It’s been real long I have written a post. This post of mine will answer many queries of yours which might be puzzling you since long.

Does Google crawl and treat Tiny URLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links?

Yes, Google consider the tiny URLs same as other links if they are 301-redirected. If links are 301 redirected then Google passes the page rank just as other links. So, basically it depends on the URL shortening services whether they are using a 301 redirect or not. If not, then Google will not consider them & will not pass any PageRank. These days many sites offering URL shortening services & number of service providers are increasing day by day, so make sure to pick only those that does provide what you actually want.

How can we make sure that Google reaches & indexes pages that are on a deeper or lower level of the website?

For this, one thing to make sure is that every important deep level page should link with your main or root page of the website. But this does not mean that you should link every deep level page with your Home Page rather it is advisable to focus on your money making or very important pages should be easily accessible to search engines & users. It is always good to link your money making pages with the pages which have good PR. So it is not a matter of concern to use deep directory folder.

Google seems to prioritize new domains in SERPs, will a Coming Soon page negatively impact the side?

No, this should not impact the website ranking. In fact, this is a pretty smart act to make your users aware with your upcoming services or information. This should not be a problem to search engines. You can optimize these page by putting quality content once the service/ section is ready for lunch.

How many pages can Google crawl or index from a single website?

Well, there is no limit as far as the page indexing is concern. Google always try to crawl as many pages as possible if pages are important for users & have quality information. In fact, you can find many websites with millions of indexed pages. But Google avoid indexing millions of pages from a website with auto generated junk stuff. So, always take care of the content quality & accessibility of the pages to make them crawlable.

Does position of keywords in URL have a signification impact on rankings?

Matt says that we should not be very possessed about these kind of details as these are very secondary kind of things. Keywords use in URL is definitely adds some value but the path or level should not impact much. Also, we not stuff the URLs with so many keywords which actually looks like a spam.

How much time does Google takes to index a new web page?

Google can find a new page very quickly like in seconds or minutes if the page is linked with an authority site, blog etc. For example, if your new webpage have quality info & is linked with CNN website then Google can crawl it very quickly.

Can I publish 100+ pages at once or in bulk? Would it count as spamming?

If you are publishing 100+ pages or 1000s pages with quality content which might be useful for your visitors then there is no problem but if you are planning to publish millions of pages at once then Google can find it strange. If Google found that the pages are auto generated junk stuff or does not have quality info for users then it will not crawl your website pages.

Should I tweak the Title & Description of the web pages to improve the CTR?

Many people think that their SEO work is over if they are ranking for their targeted keywords but it is not the case. If you are ranking on top 10 and visitors are still not clicking or if you are not getting conversions from your organic search then there is no mean of having a good rank.
We should optimize our Title & Description tags & try to make them compelling (not decisive) with correct info. Title & description tags are the part of ranking snippet in organic listing and are very helpful in increasing the organic CTR which will in turn helps in better ranking & conversions.

Do Google take into account quality factors from Nofollowed links when the links comes from authority websites like Wikipedia?

No, Google will add any value to the links which are nofollowed. Nofollowed links (even from authority websites) will not boost website’s ranking in Google. But yes, websites can get good no. of visits with the help of relevant links from the authority websites like Wikipedia.

The day began with an excitement and I was out of my house before 7:30 AM in the morning. I was going to attend the search marketing conference at Tidel Park, Chennai- organized by The Knowledge Foundation, SearchCamp; A two day Search Engine Marketing event which was organized to gather people from different fields with similar interest.

While going through the registration process I met few people who helped me making myself comfortable with the altogether new place. It was really good to have met different people from the same line yet creating difference every day. Right from an amateur to entrepreneur, fresher to experienced I found people from each and every level; junior level, middle management and CEOs.

The conference was a bit delayed due to unexpected fog around airport of Chennai however I could see the level of enthusiasm which was building up on every single person stepping in. participants were taking their respective seats and soon the auditorium was filled with more than 80% of capacity.

The conference started with the welcome speech of Mr. Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd, a social media consultancy and an excellent speaker too who knows how to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. Mr. Vishal Sampat delivered a thoughtful and interesting presentation on Usability, Conversions & SEO. This was followed with various aligned presentations dealing into varied topics. Almost every critical topic including SEO for E-Commerce , Web analytics, use of social media for SEO was covered and many hidden dimension of Googling were unfolded.

