What went wrong

Like all relationships, and Twitter is no exception, if you don’t nurture it, it will go pear shaped while your not looking.

Looking back

With my 20/20 hindsight, I can see where it all went wrong. I got greedy, pure and simple, I wanted to be popular and that was what stuffed up our relationship.

What really happened

I used a service that subscribed me to whoever subscribed to my tweets, it seemed like the logical thing to do to build my list. It also unsubscribes me from those that stop following me. I got a heap of followers who, I suspect, also want to be popular and I suspect that when I un-subscribe from them they will do like wise to me.

The great content I was getting from the people I was interested in hearing from is still there for me to read but it is now lost in the jumble of marketing Twitter spam I get from the “want to be popular” crowd.

The stats tell it all

I also reviewed my stats and I see that am not getting the click throughs to my website in relation to the audience I have on Twitter so this indicates several possibilities including,

1. The people that are following me are there to build a marketing list in the hope that people like me will pay attention to what they are hawking, even if I have no interest.

2. My tweets are not compelling enough to get people to click through to my website.

I suspect that both are relevant but that the first is truer.

Actions to take

So what should I do?
1. The first and the best action I can undertake is to create more compelling tweets to draw the audience to my website attracting the type of reader that is interested in the blogging content I write about.

2. Consider unsubscribing from the people I am not interested in following

Conclusion

I want to improve my relationship with Twitter and so I need to put in the effort.
Part of what I need to do is to take a step back and review what I really want from my relationship and change to address that need.

I hope that this helps you with your Twitter relationship, it has been a great help to me as I type out each word, it made me look at what I wanted and what I have to do to get there.

Stay tuned, I will do a follow up on this to let you know the results.

My Twitter is Out of Control is a post from Sitemaster

This may not be true but I like it anyway. I recently found out where the word ‘holiday’ originated from and it’s an interesting story. Oddly enough Wikipedia dose not have this version on their site, so here it is.

Back in America’s wild west there was a guy called ‘Doc Holiday’ who would turn up at his local saloon each night, get drunk and eventually pick a fight and shoot someone.

Basically he was a drunken ass hole that was good with a gun.

So every night Doc would turn up, get a skin full and shoot someone, simple. You would think the patronage would have thinned out or the place would have gone broke or that people would have avoided the place. Who knows.

One day or should I say night, the Doc did not turn up, in fact, he did not turn up for two weeks.

At the end of the two weeks, things went back to normal, Doc Holiday returned and continued his nightly drinking and continued shooting at least one person per night.

Soon others in the town would take off for a break or to do business out of town and say that they where doing a ‘Doc Holiday’ and would be back in a few weeks.

This was eventually shortened to just ‘I am going on a Holiday’ or ‘it’s holiday time’ or something along that line.

Bali

It’s that time of year again for me where I get to go on my holiday, I am not going to shoot anyone but I am off to Bali. I will be back in early September and start writing again.

Holiday Time is a post from Sitemaster

I have put together a few tips to help you with the WordPress setup so you do it correctly and avoid the pain of having to make changes further down the track.

1. Installation

The installation of WordPress is just to easy and most people will miss one of the most important security features when setting up the installation.

The standard prefix for the database tables is ‘wp_’. What you need to do is to change it to something different so it can not be guessed and ultimately hacked.

For example instead of ‘wp_’ use something like ‘eCcJ3q7u_’ using upper and lower case letters as well as numbers to make your database prefix extremely difficult to guess.

If you have already installed WordPress with the standard ‘wp_’ prefix you can still change the prefix but be prepared for a lot of work behind the scene.

2. Permission Settings

Once installed you need to FTP into your site and make sure the permissions are set correctly. A great plug in to check you folder permissions is wp security.

Your folder permissions should be set at 755.

3. htaccess

A good start to stopping unwanted guests is to add a .htaccess file to your folders.

WordPress does not put in a .htaccess file in the admin folder so you will need to copy the one from the wp-content folder.

Be careful when doing this as you could block yourself out of the control panel so after adding the file see if you can access the administration of your site, if you are having issues you may need to look at that the setting for the .htaccess are and even Google for information about it.

4. Blog

Now that you have logged in to the admin it’s time to decide whether your site is going to be a blog or a CMS.
If your site is to be a blog you don’t need to make any changes to the default landing pages.

5. CMS

If you are going to use WordPress as a website or a Content Management System (CMS) you need to make a few changes to start.

Go to ‘Pages’ in the left side navigation and create the following pages: ‘Home’ and ‘Blog’.

With that done go to the ‘Settings’ in the left side navigation and expand it. Click on ‘Reading’ and you will see ‘Front page displays’, with two (2) radio buttons

• Your latest posts
• A static page

Choose the second one – ‘A static page’

Now you need to set your front page from the drop down menu called “Front page”. Choose the page you just created called ‘home’

the other drop down is “Posts page”, this is to select the page you want to be your blog page, lets use the page called ‘blog’.

save the settings

That’s about it as far as setting up WordPress goes.

How To Setup WordPress Correctly is a post from Sitemaster

Out There

I did start this by saying ‘what’ in reference to the weirdest of twitterers and I think that this is the ants pants of them all because @AstroRobonaut (they call it R2) is a man made robot that is tweeting from the space station.

Odd Twitterers is a post from Sitemaster

Here are 12 essential WordPress plugins that I can’t live without, well … I can but these plugins just make it make it easier. I use other plugins as well but I thought I would keep it down to my ‘Top 12′.

If you have a fav not listed here, let me know in the comments.

1. Headworks 2

Always top on my list, Headworks 2 does it all and more. If you really, truly want to SEO each and every page on your website you need to use this plugin. Its a Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.

Homepage: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

2. Redirection

A great tool for handling all your redirects and 301′s and is fantastic if you are moving or updating your website, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.

Homepage: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

3. Link Within

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.
Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

Homepage: http://www.linkwithin.com/learn
Download: http://www.linkwithin.com/learn

4. Contact Form 7

This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly. This will also reduce the load on your server.

Homepage: http://contactform7.com/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

5. Really Simple Captcha

A CAPTCHA module intended to be called up from other plugin. It was originally created for Contact Form 7 plugin, and is now an independent, stand-alone plugin.

Homepage: http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/really-simple-captcha/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-simple-captcha/

6. WP-DBManager

Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimise database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimising of database.

Homepage:  http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/

7. Widget Context

Make conditions for the viewing of your widgets. Let a widget appear on in a category or a set of pages or even only on one page. This really lets you shape and style your columns down to each page.

Homepage:  http://konstruktors.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/widget-context/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-context/

8. Disqus Comment System

The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus.

Homepage:  http://disqus.com
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/

9. Analytics360

Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress. Even without the Mailchimp function this is a great visual tool to get a look at your visitors habits.

Homepage:  http://www.mailchimp.com/wordpress_analytics_plugin/?pid=wordpress&source=website
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/analytics360/

10. RSS Footer

This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit, Read about it on Yoast’s posts

Homepage: http://yoast.com/wordpress/rss-footer/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rss-footer/

11. Use Google Libraries

This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution
network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

Homepage:  http://jasonpenney.net/wordpress-plugins/use-google-libraries/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/use-google-libraries/

12. WP Google Fonts

Google’s Font Directory is one of the most valuable contributions to web typography in a really long time. By hosting an assortment of free open source fonts, they have made it practical for anyone to add rich typography to their website with very little hassle.

