BloggingJunkie

Survival Strategy in First Six Months of Blogging

Imran Yousaf — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:52:16 +0000

Blogging is all about writing great content, patience and networking. If you lack in anyone of these factors you are putting your blog’s survival at stake. Blog creation and running is not a big deal, but what about long term results? Are you sure your blog will exist for just first six months? I don’t think blogging for very first six months is an easy job due to;

Lack of patience & hard work
We have lot of expectations,
We think that traffic will automatically come,
Our stats will touch high numbers and even will beat big names in industry,
We also think that we will have lot of comments and will receive uncountable guest posts to publish.
We will start earning a huge amount of money.

I was thinking about some survey or poll that can show us the number of bloggers and their blogging time period since they are blogging. For more detailed and accurate results, we need a large readership so that we have a trend in blogging time period. I searched for net and landed on Problogger’s blog.

He already conducted the survey via creating a poll and exactly fulfills our need of having large audience. I participated in poll and viewed the results. Results were highly skewed towards blog failure ratio. Bloggers blogging from 3 months and from 3-6 months attracted the attention. (Please note that we are considering “Less than 3 months” figure as base for our analysis)

Survey Link

Only 40% of bloggers continued blogging till 3^rd to 6^th month and 25% continued blogging till 9th month. Results are very interesting when you further interpret it. Only 21% of bloggers continued blogging till first year.

What does all this stats means? It is crystal clear that a newbie is very energetic when he starts blogging, but within first three months they lose their hope and quit blogging.

These results are evident of this cruel truth. Survival for first six months and then continuing requires true dedication. Now question is how we can prepare ourselves for the first six months of blogging to survive? What are the steps and initiative that will make us champ in this time period?

Motivate Yourself

First rule is to motivate yourself. Your thoughts, thinking and your attitude towards blogging are very important. You need to have a lot of patience and courage to face the first six months of your blogging journey. Daily traffic stats and no comments will discourage you, but keep in mind every blogger starts with zero.

Train yourself; prepare your mind to face these expected situations and promise yourself not to give up. If you do all these things, you will find yourself much motivated and situation will turn in your favor.

Develop a Writing Routine

People like to visit such sites whose content is refreshed on daily or at least on regular basis. If you are unable to write on daily basis, set posting schedule for you and strictly follow it.

Updating your blog on regular interval is much better than non regular or more frequent posting. Your readers will get used to your sites’ updating frequency. Too much posting will also kill your blog. Because later on you will not be able to continue this tempo due to work load and will start losing your readership. Find out your productive working hours to maximum the output in possible less time. Be smart.

Killer Content

Blogging is not a simple writing job. You need to attract people to read your blog. They are loyal readers of big names in your niche. Regular stuff will not attract them. You need to brainstorm and produce unique ideas for your content. Such idea/article that is never published will force the visitors to become your site reader.

Optimize Your Every Post for SEO

Don’t underestimate the power of generic traffic. They are cheap and easy to get just with a little know how of basic Search engine optimization. You need to include every post in search engine indexation. Avoid black hat SEO, use white hat SEO tricks for long lasting results and learn from big SEO Company’s mistake.

Write for Your Readers

Don’t make your blog an operational or technical manual of a product. No one will like your blog and will let it to die naturally. People want to share their views by participating in your blog’s community. Technical jargons and stuff is totally useless.

Blogs are also not meant for search engine. If you are only targeting search engine, rest assure bots, crawlers and spiders would be your best friends for all time and all of they don’t comment.

Write your content for humans, so that they can digest and discuss it online. More your readers are involved in your blog, more your blog’s buzz will spread around.

Engage Your Readers

Have you noticed, tech and gadget blogs don’t have comments or very few comments if we compare to the blogs that are non tech. Reason is they are aimed to give you latest news and development for the products.

All you need to engage your readers by opting in various techniques,

Held a contest,
Encourage them to participate in Polls,
Provide a platform to discuss the issues,
Ask questions etc.
Held some interesting quiz,

Networking

Networking within your niche will considerably boost your motivation and traffic. Remember, no man is an island. You have to have strong social networking with bloggers, readers and commentators.

