn’t delete your blog as long as you are not spamming.
Following are some of the UNIQUE features of blog4everyone free blogging platform which is NOT available in any other free blogging platforms such as Wordpress, Blogspot, Livejournal etc
- SEO Optimized – This blogging platform is SEO optimized. It is hosted on a Class C Network and on Dedicated IP which is ideal for the SEO and link building.
- Most of other free blogging tools suffer from overcrowding. Take example of Blogspot which has hundreds of thousands of blogs hosted on SAME IP address. Any decent search engine such as Google would identify such domain to be spam as there are millions of outgoing links from this domain which is certainly not helpful in SEO at all.
- SEO friendly URLs – Blog4everyone is ONLY free blogging platform which offers you SEO friendly URLs. Rest all of the free blogs don’t offer any SEO friendly URLS. For example if you add a category called seo in your blog http://seo.blog4everyone.com then it would become http://seo.blog4everyone.com/seo and if you add a post in this category, lets say Crafting Your Website Code Structure For SEO then it would become http://seo.blog4everyone.com/seo/crafting-your-website-code-structure-for-seo.html which is what search engines like most.
- Such kind of SEO friendly URLs are not available in any other free blogs.
- It offers sub domains. You can have your own sub domains such as http://ajay.blog4everyone.com
- Hundreds of plugins – You can get hundreds of pluging preloaded for you which you can use at your convenience.
- No other free blogging platform offer you any plugin installation, in fact they don’t even offer a single plugin to be controlled by users.
- Allows Affiliate Blogs – Blogspot, wordpress and all other free blogs don’t allow any affiliate blogs/links. As soon as they spot any affiliate links the blog would be removed without any notice and without any consideration. You loose all your hard work and effort. Blog4everyone free blogging tool allows you to have affiliate blogs and add as many affiliates links as you wish. There are no restrictions on the number of affiliate blogs.
- Gambling/Poker/Casino/Bingo friendly – It also allow you to have poker, casino, bingo, sports book blogs/affiliate blog.
- All other blogging platform don’t tolerate any gambling blog or link.
- FREE Support – Blog4everyone offers FREE technical support.
- NO OTHER FREE BLOGGING PLATFORMS offer any kind of technical support to end users.
- FREE Themes – You can get hundreds of preloaded themes to choose from in different categories.
Pros:
- SEO Friendly URLs
- Excellent for link building or to get top 10 ranking on Google.
- Absolutely FREE
- Instanly indexed by search engines. As soon as you post on your blog it gets indexed by search engines.
- Loads of themes in different categories
- Hundreds of plugins available for end users
- 100% tolerant for links/affiliate links
- Excellent Admin itnerface
- Free technical support available for end users
Cons:
- You can’t remove the advertisements.
- To stop spamming they don’t allow you to register free, you have to request them to get an account.
2) Blogger
Blogger (or Blogspot) is undoubtedly world’s most popular and larges free blogging platform. It might not be as sophisticated as Wordpress but being part of Google it enjoys all of privileges.
For me, as SEO person, blogger offers excellent platform to get free links with ease.
For people who are involved in affiliate marketing it can also be used to earn money via affiliate advertisement. However I wouldn’t recommend using it for affiliate promotion as it is up to Google’s mercy how they treat your affiliate blog. I, personally, have observed that Google shows a lot of tolerance towards advertisement/affiliate links on the blogs even though it is against their terms.
Pros:
- Free
- Well indexed by search engines
- Plenty of themes
- Plenty of gadgets available
- Tolerant for links/affiliate links up to some extent
- Very good and innovative admin interface
Cons:
- URLs are not SEO friendly.
- Not good for SEO as it is overcrowded
3) Wordpress
Wordpress, the free open source CMS which powers millions of blogs all over the world, also offers a free blogging platform on wordpress.com.
However wordpress shows zero tolerance towards any promotional (read links) blogs and it shuts down as soon as it gets reported. So if you are writing a blog to get links or to promote any product services then you better choose Blogger as sooner or later wordpress will get your blog removed for violation of its terms.
Pros:
- Free
- Well indexed by search engines
- Plenty of themes
Cons:
- URLs are not SEO friendly.
- They don’t offer any plugins to be installed.
- Zero tolerance, your blog gets deleted without consideration as soon as someone rep rots it. Don’t trust me? Well try by yourself. Just pick any blog and report it to them and see how quickly it disappears.
- Zero tolerance for links. You blog will be deleted as soon as you put a link pointing to your or any other website.