Homepage: http://adrian3.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-google-fonts-plugin/
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-fonts/

There are so many great plugins out there to extend WordPress that I will never get to try them all.

Got a fav? Let me know

12 Essential WordPress Plugins is a post from Sitemaster

Transparency is the way to go and you want to do it right. Part of good project management is having your finger on the pulse of the project, scheduling the process, looking for things that could go wrong and planing for all contingencies and on top of all that keeping everyone involved informed and up-to-date with where you are at any given moment on any of your projects.

Doing this right can impress the hell out of your client if the process is easy to use and the software does what you want it to do, this all comes down to choosing the right project management software.

I have just gone through the process of moving over to online (cloud) project management and here is what I came up with. I did not have to go far, I tried about 6 different platforms and in most cases they where similar to Basecamp.

Basecamp

Basecamp came highly recommended from many people and the hype is that it is the best online project management platform available, so It was my first stop.

They don’t have a free version or a free trial plan so I needed to fork over my credit card details with the promise that if I don’t go beyond the 30 day trial my card would not be billed. I don’t call that a free trial but as I had heard so much about Basecamp I signed up.

Basecamp has a good interface but the problem is that it is not very intuitive. The help section is not that helpful and does not correspond to the section you want help with. The order of the stages is just wrong and again not intuitive. This is coming from someone who designs online applications and is very adept at working through thought processes.

After half a day off setting up and testing I was on the hunt for something that had to be better. If this was the top rated project management platform I was going to have to write my own because Basecamp just does not cut the mustard for a intuitive, good project management platform.

Copper

I came across Copper as one of the 6 platforms in my quest and they had a free trial for a month, yes, that’s what I like, try before you buy.

From the start I was impressed, the site is a users wet dream, written in HTML5, it is slick and intuitive. As a website designer I was impressed and instead of taking half a day to work it out I was up and going in 30 minutes.

The set up of users, groups, and clients was just too easy and the process ordering was in accordance with what I have in mind for managing projects.

Copper includes everything Basecamp charges extra for, wow, what a bargain.

Summary

If you are a Basecamp user, have a squiz at Copper, it will cost you nothing but time and the learning curve is a fraction required for Basecamp plus you get a heap of additional must haves included.

There is no choice between the two, Basecamp comes a poor second to Copper.

Basecamp V Copper is a post from Sitemaster

Meta tags have long been associated with providing the search engines with information about your website. I still fill in the meta keywords and for several good reasons. I know Google will not look at them but I am sure other search engines do, well, I’m not really sure because no one from the other search engines is out telling us what they do or do not do so I am hedging my bets by including them anyway.

Matt also talked about how he uses WordPress for his websites. Now if Matt Cutts, who is one of the Google guru says that WordPress gets the SEO 80% right with a vanilla install, it makes you think about WordPress in a whole different light.

I am a great fan of WordPress, I have written a lot of code over the years including several Content Management Systems but now with WordPress having matured into a system that is not only a blog but works equally well as a Content Management System, I now use it as my base for almost every website I produce.

I have gone off subject with my little rant about WordPress where the subject is meta tags.

Meta Keywords

Basically as far as Google is concerned, they are dead, other search engines may still use them.

Meta Description

This is still alive and kicking, think about what you are going to put in there, it’s important.

I have to say that I got a lot of satisfaction from the Interview with Matt Cutts, he confirmed that I have been going in the right direction and doing the right things in my development and SEO.

Meta Tags is a post from Sitemaster

Writing articles and posting them to sites that have a good page rank is time consuming to say the least. I find it hard enough to write an article here on Sitemaster every week day let alone writing for other sites with a link back to Sitemaster. It’s one of those things you want to do but the reality is that it takes a lot of effort.

This is where I should throw in my sales pitch with something along the lines of ‘what is your time worth’ or ‘can you ignore to not get quality back links’ and all that stuff.

Did I tell you that I just missed out on a good deal where I could have obtained 25 monkeys that can type?… No? I had to let that pass because they only typed in mandarin and have you seen the price of Bananas?

Well instead I made a real deal and came up with a real opportunity to get 100 articles written about almost any industry for $14 each by real people that can really write well. Really.

Let’s examine this;
Write an article andsubmit it to a website for $14.
The time to submit the article alone is nearly worth that price.

“Get 100 Custom Written Articles Including Submission & GUARANTEED ACCEPTANCE Into EzineArticles.com, For The Small One Time Investment of Only $1387 – That’s less than $14 per article including submission AND guaranteed acceptance into the most popular article directory online!

This is going to be a total no brainer for most of you, so there’s no long winded hard sell here. If you want to put your article marketing campaign on total autopilot then you’d be completely mad not to put my content writing team to work for you today.

For the small one time investment of just $1396 our content writing team will hand research and write 100 unique articles (approx 400 words each) tailored specifically to your search engine optimisation keywords & target audience.

Once completed, each article will then be hand submitted to EzineArticles.com (under your existing account or a new one created for your article marketing campaign) and each article is backed by our 100% submission approval guarantee.

In essence that means…
…within the next 30 days (approx.) YOU WILL have 100 articles working for your online business, published on what many consider to be the most powerful article directory online.
Your unique articles will…

* Drive targeted traffic to your website / squeeze page as a direct result of being listed on EzineArticles.com
* Improve your search engine optimization and rankings by tailoring each article around a specific keyword term. This will pass important theme relevancy and link juice onto your website.
* Over time more ezine publishers & micro bloggers will pick up your articles for publication in their own niche email newsletters and websites. This means that your article marketing campaign gains more traction overtime as the articles become syndicated – compounding your marketing efforts 10 fold for the small one time investment…
* Your articles will also be sent to one of over 400+ niche daily email alerts that notify publishers whenever new articles are available that match their unique interests…
* You’re also free to use your unique articles elsewhere (micro blogging, link wheels, submit to other article directories, post to your blog etc) – they’re yours to use as you wish…

…QUALITY: These ARE NOT SOME CRAPPY COMPUTER SPUN ARTICLES. These are written by real English speaking & writing human beings. Every single article is individually researched & written specifically for your unique article marketing campaign…

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably have some reservations about outsourcing content generation to promote your online business & website. I’m a total quality control freak and I’m always reluctant to outsource content that will represent our websites – especially when you’re working with new writers for the first time.

So, I do understand & respect your concerns.

However, these are NOT some shitty computer spun articles. They are written by real English speaking & writing human beings that write for a living. Every single article is individually researched & written specifically for your unique article marketing campaign. Our writers can write competently on various niche specific topics including (but not limited to)…

Marketing | Health & Fitness | Travel & Tourism | Finance | Real Estate | Gaming | Fashion | Law | etc..

If you would like to see a few example articles prior to ordering, then please feel free to drop us an email. However do realize that the quality standard of your articles must pass human moderation at EzineArticles.com and they don’t just let any old crap in. As a result, our 100% approval guarantee sets the initial benchmark…
This Offer Is Strictly Limited To 10 Customers Only…

This isn’t some marketing ploy to get you to rush into an investment decision.