You have an easy opportunity to have good social networking with your commentators. Top commentator widget will help you to reward your commentators. Announce top five commentators in a post to encourage them.

Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg are treasures of traffic. Participate in communities; exchange of e-mail ids will greatly help you. Don’t forget to guest post on high traffic blog within your niche.

These are steps and initiatives that will take you out of tough period of blogging career. If you have more ideas to share, please come up and share your views.

Hostgator September 2010 Discount Code

Imran Yousaf — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:13:41 +0000

A reliable web hosting company is on wish list of every blogger to avoid down times and rank better in Google page rank update. Customer support is awesome and has 24/7 live chat for prompt response.

Most of web hosting service providers are unable to provide maximum up time. Read Web Hosts’ Claim-A Hidden Reality

I already reviewed their hosting service with main features and various shared hosting plan they are offering. Their product features, customer support service, server uptime and reliability are the crux of their product.

All of my projects are hosted on HostGator shared server and never observed any down time. So I highly recommend their services for your blog/site.

Their Hatchling plan is best suitable to host a domain with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This plan is available for $83.40 but after using the code SPRING, you will get 20% off of the package and same plan will cost you $66.72.

HostGator Signup Link Coupon Code= SPRING

It’s pertinent to mention here that HostGator also offers 45 days money back guarantee.

Work Like an Ant for Survival of Your Blog

Imran Yousaf — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:42:05 +0000

Every second a new blog is created and added in the list of blogs. A sudden question arises about survival of these blogs. If blog creation rate is too high then there should be overwhelming number of blogs on internet. Fact is, most of them are unable to survive their existence. They lack various things which are crucial for blog survival.

Read Do You Love Your Blog?

Have you ever studies the survival of Ants in such a world where living environment is tough for them. Due to their size their survival should be a question mark but they have abilities that make them to survive for long time until they naturally die.

What are the things to learn to learn from them that might help us in survival of blogs? We need to explore and find out the factors responsible for survival. Let’s explore & discuss these factors in blogging perspective.

Hardworking

Do you know ants can lift weight up to 20 times of its own? They don’t sleep though they take power naps throughout the day. This level of hard work with commitment enabled them to survive for such long time period. They don’t compromise on work. Doesn’t matter what is working environment, what is atmosphere, what is temperature over earth. They only know one thing; they have to work in all conditions.

Blogging is not an easy job. It is full of stress and needs hard work with dedication. Writing and publishing articles on daily basis is not Childs’ play. If you are already following this routine don’t think so that you have done very well. Keep in mind this is routine work in blogging career. There are other factors which need to be done along with content creation.

You are also required to brainstorm and write pillar articles. You need specific environment to write. You need to find out your productive working hours. If content production was so easy, everyone would be involved in this work and everyone’s blog would be a successful one. It’s better to have a pen and pocket size draft pad every time to note down the idea or theme when splashed during routine life.

Never Give Up

I think I am not supposed to produce the Ant’s story of Try, Try and try again. They never give up rather they perform that activity till they complete that task.

This is the core point that makes a blogger successful one. Patience with never give up attitude leads to guaranteed success; doesn’t matter sooner or later. Your site is not attracting the traffic, don’t worry. Continue hard work in right direction and you will succeed one day. Some take six months; some require one-two years to be a successful. Just concentrate on writing and polishing your writing skills. When you feel you are exhausted due to no traffic specially and some other reason generally, take a break of one week and enjoy this time. Go with your friends, watch movies and visit amusement parks. You will feel fresh and when you return to your blogging life, you will be recharged with new enthusiasm because you decided to put more efforts and not to give up. Even we do feel exhausted some time and immediately start performing other tasks that are our favorite to eliminate the exhaustion element at once.

This is a technique to get rid of this feeling at initial stage. Don’t force yourself to work when you feel fatigue or you will be advanced to next stage which is not desired at all and is responsible for 99% of blogging failure cases.

Networking & Socialization

Ants work in a community that is called colony. Every ant has its own community. They do know each other and can trace each other by way of leaving some signals like smell etc. They are unknowingly following the quotation “No Man is an Island”.