4) Livejournal
Livejournal (LJ) is another popular free blogging platform which lies between the user friendly wordpress.com and tolerant Blogger.com. However being a small company its fate always is on mercy of economy. Recently there have been fears that this company might wind up.
LJ doesn’t offer an user friendly version of admin panel but it has other useful features.
Admin is little complex to work with and you will be lost to find out where to find out the components which you are looking for. Another problem with LJ is that it is too slow.
Pros:
- Free
- Plenty of themes
- Tolerant for links/affiliate links
Cons:
- Slow
- Admin is not user friendly
- Not many modules available
5) Vox
Vox is another free blog but not much useful.
6) Socialgo.com
It is another platform which is more of social networking rather than blogging platform. However it offers some nice user friendly tools for creating blogs as well.
7) blogigo.co.uk
UK based free blogging platform.
8) blogetery.com
Another free blogging platform based on Wordpress MU. It has got plenty of free Wordpress Themes. You can pay monthly subscription to add your own advertisement and get enhanced functionalities.
Cons: As with all other Wordpress MU based free blogs this is also no good for SEO. Try blog4everyone.com if you want to get all benefit of SEO.
9) blog.co.uk
BLACKLISTED. DO NOT CREATE ANY BLOG HERE AS THEY DELETE BLOGS WITHOUT ANY REASON. WASTE OF TIME.
10) blogsome.com
Account creation is disabled.
11) blog.com
Absolutely slow, most of the time it is dead.
It is also based on Wordpress MU, Couldn’t test it thoroughly as it is down most of the time.
12) xanga.com
Xanga is unique, it offers blog, audio, video, social networking and many more features. It’s backend is good and provides a lot of options for themes.
Cons:
- Displays advertisement in sidebar which is annoying but that is what you get with free blogs.
- Themes are not good. They are pretty much all same in standard 3 column layout.#
13) Socialgo.com
Socialgo is the latest social+blog platform which are trying to capitalize on the social media revolution.
Socialgo is purely commercial platform with a bare minimum support for free option. In the free account you can get a basic theme with very less option to play around with it. Most of the features such as twitter, facebook widgets are paid ones.
Not bad to try for free blog.
Which is the best shopping cart for SEO
Ajay Kumar Singh on June 28th, 2009While choosing the best eCommerce shopping cart for online business website people often ignore the SEO while focusing more on the features being offered by the shopping cart. When they have completed the shopping cart installation, configuration and try to promote the online shop then only they will realize that they are in trouble waters as shopping carts are notoriously bad for the SEO.
So what one should look into the shopping cart Search Engine Optimization? This article investigates some of the most popular shopping carts and their SEO capabilities.
There are plenty of online shopping carts some are free some are shareware and others are commercial "out of Box" and their number is increasing day by day which makes it difficult to narrow down on the most suitable shopping cart.
I will describe the most popular shopping carts and their capabilities with the SEO, all of these are based on php/mySQL.
osCommerce
osCommerce remains my favorite and the best shopping cart to work with not only in terms of setting it up, configuring but also for the SEO. osCommerce is, undoubtedly the best shopping cart for the SEO.
The osCommerce SEO contribution – osCommerce: Ultimate SEO URLs, freely and publicly available, is not well capable of providing the full features for SEO. It requires tweaking to make it a perfect tool to utilize the full potential of SEO.
CRE Loaded
CRE Loaded, the offspring of osCommerce and free (well almost) script, also offers SEO capabilities but it is limited and tweaking to make it works is little difficult, if not impossible, than that for osCommerce SEO. Since CRE Loaded is more or less becoming a commercial script the free contributions are becoming rare which makes it further difficult to customize for SEO.
Zen Cart
Zen Cart, another popular free shopping cart and similar to osCommerce, also offers the SEO friendly URLs capability however customizing it further is a difficult task as it is based on Smarty.
X-cart
X-Cart is a licensed shopping cart. It provides the full SEO capabilities and options to change the Metatags and description for each product.
digiShop
digiShop, the commercial shopping cart, offers to enable mod_rewrite in the new version (version 5.3.0) however making it work fully for SEO is not easy task and requires digiShop expert to handle it. If not configured properly digishop SEO module can harm your website for SEO. digiShop SEO mod_rewrite module rebuilds the shopping cart in HTML while keeping the php version of it intact and it requires further tweaking to make it work fully.
CubeCart
CubeCart is an “out of box” commercial shopping cart, the latest version of CubeCart offers SEO capabilities.
Avactis
Avactis is a commercial php/mySQL based shopping cart, it does offer some SEO capabilities.
