Taking off from my previous post about 32 SEO tips you never know about search engine optimization, I continue. Hope you find them useful and do remember to add in those I have missed at the comments.

15. Use a robots.txt to tell the bots. Though bots have been having better brains now than they had in the 90s, they still need to be told where to go and where not to

16. Whoever told you that reciprocal links, blogroll exchanges and tag memes and webrings still get you better on SERPS, seriously has a sense of humour.

17. Do not use too much of online PR checkers, backlink pingers or any other tools too much to the extent that sites start ignoring your site as spam.

18. Installing software on your visitors sites with zango, mango or whatever will not help tango with google

19. Buying or selling links on your site with the intent of search results manipulation is not a good idea.

20. I have acctually noticed that having a disclaimer, a privacy policy and a about page does help in SEO.

21. Have a linking strategy. Linking to high authority sites “might be” a good idea.

22. A friend of mine is currently using a SEO company which gives them first page ranking for a highly competitive phrase. And that site has a Yahoo! Backlink count of 19. Go figure. Choose your SEO wisely.

23. Better never hire an search engine specialist, it is so easy that you can actually do it! Save your bucks for the Social Media Expert!

More tips coming soon in another post. Yet again, stay tuned!

I recently blogged about the movie camp that was conducted in technopark by Amvizone and the first movie shot at the movie camp was released yesterday. It is based on a theme that actually happened in Kerala some months back. It was a sad day So, to spread awareness about how not to respond in a accident situation, this movie goes to all of you.

BlogCamp Kerala 2008

It was an amazing day last Saturday, the 16th of August 2008. People from diverse backgrounds, when I say diverse, It goes everyone from a school student, a farmer, a cartoonist, a researcher and even a food lover! The day started off at Allapuzha with bloggers coming together at about 9. Though we had a small problem with the delay of the houseboat arrival, it actually helped people to start socializing and get to know each other.

At last at 10.30 the boat docked in and we all started off boarding and almost 100 bloggers got aboard and then the boat left into the virgin backwaters of Kerala. The rest was totally rocking. Visiting cards were exchanged, information with shared and tips were thought provoking and the food was pure authetic Kerala luxury complete with duck, fish and vegetable thorans.

I had a rocking time and my only regret was that I was not able to take up my session on “Blogging Ideas” due to time constraints. But then, we had some really informative sessions ranging from Voice Recognition, Blogging, SEO, SEM and making money online, audio blogging, campus blogging and even on blogging in malayalam by the passionate Kerala Farmer who rightly said -”Blogging is my Weapon!”

Thus, the biggest blogging unconference event in Kerala was one of the best, the attendees ever went to. I am putting up the ppt I had prepared for the event. The photos taken at the event are here and more are being tagged and uploaded with “blogcampkerala” tags.

After more than 4 months of owning my HTC S710 phone, I by accident found the settings for GPRS on my HTC phone using Vodafone India services. I had earlier tried to get the settings from Vodafone Care with no luck.
Initially I was insulted by being asked if HTC is a cheap crap chinese phone?!? Then they say that its not possible to get the normal Vodafone Live settings on my HTC as it was running Windows Mobile.

They were more interested in making me subscribe for Mobile Connect, their Rs.199/- or 5$ a month with full access to the internet. I was sure I did not need that as I had wifi connectivity at home, at most of my friends places and heck internet even in a car!!. The only reason I wished that I had vodafone gprs on my mobile was to have a backup in case I took a vacation or if I am stuck travelling or if I get abducted by terrorists. 5$ a month is a bit too much to my already in the roof phone bills (cannot be translated that I have a gf now!)

