Guest blogging is one of the essential parts of a link building strategy. It helps us obtain high quality relevant links to our website which can help increase PR (page rank), link popularity and boost website traffic. Guest blogging has also been an alternative to article marketing. Since article directories were severely hit by Google’s Panda algorithm, article marketing is no longer recommended. However, when it comes to link value, article marketing could still give you some traffic once in a while.

In order to succeed in guest blogging, there are some few and minor rules that we should look at before we start doing it. For some reason, some bloggers don’t meet the blog owner’s requirements and in the end, they regretfully ask themselves why they didn’t follow their guidelines, which I will reveal below.

#1) Disregarding Website Guidelines

To avoid low quality and spam content, webmasters have provided guidelines to follow by their guest bloggers to ensure that their standard for content is properly maintained. Some of these guidelines are really common and you will find almost the same guidelines on other blogs as well which includes:

• Word count – Normally, web masters prefer to accept content with a minimum of 500 words with reliable information and useful advice for the benefits of their readers. You must keep in mind that webmasters value their visitors and treasure them. So, make sure that you are writing for the sake of their readers and not for the sake of backlinks!

• Excessive Linking – Linking is fine and advisable to help readers understand deeply a specific part of your content but if you link to too many pages, there is a possibility that you will drive away the attention of your readers and may lose their focus on reading your content. So avoid excessive linking if you don’t want to annoy your readers.

• Uniqueness of your content – High quality content is necessary and originality is crucial. If you would like to create good online reputation and credibility, avoid rehashing content of others or copying their thoughts. However, if your post is identified as duplicated, it will not be published anyway.

#2) Posting Irrelevant Topic and Different Language

Producing unrelated topic on a niche focused website is definitely a waste of time. If you are in the gaming industry and would like to contribute a post on a website focusing in the insurance industry with a link pointing back to your gaming website, there is no way that you will be accepted (unless your post is paid). Also, avoid using another language rather than English. However, if you are targeting non-English countries such as China, focus mainly on the blogs/websites that are written in Chinese language.

#3) Irrelevant Linking

Linking pages that have nothing to do with your content are definitely a huge mistake and must be avoided. Most webmasters only allow linking pages that are relevant and have value to your content. So if you are guest blogging for the sake of “building links” only, there is no way your post will be accepted.

Guest posting is necessary for bloggers and in SEO. So, we must comply with the guidelines of each relevant niche website that we will contribute on and make sure that our effort will benefit the readers of those websites and hopefully our website will receive more visitors and will gain more credibility as well.

Thanks to Joseph for his guest post. Now over to you. What have been your experiences with guest blogging? Is guest blogging a part of your overall strategy? How do you use it? Do you accept guest posts on your blog?

This week’s “Friday Finds” highlights Matt Cutts’ recent announcement that Google will soon be releasing Penguin 2.0. In his video, Matt talks about Google looking closer at advertorials that violate Google’s quality guidelines. He also talks about new algorithm changes that attempt to detect links to “authority” sites and rank them higher in the SERPs. Another article that you may find interesting addresses speculation (among some SEO experts) that Google+ may come into play when it comes to detecting authority.

Google Penguin 2.0 Algorithm Updates

Last Friday, Matt Cutts (the head of webspam at Google) tweeted that within the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out version 2.0 of its Penguin update. While the first update focused on black hat SEO and quality links, Cutts noted that this release promises to focus on giving special ranking boosts based on “authoritative” sites. While he doesn’t offer specifics on how authority is determined, there’s speculation that participating on Google+ may have a positive impact.

To quote Michael Garrity, author of Could Google+ Play a Role in the Upcoming Penguin Update?, one expectation is that “. . .  content that gets linked to or from Google+ will be weighted more heavily or at least with more credibility, than if it were just a link on a random website or blog.”

If Google were to begin giving more weight to links shared on their social networking site, this could potentially have an impact on where an article appears in the SERPs. Of course this is just speculation at this point but for those of us who have been somewhat slow to actively participate on Google+, this may be one more reason to think about it strategically.

Matt Cutts: What to Expect in terms of SEO from Google?