The whole session was unexpectedly interactive and people jumped into discussion wherever their subject matter expertise was demanded. It was indeed an enriching experience to have met other SEO experts and exchange ideas with them.

Finally the day ended with diversified ideas flown into the air and few argued yet open ended topics.

Overall this conference gave a very good insight into the untouched/ less explored areas of E-marketing and helped people who came with the objective of meeting different people for the very purpose popularly known as social networking. Had we concentrated more on Technical side of optimization, it would have been much better; however, overall the purpose of conference was met and will surely look forward to attend these kind of conferences in future too.

In this post you will find the link building quality guidelines & some great ways of creating quality backlinks for your website.

Firstly, I want to discuss few general things about link building (this is specially for beginners)

Link building is the process of getting quality link to your web site from another web sites in order to improve search engine rankings. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The site that links to your site can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

Now we will go through some Link Terms which we all should know before proceeding further:

• Link Popularity: the quantity of links pointing to your web page from other sites. It can also be determine as PageRank of your web page.
• Anchor text: The words in a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.
• Reciprocal / 2 - way link: The process where two webmasters agree to show each-other’s link on their website. Means, site A has link on site B and Site B has link on site A.
• 3-way links: It helps you build links while avoid reciprocal link building and other types of penalties resulting from it.
  A three-way link is where Site A links to Site B, and Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A, like so: A -> B -> C -> A. In the end, 3 websites have links to each other, and yet none of them are reciprocal.
  Google will not penalize you for using this method, as long as all the sites are somewhat related.
• Link farm: Sites/pages with dozen of links. Built for the sole purpose of increasing search results. Often has opposite effect. Bad. Spam. Avoid.
• Link bait: Any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. A very good technique to get quality natural links.
• Deep Links: Links to internal pages (not your home page). Good stuff. One reason blogs tend to do better in search engines than static sites.

What is PageRank:

A feature on the Google toolbar which lets you know how important is your page in eyes of Google. When we install the Google Toolbar, it shows us the rank of every page we visit.

For successful link building strategy:

1) Get as many links from important pages as possible

2) Build relevance between the anchor text and targeted keywords/ phreases used in SEs.

Guidelines of Quality Links

• Links should come from related page/ category. This is probably the most important factor to determine the link quality & effectiveness in terms of the PR and traffic.

• Links should come from authanticated & quality sites. Also, take care of C-class IPs. Links should come from different C-class IP’s.

• Link pages must have been indexed & recently cached in (SE’s) Google. I think there is no point in getting links from pages which are not indexed by Search Engines.

• Links should not be listed on drug, porn, illegal and other offensive websites (spam, ban, or backlisted).

• Links should not be on web pages that are disallowed by robots.txt tag.
  
  
• Links should not be from framed pages as search engines usually don’t read these type of pages.

• Link should have varied anchor text with relevant/ targeted keywords.

• Link should be created with an optimum frequency. It is not advisiable to place hundreds or thousands of links to a new site the first few days. Search Engines like Google can easily catch these types of link building which are not natural and can ban the site. So we should move gradually with the consistancy in quality.

• If we are getting the links from relevant pages with Good PR then this is really great. But we should not ignore links from 0 PR pages which are very relvant with the theme.

• Links should not be temporary. The age of your backlinks is important.

Does high page rank Always guarantee top position in Search Results?

No, PageRank does not guarnatee any specific rank on SERPs. Google consider many factors while ranking any page for related search query- some of the factors are

No. of backlinks, anchor text, historical factors, on page factors, links from quality on-facus sites etc.

Now the question arises is- How to get quality Links? So, here is the answer…

There are many techniques to get the quality backlinks though it might take time as link building is a very time consuming activity. I am listing some of the tried & tested techniques to get the qualilty back links.

Link Baiting: You must have read about it many times. But trust me it is really a good way to get the natural links. Always focus on the quality content & try to write something which is very informative, helpful, easy to understand & interesting to read. But your job is not finished here….you have to make people know about this quality info. You will not get any advantage of having great content when people does not know about it and this your own duty to make them aware. So, promote your content by participating in social media & news sites. Once people will know about it & liked it then they will start link back to you.