Your articles are being written by real human beings here. These writers only have so much time in the day. We don’t want to over extend ourselves to ensure we always meet satisfactory turn around times & maintain quality standards for our valued clients. As a result, we can only take on a limited number of new clients at one time. It’s as simple as that.
Secure Your Hands Free Article Marketing Campaign Now…

Once your payment has been made, please drop us an email that includes…

* A list of keywords you want the articles to target. We suggest 5-10 keyword terms.
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* Preferred email address for your article marketing campaign submission report. This is where we’ll send you regular updates as to the progress of your article marketing campaign.

…once that has been received we’ll begin your article marketing campaign within 2 working days. Turn around time is approximately 2 weeks to create 100 articles and the submission process begins not long afterwards…

About Our Guarantee: Please be aware that there are NO REFUNDS with this service. Once our content writers have completed their work they cannot be uncompensated for their time. However our 100% approval guarantee means YOU WILL have 100 articles accepted and listed within

Hands Free Article Writing is a post from Sitemaster

Now don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of other factors when it comes to search engine optimisation but the page title is one of the first places to start and one you should think about carefully to make the best impact.

I wrote about How To SEO Your Website and typed briefly about the page title, it can be so effective when you get it right that I thought I would dedicate a post to the subject.

With all that said the next thing to do is give you an example.

The first thing is to think about what someone would type in to the search fields when looking for the page you are composing.

Let’s say the page you are writing about is for growing tomatoes, the first thing that comes to mind is ‘Growing Tomatoes’ as the title and in fact that would be a good title but what would be better is ‘How to Grow Tomatoes’.

Why would it be better? Both titles will perform well but if I wanted to ask a question about how to do something, I would type in the words ‘How To’ and the subject. Doing this would get better results for my search request and let’s face it, if you don’t appear on the first page of search results the chances that someone will go to the second page are slim.

Go to Google, type in ‘growing tomatoes’ and view the results then do a search with the phrase ‘how to grow tomatoes’ and see the difference in the results. The better results are of course the search done with the phrase ‘how to’. So if you had used the title ‘How to grow tomatoes’ there is a good chance that your page will come up on the first page.

So think about the way people would search for the page you are putting together. do a few test searches and see what the results are, from there you can see your competitors for the same key words and get a better idea of the way to construct your title.

All that said, the title is just the first in a line of things you need to consider when aiming to come up on the first page of Google.

How To Build The Page Title is a post from Sitemaster

Off page SEO is basically building links that point back to your website. Google loves to see links that point to your site from other websites and the higher the page rank of the recommending website the better.

Get Social

Facebook is the first step you should take, if you need a hand, read Branding With Facebook.

Link Exchange

Email website owners that have similar fields of interest asking for a link exchange. This is time consuming and you may, if you are lucky, get a reply for one in twenty. The idea is to get a good value link exchange by targeting sites with a high page rank, the higher the better.

Paid Links

Buying links is a quick and relatively cheap process and one I highly recommend. I use Directory Submission Services to build my in bound links.

Article

You could write articles and submit them to an array of sites that deal with the subject of your website.

Guest Blogging

Write a blog article for other bloggers, this not only gets amino back to your website but you may also be able to pull a few readers to your website and build up your reader base.

All that done and said I have one warning, do not build your back links to fast, by that I mean that if Google sees that you have gone from 0 – 10,000 back links in nothing flat you could be penalised. So do it gradually over 6 months or so for the best results.

Have you got a link building idea I have missed in this article? Drop it into the comments area below or email me about it.
Hey, why not write an article and post it on Sitemaster, it has a good page rank (PR4 at the time of this post)

Building Your Page Rank is a post from Sitemaster

I looked around for the best price ie the cheapest as it was a straight forward job. You see I was only going to use WordPress as a CMS, the client did not want a blog so the template work was reduced considerably.

I found ‘the cheapest’ for US$99 the next price was US$300 and they would not drop the price even thought it was only one template and no blog templates.

I took the cheapest option

Needless to say, you get what you pay for. Bad service, substandard work that I have had to consistently send back, bad communication, lack of care and worst of all but the norm when dealing with unprofessional people, blame.

Yes blame, it all became my fault because I upgraded my WordPress application and it broke their work. Don’t get me started on this point.

I could vent my spleen on this but I will save you my anguish because I have learnt my lesson.

You get what you pay for, so next time you get quotes for something (web work in particular) think carefully about the whole process. This little exercise cost me way more than $300 in my time let alone the stress I have had to go through.

So I will say it once more ‘Beware of Cheap’ you will only get what you pay for.

Beware of Cheap is a post from Sitemaster

Online apps

1. Anti-virus

I use Avast but AVG is just as good, both are great and so is the price for home use- free. Go to Avast or AVG

2. Advanced System Care

iobit.com turn out the best little free app for cleaning your computer called Advanced System Care. They also have a free defrag program and other apps but I have not tried them out yet.

3. Ultimate defrag

I can not say enough about this app, it is great for keeping your computer running at it’s best. I guess there are several out there that do the same thing.

4. FTP

I use filezilla, it’s easy to use, auto updates and is open source so I costs nothing.

5. Dropbox

Dropbox let’s me store 2gig online for free and I can sinc the contents between my computers

6. Mozy

Mozy is a backup app that let’s me store up to 2 gig online for free. It has saved my bacon just recently after I had a hard drive collapse and lost everything. Just click on the Mozy advert on the right of this article to find out more.

7. Google

Well I do love Google, there is gmail, calendar, docs, reader, picasa and heaps more. The few things they do not do are a CRM and project management.

Google will also handle your business email for free go to http://google.com/a and find the standard (free) account. It comes with gmail and all the google stuff and you can rebrand it with your own logo.

8. Zoho

zoho.com like Google these guys do it all but my favs here are the CRM and the billing apps.

9. Manymoons

Project management software online (got to love the cloud) I like Manymoons and if you have a Google apps account it is even better. Zoho also have a project management app.

There are more great apps out in the wild and if you can tell me about them I would love to know.

Everything I have mentioned here is free and there are paid versions of the same apps.

Sorry for not adding all the URL’s but I am sitting on a train composing this on my phone and doing this from memory. Just Google the name of the app and you should find it.

If you know any free online apps like the ones mentioned, please let me know. Thanks

9 Essential Software Apps is a post from Sitemaster

What are you going to blog about?

This was the question of questions for me, I can only tell you what brought me to start down this sometimes painful and yet satisfying road.

I am a website designer and developer. I thought I knew a lot about website design having designed websites since 1994 and I have worked on many big name websites.

Along came My Space, I didn’t get it, what a waist of time I thought and then came Facebook, I still did not get it.

My kids started using both My Space Facebook finally settled with Facebook. I still didn’t get it.

The smart marketing behind Facebook is that you need to have an account to view someones pages, I wanted to see what my kids where doing on this ‘social network’ and I needed an account to be able to do just that, so I signed up, I still did not get it.

I didn’t do anything with my Facebook account for an age or two, it just sat there doing nothing. You see, I only signed up to see what my kids where doing and ‘try to’ connect with them on their level.

What I did next, which I did not know at the time was my first real venture into social networking, I get a Twitter account.

Twitter was hard for me grasp, some of the dribble was way to superficial for my likes but I stubbled across Michael Martine aka @remarkableblogger
I stared following his tweets and reading the things he linked to, looked at the people that also followed him and found a heap of information that lead me to get a grip on what it was about for me and it changed the way I looked at social networking.