For those of you who may have missed the “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?” video that Matt Cutts recently released, you can watch it here:

Basically, the highlights (that I’ve gleaned) from this video are:

• Create a great website that visitors will love. (Google will work hard to show high quality sites.)
• Google has been “looking at advertorials, that is, sort of native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines”.
• “There is nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising but they should not flow page rank and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure.”
• Google is looking at ways to deny the value to link-spammers.
• Google continues to work on “hack” sites and to communicate better with webmasters who have had their sites hacked.
• Google is doing a better job of tweaking their algorithms to detect when someone is sort of an “authority” in a specific space and helping them to rank a little bit higher.  (This portion of the video starts at approximately 4:42 and is what the first article that I linked to refers to.)

Over to You

What are your thoughts? Are you concerned that the Penguin 2.0 updates may have a negative impact on your SEO efforts? Do you find that these video chats that Matt Cutts tapes to answer specific questions valuable? Personally, I believe him when he closes his video saying “We’ve got a lot of nice changes queued up that hopefully will help (you know) small/medium businesses and (you know) regular webmasters as well”. I’m hopeful at least.

This post is part of the weekly series Friday Finds featuring news that you may find both valuable and interesting. The topics that I’ll be focusing on this week include link building, tips on converting website visitors, social media and tips on CSS style sheets.

Interesting Articles You May Find Valuable

Big List of Link Building No-Nos
Sometimes the best way to learn about something is by reading an article that lists what not to do. Lots of bloggers talk about the importance of link building. In this article by Michael Garrity for Website Magazine, he advises his readers to avoid eight common link building mistakes ranging from tips about content, commenting, social media, buying links, submitting to directories, over-linking to your own site and the use of anchor text.

8 Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Conversion Rates
Sometimes, we put too much focus on website traffic and not enough focus on conversions. Whether we’re looking for buyers, clients or subscribers, our focus should be on the bottom line. In this article, Daniel Sharkov shares eight tips on how to get better conversion rates by tweaking your WordPress blog.

7 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Engagement
With over 1,950 tweets as I’m writing this, there’s a good chance you may have already read this article but it’s definitely worth sharing here. This guest post by Bryden McGrath on SocialMediaExaminer.com provides some great tips on how to encourage people to interact with you using social media. The screenshots that he includes highlight examples from companies such as Whole Foods Market, The New York Times, the Travel Channel and NBC News. You’re bound to pick up an idea or two from reading this.

6 Simple Tips For Learning CSS For WordPress
CSS stands for cascading style sheets and basically it’s a document that defines the design element of your website/blog. (Many of you may not remember the old days of having to code the design elements into each page of what was referred to then as “static” HTML websites. It was a boring and tedious task.)  Every WordPress theme includes a CSS style sheet. Making some simple styling changes can be intimidating. If you’d like to expand your CSS knowledge, check out this post. I found the link that he included to explain the CSS box model to be especially helpful.

 Over to You

As always, feel free to discuss, share and have conversations with one another in the comment section below. On a personal note, I’ll be MIA for most of next week and a couple of days the following week for a much needed getaway. So, if you don’t hear from me that will be why. I’ll catch up with everyone when I get back. (Meanwhile, when I am here, I’ll do my best to reply to each and every one of you because I do value what you have to say.)

How many social networking sites are there? Does anyone really know? How in the world are we supposed to know which ones to join? Sure, we should probably join the major ones that pop into most everyone’s mind (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter just to name a few) but what about sites like Biz Sugar, Blog Engage and Triberr? Aren’t those important social networking sites too? How do you determine which sites fit best into your social media strategy?

The Number of Social Networking Sites out There

Out of curiosity, I searched to see if anyone claimed to know how many social networking sites there are today. As expected, I did not find a definitive answer. I decided that the best resource for this piece of information may be to go directly to KnowEm.com.

KnowEm has been tracking social networking sites since April of 2009. This company was founded to help individuals and companies secure their name across multiple Social Media networks and to help protect their brand. On KnowEm.com, you can check to see if your username is available on the most popular social networking sites for free. Then, you can register for the ones that you want to join.

