How to find List of Link Directories

Below is the Tips to Find Directories, Websites to List/Add Your Website. That I use when I'm trying to find links or a place related to my keyword(s).

These are the searches I do:

Replace "your keywords" with words that your site is targeting.

"Suggest link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"favorite links" +"your keyword(s)"
"recommended links" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool sites" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool places" +"your keyword(s)"
reciprocal +"your keyword(s)"
directory +"your keyword(s)"
directorys +"your keyword(s)"
directories +"your keyword(s)"
exchange +"your keyword(s)"
resources +"your keyword(s)"
links +"your keyword(s)"
"your location" +"add url"
"your location" +"suggest a site"
"your location" +"submit site"
"your location" +links
"your location" +"reciprocal links"
"your location" +directory

How to set up Ads Campaign on Linkedin

LinkedIn Ads Guide

120 Million Professionals uses Linkedin worldwide among them 7.9 Millions are business decision makers.

Before telling you how to get up ads on linkedin, it is very important to know how beneficial it will be for your business to run ads on linkedin. So let’s see that first.

Why I like linkedin ads is because you can reach professional by Job title & function wise. You can find your target audience through -

• Job titles & function
• Industry & Company size
• City and Country
• Seniority and age
• LinkedIn Groups

Log in to your LinkedIn account, go to URL – www.linkedin.com/ads

Click “Start now” to set up Campaign -

 

Fill the campaign Details -

First field you need to fill is ad campaign name – give a name to your campaign

Next, you need to create ads which will be displayed; you can create up to 15 variations. You need to put the ad destination, if you want linkedin professional to reach to your website then put your website URL or if you have a page on linked in you can direct your audience to that linkedin page.

Add an image & write title for your ad & provide 75 character descriptions for the ad, your title & description must be catchy so that it is visible on the page & maximum professionals can find it, at the same time your message on ad must be very clear so that you attracts clicks which are more fruitful & save on the cost, in short you must optimize your ad copy.

Once you are done with ads, click next and you will reach to the page where you need to select your target audience.

Select your Target audience -

You can select your target audience city wise, company wise, industry wise or turnover wise. You can also select you audience by Job title, Job function, group, gender and age.  

Choose you daily Budget -

Under campaign options you can choose how you want to show your ads, there are two methods first is pay per click second is pay per 1000 impression. Now it’s your call which option you want to go for. I would suggest you should try both examining their results and then taking a final call.

Now you need to set daily budget, minimum budget limit is $10 and select the duration for which you want to run your ads.

Make Payment -

Provide your billing details & credit card details. Linkedin Ads activation charges are $5 which is one time set up fee.

And you are all set with your ad campaign. Do share with us the experiences of setting up your own Ad campaign.  Adieu until next time 

Can Shared Hosting Lead to Google Penalty?

Image via Wikipedia
You must have heard term "bad neighborhood" being used in link building for getting links from low quality websites. The same concept can be very relevant here also in shared hosting, where you don’t choose who will be your neighbor. Sharing an IP address which is common in shared Hosting can be very harmful for websites if any bad reputation website is there in your sharing network.

If search engine blocks a particular IP of shared hosting all the websites will stop showing in Search engine results including yours; than blaming the hosting provider will not help.

You may guess Google penalty; if the rankings of your website goes down significantly without any notification from Google.  Google’s guidelines are broadly separated into three areas: 1. Design and Content, 2. Technical Guidelines and 3.Quality

Stop Words ignored by Google - Search Engines

Image via CrunchBaseGoogle does not consider words which are extremely common in usage to speed up search results or to save disk space. These words are known as "Stop Words". 

Below is a list of words ignored by search engines:

a able about above abroad according accordingly

Habitat Twitter Debacle - Part 2 | A case study in ORM

Habitat’s Apology:

Habitat deleted the offending tweets after users expressed their outrage, and replaced them with generic tweets, to cover up its tracks. On 24^th June 2009 Habitat put up a apology on Twitter.

The essence of the apology being that Habitat pushed all the blame aside, by saying that; it had not authorised the usage of ‘top trending topics’ hashtags. Habitat even went forth to say that it was shocked when it discovered the hashtag mis-handling and; that this was totally against their communication strategy.

This apology by Habitat lead to speculation as to whether the error was committed at Habitat’s end or did its PR agency mess-up? To clear up the air Habitat did tweet that the hashtags were not uploaded by any agency. So this squarely put the blame on Habitat, and its PR staff.

