I am trying to compile an exhaustive list of the best Wordpress plugins, could you please comment and list your favorite ones?
There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:
1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.
2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).
3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.
4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.
5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.
Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.
Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.
Basic Link Checks.
Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.
You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.
Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.
Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.
Ok, I know this blog should be about seo theory but we geeks also love the cool gadgets, and I have found the coolest toy in some time, last week I was surfing the Internet when I came accross this cell phone that is also a projector which is based on LED technology.
You can read more about the cell phone projector at the wholesaler’s page
Google’s PagerRank is named after one of Google’s founders Larry Page. The Page Rank is represented by a number between zero up to 10 which is the higest possible rank. A lot of people overestimate the importance of Google PR, while focus should be put on conversion and SERPs.
A Page Rank is casted by another page linking to that page, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google terms a page’s importance comes from the number of votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.
As a general rule, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That’s a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.
Page Rank matters because it’s one of the most influential factors that determine a page’s ranking in Google’s search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, you’d better make sure people are linking to your site.
Well, don’t jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesn’t count every link. They have started filter out links from known ‘link farms’ (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.
The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complimentary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.
How is PageRank Calculated?
Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page ‘votes’ for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.
This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It’s not just the Page Rank of the page that’s important, but also the number of links it has.
The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.
Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.
Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others’. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they’re the only ones with access to the whole index.
This is something I have been toying with since last February and I am glad to say we should have a working beta live by January. If you are interested to be informed when I release this please sign up for updates.
The purpose of this document is to give an insight into the possibilities of using a DVDSN. The main aspects of a DVDSN are:
• Content distribution based on location or category
• Use of completely independent IP networks
• Network of independent DNS servers
• Availability
• Centralized management of content and statistics
• Geo Targeting
• Cost reduction compared to traditional dedicated hosting
• Backups through a RAIS (Random Array of Inexpensive Servers)
• Automatic pinging of new articles on the network
• Automatic intra-site linking
• Social Bookmarking
The use of DVDSN is completely transparent to the users as the optimal content distribution is handled by the software and as new servers are added to the network they automatically become available from the management console.
Content can be distributed according to criteria that the webmaster sets, the options are:
1. Category
2. Geographic location
3. Domain name
Availability is achieved by using multiple DNS servers and each server will have different IP addresses for the same host, so say NS1.xyz.com is responsible dns queries for host www.xyz.com ns1.xyz.com would have an ip address of 123.123.123.123 for www.xyz.com and ns2.xyz.com would have an ip address of 222.222.222.222 for www.xyz.com the reasoning behind this is that should that particular network server be down then automatically a secondary dns server would respond with an alternate host ip address.
The communication between the servers on DVDSN is all done through the SSH protocol and therefore all data is encrypted at all times. Replication on the network is scheduled to be performed at regular intervals.
The cost of being part of the network is relatively less expensive that traditional dedicated server packages but offers significant advantages from an availability and SEO point of view.
As data is replicated on the RAIS network, availability and backups are more secure as this is done on geographically different networks.
As data is published the CMS system also automatically notifies the major blog search engines (pinging). Further automations like directory submissions can also be done if needed.
There is also the possibility of having sites on the network automatically link to each other based on criteria set by the webmaster.
The distributed servers may also be used as a gateway for social bookmarking; the biggest obstacle with automating this process is the use of captcha fields. This can easily be solved in the following manner, let’s suppose we have a site where a large mass of users register; what we do is have them fill out a registration form and we use the captcha field from a remote social bookmarking site as follows:
Once a new user registers on one of our network sites a script on a random DVDSN server initiates a session on one of the social bookmarking sites and stores the captcha image and re-displays it to our user that is registering once the user inputs the captcha value we send this value back to the script and if the value is correct we have successfully added a new bookmark, if not the user is prompted again with a new captcha image. Obviously this process will use different user IDs that are constantly created from the different IP addresses on the various social network sites. This process can be maximized if we would use the captcha field also in the login or action (forum posts, blog comments etc) process.
Does the idea of online marketing scare you? have you thought of engaging a pro? Well, we’ve got excellent news for you. It’s actually not complicated to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on your own - a good chunk of cash can be saved, and the same results can be achieved as the search engine pros do. Probably better results can be attained from contracting experienced professionals, but you should at least try some of these diy actions first. Once you’ve start doing some of this type of optimization it will be easier to decide if a pro is worth his money.
Fundamental SEO is very easy and simple - all is needed is the willingness to go through the sometimes very boring work. Once you are aware of the tricks of the trade it is not that complex though it does take a lot of effort. The most important factor of a website is going to be the quality of its content. Here are a few considerations of when you are doing SEO on your own:
1. You will start by finding a domain, which should reflect what your site is about. Keep it brief, as long as it is somehow connected to your site. Being more specific can help. You could prefer to name the page after one of your services or products, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will in general help you get indexed faster though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade off here, sub domains are faster to setup (and generally cheaper), but domain names are easier to remember, and, long term, better for your indexing.
2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s title (i.e. the Title tag), which is vital in letting search engines see what the content is about, and is the first tag looked at by search engines to establish your relevance. You should put the most important keywords in your title tags - there is no need to care about singular or plural forms as the search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, do not name your home page ‘Home’ - the title should be a mini-description of the page.
3. The two primary meta tags are not as critical as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by several search engines to display information about your website to users and help them determine whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some importance on it (even if it is minuscule).
For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file - they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason.
Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page - it is used by developers and graphic artists to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some programmers used to put scores of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be discovered by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Remember this when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of conduct can get you banished from a search engine.
4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level - but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.
5. Many search engines estimate web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many. Don’t exaggerate inbound links either, and keep them connected to your site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.