As an alternative, you can sign up for one of four different plans ranging from $69.95 to $649. (The plans include sign-up, email confirmation and uploading your photo and bio for you. The least expensive plan includes 25 networks and the Enterprise plan includes 300 networks.) They also offer a brand protection program (for an additional $59.95) where they will secure your user name on new sites for you.

According to KnowEm, their database includes over 550 popular social networking sites. So, for the sake of this article, let’s assume that there are at least that many sites. So how do you get started and how can you not quickly become overwhelmed?

Tips on Getting Started with Social Media

1.) Choose Your User Name: Since your username is a big part of your brand, you’ll want to make sure that you’re selecting a unique username. Start by going to KnowEm.com and search to see if your username is available. (Keep in mind that Twitter only allows up to 15 characters for your username.)

2.) Register your username on the most popular networking sites that you’re familiar with and on those sites that are specific to your niche. (Even if you have no intention of being active on a site, reserving your name prevents someone else from reserving it.)

3.) Set up your globally recognized Avatar at Gravatar.com. (This is free and easy to do. Simply register the email address that you will use to comment, the URL of your website and upload your profile pic. Whenever you leave a comment, your pic will appear. That’s it.)

You’ll also want to create a keyword rich profile on all of the social media sites that you join. I think it’s a good idea to keep track of which sites you’ve joined and what profile you used. Since I’m a bit of a spreadsheet addict, I maintain this info in an Excel spreadsheet. That way, if I refine my profile, I can easily see which sites I need to tweak.

The Case for Creating multiple Social Media Profiles

Leora Wenger has an interesting post on her blog titled New to Social Media? Understand the Challenges. The guest author, Carlo Pandian, addresses the issues of deciding which sites to join and how to manage your time. (There’s a lively discussion going on in the comment section too).

In the comment I left for Leora, I suggested that it’s a good idea to reserve your username and create a profile on several social media sites – whether or not you have any intention of ever being active there. My reasons for recommending this include:

• Reserving your username protects your brand. (If you don’t reserve your username, someone else can.)
• A site may not fit your strategy now but either the site and/or your social media strategy could change in the future. (For example, you may  decide to start a business or blog in a new niche and those potential customers/clients may be very active in networks you never thought you’d be active on. So, why not reserve your name now?)
• A site that you can join for free today may turn into a membership site in the future. (It’s not uncommon for these sites to grandfather early adopters.)
• Being a member of a social network can add to your social proof. (When I join a new site, I’ll often look to connect with people who regularly share my content.)
• Your site profile has the potential of being do-follow.

Over to You

Which social media sites do you actively participate on? Do you agree that it’s a good idea to reserve your username and create a profile on multiple social networking sites? What are your top 3 sources of referral traffic? (Last month, mine were Twitter, StumbleUpon and BizSugar with Twitter driving three times more visits than the #2 and #3 sources.) Lastly, LinkedIn is my favorite social networking site for building mutually beneficial relationships. While it doesn’t make my top three sources of referral traffic, I can attest that many of my clients first met me there.

This post is part of the weekly series Friday Finds featuring news that you may find both valuable and interesting. The topics that I’ll be focusing on this week include a security vulnerability in two popular WordPress plugins, award winning websites, a blogger’s view of keyword stuffing and infographics about online marketing strategies and social media. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts, concerns and experiences in the comment section. That way, we can all continue to learn from each other.

Interesting Articles You May Find Valuable

Remote Code Execution Vulnerability was Disclosed: A security vulnerability that affects two favorite WordPress caching plugins was brought to everyone’s attention this week. Both WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) are at risk of being exploited. This is a very serious vulnerability and at the very least you should make sure that the plugins are updated. Some of the commenters in this article suggest replacing them entirely.

Award-Winning Websites That Inspire Us – This article takes a look at some of the companies that won a Best Website award from the IAC (Internet Advertising Competition) in 2013. The 10 winners that are featured represent: Government, Small Business, Advocacy, Employment (2), Beverages, Travel, Automobiles, Retail and Consumer Goods.