(image courtesy Inquisitr)

Habitat Twitter Debacle - Part 1 | A case study in ORM

Twitter:

As per Twitter’s own stats it has 175+ million registered users. Impressive number, for a platform that proclaims to be a information network; with small burst of information capped at 140 character length per Tweet.

The number of registered users is a very strong lure for companies to join the ‘Twitter bandwagon’. Today almost every major corporate has its own Twitter account. It’s ‘the place to be’ for customers and retailers alike. While growing popularity of Twitter is a fact; lack of knowledge about how to use this platform is also a fact.

Here’s a perfect case of ‘Mishandling Twitter Account’ by; Habitat is a major Furniture brand based in UK.

Habitat UK Twitter Failure:

Sharing the Share Trends

ShareThis, the world’s largest platform for sharing, collaborated along with Starcom MediaVest Group to release its First Comprehensive Study on Sharing; on 6th June 2011. This is the most comprehensive study of online social sharing to date; and has been conducted by former ARF Chief Research Officer, Joel Rubinson. This study is the first in a series of studies as part of an ongoing partnership between ShareThis and SMG.

Coverage of Studies:

• Over 7 Billion Sharing Signals across all major sharing channels
• Sharing pattern of 300 Million+ Monthly Users
• 1 Million Domains
• 1,000 Publishers websites

For the month of March 2011, all the above factors were analyzed in detail to Uncover Sharing Truths for Marketers

Why is this study important?

Best Link Building Strategy to get High rankings & Traffic

Image via WikipediaAfter my Last Post on what is link building now let me ask you a simple question here, after panda update why many websites could not get back to their original traffic & rankings?

One probable answer is, the links which they had created were getting only link value & not traffic and when Google rejected those links your rankings went down so as your website traffic.

So now you must be thinking which kind of backlinks will be most suitable for your website?

Keyword Selection process simplified

You might have the most amazing website, with terrific graphics and excellent text; but beware if you have invested all your time and energy in just designing the website. Because you might have overlooked the crucial part of, optimizing your website!!
SEO or Search Engine Optimization as it is known is crucial for every website/ blog seeking to attract visitors to views its product/content. SEO can be overwhelming to a novice and the broad picture of SEO is quite vast.

However once broken down into smaller components, SEO can be easily tackled. Keyword is one of the most crucial component of the broad SEO picture. So let’s understand what is the concept of Keywords and how can it be implemented for your website/blog.

( image courtsey tricks machine)

What is Keyword?

Keywords are the words that people are using to search for your product or service. These are the words/ phrases that people actually type in Search Engines to find your website/ blog/ your offerings. Your potential customers are using these words to search for your offerings, and hence these words are what defines your ‘business’ online. This makes these words very crucial for every business online; and hence these words are termed as ‘Keywords’ to convey their importance.


How to find Keyword for your website/blog?

How to get Maximum benefits from Twitter for your Business

Image via Wikipedia

In my earlier post i have spoken about How to Build online contest to gain more Facebook fans & ... Now something more about twitter.

Twitter can benefit your business through creating a buzz about your company; all you need is to do the following things.


Create a possibility which your want to achieve from Twitter 

You need to write down the goal which you intend to achieve from twitter, it can be gaining more fans for your twitter page, or interacting with your fans or creating buzz about your products or services.

Once you have created the possibility you need to get into actions now, what are the actions required to achieve the goal which you have set.

Write it down, for eg. Your goal is to create more fans and have a conversation with them.

How are you going to achieve this? You can start from taking about their interest so that people can join you. Think on how you target audience can join you on twitter. The best way is follow people so that you can get connected to them.


Be the Cause in the matter of life

On page optimization

Image via Wikipedia

Here website is modifies in such a way that your website becomes search engine friendly. There is many things SEO expert do in on page optimization, below is a brief summary of it.

Keywords research, Market analysis & Competition analysis – when you get a project first step is to study clients website, understand his business, select keywords from there.

Then you need to do some competition research and market analysis, find out who are the players in market, study their website find out their strengths, keywords, site layout,  find out anything else which you are not providing but your competitors are. Find out their rankings for the keywords, have they done SEO or not. Competitor website Meta tags, page rank, no of Backlinks, page authority, domain authority etc.

After doing competitors analysis, you need to do your keyword selection for your website. By now you will have a list of rough keywords you would be targeting, some from your client’s website, and some from your competitors Meta tags rest you came out with your GK. Now what?

How to do competitor website analysis - #CompeteSEO

Image via Wikipedia

I would like to share my learning from Competitor’s SEO Program, I must say it was very detailed analysis and it has added to my current way of analyzing a website. We all know how to do website analysis but what Marios Alexandrou spoke about was a value addition to what we normally know.