I started looking for other interesting twitts … twitterers to follow and looking at their websites and their tweetes, I was hooked, great information from like minded individuals.

SEO was my first great interest but I came across Mashable, Problogger and a heap of other sites that pushed all my buttons, but in a good way and my education had begun.

That’s how it happened for me and it has reinvigorated my passion for the digital space, so much so that it has changed my outlook on website design and online marketing and now I am following in the path of those that inspired me.

If you have a similar story or one that relates to this, please let us know or add a comments below.

How I Started Blogging is a post from Sitemaster

For your business to be successfully marketed on the Internet you need to appear on the first page when someone types in your key words or phrases when looking for your service or product.

If you don’t come up on the first page of search results then you are waisting your time and money and all you have is a great brochure website.

Even the businesses that do well by coming up on the first page continually have to work to keep their place on the first page because the competition is aiming to take that position from them and keep it for themselves.

So how do you compete with businesses that are pumping big dollars into tweaking their websites?

It’s not easy, you either hire an SEO company or you learn to do it yourself

I am here to help you along the ‘Do it yourself’ road.

Page Title

This is what is displayed in the search results, it’s the first line, the title.

With Google you get 66 characters (including spaces) and if you go over this amount Google shows 63 characters and 3 dots = 66 characters.

Think this through carefully because it is very important.

The biggest mistake made by so many websites is to put their website/business name in the title and use up the display limit.

Face it, people do not care what your business is called, they are after a search term and want the results for that term. If they knew your website name they would go directly to it.

What you do want is a description to attract your audience.

Use an individual title for each page, something to describe what the page is about and do not put the same information on every page.

Meta Description

This is displayed by Google for searchers to read and comes after the title in the search results.

Get this right in relationship to each page and you will see a big difference in page views.

You have 150 characters, think of it as a tweet.

Meta Keywords

All of your keywords should be lower case, comma separated and should be specific to the content of the page.

Do not use vague or generic terms without first addressing what the page is about first. Sometimes generic terms can be beneficial, it’s all about what your selling.

Nofollow

This is used in links to tell the search engines NOT to follow this link. Apply this to pages like terms and conditions, privacy and so on. It should also be used when linking to external pages or sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Why use nofollow?

Your website page rank is diluted by the number of pages you have, this is a very complex subject and I will not go into it here but basically the gist is to use the nofollow on pages that are not going to effect what you are trying to achieve.

SEO your Images

Name your images in relationship to the page subject. There is no trick here it just takes effort and a bit of thought when first naming your images.

Title and alt tags

Apply both title and alt tags to all links and all images with the exception of spacer images.

Page content

Optimal page content size should be between 250 and 350 words. When developing copy consider the page subject, the keywords and phrases you will be aiming at the search engines ie. the terms you want to be found with when someone searches via the search engines.

Write in a normal fashion, do not stack the content with unintelligent content and keywords aimed at attracting the search engines, Google can understand sentences and can see if you are trying to stack the page with keywords and you will be penalized.

Internal links

Link between your pages, Google likes it

Footer

Put your sitemap in the footer of your website allowing one click to anywhere as well as giving the search engines and visitors easy reference to the rest of your site.

That’s about it for the beginners ‘How to SEO your website’

If you use WordPress the best SEO module you can use is Headspace 2, it does require you to put some effort in but the results are well worth it.

How To SEO Your Website is a post from Sitemaster

I call it the Book of Face because marketing your business is all about your brand and your brand is the face of your business.

Marketing

Advertising on Facebook is great value for money because you can define your demographic and market only to them. Let’s say your target demographic is Australian males in Post code 2250, aged between 35 and 45, Facebook let’s you display adverts only to people that fall into that demographic criteria. How good is that and you can also target people having birthdays that are between the ages of 55 and 60 in Gosford and the cherry on top is that it’s all pay per click.

Get a free website

Facebook lets you have a free website, that’s right a free website, so if you have a personal Facebook account you can create another set of pages linked to your personal account that you can brand.

So as I said in my opening paragraph, get on Facebook today, don’t delay and if you want to see an example of a branded Facebook site look at Sitemaster on Facebook and if you want to hire someone to create your branded Facebook page, please consider contacting me.

Branding With Facebook is a post from Sitemaster

Why is Flash going to disappear?

It’s simple, search engine optimization has become so important in the struggle for first page placement on the search engines that to ignore an opportunity to optimize your site to it’s fullest while those around you do so is a death call for your business.

Flash V HTML5

Put simply, Google can not read flash, it just ignores it, where with HTML5 you can do lots of cool stuff that flash does and the search engine can read it.it’s a bit of a no brainer if you ask me.

I am currently working on an international car manufacturers website converting it from it’s ‘way cool’ Flash animations to HTML5. This conversion is not a cheap exercise, the site looks as slick as can be, so why would they spend a shit load of money to convert the website.

The answer is as simple as three letters, SEO.

We are also doing a few other tweaks, all SEO related because getting to number one on the search engines is the goal, it’s brand awareness, brand placement and sales.

It’s going to take a while for flash to disappear from the majority of sites unless Adobe pull a rabbit out of their hat which I can’t see happening.

Flash is Dead, Long Live SEO is a post from Sitemaster

Hence the saying ‘A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing’

Sometimes I will point out that if I knew the name of your website why would I search for it but usually I just tell them well done, add a smile and change the subject.

As I said, I wish I had a dollars every time I heard that statement.

On my better days when I am feeling more social and up for an education I will actually ask another question like ‘So who designed your website?’ and again 80 to 90% will reply ‘I did it myself’ or ‘My 16 year old nephew did it for me’ or something along those lines.

This usually stops me dead, I know when I am defeated and in comes the smile with a nod and even an enthusiastic ‘great’ or ‘ok’ with a raise of the eye brows for the body language part. Sometime I will try and just raise one eye brow like Spock in Star Trek just to see if I can pull it off (I get a lot of practice at doing this, I can do the left side fine but the right side makes me look like I have indigestion or I am having a stroke).

On the very odd occasion when my masochistic side is showing and I am really board, so board infact that I actually open my mouth and sound emerges (even to my own amazement … or amusement … because a little bit of punishment just is not enough) I ask the final question I know will complete the loop, making me finally realize I should not have opened my mouth after the first answer … and that question is ‘Have you thought about doing some SEO work on your site?’ see answer number one.

Is there a moral to this story? Apart from the one about learning when to shut my mouth? There could be, there should be but I don’t know what it is. I could say something like ‘ Do you change the oil on your BMW yourself?’ but that is not quite right for many reasons I won’t go into. Needless to say, if you are competing for one of the ten positions on the first page of Google and you are not in a niche that is so obscure that there is only ten of you in the world on the Internet, you need to be proactive in your approach to your business and that means taking a professional approach, this does not mean that you need to run out and get a professional developer to do everything for you but it does mean that you need to have an open mind, consider the possibility that you can do better and look at what you do best and hire me.

Top Of The First Page of Google is a post from Sitemaster

Let’s step back and have a look at what the title tag is and does.

The code looks like this: title=”title description”

You know those site you go to and if you mouse over the navigation or an image a description appears, usually it is the same text as the navigation button or a description of the image, well that comes from the title tag. Yep, we all see it everyday, it’s something you may not even notice but if you keep an eye out you will see it.