Keyword Stuffing – What’s the Limit? – This article was posted a couple of weeks ago but (like many good blog posts) the content will be relevant for a long time. I think it’s a good follow-up post to the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago that featured a video of Matt Cutts (the head of webspam at Google) talking about the “Synonym” team at Google.

37 Different Online Marketing Strategies (#infographic) – This one is for those of you who find infographics informative and a nice break from reading long blog posts. If you’re the type of person who enjoys infographics, you may also want to check out the Social Media Snapshot Men vs Women infographic that I blogged about this week.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below. For those of you who have concerns that your WordPress site may have malware (or a few other security risks), you can always scan your site for free here on Sucuri.net.  Best wishes for a safe and happy weekend and a productive week ahead

Where do you spend the bulk of your time on social media? I’m sure your answer depends on why you’re there. Let’s face it, social media can be a huge time waster and if we’re not careful, we can quickly lose track of whether or not we’re achieving our social media goals. (You are tracking your social media goals right?) So, which social networking sites should you be on? Well, if one of the ways that you define your target customer is by gender, you may want to take a quick look at this infographic:

How Men and Women Spend their Time on Social Media:

Thanks to InternetServiceProviders.com for compiling this infographic with data that they compiled from: PewStates.org (the Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of this organization), PoetsAndQuants.com, NYTimes.com and NCES.ed.gov.

Bullet Points from the Infographic:

• Every month, users spend an average of 405 minutes on Facebook compared to 3 minutes on Google+.
• Each month, 40 more million women than men visit Twitter.
• On Facebook, 62% of the sharing is done by women.
• On Pinterest, 70% of the users are females.
• On Google+, 64% of the users are males.
• 20% of online adults use LinkedIn with males slightly edging out women at 54%. (Of all LI users, only 1 in 10 use the paid version.)
• There are approximately 280 million active YouTube accounts with men spending an hour a week on YouTube (on average).

Do any of these statistics surprise you? Which of the social media sites are you the most active on? Why do you feel that site is a good fit for you? My main goal for networking online is to build awareness and to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships. So, while I maintain an active presence on most of the major sites, I tend to use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest for sharing content while I  spend the bulk of my time on LinkedIn. What are your thoughts?

This is a new weekly post where I’ll be sharing interesting posts that I’ve found throughout the week. Today, I’ll start with a brief recap on the recent attack on WordPress sites including a link to an article that I believe covers the situation thoroughly with some steps that you can take immediately. Whether you’re a newbie blogger or a seasoned veteran, you should either be able to either learn something new or share your experience and personal recommendations with the rest of us.

How to Protect Your WordPress Website from Security Attacks

Here’s just a quick recap of some of the very basic things that you should be doing to protect your WordPress blog/website. Hopefully, you’re already doing these things.

• Delete the default “admin” username. How? 1) Create a new user with administrator rights. 2) Logon as that user and delete admin. 3) When you’re prompted to transfer all of the posts created under the admin username, select your new account. 4) Backup your database.
• Create a secure password. It needs to be a minimum of 8 characters long, including characters and numbers, at least one capital letter and at least one special character. Possibly the best solution is to use a password service such as: LastPass or RoboForm.
• Limit the number of logon attempts per host in a specified time period. (If you’re not using a more robust security plugin, at the very least, install the Login Lockdown plugin. Yes, it’s an old plugin and it hasn’t been updated recently but it still performs well as is.)
• Set up file change detection to notify you if there are changes to your WP installation. (Plugins like Better WP Security enable you to do this and you can exclude notifications when directories like cache are modified.)
• There are several popular WordPress security plugins that you can install to protect your site. Three of the most popular are: Better WP Security, WordFence Security and BulletProof Security. (Feel free to share your favorite WordPress security plugin/program in the comment section.)

For a more in-depth article, I recommend reading Ongoing WordPress Security Attacks, The Details and Solutions.

How to Contact Some of the Major Social Network Sites

If you have had an issue trying to contact the support team for any of the major social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, I’m sure you would have appreciated having access to this great article by Kristi Hines: How to Contact Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Other Social Networks.  This is definitely a link that I’ve bookmarked.