After a bit of playing around with the settings at the official site, I dicsovered the right mix for GPRS in HTC Mobiles with Vodafone India! Here goes:

First go to Settings -> Connections -> Hutch WAP (GPRS) (or create if you dont have this already)
Connects to: Work
Access point: portalnmms
User name: (empty)
Password: (empty)
Authentication type: Select the option ‘None’
Primary DNS: (empty)
2nd DNS: (empty)
IP Address: 10.10.1.100

Then go to Settings ->Proxy -> Hutch WAP Proxy (Again, create if you don’t have it already)
Connects from: Work
Connects to: WAP Network
Proxy (Name:port):10.10.1.100:9401
Type: Select ‘HTTP’
User Name: (empty)
Password: (empty)

Open Internet Explorer -> Tool -> Options -> Connections
Un-check the Automatically Detect Settings option
Select Network: WAP Network

After this, be sure to reboot your phone and thats it! Voila, Free Vodafone on HTC without having to subscribe to their 199 a month Mobile Connect Plan. I will report again in a few days if its possible to acctually connect my htc phone with a laptop and access the internet. See the Edge(E) symbol on the signal on my screenshot:

Browsing my blog with GPRS

This is a paid review, but it is my uninfluenced review and suggestions on the site.

I never looked into Blog Aggregators before I got this review request as I always thought they never provided any real value to the users except post content from other blogs. But when I got a request to review this Indian Blog Aggregator called enewss, I had to revisit my own prejudice about blog aggregators just being scraper sites.

Enewss is a Indian Blog Aggregator with a small twist to it. It combines the functions of a blog aggregator with a social network. This is a very innovative idea and it helps builds a community around the site. I always used to ask myself why people visit these sites and for what. Just a visit to enewss now, you will understand why it exists.

It contains information about various topics at a glance. But what is the point? I am not sure about english bloggers, but most of the regional language bloggers rely just on blog aggregators and regional digg clones for new posts in their language. This is where enewss comes in with its unique selling point, the social network with blog aggregator. It has language specific categories like Hindi, Tamil and usual categories like Technology, Recipes and others.

Suggestions:

There are quite a few things like simplicity, ease of use and white space that I loved with enewss. But there are a few other things I noted which can do with some improvement too.

1. Ad could be better placed within the content for a better CTR.
2. SEO in the pages need to be worked from ground up
3. Malayalam Categories is currently missing. I am sure they miss a social network like this.
4. Socializing the content on the site.

Conclusion

I am already a fan and think it holds a lot of promise in regional language aggregation as most of them are scattered and will find enewss very useful to getting in touch with other bloggers. What do you guys think about blog aggregators and enewss in particular?

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is something really simple and it amuses me that corporates are willing to shell out loads of greens on maintaining their top positions on SERPS. But then, though we all know how to change a bulb, we still pay an electrician to do it. Speciality is money in itself.

Here are a few excerpts from my mindmap on SEO that I am currently working on.

1. Incomplete sites, 404 links and  pages with little to no content will give you the boot on search engines.
2. When your site is ready, make sure to ping the Google, Yahoo! and Live engines with a sitemap so that they can index you. I have had Google index me for a site within 12 hours of creating it with Wordpress. All I did was create a post which used the default ping feature of Wordpress and use the sitemap plugin for create a sitemap page.
3. Sitemaps need to be of two kinds, one for the visitor in HTML and the other in XML for the lovely search bots.
4. Reputable Directories and Social Networks like Del.icio.us and furl will give your site good brownie points.
5. I am sure you know this SEO tip: NO Duplicate Content! But did you know that using multiple mirror sites with the same content is also a NO NO ?!?
6. Keyword Density is important, but how much stuffing is called SPAM?!? SEO gurus usually aim for a 20% for a high competitive phrase, but usually 8-10% is good enough.
7. Make sure your titles are readable, yet keyword rich. Consider the title of this post. “32 SEO Tips You Never Knew!” has the keyword “SEO tips” but the rest was inspired from copyblogger tips on writing interesting titles.
8. ALT tags on images are very important too. They apart from making you rank on image search, will also help those with disabilities to know what type of images are being shown on the page.
9. Title Tags are usually meant to be about 50-80 charecters.
10. Meta Tags can have about 30-40 words. But this is not very important in today’s SEO as most of the engines do not give importance to meta description or meta keywords. But it does not hurt to have ‘em!
11. Always have a H1 to depict the most important title, and a H2/H3 to show the sub-title key phrase. Helps the readers scanning the page as well as our lovely friendly search engine bots!
12. Have valid coded pages and fix any display errors.
13. SEO friendly urls. This is a nobrainer .com/index.php?word=seo?area=IN?tips=32 or .com/32-seo-tips/ ?
14. Take care about how you link to other sites. And be sure to have less than 100 links pointing outside your site. Prevents flagging of your site as spam!