I have a strong feeling that there may be some SEO advantages associated with adding in the title tag. Like alt tags, the title tag is another descriptive tag for the search engines.

Even if Google did away with recognizing it tomorrow the advantages for using it would still remain because it helps the visually impaired, it’s helpfully to every user to your website and the other search engines will always do things differently so it’s always best to prepare for all contingencies.

Now is the time to do a site review and make sure your titles are in place.

The Title Tag is a post from Sitemaster

Page rank is the Holy Grail of search engine ranking, well … along with a few other things but all those other factors go to contribute to your page rank.

Before the move

Determine weather you are going to change any of your URL’s. By that I mean any change at all, like changing from a .html to a .php or adding a mod reWrite to change your .php or .html to make it a more search friendly URL? I could go on for lines and lines about the different type of changes you could make … but I won’t.

Google, Bing and Yahoo have referenced every page on your website already and will be sending people to those URL’s for some time after you have made any changes.

Document every URL in your website or just the ones that will be effected by the changes you will be making, so you have a reference.

If you are doing this after the move do a search on your domain and have a look at the results, this will let you know what URL’s the search engines have referenced in relation to your website.

The next step

Now that you know the URL’s it’s time to do the real work.

What you need to do is create a 301 redirect for each URL. Google does no penalise you for using a 301 redirect.

Now you will not loose your traffic to the dreaded 404 error and you will not effect your page rank.

301 Redirects is a post from Sitemaster

The question I hear from the non Twitterers is ‘that’s just kids stuff, isn’t it?’, ‘What is it?’ or ‘I don’t have time for that stuff’.

Now I know Twitter is not for everyone, it’s not practical for some businesses in so many ways but for a lot of businesses a few tweaks to their website and it can be an automated process.

Consider the potential, if you could start bringing people to you website you are raising your brand awareness and you have a new demographic to market to. Hey you may even make some sales.

Consider the possibilities, ignore it at you peril.

To Twitter or not to Twitter is a post from Sitemaster

Where does the passion come from and the ‘being consistent’ thing, wow, that’s the bit that blows me away.

Well your not alone in wondering about it all and I can at least point out a few tips that may help.

1. Revenue

This is the number one most important part so read what little wisdom I have, and here it is – No one and I mean ‘NO ONE’ makes money from blogging. That’s it, I did say a ‘little wisdom’

What they do make money from is selling a product or service. The product or service may be advertising or someone else’s product (usually by selling advertising) or even their own product or service but please, do not go into blogging thinking that you will make money by writing for a subject you are passionate about without considering a revenue stream.

2. Passion

If you have a passion about the subject that you want to write about, you are way ahead of the pack because it’s very hard to fake passion.

3. Consistency

Write about the subject that your blog is targeting, so if your blog is about snow dogs and you start blogging about surfing in Bali you have lost your audience unless they are snow dog surfers (hey, you never know!)

4. Frequency

This is good topic and one I personally am just coming to terms with. I have read blogs by the big name bloggers and they all say to try to at least post a new article 3 times a week. This is good advice if you want to build and audience,

I am attempting to produce 5 articles a week, ie. Monday to Friday and to post in the morning, my time and it is proving to be difficult. It’s not an easy task for me to achieve so I am trying to develop a method or strategy for achieving my goal.

5. Goals

Firstly I mainly write when I am traveling on the train or bus by whipping out the iPhone and firing up WordPress
I composing articles locally on the iPhone. I outline several subjects and work on them a bit at a time or go crazy and do one in one session, that is the strategy, it’s not great but I at least have a plan.

This article was done over a 5 days, a bit here and a bit there. When I have finished an article I send it to ‘draft’ on the server where I pretty it up with H2,H3 and other layout features and then add an image.

I hope this helps you and my final tip is ‘nike’ – just do it

Blogging tips is a post from Sitemaster

Most of all, marketers have taken to it ‘big time’, 140 characters to get you in and back to their website, wow what a way to sell.

I have to admit that a majority of traffic to Sitemaster comes from tweets.

I use Hootsuite to send out all my tweets using either the desktop or the phone version. At this time Hootsuite dose not do everything I want in an online application but it comes close.

6 Things I Need in Twitter

Here is a list of 6 features I need for my life in the tweet lane.

1. Multiple Twitter accounts

It has to have the ability to allow multiple accounts. I have several Twitter accounts and I want to be able to view them all without having to log in and out.

2. Research function

I’m a nosey bastard and I like to know more about just about everything including what a particular subject is about. For instance, if I see a #paragliding tag I want to click it to know more but I don’t particularly want to leave the page I am on

I may just want to know about the person doing the tweet. I am not asking for much, just a good HTML5 interface with a lot of good thought behind it.

3. Auto follow

One of the feature I want in my tweet arsenal is to be able do an auto follow so that when someone follows me I follow them back. It’s a great marketing tool

4. Auto follow message

If you have signed to follow me on Twitter you would have received an auto generated message asking you to ‘like’ my Facebook page.

There is a whole discussion out there about what you should and should not be sending out in these welcome tweets, I am using a service that allowed me to have a heap of different thank you messages and it sends a random message in response to anyone signing up. Now I just have one message and that points at my Facebook page.

5. Auto un-follow

As well as an auto follow I use an auto unfollow so if someone unfollows me, I unfollow them. Twitter has limits to the ratio of people you follower to the number of followers you have, I don’t know what the ratio is because they say one thing and in practice it is totally different. That’s my reasoning behind not following people that are not following me.

6. Statistics

Who, how many and when are all questions that interest me. Sometimes it drives me crazy (that’s when I look at it to much) but it’s all good information to have.

How do you Organize your reading?

Some people in Twitter land have many thousands of followers and also follow many thousands of people. This makes me wonder how do they organise themselves to view all of the tweeted content getting thrown at them or what and how do they decide what to look at.

I have a select group of twitterers I look at that provide me with a range of information that satisfies my information needs and give me a good laugh now and then.

I always look at what’s coming through, you never know what gold you will come across.

If you have a way you organise your Twitter life, I would love hear from you.

6 Things I Need in Twitter is a post from Sitemaster

The Mission

To build a website to complement the restaurant and upgrade and expand the online brand.

The Outcome

I’ve just finished the ‘Seven Mile Restaurant‘ website, their Facebook page and their Twitter page and they all look great (even if I do say myself…)

The Seven Mile Restaurant is located at Lennox Head on the north coast of NSW.

The Websites

Seven Mile Restaurant‘

Facebook page

Twitter page

The Brand

The owners where great to work with, Lisa outlined what she was after and we went through the process to achieve a great look that goes well with their restaurant. The Facebook page and the Twitter page also complement the look of the site and a continuity has been achieved between the 3 sites to establish the brand that is Seven Mile Restaurant

Seven Mile Restaurant Website is a post from Sitemaster

SEO tactics have made a major move into Youtube and you can easily take part in it just by using your phone.

What? You say, does my phone have to do with SEO?

It’s simple, you can make a quick movie, review it and re make it till you get something that gets the message across about you.

You do not need to have a slick production you just need to tell the story, that’s it and you will get better as time goes by.

I was at a local business expo a few nights ago and caught a short presentation by Nick Bowditch from The Bowditch Group. Nick talked about a client who did a 90 second video on their old phone, just the two owners of a coffee shop sitting down telling us about their business and to come in for a coffee and a chat. The quality was not so good, it didn’t go viral and it is not on the front page of YouTube but it did help push their site page rank up and, believe it or not, , it contributed to a 16% increase in revenue.