Here are some link baiting techniques:

• Offer something useful for FREE: Give other website owners a useful or interesting tools for FREE. For example: if you are in to loan or mortgage sector & providing a free mortgage calculator or currency convertor etc. then if other webmasters will use that tool on ther website will automatically provide you a link back.
• Create Poll or Quize: Polls, quizzes, surveys, tests etc. are good ways to create the buzz.
• Contests: Organise something for people to participate in. It is again a good ways of link baiting. For example: seomoz SEO quiz, when people score a good percentage then they put their score banner on there website with a link to the main seomoz site.
• Humor: This is one of the best link baiting techniques I have ever seen. Most people generally act on and spread that content which is houmouous.
• Similarly, controversial posts usually get strong reactions. People post their perspective & publist the complete conversation on their on blog also.
• Research and Statistics - Research a topic which is very popular or in trend and then post your outlook on the same and invite a little controversy. Try to give some thing valuable to the visitors that people can use in some way is another effective way to generate incoming links.

Directory Submissions: Though currently directory submissions are not considered as benificial as before, however quality directories still have advantages, therefore we must submit the site to the quality web directories. There are 1000’s of websites available on the net with wide range of categories, regions and languages. Few of them are paid & fortunately maximum are free.

But you should take care of the relevancy & quality of the web directories before submissions. I am not in a favor of automated submissions as they might affect the quality of links. Always go for manual submissions though it will take time.

Take care of the following points before submitting the site:

• Always choose relevant directories
• Submit your site only once
• Choose the relevant/most appropriate sub category
• Always read the Directory Submission Guildlines
• Use the email address of the same domain because some dircetories reject the submissions from free email IDs.
• Don’t be just a seller while submitting the website, write accurate business title

Here is a list of some good directories:

www.dmoz.org/ Free

www.dir.yahoo.com/ Paid

www.lii.org/ Free

www.business.com/ Paid

www.jayde.com/ Free

www.botw.org/ Paid

www.directory.v7n.com/ Paid

www.businessseek.biz/ Paid

www.illumirate.com/ Free

www.turnpike.net/directory.html Free

www.littlewebdirectory.com/links.asp Free

www.wikidweb.com/ Free

www.linkcentre.com free

www.allthewebsites.org free

Here are some other resources where you can find list of web directories:

http://www.onewaytextlink.com/links.php?type=free&pagenum=1

http://www.web-directories.ws/General/Free/

http://www.directorycritic.com/free-directory-list.html

You can also search relevant directories by using these type of commands:

“add links” + Your Keywords

“add a link” + Your Keywords

“add your link” + Your Keywords

“add site” + Your Keywords

“add your site” + Your Keywords

“add a website” + Your Keywords

“add a URL” + Your Keywords

“add your URL” + Your Keywords

“submit URL”+ Your Keywords

“Submit a site” + Your Keywords

“submit links” + Your Keywords

“submit your URL” + Your Keywords

“suggest a website” + Your Keywords

“Suggest URL” + Your Keywords

intitle:add+url “keyword phrase”

intitle:submit+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:submit+url “keyword phrase”

intitle:add+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:add+your+site “keyword phrase”

intitle:directory “keyword phrase”

intitle:list “keyword phrase”

intitle:sites “keyword phrase” and many others.

Link exchange: Exchange links with a few better quality sites which deal with the same topics as your website. Though this is not a good way in the eyes of Google. But we can do the 3 way link building which is a better option.

Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of link exchanging, irrespective of the links quality, relevancy and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

While exhanging the links then take care of the following things:

• Links should be from the relevant (theme based) websites
• No links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Link growth should be natural so maintain the frequency

PR submissions: New product line? Company going public? Acquired another company? Any newsworthy event you may have, do a press release and submit it through PRweb.com and many other quality Press release sites. Some PR sites allow backlinks to the main site and in this case we are getting links with marketing.

Here are some Press Release sites:
http://i-newswire.com

http://www.pr.com
http://www.pr9.net
http://www.press-base.com/

http://www.prfree.com

http://www.prleap.com

http://www.prweb.com/

http://www.webwire.com/

http://www.free-news-release.com/

http://www.myfreepr.com/

http://www.pr.com/

http://www.pr9.net/

http://www.prlog.org/

http://www.pressrelease.com.np/

You can find some more PR sites here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/95516-press-release-submission-websites.html

Also, keep track on those who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content to submit. You can also email your exclusive news & article content to some of your friends & relevant industry bloggers, when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback, they will publish the info if find that useful.

Article submissions: Write some informative articles and share your unique expertise by including tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. Syndicate articles on some great article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. You should optimize your author resource box to get the backlink to your website. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic. (Get complete detail about how we can get the best from article marketing.)