I will be publishing the rest of the SEO tips this week, so stay tuned!

The contest finally came to an end last week and I am putting up the winners and their winnings here. If you have been selected as one, get in touch at Yahoo! or Gtalk IM or use the contact form to claim the same. First, here are the participants.

• John
• Shypy
• Aravind
• Sreehari
• Tito
• Haroon
• Meldweny
• Bob
• Shareng

I had assigned each of you a number and used  the randomizer and (drumroll please)…the winners are:

Shypy - Gets the first domain Entersurf.info

Haroon Hameed - Gets the Freedombabe.info

Aravind Jose gets my 2 hours of SEO help for any of his sites. ($997 worth )

And John and Tito gets free links on the sidebar for the next 2 months.

Get in touch with me to claim your prizes.

With my own blogging celebrations coming to an end today by 18:00 Indian time, I was back to thinking about how contests can help gain more traffic to our blogs. I know at least 10 bloggers who usually put up contests on their sites and giveaways to make their blogging community active and interesting. But do you think its a viable means of increasing traffic over the long term? I would really appreciate your comments on this.

Sometime back I had done a small un-comprehensive case study on how blogging contests affect traffic metrics on blogs. But then this contest was not meant to be a traffic puller, but was in essence to celebrate nothing, yet something

So make sure you are entering my little celebration and winning my $997 worth of SEO consultation In case you find my contest out of your tastes, you should definitely consider visiting TheUniversityKid since he is always into contests and prizes bribes all the time!!!!

Rajdhani Express - Trivandrum to Cochin

I finally travelled the ultimate luxury of trains in India! I have been travelling in trains for quite a long time as I was in the hostel at Rani Public School which is about 6 hrs on train from Cochin. Last month I got this really great chance to travel from Trivandrum to Cochin on the Queen of all trains in India - the Rajdhani Express

The train which is bi-weekly and beats timings of every other mode of travel to Cochin including the flight. It literally never stops after leaving Trivandrum at 19.15 and reaches Cochin by 22.30. I say it beats the flights too since it reaches the heart of Cochin in 3.15 hrs. Try the flight now to reach the same place.

And the fare is about 10 times the normal fare at about INR 480/- including the 3-course dinner for the night. The trian definitly the best of suspensions in trains out there and speed is barely felt inside the train. Pure silence and luxury is what Rajadhani is all about.

The dinner for the night was complete with the initial soup till the ice-cream in the end. No, it did not totally suck and was way better than the stuff you normally get on trains.

And it seems the train has some kind of a deal with Airtel, the telecom giant of India. The entire train was plastered with Airtel ads all over. On the outside, boards inside and even on the toilet!!!

So, have you been on the Rajdhani before? How was the experience? What other travel do you suggest me to try out now?

Last week BlogCamp Kerala was on news again, this time on ‘The Hindu’. What started as a small unconference took a life of its own teaching me the fact that ideas take a life of their own once initiated. With less than 2 weeks to go for the Kerala’s first unconference blogging event, things are shaping out really well. We had a trip to the venue last weekend and the pictures are now live at the official site.

Also, in case you are an outstation bloggers and are looking for a place to stay overnight or the night before the event, do get in touch with me so that we can see if its possible to arrange accomodation for you.

This is a scanned copy of The Hindu on 4th August 2008.

BlogCamp Kerala on The Hindu

So, how many of my readers are attending the event? Maybe we can hook up some ice sodas after the event? I wish I could say beers, but dad would be reading this blog!!!