Same is the situation with bloggers. We need to work in a community and promote one others’ work. Like of a newbie become easy if he has support of a problogger or of an established community. Use various social networking sites to create contacts. Twitter and facebook are on top of them. Other famous social networking sites are Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit etc. Join and participate in forums. You would have great opportunity if you can help anyone.

Make a strong relationship with your fellow bloggers, communicate with them via e-mail. Promote their work and they will reciprocate it.

Save for Winter

Winter is the season in which ants can’t survive if they don’t go underground. Then how do they fulfill their and others eating need? Answer is very simple. They store food for the situation when they can’t go for daily work and being underground is beneficial for them. What is the lesson for us?

Which season is winter for bloggers? A situation when we can’t write and publish is winters’ season for bloggers. Such situation can arise due to some emergency or when we need to go for a break or when we are going for refreshment.

Keep some articles in your inventory to manage such situations and to continue your posting frequency. Schedule your articles when you are going away and use the time stamp feature of WordPress to automatically get it published in scheduled dates.

Specialization

What this word specialization has to do with ants? Do ants specialize in some work? Different type of ants within same community, perform different assignments and are given names based on their nature of work. Fire ants, army ants, leaf cutter ants are some of their well known types.

This is the main point which we need to focus. A blogger can’t be expert in all areas like designing, dealing with web hosting problems, content writing, and content promotion. It’s better to have a blogging partner, if budget is tight. Probloggers have special team for web site designing and its maintenance, server related issues, content writing and proof reading and specially marketing team.

SEO Tips to Include Every Post in Search Engine Indexation

Imran Yousaf — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:24:44 +0000

Without optimizing the posts for search engine, a blogger is wasting his energy because people are unable to find his work on search engine . Articles are not properly optimized for indexation and are penalized by search engine. Indexation of each & every post is crucial. People do search on web to find their required information. Almost 80-90% of people find their relevant information on the first page of SERP. They don’t go to second page and in such scenario, if posts are totally unable to get listed on SERP, you need to take a decision out of two available options.

Quit blogging
Learn at least Basic SEO

If you are better with first option then go for it, but remember you left the ground without putting minimum required efforts. So it’s better to try the second option and watch the results.

In this article we are addressing two issues which are common and are main cause of not listing or even non-indexing on search engine.

Post is not optimized properly for SEO,
Search Engine penalized and didn’t index it.

To solve these problems, we need to have a set of plugins that will ease the process of search engine optimization.

All-in-One SEO Plugin

This is awesome plugin which fulfills all your basic requirement of optimizing the post for search engine. Configure it as per your requirement and start using this awesome piece of work. It gives you the word count when you are typing title or meta description of the post, which enables you to be in that word count limit so that each & everything is shown in SERP. That was the reason I started using All-in-One SEO in thesis 1.7 because thesis was not offering word count feature in that version. Though they have realized and embedded word count feature in thesis 1.8.

Search engine don’t index words after 60 characters in title and 150 in meta description as per best SEO practices. To testify this statement I ran a test which showed mw that how much characters are acceptable by Google.

I created a post and filled title and meta description with text “Blog Blog2 Blog3 Blog4 Blog5 Blog6…. Blog 30” to know how much characters are shown in SERP. Please keep in mind that space is also a character.

When I counted the word, result showed that maximum characters for title are 60 and for meta description are 150. This is the main point where we have to define each and everything within that limit. This test also confirmed the total word count shown in Google Search Engine.

Bonus Tips:-

Keep your keyword in the start of title and meta description so that it is not skipped by crawler. By doing this you are increasing the visibility of your blog.

Download AIO SEO Plugin

SEO Keyword Density Checker

Why I felt the need of this plugin? Because,

I want to ensure the increased visibility of my keywords,
I want to avoid touching maximum Keyword Density,
This plugin also gives you suggestion of tags,
This plugin also shows you two-word and three-word long keywords.