Never, ever under estimate what a little bit of effort can do to help your business.

Since then the coffee shop has turned out 20 plus videos demonstrating things from cooking eggs to staff introductions helping to boost their SEO page rank and increasing traffic through the door, you can hear the sound if the cash register clinging away from here.

That’s why I have dubbed it “Phone SEO”, so do it right now and if you have a smart phone you can post it from your phone to YouTube with no delay.

Video your customers and let them tell their friends and family about how they are on YouTube, it’s not a major viral campaign but more like a case of the sniffles or a slight cold but it works.

Act now, prosper tomorrow

If you know of a similar story, let me know about it or write a guest post and see it on Sitemaster

Phone SEO is a post from Sitemaster

Maybe your upset that someone has posted the content you have poured over to create. You did the work to post to your audience so why should just anyone be able to use it.

The glass is half full

If the post has your name on it and a link back to the article your a winner.

You now have your work in front of a bigger audience, you have a back link that Google will give you a credit for, and if the site that is re-posting it has a good page rank, you benefit even more.

If you guest post on another blog it is exactly the same situation, you don’t do a guest post because you love writing for other peoples blogs, you so it because you want to raise awareness about your blog, raise your page rank and increase your audience.

So don’t take the attitude that your being plagiarised and the world (or just that blog) is out to rip you off, it’s probably just that someone thinks your worth telling their audience about and your article is worth a read.

On the other hand if your not getting the credit, kick up a stink but in most cases the credit is there.

Contact the owner of the blog and see if they will enhance the author section with the information you want about you and make sure you have a Gravatar linked to your email address, you can at least have your picture up there without any effort.

After all we all want to build an audience and of someone thinks your worth talking about, you must be doing something right.

If you think I am right or wrong, hit the comment section and vent your spleen

Someone is Using My Content is a post from Sitemaster

In person, you spend time asking questions and developing an understanding of what exactly is being communicated. Online, you can spend time leaving comments on blog posts, following up via Twitter and discussing topics in forums. This is great as it helps you get to know the meaning of specific posts, and others can join in on the conversation providing real community involvement helping you get noticed.

How does this help my online reputation and SEO?

It helps your reputation and your own SEO by providing a useful resource for others to read. Think about it. You leave a comment and leave a link to your site. If you provided something of value to the conversation, either by posing a clarification question or expounding on the original post, you’ve provided something of value and other readers will consider checking up on you. Now, this won’t necessarily, directly increase your SEO performance just by posting a comment, but, it will likely get you visitors, if you provide enough value, the blog owner may get in contact with you or even write a post about your comment and link to your site. Now we’re talking.

Take it one step further and get involved outside of blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. Even though not everything is indexed by Google and others, the conversation value and pass-along value transmitted through these services offers a significant amount of benefit to your online reputation. And, as always, more hits means better SEO and more publicity across other people’s blogs and Twitter accounts as well as their Facebook pages. That brings me to another point which I will cover in another post in the near future: Social Networks pass information based on trust.  A link or piece of information passed through a trusted friend is much more likely to get clicked than a link all by itself. Social networks hold massive amounts of power in this respect.

So get involved!

Read blog posts, post comments, share information via Twitter. Become a fan of something on Facebook and create content that is valuable to others. If you give you will receive. It will take some effort, but the internet is a world-wide community of people looking to share something. Content is king. Contribute and get noticed.

How to Use Active Listening to Improve your Online Reputation and SEO is a post from Sitemaster

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and Social Media 101.
6. Make any really important links trackable with a URL shortener. I know exactly how many people click my links.
7. Start listening for your name, your book’s name. ( Covered in this post about building blocks.)
8. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious. And here’s one from Dallas Clayton for his Awesome Book. (Thanks Naomi for pointing this out).
9. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
10. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
11. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
12. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
13. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
14. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
15. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
16. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
17. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
18. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
19. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
20. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
21. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author of the NEW book, Social Media 101. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at [chrisbrogan.com].

An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts is a post from Sitemaster

For the uninitiated, Little Creatures is a craft beer which has it’s origins in Australia and has recently opened a flagship ‘dinning hall’

They’ve simply taken this to a new level. I’m not taking about the fact that they have weird and groovy beer flavours, all naturally brewed. I’m talking about the way they take you on a personal journey with their service.

My favourtie was the beer education programme. They have a ‘pony show’ – I don’t think it’s called that, but it is what I’ll call it for this post.

You get a taste in little groovy pony glasses of all their different beers, then choose one you like. One of their ‘Little Creatures Beer Experts’ comes and sits down on your table with you and they explain all the different types of beers. A real sit down for 10 minutes. A rare treat when the usual sitiation is waiting 10 minutes for crappy service in bars and restuarants. They teach you how to taste each beer and the slight nuances of each. They even provide an idea what type of people generally like the different types.

It’s really nice and fun. I even heard the word “sessionable” to describe a beer – They invent some nice jargon to make you feel part of a tribe. Cool.

No need to advertise this little venture. We’ll do that for them….

And this is what cool startups are doing in retail.

Know what you’re selling is a post from Sitemaster

Before we jump to the answers, a big thank you to John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich), Matt Cutts (Webspam Engineer, Google California), Zareen Kazim (Strategist, Google India), Koteswara Ivaturi (Project Manager, Google Hyderabad) and Kaspar Szymanski (Strategist, Google Dublin) for giving their precious time and such valuable suggestions.

[*] You can also download the entire Q&A as a PDF file for offline reading.

Q 1: Google now considers page loading speed as one of the many factors for ranking web pages in search results. Does this mean I should switch my blog to a faster, and more expensive, web host or even consider using a CDN (like Amazon S3)?

Zareen Kazim: If you are sure that switching your blog to a faster webhost or using a CDN will enhance your speed then I say go ahead my friend.  Making your site faster will not go unnoticed by your users.

Having said that, increasing server speed alone may not help in some cases. The most common problem is not the time for a page getting sent to the user, but the time it takes to deliver and render all page objects. It’s always good advice to fine-tune your site and implement some options (compress your CSS, reduce the amount of JavaScript you need to load and also improve on the caching) to ensure faster loading.

There are lots of tools to help you identify ways to improve the speed of your site. Our official blog post gives lots of links, and some of the links lead to other tools. But just to highlight a few, the site performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.  In addition, various free-to-use tools offer things like in-depth analysis of individual pages . Google also provides an entire speed-related mini-site with tons of resources and videos about speeding up websites.

Please note, site speed is just one more signal (out of many ) in larger picture of Google’s search ranking , this is not a high -impact change and therefore better loading speed will not guarantee ranking.

Q 2: Like most other blogs, I have tons of “archive pages” on my blog that don’t have any content but merely group content by author, category or tags. Will these pages constitute “duplicated content” and should I block them from the Googlebot?

John Mueller: Good question. Duplicate content within your site is generally not a problem, however it always makes sense to try to limit it to a reasonable amount to make it easier to recognize your preferred pages. There are several methods to handle duplicate content, and when it comes to archive pages, one simple solution might be to just show a snippet instead of the full article.