Before starting any job we must ask four basic questions. What, Why, When, How.

• What are we going to do?  Its pretty simple, we are going to analyze a competitor’s website.

• Why we are doing it? We are doing it to motivate clients to do SEO for their websites, we want to show them where their competitors are standing and how they can also avail the same market share as their competitors are having.

• When to do it?  That’s up to you. You can do it when you get a new SEO enquiry, you can do it for you current SEO client.

• How to do it? Well this is quite long answer, so here we go….

The First step is to find out who are your client's competitors. How are you going to find it? Quite simple, ask you clients who are their competitors, do a Google search for their keywords & find out who are the market leaders and which businesses are competing with your client.

Once you have a list of competitors go to compete.com, check for their monthly traffic and find out where your clients is standing vis-a-vis the competitors.

Now zero down on one of the competitors, and then start the following analysis –

Technical -

• Crawl the site, find out total number of URLs, internal linking structure, how the link equity is been distributed.
• Do some analysis on Title of the pages, what are they emphasizing on, whether its Brand name, product name or commodity name?
• In the next part view page source, compare Google view with text only, find if canonical tag is been used in the site. Find out automatic injection of internal link building is being used.
• How many pages has Google indexed for their website, page speed of the website?

On page –

• Quickly scan through the website pages & look for the quality of content, keyword usage & what kind of keyword they are targeting.
• Check out how images are being used, Alt tags are filled or they are empty, do they have blog, if yes how they are utilizing it, what benefits is the blog providing them.
• Are they using videos, how they are promoting their website through video content?
• How content is helping them to generate traffic for their website, how quick they are adding content to the site or blog. 

Off site- 

• This section is for doing link research; find out the domain trust, domain authority, page authority.
• Find out total number of links they getting, what quality of links they are, use majestic seo, open site explorer.
• Find out what all link building activities they are doing, how many links they getting from articles, are they using badge linking.
• How active are they on social media, what initiatives are they taking and how much audience is involved with them. Check out their Facebook, twitter, digg accounts.

After doing all this, I am sure you will have a clear picture of how strong your competitor is.

I hope you enjoyed the article. I would love to hear your suggestions, please do share them via the comments section below.…

How to write effective blog content

Image by jjpacres via Flickr

1.     One of the most important things you need to keep in mind when you are writing a web copy is to hold your readers attention from the start of your content. Your title should be very attractive and catchy which force visitors to click on your post to know more about it, apart from post title, your initial post should be able to hold visitors interest in the post, you can try telling about some facts or about a recent research which will gain their interest in further reading.

2.       In body, try to explain what your target visitor must be looking when it came to your website. What is the thing which pulled him to the website; explain it using chart, diagrams, or pictures.

3.       Make your message very clear to the audience, don’t use jargons.

4.       Do proper formatting of your article, research has shown when the copy looks clean more no of people intend to read it.

5.       Use small paragraphs, don’t go on & on, take a pause after every conversation.

6.       Use headlines, use bold, italics, underline wherever required.

Related articles

• 10 Steps for Writing an Effective Blog Post (marketingtechblog.com)

Build online contest to gain more Facebook fans & twitter followers

Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

Every business seeks to promote its products / services online. To improve the efficiency of their website and the resultant sales, these businesses approach SEO Company to get search engine optimization done for their website.

However in today’s competitive environment, only SEO is not enough. Today you need to reach out to your customers, in their offices, homes and sometimes right in their bedrooms!!! Yes. It’s no more about just selling, today you need to build a connect, a relation with your customer. Social media optimization offers the best platform for this.

Strategizing is the keyword. Every business needs a Social Media Strategy, which will aim to maximize its reach. You need to go out and interact with the customer, and socializing is the best way to build better relations. With internet, you can socialize right from the convenience of your office, social media platforms are the best place to interact and engage your customer.

Websites are a passive medium, they offer all details about your product/service and the customer can browse through it, but social media is alive and kicking, and everybody loves a healthy discussion. Social media is fun and interactive, and you nee to make sure your strategies are best designed to harness the power of this media.

One of my personal favourite strategy using Social Media is something that will excite and invigorate your customer about your products or services. Its - A Contest!!! You got it right, running a well planned and interesting contest, can work wonders for any business. It can generate enormous buzz and fresh interest amongst your customers about your business.  
 