When I started learning SEO, I found that my few posts were not indexed in Google. At that time I had no answer to this problem. But later I find that that among other issues, keyword density was also hurting indexation of my posts. Best SEO practices suggest keeping the keyword density below 5%. I suggest you to keep this limit to maximum to 3.5% as per this plugin; because scribe was showing the same density at 5%.

By keeping the density below allowed threshold, you are avoiding Google penalty and successfully passing the keyword density test. While AIO SEO will ensure to show your keywords and description to the crawler of search engine.

It’s good to have each and every post indexed in Google from very start instead of making corrections later to include it in indexation. It will take more time and energy if you are doing it after Google’s penalty.

Download Keyword Density Checker Plugin

Follow Shoemoneys’ Strategy and Increase Twitter Followers

Imran Yousaf — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:37:49 +0000

Twitter is not only a famous social networking and marketing tool but it is also a symbol of growth by considering the number of followers. It means, higher the follower number, more dynamic growth is. You will see many bloggers who compare their previous month/years’ follower count to current number of followers to gage the growth.

But question is, can we manipulate this number? Can we increase our followers count by using illegitimate methods? Answer is yes. It’s very simple and easy to inflate this number.

Today I was checking my Alexa ranking (one of my time wasting activities), suddenly an idea came to my mind, why not to check the Alexa ranking of one of my previous blog. I did so and started observing various information provided by Alexa. I saw a good number of backlinks and curiosity forced me to check who are linking back to me.

Instantly a site caught my attention due to uniqueness of its name and I clicked it to view its content. I have a habit to check the initial posts of the blog to observe the growth of blogging career of every blog(another habit to waste a lot of time ). This gives me inspiration to work hard and put my best efforts.

I saw a detailed post about Jeremy Schoemaker’s spell mistake in his business slogan. His slogan is “Skills to Pay the Bill” but mistakenly it was written as “Skills to Play the Bills.” I clicked the screenshot that guy attached with his post and was surprised to see that he was right.

Yet this story not ended here, when I observed difference in followers count I appreciated his growth but amazingly next number put me in the world of surprise. In 2009 (as blogger claimed his post in 2009) Jeremy was following 12000 plus and currently he is following just 90 people. See Here.

It’s Amazing. Why a person will unfollow such huge number? Had he followed wrong people? (Don’t get offence my friends, here I mean to say change in interest or any other factor that led him to take unfollow decision). Why he followed this large number of twitter accounts that he thinks they deserve unfollow later?

I started to brainstorm on the reason and got the possible answer. Actually Jermey Schoemaker wants to inflate his number of followers by following a huge number of tweeps. In return, we know that, they also followed Mr. Jeremy. In this way he increased his followers’ count in very short time.

What was the fun of doing so? We know you immediately came into notice that you have a good number of followers, people tend to follow them. Because higher your follower figure, higher you will be ranked in twitter list and sites quote such twitter accounts as an example. Take an example of this Google search query Top 10 Twitter accounts, you will notice Top 100, Top 200 and other famous celebrities who have great count of followers like Britney Spears is also shown in this search result of 1^st page of SERP.

But when you follow people in bulk, you will miss various things like common interest, quality twitter profiles etc even you would be following spammers as well.

When Jermey got a good number of followers, he realized that it’s time to unfollow that huge list.

My aim is not to blame anyone but I want to ask a question. Is such practice ethical? Shall we inflate our tweeter followers by manipulating the system? I don’t think so. I am sure I can increase my follower number to 20+ just in two months. If we do a little math, like;

Follow 400 tweeps daily and at the end of 2^nd month you will have,

400 x 60=24000.

But again is this practice fair or Jeremy is exercising modified saying “All is Fair in Love, War and Business”. Decide yourself.

Seven Steps for a Stress Free Blogging Life

Imran Yousaf — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:39:26 +0000

Our jobs leave its impression on our lives and blogging is no different from them. It is a complete package of various activities to be performed for being a successful blogger like, designing, writing, optimizing, moderating comments and maintenance etc.

Each of them requires plenty of time and it becomes very difficult for a blogger to manage them along with his routine life activities. My article on productive working hours better explains the productivity issue. If you are able to manage your time efficiently, you can live a stress free blogging life along with natural life.