Here are some good article directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://www.articleclick.com

http://www.articlebiz.com/

http://www.articledashboard.com/

http://www.articlealley.com/

http://www.free-articles-zone.com

http://www.articleworld.net

You can find some more resources here:

http://www.styopkin.com/article_submission_sites.html

http://www.beansoftware.com/article-sites-master-list.aspx

Blogging: Blogging is a good way to get traffic, populairity and backlinks. Blogs give you great presence on major search engines, like Google, Yahoo! & MSN. A well-written, routinely updated, keyword-oriented blog can enhance your chances of getting higher rankings on search engine result pages. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with earning a link from a blog post you decide to comment on. In fact, if you comment often on blogs, it is a good way to increase the amount of inbound links pointing to your site’s pages. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

Here is a short list of things “not to do” when commenting on blogs.

• Don’t spam thru Blog commenting. Comments like “nice post” or “I agree” and then include a link is not a good way to create the link, you should try to give valuable comments to gain the authority. Spamming comments, spelling and grammar errors, or even unprofessional language will reflect badly on you, doing you more harm than good.
• Don’t try to stuff keyword rich anchor text in the “Name” field.
• Don’t mass comment all at once. When I see the same person commenting on a number of posts, all in a row, their intentions are clear.

Be a part of Technorati. Technorati tag pages rank well in Search Engines. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

There are 100’s of free blog directories available on the net where you can submit your blog for free. It will help you to get back links also. But take care of the relevancy. Always submit your blog in to relevant directories.

Here are some directories:

PR: 8 Technorati

PR: 8 Blogarama.com

PR: 7 blogcatalog.com

PR: 7 eatonweb.com

PR: 7 ping-o-matic.com

PR: 7 blogtoplist.com

PR: 6 WeBlogALot.com

PR: 6 BlogHop.com

PR: 6 blogdir.com

PR: 6 blog-directory.org

PR: 5 blogroll.net

PR: 5 biggerblogger.com

PR: 4 blogrankings.com

Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

Links from using the “Blog and Ping” technique

This technique is mainly for getting your pages into the search engines as quickly as possible.

Links from social bookmarking sites using the “Tag and ping” technique

It will help put your site on the Internet map and if done right, Tag and Ping will deliver plenty of targeted traffic to your blog/website. It will boost your rankings as well. Just make sure you’re using some Ping and Tag marketing techniques to harvest all those links, traffic and sales for your site. If this is still confusing to you, one simple way to ping your tags/blogs is to use a site like: http://pingomatic.com/ and it will automatically ping your blog in many of the most popular blogging services.

Social Communities & Networking Sites: Start creating profile on social community sites and forums & build your network. Many forums allows signature links on every thread. Strong networking can bring lots of visitors to your site with quality back links.

Join The Bloggers Groups: You can join relevant bloggers groups. By writing some quality post you can get traffic to the blog and some back links also.

Offer something FREE: You can offer valuable information on something that an end-user finds useful, such as free tools, industry specific reports etc. This is the Natural Link Building process as an end-user finds something on a web site that they feel is useful and they create a link to it.

Affiliate Linking – Affiliate link building is one of the most prominent ways to increase you customer base and sales without actually making a lot of efforts when compared to other marketing techniques. These services are beneficial for increasing sales. These are usually especially strong, and easily obtained one-way backlinks because normally they don’t have a bunch of other links diminishing the value of your backlink.

Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Just create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & participate in as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together and link back to your affiliate website.

Similarly, Qassia is a good way to get the one way links. Post some intels and you will get one way links and some good traffic from other members.

Write about others: If you want links from some influencial sites then this tactic can be very useful. You just need to write a news article about the individual or company with some authenticity and request a quote from them. Once they know you’re writing about them, make sure to send them a copy of the press release or story once it hits.

Links from Classified Ads: This type of advertising is very useful to get backlinks, traffic & sales, including a short summary (text based) and telephone number for contact. There are other details presented with certain free classified ads, including the name of the company, service or product provided, website link and detailed descriptions. Sometimes the backlink marked no-follow so does not count for Google, but some search engines ignores the no-follow, so counts with them. You can submit several ads for different products/niches within different categories and some local directories as well.

Similarly, sites from Citysearch & Yellow Pages to Google Maps provides global, local links if you sign up with them. You can find local business dircetories & yellow pages where you can list your business for free.