Enough of all this theory, now let’s talk about the how you should go about designing the perfect contest, to engage and excite your customers

Pre-requisites to Design a Social Media Contest:–

1.      Your target audience: Clearly define your target audience, demographically and geographically; whom you intend to target for this Contest

2.      What is your goal: Every Strategy has a goal, so also with your contest, having a clearly defined goal is very essential; what is the final outcome you  are seeking from this contest in terms of no of fans, sales etc

3.      Cost: Clearly defined budget helps in keeping the expenditure in check. What is the amount you are willing to spend on this contest? Will it be sufficient to attract your audience? So on.

Once these parameters are defined, go about designing the perfect Contest. Now once designed, it’s all about getting the contestant for your contest. Spreading the word far and wide is what will attract your customers and make your contest worth its money. Our suggestion, don’t make your contest Social Media friendly, make it right on the Social Media!! Here’s how:

How to use Social media to Design the Perfect Contest


Facebook is the perfect launch-pad for your Contest, so ready and launch a Facebook campaign - 

• Create & update contest on Facebook, use an attractive title which will intrigue and draw visitors to join your contest.
• Utilize the Facebook updates application and be sure to send all your existing fans the latest about your new Contest; and call them all to join in.
• Run ads on Facebook about the contest.
• Send newsletter to your existing customers about this contest & encourage them to join your contest.
• Encourage the participants of the contest to share the contest details with their friends.
• To keep the contest fresh and interesting, persuade the participants to keep commenting on the wall of your contest page.
• Participants must like your updates on the contest.

Don’t forget the power of Other Media’s like Twitter, Stumblr, Delicious etc…

• Promote your twitter account to your contest participants.
• Get your contestants to follow you on twitter. The more the merrier.
• Encourage them to retweet your messages & comment on the updates.
• Get your contestant to go social and share your contest page via all the mediums like Stumblr, Delicious etc….

Get going, implement all ideas, and see them work their magic for your business. While focussing on the big things do not overlook the smaller details. Create a proper landing page for visitors to join this contest, use good images & attractive language.

All these small points are very important. Keep them in mind.

All the Best!!!

Link Building – Is It For Great Rankings or Penalty

Image via Wikipedia

I had spoken about what is link building in my earlier post, now I will take this discussion further to Is link building good or bad.

Recently we have seen the link building spamming cases caught by Google of J.C Penney, warning to Forbes and penalty to overstock.

These all three have tried to play with links to get better ranking in Google for their products, J.C. Penney had bought links with proper anchor text, where as overstock had caught for getting links from students & professors giving them discounts on products. And Forbes was warned by Google for its un-natural links. So now what do you conclude is link building is a great way towards good rankings or it’s a way towards penalty from Google? Think about it.

I guess I have scared you enough by telling how these biggies got messed with Google for link spamming but link building is not always bad. If you use it properly and in a natural way, links will help you in a great way.

Just keep in mind that you don’t have a bad neighborhood, you don’t link to spamming websites or the sites which buy or sell links. Always try to link to high authority websites and high PR websites they help you a lot in getting good ranks, try to get links from .edu, .gov Google gives lot of importance to such links.

Keep in mind that you don’t build all the links in a single day, remember that Google is always watching you and your link activities. Build links slowly each week.

The best way to create links is –

- Do blog commenting on other good PR websites

- Create such content which other links to on their websites

- As others to speak about your services if they are happy with your services

- Do Directory Submissions

- Do articles Submissions

- Create lens on Squidoo and Do Guest Blogging on others Blog

- Use Social Media to create back-links

- Do Social Bookmarking

If you use all this in natural way I am sure you will achieve Google back links with high rankings, All the Best to you.

If you want to get Latest Updates on Online Reputation Management & Online E-Marketing, SEO Services or SEO Training then Subscribe to my blog via email to get the updates directly in your inbox.   

What is link building

Image via Wikipedia

What is link building?

Link building is getting good quality website to link to your website which helps in improving the rank in search engines. Link building is important because most of the search engines use quality & quantity as a parameter for website ranking. The more number of people link to your website the more popular your website becomes but don’t forget becoming popular has its own sets of problems so while doing link building you need to keep in mind that you don’t overdo it.

Which websites to get back links?

While asking for linking you need to analyze the website and see the following things –

Age of the Website & Domain – Old is Gold! Try to get backlinks from old domains they are more reliable in eyes of search engines.

Page Rank – You should always try to get backlinks from high PR websites, possibly from +3 PR Website.

Number of Pages indexed – Check out the no of pages index to find out how useful Google think the website content is.

Number of incoming links –Now a day’s Google has started giving importance to authority links and Trust Rank, In short it means having links from trusted websites like .edu, .gov etc.