Find Blogging Partner

Blogging partner will greatly help to live a stress free blogging life because you are going to share your work load. Find a person of same interest as you have, and enjoy stress free blogging life. If you are unable to find a partner, held a contest for writing articles for you and encourage your readers for guest post. You can share activities with him like site designing or marketing part. His social network will also help to market you blog and ultimately result in increased traffic.

Break up Your Time

You need to allocate your time between blogging and routine life activities. Depending on your blogging profile (full time or part time blogger), you need to allocate ¼ or 2/4 time to blogging and rest of time to your routine life. Avoid overlapping of each other and use your time productively.

If you spend your desired scheduled time on blog but haven’t produced any article or some other productive activity, you have wasted your time. But don’t worry; don’t use time from your routine life quota to perform some blogging related activity.

Allocate Days for Complex and Creative Tasks

You need to figure out your complex, creative and time consuming activities, make a list of them and allocate days of a week to perform those activities. Just like in my article of productive working hours, you shall have specific days of a week in which you are more productive. Perform those complex or creative activities on those specific days to maximize your output with quality, without making it burden on yourself.

For example I perform site designing activities on weekends because, it take long sittings without any disturbance. Likewise, you shall also prioritize your activities on specific days. But don’t risk your health.

Read 8 Major Health Problems Faced by Bloggers

Hunt for Ideas

Make it a habit to keep a pocket size draft pad and pen with yourself all the time and hunt for ideas, topics for your content. Keep in mind, content is king and your unique content will make your blog stand out of crowed. Develop a habit of brain storming, in this way you will have new ideas for your content and have rich inventory for articles. You are saving yourself from mind block.

Produce More Articles

Content creation is a common and major problem among bloggers. Some bloggers fall ideas shortage or some don’t have enough time to write too frequently. Why not to keep yourself out of this trap by writing more and more. Allocate your preferred day, specially weekends are best for this purpose, and write how much you can. You already have rich ideas for your content by adopting idea hunting habit.

Read What is And How to Write Unique Content?

Use Time Stamp Feature

Now when you have good inventory of articles, use time stamp feature of WordPress and schedule them to make them available online. Save some posts in drafts for time when you decide to take a break.

Avoid Non-Productive Activities

Non productive activities waste your time and energy which may lead you to frustration. Avoid frequently watching site stats, checking inbox, reading approved comments etc and use that time in an activity that has some outcome. For example you can spend that time in making friends on social networking to expand your social network.

17 Things to Check Before Publishing a Post

Imran Yousaf — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:32:31 +0000

Blogging is combination of skill, knowledge and art. Combination of them makes a bloggers’ success more rapidly. Writing is no different from art and skill. If a blogger is good in writing he can easily attract readers.

Whenever a post get publish, we make spell corrections, optimize title and for SEO in it after it go online. Frequent update hitting may cause to ban you from search engines and directory listing. Read use wisely ping utility.

So isn’t better to check your post for couple of things before we publish it. This list will help you when you are about to hit publish.

From Content’s Perspective:-

Spell mistakes, grammatical error are fatal mistakes for blog and reduce readership due to low quality articles. Use good word processor like Microsoft Word to avoid these mistakes. Proof read your work and run spell checker.
Limit one idea to one paragraph. By doing so, your ideas are clearer and article will be easier to digest.
Opt and stay with one language format i.e British or American
After completing the post check that post has covered all points and none is untouched.
Most important part of an article is its title. Striking title attracts readers to read the post. Without attractive article no one will even bother to look at it.
Don’t forget to add eye catching image. Graphics adds style to the presentation of post and also catches attention of readers. Just imagine a plain post and a post well formatted text and with pictures.
For navigation and readers convenience, put your work in proper category so that clicking that category bring all related posts in front of readers.