Check competitors’ links: This may sound unscrupulous but it is one of the most effective ways to build relevant links. Firstly, you have to search pages that link to your competitors’ sites and get those sites to link to you as well. You can easily get the relevant links because the site is already linking out to people in your industry. This will consume less time as we need not to invest much time in searching the relevant websites/ directories for linking. The most effective ways to find your competitors’ links are listed below:

1. At Yahoo! type linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
2. At MSN’s techpreview type link:url.com -site:url.com
3. At Yahoo! type link:http://www.url.com
4. At Google type “url.com” -site:url.com

These are typically the most reliable way to find the sites and pages that link to your competitors and, incidentally, those sites which link to you.

Keep track on updates in your industry: Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of, if not, the first comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight.

Link thru Wikipedia: . Create a page related to unexplored topics in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. Don’t link directly your site but try to add links to other pages that link to your site. Try to add your link in the “discussion” section for the page. This way, you get a real, non-nofollow, indexable link from Wikipedia and you are at a much lower risk of pissing off the community of editors.

Links from partners: See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

So these are some of the great ways to get the quality backlinks.
But don’t forget that the link growth should be as natural as possible. If you are running a link building campaign than even try to make it as natural as posibe with these ways:

1- Anchor text should varies

2- Link growth should not be too high & should be natural, so control the frequency

3- Limit the reciprocal no. or can go for 3 way linking

Path of learning does not have any cul-de-sac therefore this post cannot be treated as a complete guide; rather it will act as a briefing for beginners and catalyst for mid level enthusiasts.
After going through the post, I will encourage you to submerge yourself into the web and figure out what is relevant to you as new things come up almost daily.

The more you are intact with the updates, better you understanding would be on the subject. Happy learning……

Reference Resources:

http://seomoz.org/

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Everyone is promising of best exposure to the maximum number of viewers. Yesterday, Google & Facebook both announced the launch of their new application- Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect respectively.

Google said- “Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut.” Friend Connect is using open standards like OpenID and OAuth to makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit.

Facebook Connect represents an analogous but more open system that allows third-party Web sites to accept Facebook login information. It also provides users with the opportunity to share content created at a third-party Web site on Facebook. Facebook Connect allows Facebook’s users to participate on other websites using their Facebook IDs. So this opportunity of exposure to Facebook’s large audience (125 million) could encourage publishers to choose Facebook’s system over Google’s.

For example, if you want Digg a story then you can log in to Digg with your Facebook login ID and password and can vote on Digg just like a registered Digg user and all these activities will be reflected in your Facebook news feed in the same way it would if they had written on the Wall of one of their Facebook friends.

Both the applications are designed to expand social-networking capabilities across the Web. Facebook Connect allows us to link stuff to our social network on Facebook, while Google Friend Connect lets any web site add a social networking element.

Now, the biggest question for users including marketers, advertisers & publishers is- Which one is the right networking media?

What does u think?

References:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/facebook-connec.html

Facebook is one of the best social media platforms. Facebook is evolving with exciting applications on regular basis. Currently, it has over 52,000 applications with 14 billion page views per month. People are appreciating these applications & actively using those. Yesterday, Facebook has announced Facebook Connect- a feature to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into your own site!!!!

“With Facebook Connect, you can take the same Platform features and tools that you’ve used to grow your applications successfully, and integrate them into your own website.”

With Facebook Connect you can use your Facebook character on partner sites such as CitySearch, TechCrunch, howcast, Digg etc. Now, you need not to remember different ID’s & Passwords J

Now, with the help of Facebook Connect, users can log in to a site using their facebook account & can easily find friends also using the website, and share information and experiences using the same features as they would on a Facebook application.

With Facebook Connect, users can easily share and distribute the information and actions to their friends via Facebook Feed, requests, and notifications.

This feature will help with the emergence of a new “social Web”.

Today I have noticed one new thing in Google search results- A site specific search box below the top search result of a site in SERPs. Then I searched more about it & found that this is not a new thing but I noticed it today only.

Sometime this search box appears with sitelinks & sometime without sitelinks. This new feature of Google is a good functionality for users as they can directly search the most relevant pages within their most relevant search results.

The search box usually appears if you search for big sites comprised of networks of microsites/ subdomains/subdirectories etc. When we enter a search query into the search box, Google fetches the results within that site and display the search results. I liked this feature and what about you?