How To Optimize and Promote your Blog Posts

Recently, I wrote a post titled Tips for Bloggers | Before You Press that Publish Button where I shared tips on some simple SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how to optimize your images and graphics for the search engines.  To expand on the information in my article, I recommend reading How I promote my new blog posts by Mike Alton where he shares the 21 steps that he takes after he posts an article to his blog.

I hope you find these resources helpful and I hope you like the idea of my writing this series of posts which I intend to schedule on Fridays. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts, ideas and recommendations below.

Google Reader won’t be available after July 1^st, 2013. What does that mean to you? Well, for starters, for those of you who may be unclear what an RSS Feed is, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it’s a method of delivering your latest blog posts to readers who choose to subscribe. Now, there are two ways to sign up for this delivery. You can either sign up to have an RSS feed delivered by email or you can subscribe to have it delivered to an RSS reader. If you currently use Google Reader to access RSS feeds, you need to find an alternative.

If You Subscribe to RSS Feeds:

You’ve probably already read one of the numerous blog posts that have been recommending RSS readers. If you’re interested in reading one more, LifeHacker.com conducted a poll to find out what people considered to be the best alternative to Google Reader. The Five Best Google Reader Alternatives (according to their reader nominations) include: The Old Reader, NewsBlur, Feedly, NetVibes and Pulse. Of course, there are many more than five alternatives and some people are passionate about this topic. When I last checked, this article had 100 discussions going on in the comment section for that post.

Perhaps one of the more surprising efforts to replace Google Reader is by Digg who is promising to build a functionally complete replacement including an API (Application Programming Interface) which would enable developers to build Android and IOS apps to interface with it. (You may want to consider waiting for this one.) Digg has asked anyone who is interested to “pitch in your thoughts”. So, feel free to join in that conversation or simply read the thread for more insight.

If You Burn an RSS Feed for Your Blog:

Although Google has not officially announced that they’re discontinuing FeedBurner (Google’s service that generates an RSS Feed for your blog), the writing is pretty much on the wall. Most bloggers believe that at some point, it will be gone. Once again, there have been numerous blog articles recommending alternatives.

Honestly, I am still using FeedBurner. So, I can’t personally make any recommendations (yet) but after a little research, I came upon this article, 15 Great FeedBurner Alternatives that (in my opinion) does a good job of covering some of the alternatives. (As always, please let us know in the comment section what you’re using, considering or think we should avoid.)

Don’t Delete Your Google FeedBurner Feed:

Okay. You’re probably wondering why I’ve told you all this and haven’t yet explained why I’m recommending that you don’t delete your FeedBurner feed when/if you replace FeedBurner with another service. Well, today, I received an email from FeedBlitz (one of the services that I am seriously considering) and they go into lengthy detail of why deleting your FeedBurner Feed is a bad idea.

Personally, I recommend reading their article but bottom line; their points are that (if you delete your FeedBurner feed):

• Your existing RSS feed will be deleted after 15 days.
• RSS subscribers (who don’t update their RSS reader) will stop getting your latest posts.
• You will lose your old FeedBurner links.
• You will lose your old FeedBurner analytics.
• After 30 days, you will lose your Feedburner URL. (Yikes! Someone else could claim it.)

Now, honestly, I have not committed to using FeedBlitz (Note: this is my affiliate link) yet but so far, they’re my front runner. One of the things that impresses me about them is that they seem committed to looking out for our best interests. Their pricing structure is set up so that you do not pay for subscribers who have your RSS feed delivered via a reader. Your monthly fee is based on the number of email subscribers that you have. Even if you’re not interested in using their service, you can download “The FeedBurner Migration Guide” for free. (It’s over 60-pages and I’ve already downloaded mine.)

Over to you: What are your thoughts? Do you use an RSS reader? What do you use to burn your RSS feed? Did you realize that by deleting your FeedBurner feed, you’re releasing your FeedBurner URL and someone else could start publishing to it (and readers who didn’t update their subscriptions would receive it)?

According to Google Webmaster Tools, keyword stuffing is defined as “the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results”. They go on to say that it “results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking”.  So, how can we write good content that our blog readers will enjoy while not getting penalized by the search engines?