Search Engine Perspective

Without optimizing for search engine, your efforts are useless because no one is seeing your site on search engine. What would be benefit of your article if it is not found on net despite the fact that it contains best material available online? Proper keyword research is as necessary as the content itself. Research and optimize your keywords so that vast majority on net can find it.
Anchor text is vital for site wide keyword optimization. Use it in your articles.
You have great stuff on your site why not to use them in coming articles by interlinking? By interlinking you have various benefits like
- Its SEO requirement,
- Engage your readers
- Reduce bounce rate
- Increase page view
- Increase time on site.

Still I am supposed to tell more on interlinking?

Also check that all links are working and no one is broken.
Don’t forget to use “Alt” tag for images. You would receive traffic when someone searches for image.
If you want to rock SERP, craft Meta description by yourself instead of automating the process with help of plugin. Please note that search engine shows your Meta description for that particular page. Include your keywords in Meta description and watch the traffic spike.
Don’t forget to optimize permalink. Remove two character words from URL. Article on URL structure is further guide on optimizing permalinks.

Readers & Authority Perspective:-

Every blogger wants quality traffic with readers’ engagement in articles. Use different tools to engage them like encourage for comments, participation in Polls, ask for their view on certain point etc.
If you want to quote something from outside of your blog, use authentic sites whose authority is not doubtful. This will add value to your site and also strengthen the confidence of your readers on you.

Monetization Perspective:-

In last, if you are running any monetization program like Google Ads, or AdBright, don’t forget to include them.

I also have created PDF check list file, for your ease to check your posts before publishing. Download

SEO Best Practices for URL Structure

Imran Yousaf — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:33:35 +0000

Organic traffic (traffic from search engine) is cheap and ever green source of traffic. Its important for a blog to properly optimize URL structure for SEO purpose from very start of blog because by doing so, your site will attract more traffic and readers.

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Search engine gives high SEO ranking in SERP to the sites that have optimized permalink instead of numbers and other characters. Examples of non-optimized URL is;

Because it has been observed that search engines give high weightage for keywords that are present in URL. Wordpress provides various option to define structure based on year & month however you have vast choice for selection of permalink. Some prefer to include category name, year to be included.

While I prefer simple yet search engine friendly permalink structure which you might have observed.

SEO Best Practices

Follow these tips while deciding permalink structure for your blog.

Select static URL structure instead of dyamic URL,
Use minimum number of words in URL
Try to use keywords in start of URL
Try to limit the number of directories for SEO purpose. Because you are pushing your keywords in the end.
Don’t change permalink structure. If change is unavoidable use plugin to safely change permalinks.
In my opinion, don’t use categories in structure, it will allow to rearranging/renaming categories in future.
Use dashes instead of underscores.
Use Clean SEO Slug plugin. It will remove unnecessary words from URL to make it short and SEO friendly.

If you want to customize the structure, all you need to click permalink in wordpress control panel and select custom structure. Here you can define valid tags in custom field.

Carefully select permalink structure for your blog, because changing it later will cause broken links which is not liked by Google.

Use WordPress Ping Utility Wisely

Imran Yousaf — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:28:58 +0000

Every time we update our blog with fresh content, wordpress tells ping service provider that blog has been updated by sending a ping query. Basically by pinging, we tell directories and search engines that our site has been updated and have now fresh content. All such directories and search engines send their bots and crawlers to index out site.

So it means that ping service is a way to increase traffic by telling various search engines, directories and blogs that we have updates. We increase chances of hits from various sources. Why not to leverage this opportunity by pinging maximum directories and search engines.

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But keep in mind that frequent pinging can also ban your site and such sites are known as Ping Spammer. For example, when a blogger writes new content and hits publish, just after some time he realizes he need to make some changes like to remove spell mistake, rearrange sentence or anything like, every time you hit update, wordpress send a ping query which can cause to ban your site.

To resolve this issue and take maximum benefit from this service we have some plugins that will take care of frequent pings.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

This gem from MaxBlogPress optimizes ping query to avoid getting ban of your site. It sends ping only when you hit publish button. No matter how many times you hit update button after publishing a post.

Most interesting feature of this plugin is, it saves you when you schedule a post to appear in future and your blog sends a ping despite the fact that post hasn’t been appeared in blog. This means, all ping service providers are notified but post is not appeared while when that specific time comes ,publishing event triggers to make the post visible online, but in this case ping is not send because wordpress already send a ping for same article.