Social bookmarking is very popular & widely used by people around the web. First time I heard about these social bookmarking sites like Furl, reddit, del.icio.us etc. around 2 years back, that time social bookmarking was not that much popular as it is these days. Now, it has become a handy tool to keep the record of web pages & links you like the most. It has become very popular because of some great features like tagging, easy search, sharing & networking.

Now, around 2 weeks back I found a new bookmarking way i.e. image bookmarking- a technique of organizing all the wonderful images around the web.

Now, your question might be why?

Bookmarking sites like reddit, furl, del.icio.us etc are not visual in nature and therefore it’s nice to have a fanatical tool to entertain the eye as well as the mind.

These image bookmarking sites work in a similar manner like text-based social bookmarking. When members discover an image worth saving, they bookmark it. People are appreciating these sites (though I myself haven’t tried much)

Here are some image bookmarking sites:

: Photagr is a social bookmarking site, inspired by the wonderful site del.icio.us, but geared towards photos. It is a way of creating your own gallery of images found all over the web. This could be a collection of fine art photographs, family photos, icons, or any combination there of. Once on photagr you can then discover images other web surfer’s have found and tagged.

: vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking website for visual contents — vi.sualize.us (read visualize us) allows you to remember your favorite images around the web, and share them with everyone.

: imgfave is an image bookmarking service that allows you to save all your favorite images from around the web in one convenient place. You can also subscribe to users you like to keep up to date on what they’re adding.

: We Heart It is a social bookmarking tool for images and videos but IE doesn’t support   bookmarklets.

: FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

: Typeish is an image bookmarking database showcasing a careful selection of inspirational, provocative, intoxicating, exquisite, captivating, photography, designs, type, art, fashion & more.

:

Once you register as user, Photoree creates for you a personal filter stored in the database. This filter is responsible for the selection of the images that will be shown to you. Photoree shows you a stream of images which you will rate. Rating is important as the algorithm uses it to train and adapt your filter. More the photos you rate, better the filter will learn your taste.

Now, with the help of these image bookmarking sites, you can enjoy the interesting photos you found, in your own personal collection of favorites.

You can discover images with your personal filter what kind of photos you like. And yes, you can Share the photos you discovered, to your contact list or to the whole world, the choice is yours.

I was watching a video of WebProNews’ Mike McDonald with Matt Cutts and here you go with some of the key points, which might be of some use to you.

Does PageRank have lost its significance?

Matt Cutts said that ranking is not as important as it used to be. He suggests that the main focus should be on traffic & conversions, not just the rankings. Webmasters should keep building good content and should not worry about keywords or keyphrases. The content should be very natural & original.

SEO in 2009?

Matt said that SEOs should need to work on broader perspective to get great response. They have to think about creating buzz, finding the ways of getting more loyal customers, maximization of ROI, videos creation & optimization, image & flash optimization and more.

According to Matt mobile marketer should think about the users’ experience not just about search engines.

View about Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is getting more malicious these days & people are doing illegal stuff. Google has been focusing on its different technologies to manage the black hat & spam issue.

Any advantages of using Sub-Domains?

There is no real advantage to using Sub-domains. Sub-domains can actually increase the work.

Every website owner is fighting to get back links from other websites to increase the PR & ranking on Google search results. But they are not concerned about the internal linking of the site which is also a very important factor in search engine ranking.

Let’s first understand the difference between internal & external linking……

Internal linking is the links on web pages or the website that point to other pages within the same website. External linking is when we put link on one website to another website.

Why Internal linking is important?

Internal linking is very important for any website as:

• It increases the accessibility of the website for users & search engines. Search Engines like Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user’s experience easier and better

• It helps search engines & user to navigate the site easily

• It is a perfect strategy for giving an extra boost to specific pages for specific keywords

• It helps search engines to crawl deep web pages which are away from main menu, navigation bar or home page of the website

• Anchor links helps search engines to co-relate the pages with the overall theme of the website

Internal Linking to get the top ranking on Google or Other Search Engines

As said above Internal linking is very important but I have seen many websites where every 5^th-6th word is linked with other page of the website which actually looks very irritating. We should not mistreat this opportunity as spamming.

I have consolidated some best practices of Internal Linking which is good from Search Engines & Users point of view.

1- Utilize every opportunity of effective internal linking like add links in your navigation, header or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections of the website.

2- Internal page linking thru dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript is not a good way of linking as search engines cannot follow links created in JavaScript; they can only follow simple text links. We should use simple text links to link all internal pages of the website.