Q 3: Over the years, my university has moved my Web site from server to server, and, as such, the URL has changed six times. They use aliases to map all six to the same IP address, so my old links still work  but Google considers it as six separate Web sites. Is there anything I can do to consolidate the six URLs?

John Mueller: One easy way to handle duplicate content across different websites is to use the rel=canonical link element. Other possibilities are included in our blog post about handling legitimate cross-domain duplicate content.

Q 4: I was looking at my Google Webmaster Central report and under Sitemap, it says that the total number of URLs is ‘x’ while the number indexed in Google is only ‘x-y’. What can I do to get more of my pages in the Google Index?

Zareen Kazim: Google uses a large number of factors to determine which pages to crawl and index. Two important elements to work on are:

• Make sure that it’s easy to crawl your pages; try your site with JavaScript disabled and also check your crawl errors in Webmaster Tools.
• Make sure that your site provides unique and compelling content.

Q 5. We publish a lot of original content but there are scrapers who copy our content without giving any credit. The sad part is sometimes these sites, who copy our content, rank higher than the original content creator. How can we tackle this problem? Does Google Search take into account the timestamp when an article was published for search results rankings? Why does Google even index scrapers?

Koteswara Ivaturi: This is a popular question. At the outset, duplicate content due to scraping does not equate to a webmaster violation because we know that it is not the fault of the webmaster to not have control over who is scraping the content from his website.

Google is very good at identifying the original source in such cases and so that takes care of the any potential negative effects that the original source may have. It is very rare that the scraped sites rank better than the original site in the search results; but if that happens you can follow the instructions.

Q 6. For an image or media-rich website, what are best practices? Too often, the focus remains on written textual content — which of course is a major factor towards a website’s relevance to search terms, but sometimes, artworks are also relevant to the search. Other than adding good ALT text and using descriptive file names for image, what can I do to improve my site’s visibility in Google Image Search?

Koteswara Ivaturi: Image Search can be a great source for some additional traffic to your website. Adding the ALT text and using descriptive file names are a must when it comes to image- or media-centric websites.

Beyond these, context for the image is going to really help the search engines understand the images much better. For example, if a page has an image of a flower the text or caption that describes the flower should be around or next to the image. Lastly, we recently announced that you can now submit information about your images while you submit your Sitemaps.

Q 7. I already have an XML Sitemap for my website. Should I also create an HTML sitemap? Also, should I include every single page of my blog in the Sitemap (including tag pages and the date-based archives) or just the important ones?

Matt Cutts: In general, HTML Sitemaps can be very handy for your human visitors, and it’s a nice additional way to help search engines make sure that they know about all of your pages as well. If you have time or a script that can generate a pretty HTML Sitemap (e.g; for a blog, you could have one page for each year or month of your blog, depending on how much you write), that can work nicely.

If you don’t have the time or motivation to do that much work, you might consider creating a “Top 10 most popular posts” feature for your blog. I know that as a regular user, I love stumbling on a new blog and discovering that the site owner is pointing out some of their best or most popular posts.

John Mueller: It’s always a good idea for your XML Sitemap file to include all pages which you want to have indexed. If you have pages such as tag or archive pages which you prefer not to have indexed, it’s recommended to add a “noindex” robots meta tag to the pages (and of course, not to include them in the Sitemap file).

Q 8. I have read on forums that domain expiration dates are a factor in Google rankings and domains that are due to expire soon may be penalized in some way. Is that correct? I have registered a domain through Google Apps and it won’t let me renew the domain for more than a year.

Zareen Kazim: Matt Cutts addressed this issue in a Webmaster Central video recently and confirmed that the length of a domain name registration isn’t a ranking factor.

[On Google Apps] Your initial domain registration is valid for one year. If subsequent registration renewal fails, you’ll have several opportunities to change your billing information and renew your registration. If you purchased the domain through Google Apps, you should make sure that you have the renew option checked in your Google Apps account and have a valid Google Checkout information. You can find more detailed information here.

Q 9. How does search quality team look at links from Newspaper Websites & Editorials? In recent times there have been incidents where leading editorials were selling paid content (which include links) on their website for brands & business interested in ranking well on search engines.

Although they explain they only offer advertorials with SEO benefits to agencies to promote brand content, doesn’t this mean offering a paid content (links) to manipulate SERPs is a direct violation of Google’s TOS? These sites indeed have a long reputation & trust but Google TOS should be same for all regardless of the brand or individual?

Matt Cutts: If you’re talking about the recent incident in the UK, we saw that. Google’s quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn’t pass PageRank.

Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.

Q 10. I do have a couple of affiliate links on my website that point to Amazon.com and some other websites. I am not getting paid to insert these links into my content but will get some commission on a sale. Should I use nofollow with such affiliate links?

Zareen Kazim: If linking is natural, based on relevancy of a site’s content, I don’t see a violation of any Google Webmaster Guidelines.

While it is legitimate for a webmaster to monetize great content, in order to perform well in Google’s search results  it is important to take technical steps in order to prevent unnatural passing of PageRank through paid links, e.g. by either using the “nofollow” attribute or by creating a robots.txt file.

Q 11. I have launched a new blog and it obviously won’t rank in Google because none of the reputable blogs are currently linking to it. Therefore, I am actively writing guest posts on other blogs as that gives me a chance to get a link from them. Is Google fine with guest blogging and do links ‘earned’ from writing guest blogs matter?

John Mueller: Making and promoting a new site takes time and effort. In general I would recommend putting that work into your own site, instead of creating content for other people’s sites.

It’s much better to create great content for your blog and to let other sites refer visitors to your site on their own. Good luck!

Q 12. What’s your take on articles submission websites? I do a lot of article marketing & distribution for my clients. These are original articles written and distributed through sites like eZineArticles and iSnare. Obviously besides the exposure my clients get as experts, I am also looking at the SEO benefit of earning backlinks from these posts. How do you treat multiple copies of the same article spread over different sites?

John Mueller: As mentioned in an earlier question, it generally makes much more sense to create great content for your own site, instead of giving it to a large number of other sites to publish.

Personally, I would recommend not looking at it with regard to the links; think about how users will view the content and the people who created it. Having high-quality content on your own site will make it stand out much more than if that content is posted all over the web. If the content is unique and compelling, it will generally attract links naturally over time.

Q 13. Are all links on a page treated the same or does the order of links matter. For instance, will Google flow more juice to the links that are in the first paragraph of the story than the ones that are in the page footer?

Zareen Kazim: Our link analysis is getting much more sophisticated than the original PageRank used to be. To answer your question, we may treat links across different areas in a different way, as some areas of a page might not be as relevant to the content of the page as others. Check out Matt’s video where he talks about links in paragraphs:

Q 14. My website has a country specific extension (like example.in for India) but the content is of interest to a global audience. How do I ensure that my domain /site is visible in Google search results of other countries as well?

John Mueller: Any website can be relevant to users globally; it doesn’t have to use a generic top-level domain (gTLD) for that. Using a country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) is fine if you want to create a website for users all around the world.

If you’re looking to target specific countries (instead of the whole world), you may want to review our recent blog post on multi-regional websites for more information.

Q 15. How do I know whether my site has been penalized in Google or not? I know Google Analytics reports can give me an idea but are there are any other methods? Will Google inform me about the penalty through Webmaster Tools?