If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do well. SEO, if done correctly, can keep you on top of the SERPs for as long as you want to be.
View the source of each and every page: is there JavaScript and CSS on the page? Think that bots may not index pages that have more than 10k or so of JavaScript or CSS embedded in them. Spiders don’t enjoy getting tangled up in JavaScript. So as a general rule you should avoid putting out prompts and alerts using JavaScript every time that a page loads. Because of this rule, it is also wise to avoid link partners who do so on the pages that they link to you from. If anything looks fishy, it probably is.
CSS won’t give you many troubles. If you have to use CSS, it is best to link to it from another source. Create a separate CSS page and use the <link> tag to work it into the head of your HTML. This method will keep your page size down substantially, and since you will probably be utilizing the same CSS on different pages, reduce your bandwidth use. Normally a important quantity of CSS within the document isn’t indicative of any questionable behavior on the part of the linker. If you sense that you are, indeed, suffering from the fact that the site uses such a large amount of CSS on the page itself, suggest to the webmaster that he/she may want to create an external CSS document and link to it in his/her header.
Check that you’re still on the domain you clicked on a link to, and you haven’t moved to another site or a subdomain. Some people will move you to another domain while telling that’s their site and your link is there, relying on you not checking the address bar. This trick is all too common and happens to folks who are new to SEO every single day. This sad fact will continue until people begin to catch it every time.
If the domain has changed, delete your backlink to the site in question immediately and then email the webmaster with your complaint. If the webmaster does not fix the problem you may even want to request that they remove the link as the site may wind up discredited as a link farm or some such thing that you do not want to be associated with for fear of being banned from many popular search engines with technology used to combat link farms.
On a related subject, when you check your back links, make sure that these links appear in legitimate places. If the site is completely dedicated to linking to other sites and doesn’t seem to be a directory or something similar you will want to get your link removed as soon as possible. There is no time when one link is worth the risk of being permanently banned from any popular search engine. Aside from the traffic that you will lose from that one search engine, you may wind up “red flagged” so to speak. It seems to be common practice among search engines that if one finds faulty activity the rest seem to find out soon afterwards.
Generally, if it seems dodgy, don’t touch it. It’s better to sacrifice one link in caution than to destroy your site’s rankings by accepting one you’re not sure of. There are hundreds of situations aside from link farms that can and will give you trouble. It would be impossible to list every scam as there are people who make their living (or seem to anyway) in creating and executing these scams. Whenever there is a new form of “SEO” technology that “can’t fail,” you should watch out because it is almost guaranteed to blow up in your face. The only truly powerful and guaranteed method of SEO is to make your site valuable to your visitors and then let it fall where it may in the realm of the search engine.
It is difficult, after you have optimized your pages and submitted them to search engines and directories, to sit back and wait, but there is not much that can be done aside from attempting to accumulate links from good, solid places. The work that you have done is bound to pay off sooner or later as long as you stay honest. When it comes to the world of SEO, honesty is, indeed, the best policy.
Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging – but we’re here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.
The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:
1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a “search” option. Always use this before posting your problem.
2. Do not “Flame.” Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of “yelling” at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other people’s posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.
3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesn’t take it off topic.
4. Do not “bump” your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.
6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you can’t be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.
7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include “games” which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.
Here’s a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you don’t want to pay for it.
Finding Groups.
Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their ‘Google Groups’ tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in ‘seo’ to see what’s on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you don’t like Google’s groups, try Yahoo’s instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.
dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.
There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.
Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out
I have been busy working on a consulting project in Switzerland since April, so I have not been able to update my blog in a long time. I have also been spending a lot of time at the blackhat world forum which I find to be an excellent source of information.
On the other hand Max and I have been busy architecting and developing our newest product for the hardcore seo which we should be releasing sometime in January 2009. DVDSN is a centralized content management system that automates a lot of the hideous processes a SEO has to go through and centralizes everything from one management console, I will let you know more about it as it gets released.
Cathy at 4flush has also been helping us out, and she will be in charge of sales over at Search Engine Studios where we will be selling our SEO services from.
I stumbled onto fantomaster’s blog today from seo-theory’s blog and I saw something that seemed very interesting at first sight, Fantomaster is offering 20 links a day for about $157 a month the service seems cool he is using a network of existing blogs and sites which have different class c networks, ok this does sound good, but now let’s try to analyze the real cost of the service; the way the system works is that you need to submit 20 unique articles a day to get your articles published and get your one way links. let’s suppose your articles cost you 5 cents a word and you need atleast 500 word articles that is $25 per article which makes $500 a day in articles, and to take advantage of the 600 links (one link per article) you would have a cost of $15000 a month in just content fees.
Fantomaster also states on his site that all IP addresses are from different class c networks, that is fine as long as the Class C networks are owned by different organizations, if you can do a whois query on the different class c addresses and the owners are different and the networks are different then that is good, otherwise a pattern exists.
Other possible patterns are the use of the same domain name registrar.
Fantomaster also claims that in his system there are no patterns the search engines can spot, but if you are adding 20 links a day isn’t that already a pattern?
The idea of having a centralized control panel to distribute content is not new don’t get me wrong, I think his idea is great especially since we have something very similar to his but we do not advertise it in the open so that our network does not get compromised. If the search engines where to open an account with 20links a day they could easily link the nodes on the network and start banning or penalizing the network sites and flagging them as commercial links.
Fantomaster’s offering seems like a good one if you are actually getting access to 600 different hosts a month, if not there is obviously a pattern, I highly doubt that you will get so many different hosts it just does not make business sense and the cost would be astronomical.