Download this plugin and save your blog from getting ban on various services.

Ping Status Checker

In start of our article we got the idea of pinging and benefits of ping. It means we need to add more and more sites or search engines to send update signal.

But how to avoid dead or duplicate entry of ping service providers? Ping status checker plugin will do all the work for you. This plugin has two buttons; one will check all listed ping services for duplicate entry and list them with number of repetitions. Second button checks health of search engine/directory to ensure optimized pinging. In the end of both results you need to remove dead and duplicate entries.

Bonus Tip

Most of time it happens that bloggers refers to their article in blog while producing fresh content. They got pinged by their articles which are shown in the comments section of referring article. How to avoid it? No Self Ping plugin disables self pinging and saves your time. All you need to install it and forget it

I am listing a base list of ping service providers, all of them are alive and in working state. There is no duplicate entry in list. You are highly encouraged to add more services to enhance the list.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blog.goo.ne.jp

http://godesigngroup.com

http://ipings.com

http://lasermemory.com

http://mod-pubsub.org

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.blogoon.net

http://ping.blogstart.de

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://ping.feedburner.com/

Confession of Black Hat SEO and Lesson for Us

Imran Yousaf — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:21:31 +0000

Search Engine Optimization is a complex process requiring careful execution and proper skill with knowledge. Here, question is not about in house SEO or outsources the optimization for your site, but the problem is proper know how of procedure. Without proper knowledge and trying Hit & Trial method, you will definitely suffer.

But what if you hire some reputable SEO company and after some time you simply get to know that they were not executing the SEO in right direction? Some of them were using Black Hat SEO which are not long lasting and may result in banning and kicking out of search engine results.

Most of the times Black Hat SEO practices are intentional and clients do suffer.

This article is aimed to avoid such misleading SEO concepts that are the waste of time. But before we start analyzing those concepts, thanks to Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, who shared his past Black Hat SEO mistakes and in his article Biggest SEO mistakes, he also busted some other myths.

Reciprocal Links:-

Rand was using reciprocal links to get links from other sites and accepted, in start of SEOmoz Company, he fooled some webmasters by blocking outbound links by nofollow/robot.txt technique. This act may helped him in short term but he lost trust of web masters. They simply removed his links from their website and lost their trust in Rand.

[adsense]

Building your brand, trust and reader in blogosphere is hard earned. Honor your brand and have more trust of your readership.

Buying Links:-

Second confession is about buying links. Rand purchased links for his clients to excel SERP but we know, this is just waste of money and Google totally dislikes it. Anchor text plays vital role in link building and paid links haven’t this quality. Along with this disadvantage, relevancy and link worth plays important role. Irrelevant links are totally useless and Google understands that such link has been purchased due to difference in niche/topic of web site.

Be fair in your business and provide long term results to your clients to build huge portfolio of satisfied customers.

H1 Formatting of Keywords:-

Third mistake actually busted a myth. Before that mistake they strongly believe that keywords should be formatted with H1 so that bots can easily detect them due to emphasis and give it more weightage.

Just think about if you have a blog with 500 articles, how would you feel about editing every post and formatting keyword with H1 formatting. But thanks to Rands’ adventurous nature, he found that his H1 practice having same weightage as formatting keywords with normal text. Though, most of us still use bold formatting for keyword to make it more visible to search engines. H1 formatting is beneficial in titles and this fact is also endorsed by W3C in their article.

XML Site Maps Myth Busted:-

Practice proved that sitemaps based on XML increased indexation rate. Before this myth was busted accidentally, SEOmoz Company strongly believed in non XML based sitemaps which ultimately resulted in reduced indexation rate.

301 Redirect:-

Redirection is a tricky game. Wrong redirection will cost you in losing the traffic due to various issues like redirection of backlinks etc. I myself permanently redirected my previous domain traffic to this one and was successful and kept that site in redirection state for next Google PR update. Link by link direction will save you if you have small site.