Zareen Kazim: Many webmasters worry about penalties when they see their site change in the rankings, and for most times, these changes can be attributed to the nature of the web itself. Google algorithms are constantly changing, to reflect the changing content of the web, and these changes can affect how your website is ranked in our search results.

Working on improving your content and the user experience of your site should be your number one priority. In our Help Center, we have an article with suggestions for potential fixes if you see your site’s ranking change significantly. Google uses the Message Center in your Webmaster Tools account to communicate important information to you regarding your Webmaster Tools account and the sites you manage.

If we have noticed there is something wrong with your site, we may send you a message there, detailing some issues which you need to fix to bring your site into compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines. Once you fix your site you can submit your site for reconsideration. Please note, while not all of the messages in the Message Center are for issues involving our Webmaster Guidelines, it’s strongly recommended that you make sure that these messages are forwarded to your email account, so that you are informed about changes or issues as quickly as possible.

Q 16. There are times when I have searched for a ‘query’ and clicked on ‘ads’ as they offered better content than the natural listings. However when I tried the same keyword few days later, the site that I clicked through ‘ads’ was listed in natural listing this time. Would the future of SERPs based on Google Algorithm involve correlating large number of user clicks on ‘ads’ and adding them to natural result pages?

John Mueller: We work hard to provide high-quality search results. In many cases providing personalized search results can help to make them more relevant to you. Ads, however, are separate from natural search results, so I would assume that what you’ve seen here is a mere coincidence .

Rest assured that ads do not affect our natural search results.

Q 17. My site is all about movie reviews and now I am planning to expand it into food recipes. Should I use a sub-domain (food.example.com) or a sub-directory (example.com/food) for the new topic.

Zareen Kazim: When it comes to Google, there aren’t major difference between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your user. If you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do ), you’ll automatically be verified for deeper sub directories of any sites you’ve verified, but sub domains will need to be verified separately.

Q 18. I have two blogs – one is about food and other one is about movies. Will it be OK if cross-link the two sites even if the content is not related? I am worried that Google might consider that as a “paid link” even though I run both the websites.

Zareen Kazim:  Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user’s perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. Ask yourself if you would place this link in a highly visible place on your page — if no, maybe it would make more sense to skip the link.

Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn’t provide value, and I would not recommend it.

Q 19. Googlebot can read and execute JavaScript files but do you also pass any juice to the links that you may have discovered through the scripts?

Kaspar Szymanski: It’s true that we started crawling JavaScript.  We don’t recommend for webmasters to focus on linking; instead a much wiser way of spending your time is by enriching the site with great content and useful tools. However, if you are concerned about JavaScript links passing PageRank, feel free to use “no follow” attribute. Check out Matt’s video on the same topic:

Q 20. I have an active blog where I post anywhere between 10-15 articles in a week and Google indexes my new stories often within minutes of publishing them. I am however planning to take a break and won’t be adding any new content to my site for a month or so. How will that impact my site as far as indexing and rankings are concerned?

John Mueller: Your existing content will hopefully remain relevant in that time , so I wouldn’t worry about Google’s crawling, indexing or ranking during your break. Google will be ready to pick up your new content when you’re back; you don’t have to do anything special in a case like that.

One thing that you will want to do — if your site is self-hosted — is to make sure that it’s running the most current version, is properly locked-down, secured against hacking and monitored accordingly during your break. We see many blogs get hacked nowadays, and that in turn can affect your site’s standing in our search results if it’s left in a hacked state for a longer period of time.

Q 21. Some people call a portable computer as a notebook while others use the term ‘laptop.’ Similarly, a Flash Drive is known as a USB stick, a thumb drive and even a memory stick in some cases. Now if I am writing an article on say “10 best laptops,” how can I also optimize it for all “notebook” related queries?

Matt Cutts: When you’re writing an article, it pays to think in advance about the words that regular users might type when searching for your content. If you identify 2-3 common terms before you start writing, it’s not hard to incorporate those synonyms into the content of the post in a natural, non-spammy way.

Don’t keyword stuff in the article, but you might write “a flash drive (also sometimes called a USB drive or thumb drive) is a handy way to carry around data in your pocket.” Or you could sometimes call it a flash drive and sometimes call it a USB stick. As long as you’re doing it in a natural way, sometimes it can make the content even more readable than repeating the same term over and over again.

Q 22. Is there any ‘optimal’ length that you can recommend for the page URL and the title?

Kaspar Szymanski: Not really; instead it’s probably best to decide upon these things with the user experience in mind, rather than search engines. If you are interested in optimizing your snippets, feel free to have a look at our blog post on that topic.

Q 23. I know that inbound links will help my site’s ranking in Google search results but is that true for outbound links as well? I always link to quality websites from my articles where my visitors can read more about that topic but do these outbound links aid search rankings as well?

Kaspar Szymanski: No, they don’t contribute directly towards your site’s rankings; however they add value for your readership and they contribute to the community, so feel free to continue this good practice. On the other hand, being selective and preferring quality sites to link to might help in how Google perceives your site.

Q 24. Do ads on a web page affect search rankings? All other factors remaining the same, will pages having 3 ads rank better than a page with say 5 ads?

Zareen : No, ads don’t affect a page’s rank in our natural search results.

Q 25. Would you recommend any books on web search and SEO?

Zareen Kazim: Given the dynamic and constantly changing nature of the web, it might not make sense to stick to a single book. But we have an entire page in our webmaster Help Centre about SEO including the SEO starter guide [PDF] which I highly recommend.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Google Experts Answer your SEO Questions is a post from Sitemaster

There are lots of different reasons why I personally use social media, here I will make some suggestions for how I practically do this.

I will start with the most common platforms, and build up a description for each of these.

Facebook.

I personally use Facebook as a tool for staying in touch with my friends primarily. Although I have begun to experiment with using landing pages within the different types of facebook “pages”. This can be a really cool way of generating subscribers to lists, and can really make facebook work on your behalf. This can really turn facebook from a platform to stay in touch to a highly sophisticated business platform.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is perfect for me, as there are lots of my contacts which I have made over my business career which I can now stay in touch with. I personally use this as a way of approaching people and introducing new ideas and concepts. I don’t know what it is about LinkedIn, but it just seems to have a much more commercial edge than Facebook for example, although I think that Facebook is rapidly catching up and probably will overtake. I guess the angle which Linkedin has always been focused on is the Business relationships. I have initiated some good business relationships through LinkedIn and would recommend using it regularly to expand your contact list.

Twitter

I personally use Twitter to drive traffic to websites. Nothing more exciting than this! I have tried a whole range of different types of approaches with Twitter, and have found that if you are to drive traffic to a free report or service, which then down the line has upsells, this is the formula that works best. Due to the nature of Twitter and all of these Social Media platforms people expect free stuff. Therefore you have to build up the trust and confidence with individuals prior to getting them to part with their money!

My Twitter following which I have developed over the past couple of years is around 40,000 over various accounts. I have used various methods to build up such a significant “follower” list, and this has worked very well for me. I would certainly recommend using Twitter if you are a business owner. The difficulty that most businesses will have is the time that it takes to get the critical mass of followers to make it worthwhile to justify spending the time on it. If you are to persevere this will work for you in the end!

I welcome your thoughts and comments around this and would like to see how you use these services yourselves!

Why I Use Social Media is a post from Sitemaster