How to obtain Good backlinks?

Article writing: write articles and submit to various article directories having your website link in it.

Blog Commenting: Using Blog commenting to create backlinks.

Use social bookmarking and social media to create buzz and backlinks both.

Link Exchange Programs: You can ask other website owners to link to your website with two way linking.

Directory Submissions: Use Directory submissions for creating back links, it is one of the easiest methods of creating backlinks.

Guest Blogging, Press Release and Buying links are some more ways of creating backlinks.

How to find & build Good authority Backlinks?

Keep an eye on your competitors backlinks – the first lesson of business is keep an eye on your competitor and be ahead of him. Keep checking their backlinks and try to get the same for you.

linkdomain:www.google.com site:edu

Using the above, find out others google quality backlinks and apply for the same.

Keyword+inurl:blog site:.edu

Search for good backlinks, comment on those blogs.

If you want to get Latest Updates on Online Reputation Management & Online E-Marketing, SEO Services or SEO Training then Subscribe to my blog via email to get the updates directly in your inbox. 

Related articles

• Link Building 101 (yoast.com)

JC Penny Link-building After Effects – Google’s New Improved Algorithm

Image via Wikipedia
Well Google has shown its power to the world once again that he is the one who rules on online world. After JC Penny used bought links to rank to for its keywords Google has come up with its new algorithm which has given pains to all most all big sites around the world.
JC Penny did it and we all are bearing the loss. Well we can’t call it loss exactly as what Google is doing is good for the people who search. But it’s surely a pain for the webmasters who had worked hard to get their website rank top in Google. Google’s shuffle make sites traffic and ranking have gone down.
Google has launched Its new algorithm (which reduced rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful) on 24th Feb 2011 which has affected websites traffic across the globe. Google informed a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of queries.
Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search
Some of the biggest losers in this are ezinearticles,suite101.com etc Currently this algorithm is being launched in US only but soon it will be across all countries.
Remember do not panic, just follow Google webmaster guidelines and optimize your website. Don’t use duplicates content, make your content useful for visitors. Use canonical Tags whenever you find similar content in your website.

If you want to get Latest Updates on Online Reputation Management & Online E-Marketing, SEO Services or SEO Training then Subscribe to my blog via email to get the updates directly in your inbox.

Blogging is it dead or not!!

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Recent article in New York Times (NYT) painted a grime picture of blogging by citing the decline in number of bloggers; this has annoyed the online community greatly. As soon as the NYT article hit the e space, numerous hardcore bloggers went into action posting their views on how absurd NYT was being with its story. Charges from ‘cherry picking statistics’ to ‘lack of understanding of blogosphere’ were levied against NYT.

Here are the dampeners from the NYT article:

• Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million
• From 2006-2009 blogging amongst 12-17 yr old fell by half
• Amongst 18-33 yr old it dropped by 2% in 2010 as compared to 2008

And here’s the cheer from the same article!!

• Among 34-to-45-year-old's who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier
• Blogging by 46-to-55-year-old's increased five percentage points, to 11 percent
• Blogging among 65-to-73-year-old's rose two percentage points, to 8 percent
• Globally, Blogger’s (owned by Google) unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.

While the hardcore bloggers say these figures paint a false picture, the truth is far from clear. Blogging sites do acknowledge that they have seen some decline in the traffic. But at the same time they are happy to acknowledge that the number of serious bloggers is increasing. While the younger audience is moving towards ‘Facebook and Twitter’ the older and more serious talkers are joining the blogosphere.

Facts that we are able to gleam from all the discussion going in the E- world about this topic are:

• Blogging is decreasing amongst the younger generation below 25 yrs are looking towards 'facebook' and 'twitter' to keep in touch with friends and share their opinion
• At same time more and more audience above 30 yrs is joining the blogosphere to post their views and thinking
• Blogs are becoming meatier and serious as lighter writers are shifting towards Twitter and other applications
• Blogging sites are coming of age and becoming more suave by creating communities to bring like minded people together and offering more applications and features
• New trend is emerging where in people are using other application like ‘facebook’ and ‘twitter’ to promote their blogs

As a last word, every statistician agrees that more and more people are joining the online world to share their views and opinions on myriad topics with the world. Thus the bottom line is that whether its 'blog' or 'facebook' or 'twitter' or any other application the final goal of the people is to share their thoughts with the world and, this is a very useful tool for any e-marketer.

If you want to get Latest Updates on Online Reputation Management & Online E-Marketing, SEO Services or SEO Training then Subscribe to my blog via email to get the updates directly in your inbox.