3- Every page of the website should be maximum 2 clicks away from the home page of the website. E-commerce sites are usually very big in size so in that case search engine might face problem in crawling & indexing all deep level pages without appropriate internal linking.

4- In some times it is not possible to link every page of the website with the main menu or header or footer of the website; in that case internal contextual linking thru web content is a good idea to enhance the accessibility of the site.

5- Try to use relevant keywords as anchor text instead of using “Click here” etc.

6- Always use the same URL when you are linking a specific page. For example, if you want to link your service page (www.example.com/service.html) from other pages of the site then you should always use the same URL. Some people use different URL to link the same page like sometime example.com/service.html & some time www.example.com/service.html, this can create canonicalization issue.

7- Use breadcrumb navigation on sites that will link to other pages often

8- All internal links should work properly. Broken links are not good from both users & search engines perspective.

9- Use site map with all important pages links. It will help search engines & users to search all level web pages. Sitemap is not only effective for SEO, but also has usability benefits.

10- Some web pages may be more popular in the search rankings and receive more links than the rest of your website. You can strengthen these weaker pages by including some contextual links to them from the stronger pages.

11- Check your server logs for 404 errors. fix any broken links and redirect old linked to pages to their new locations

12- Try to use absolute URLs for internal linking as it can help you when you’re reusing content across multiple protocols (such as http and https). Absolute URLs provide you with indirect benefits in unforeseen situations, such as when someone steals your copy and forgets to change the internal links. Absolute URLs also show you exactly where your links lead, whereas links using “…/somewhere.html” structures are ambiguous and, especially in deep-content sites, often cause links to break when pages are moved around. Absolute URLs provides the better control over optimization.

13- Linking page & text should have connection which is actually beneficial for the users. Linking should not be from SE’s point of view.

14- Pages which are not very important from users & search engines point of view should have nofollow attribute while linking with navigational part of the site, because thru linking with those less important pages we are passing our link PRs to pages that aren’t as important. For example: private policy pages, legal terms, thank you pages, shopping carts, sitemap etc. are not very important so we can put a nofollow tag on these pages. You can understand in this way, like you should put nofollow tags on those pages which are not important for (search engine result pages) SERPs as people might not come to your site thru those pages. Basically, every link that you put it, ask yourself “does that page/section need more link weight?”, and if the answer is no, nofollow it. Don’t go overboard though, or else you won’t have any internal links as far as the engines are concerned.

15- Find out a list of pages which are most important for you- from SE’s & Users’ perspective. Try to optimize the internal linking of these pages with appropriate anchor text. If you have several pages for the same product range like in case of e-commerce sites then link the main page to all other pages but you can put nofollow tags on less important pages. Always put a link back from deeper pages to the main page of that specific category.

A well structured internal linking pattern will help SE’s to navigate your site in a better way & in longer way it will help you to get sitelinks in Google.

I am sure these internal linking techniques will be very helpful in your site optimization in a better manner.

Please don’t forget to digg or stumble this article if you really find it helpful for others.

Go SEO!!

Google has again become generous & reveal some secrets about the use of images & their optimization. I hear a lot of the concerns, questions, thoughts, etc about image optimization.

You might have read many articles on the same topic….It might not be new to you but I found it helpful so thought to share it with all of you.

Images are important component of a website and you will be happy to know that images can bring lots of traffic to your sites, but we have to optimize our images to get the desired results.

Here are image optimization tips from Googlers:

We should use Alt attribute to optimize them, this attribute allows us to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Alt text (alt tag) is basically a brief description of the image.

It is useful, if a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, or is using alternative technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture. Similarly, if you’re using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, Google don’t recommend using too many images for links in your site’s navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Also, image optimization makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.

Always use descriptive file names & avoid using image.jpeg, picture1.jpeg etc. For example: if you are inserting image of IBM printer then use the file name ibm-printer.jpeg or ibm-printer.gif etc. Don’t write lengthy file names but try to make it accurate.

Store images in a directory of their own, instead of having image files spread out in numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain; consider consolidating your images into a single directory (e.g. yourdomain.com/images/). This simplifies the path to your images.

Also, use commonly supported file types. Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats. It’s also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the
File type.

Also, don’t forget to optimize PDF. You can also use PDF adds-ons from Mozilla that enable you to complete the PDF-Object metadata, place links inside PDFs which did not previously have them.