A Quick Review of Where You Can Incorporate Keywords for SEO

There are lots of opportunities to use keywords in your blog posts. We can start by using them in our blog post titles, make sure they’re part of the permalink (what shows as the URL at the top of the page) and within our content. We can make sure to use them in heading tags (like the bold larger text that I have above this paragraph) and as anchor text (like these words that  link to a related article about keywords and SEO). Since we don’t want to overuse keywords, it’s common to use synonyms. (I like to use the thesaurus option of my word processor for suggestions.)

Matt Cutts Google & the “Synonym” Team

Have you ever wondered what Google thinks about synonyms? Did you know that they have an actual “Synonym Team”? Check out this video by Matt Cutts, (the head of webspam at Google) in response to the question “Should I incorporate synonyms for important terms into my site?”

The Takeaways from Matt Cutts’ Response on Using Keyword Synonyms

Google has an entire team of people whose job it is to realize that car and automobile mean the same thing. So, that’s an opportunity to naturally incorporate both terms in your website content. It’s perfectly acceptable to use interchangeable terms as long as you don’t sound “artificial”, “stilted” or “spammy”

Bottom-line, it always comes down to writing naturally, as if you’re having a conversation with your website visitors. Think of some of your favorite blogs. Why do you visit them? Do some of them make you smile? Make you feel more confident? Teach you something that you didn’t know? Some of the best advice that I read when I started to blog was to “find your voice”. Have you found yours?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem complicated and it can be overwhelming.  If you don’t have the resources to hire a technical SEO specialist, do you have any chance of your website being returned in the organic search results? Should you even try to optimize your site for SEO or should you rely on providing quality content and promoting your website through social media?

You Can’t Count on SEO Alone

A couple of months ago, David Rekuc wrote a guest post (for my blog) titled SEO Gets Social | How to Use Social to Get More out of Search.  As David points out, “If you follow SEO, you know that it’s a constantly evolving discipline.”  David went on to discuss the current trend in SEO which is the increasing impact of social media. He went on to explain the difference between direct influences (like Google+, Gmail, Google Authorship and Structured Data markup) and indirect influences (like YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, your Twitter handle, Facebook pages and your social “following”).

So, how do you tap into social media? How do you get a following and especially followers who are willing to share your content? Isn’t it in fact good content that your website visitors are looking for? Whether they’re looking to buy something, be entertained, be informed or be part of a community, we’re all surfing the web for a reason. Just do a quick search of either the keywords “Google Panda content” or“Google Penguin content”and you’ll see for yourself the overwhelming number of articles written about the importance of publishing quality content.

How to Survive Google Panda & Penguin Updates

At the recent SMX West (Search Marketing Expo), Matt Cutts (head of the “webspam” team at Google) spoke about the updates that were planned for both Google Panda and Penguin in 2013. (Actually, the most recent update to Panda occurred last weekend.)

Many of you here may already know Adrienne Smith. She describes herself as being “one of the good guys” when it comes to blogging and I agree! She provides quality content that her readers find valuable. She doesn’t purchase links or overwhelm her readers with advertising. So, why was she negatively impacted by Google’s Panda update?

Like Adrienne, I don’t understand why she lost organic search traffic. Thankfully, I haven’t personally noticed a drop but I certainly don’t feel that it can’t happen to me (or you). Neither Adrienne nor I rely heavily on search traffic. It’s nice to have and both if us pay attention to basic SEO tips. Bottom line, we both concentrate on writing quality content that our readers will find valuable.

What Can We Do to Avoid Being Penalized by Google Panda Updates

A recent article on Hubspot, titled How to Survive Google’s Pending Panda Update should provide you with some additional insight. The main takeaways being to avoid:

• Thin Content
• Duplicate Pages to Target Keywords
• High Ad Ratio
• Empty Web Pages
• Purchased Links

Adrienne (and many other bloggers and website owners) really believed that they complied with Google’s new algorithm changes. So why are so many people negatively affected by it?

Over to You

What are your thoughts? Were you one of the unlucky ones who have been penalized by Google’s algorithm changes? How important is organic search traffic to you?