Effective Online Marketing to Build Traffic
Ajay Kumar Singh on January 19th, 2009Creating an online marketing plan is similar to developing a marketing plan for your brick and mortar business. Every good internet marketing plan has a dedicated online marketing road map. Site owners should carefully develop their internet marketing plan, analyze the plan and then chart their online road map. The goals of this online marketing plan and road map are to create hits, sustain a readership and thus increase the site’s inherent value.
Site marketers can develop an online marketing plan at virtually no cost. Costs may be incurred when the road map is implemented, but site owners should not be caught unprepared. Establish an online marketing budget and be determined to stay within the reasonable guidelines. When building traffic to your site, spending money is not necessarily the top priority. Many people spend money and lack an effective internet marketing plan, and for that matter, a good marketable site. When site owners spend money, they should know what services they need and should receive a written proposal detailing the services and projecting results that are consistent with the online marketing plan goals.
Web Design
A good internet marketing plan begins with proper web design. Today’s technology allows for many options. Developers need to know their market and connect the site’s appearance to that market.
Sites must be easy to reach, easy to navigate and should contain well scripted SEO content that establishes the site as a valuable resource. Sites that take positions, even contrary positions, generate traffic. Traffic is the measure that increases the site’s value.
Poor web design can alienate readers just as a dynamic web design can add viewers. As the site’s home page is the most viewed site, the internet marketing plan should outline the most important criteria that will grab and hold the reader’s attention. Web sites are like business acquaintances. The site has one chance to create a first impression and there is no disputing that first impressions last a long time. A web design that creates a memorable home page, will spark interest and get traffic right away.
Link and Build with SEO
Internet marketing plans and good web designs acknowledge the value of feeds and links to enhance the site’s network. Encourage other feeds and make your site easy to locate by encouraging links. Of course, your online marketing plan calls for continuous and consistent promotion through the use of regularly posted SEO content.
Online marketing uses material that has substance. Search Engine Optimization keywords and frequency can not overwhelm the content but must be utilized. All SEO articles must be reader-oriented and avoid self-promotion. There is no quicker way to turn off your readership than to self-promote. Generate interest and keep the readers coming back and telling other readers about your site.
The more links and RSS feeds that connect to the site, the more of a resource the site becomes. To keep the site in the mainstream, stay ahead of trends and provide opportunities for reader’s comments. All material should be current and relevant to your market.
Search Engine Optimization can boost the sites rankings on various search engines. Effective keywords and effective use of those keywords generate traffic to the site. Even archived articles with proper keyword usage get hits long after the articles have moved from page one. Every article should be edited to perfection and written with lasting content. Remember that every SEO article may be a reader’s first impression of your internet presence.
For effective SEO content, the keyword should be utilized in the title, the first sentence of the article, in the last sentence of the article and throughout the content. Keyword usage of 3% of word count has potential to boost rankings.
While SEO content is helpful to the site, it can also adversely impact the site. Blatant attempts to boost rankings through SEO keyword usage will be recognized by the readership who visits the site for insightful content. These readers are not simply passing time. A site’s readers want substantive resource material. Work the SEO keywords into articles but do not compromise your site by diluting the material with forced keyword usage.
Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Most internet marketing plans incorporate the use of social media. Social media optimization (SMO) implements proven methods of generating publicity for the site. Think of SMO as an online publicity campaign that creates buzz through various online communities, community websites, web logs, RSS feeds and news sites.
The difference between SMO and SEO is that SMO focuses on efforts to create traffic through the use of other sources rather than from Search Engines. Imaging and the use of videos are helpful tactics to boost SMO rankings. Again, it is imperative that content be viewer-oriented. Self promotion is an online marketing mistake.
Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)
A new age internet marketing term is important in developing your online marketing strategy. Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) is a scant used term, but a very viable internet marketing concept. Basically, site owners who are committed to SERM employ vigilant site management strategies that include the web design, content definition and sound marketing plans.
Building traffic to a site can be accomplished. Like all marketing plans, online marketing requires reasonable short and long term goals. These goals are defined in the internet marketing plan. The application of the strategy is called the online marketing road map. A site’s marketing road map charts the course for generating traffic and assures that the web design, SEO, SMO and SERM interact through in cohesive content.
Site managers must consistently perform their timely responsibilities to assure a maximum return on the site’s investment. Sites must remain true to the marketing plan. This internet marketing plan should be reviewed periodically. Adjustments should be made to reflect the site’s statistical data which is accumulated over a period of time. Online marketing managers need to be aware of what site items are creating traffic. Effective internet marketing always has an eye to the future and tracks new technology and strategies to maintain high rankings and constant traffic.
