Oct 27, 2009

How to create SEO-friendly JavaScript menus

JavaScript is not SEO friendly.
You can find this statement all over the web.

What does it mean and is it really true?

I’ll try to answer.

What SEO-friendly means?
SEO friendly or Search-engine friendly website is a website which is easily crawled by the search engine robots. JavaScript in page navigation can stop the crawlers from accessing some pages but this doesn’t mean you can’t use JavaScript in website menus. As long as you have anchor links your pages are accessible.

For example you can have a list with your links animated as a drop-down menu. You must have

<a href=”http://mysite/my_inner_page” >menu item</a>

in your list items and your inner pages will be easily accessible by all web crawlers.

So, JavaScript can be used in optimized websites and if it is used cleverly it won’t harm the SERP results.

Oct 24, 2009

10 reasons to use blogger

Blogger is a popular blogging platform used by many people.

Here are the reasons I use and like blogger.
  • It is free.
    You don’t have to pay for domain name or hosting. You don’t have to pay for support. Of course you can use your domain, but there is always an option to make your blog totally free. The possibility to minimize the costs is very important for new internet businesses. And you have the freedom to experiment and learn without paying anything.
  • It is easy.
    It is very easy to use. You don’t have to read long tutorials or boring documentation to do something with your blog. For example you can change your template with only few clicks.
  • It is customizable.
    You can change almost anything to better represent your ideas.
  • There are many templates.
    Blogger offers its own template API and a page with lots of templates. You can also download a template from many websites that offer free blogger templates. Just type “free blogger templates” in Google and you will find countless websites.
    Editing your template is not hard either. You can code it from PSD with almost no efforts. You just need to know basic html and read the help page.
  • It is SEO friendly.
    Your blog will be SEO friendly without any efforts. You don’t need to do or install anything.
  • It is professional.
    Your blog can look professional and high quality if you provide good content. Yes, it is a free service but people choose it because of its quality. You don’t have down time or problems and its support and security are at high levels.
  • You can make money with it.
    You can use Adsense or other network to make money. You have no restrictions as long it is legal and it complies with its terms of use.
  • It is multi-language platform
    You can work with it on your own language.
  • It has many add-ons.
    You can add many different gadgets with only few clicks. You can add search box, adsense widget or even a poll.
  • It is fun!

Oct 22, 2009

Remove URL from Google

I find this video by Matt Cutts very useful and decided to share it with you.



And one more talking about robots.txt file.

Oct 20, 2009

How to get traffic through forum posting

Maybe you have heard that forum posting can bring you traffic and you wonder if it is true. The answer is – yes, it is true for people who know what they are doing. Here is a simple tutorial on how to get targeted traffic from forums.

First things first – start with a plan. Examine your site and select few good looking pages for landing pages. Or create some. Landing pages are important because they create the first impression. If you want an action make sure your message is clear enough.

Next, find a list of forums in your niche. It would be best if they are sorted according to their page rank. Filter the ones who don’t allow forum signatures. In the matter of facts you can try them, create account and make few posts but you won’t get much traffic from them. Don’t forget to add your site in your profile details.

Now you must have a list of niche forums. It is not a problem if they don’t allow sig during the first few days or posts. Register in all of them and visit their hello section. Say hello and few details about yourself. For example if you have a gaming site and you are a girl don’t forget to mention it. Use humor, people like funny things.

Make a posting schedule. Try to post regularly and in all forum sections. When you have something like fifty posts – do your hit. For the time you spend on the corresponding forum you must know which topics are hot and create big buzz. Create a hot topic. You can use even a linkbait style. After few posts or pages submit this page to digg and some others social websites.

Continue to post even after the initial success. New posts will bring new visitors. And you get more incoming links. Keep up with your posting schedule or hire someone to do the work. If you use a freelancer to make forum posts for you – make sure the posts are quality enough. Just spamming will bring more harm than benefit.

Forum posting is an easy way to get targeted traffic, links and brand awareness. Forum can help your business grow but you must take the work seriously. Even if it looks like free time it is a job and you must do it careful and with a lot of thinking.

Oct 16, 2009

Short list of useful blogging tips

Blogs are taking over the world. They are everywhere and about everything. Everyone can have a blog. And people make money from their blogs. You can see good blogs and bad blogs, seo blogs, entertainment blogs, personal or even an autoblogs.

How to create a popular blog? It is not an easy task and many people start and then give up.

Here is my list of advices for beginner bloggers:


  • Establish a blogging schedule
  • Write good content
  • Don’t copy blog posts
  • Copy successful bloggers
  • Use common sense
  • Offer useful information
  • Get cool and easy to understand blog theme
  • Have simple blog navigation
  • Select a niche and stick on it
  • Comment on other blogs in your niche
  • Participate in comments discussions
  • Participate in forums
  • Create videos
  • Use photos
  • Drink your morning coffee before posting
  • Think before posting
  • Use twitter to promote
  • Use sense of humor
  • And have fun
  • Learn SEO
  • Read blogging news
  • Be creative
  • Create goals
  • Follow your goals
  • Analyze, analyze, analyze (your visitors, traffic, achievements)

Oct 10, 2009

Stolen content

These days I found the articles from one of my blogs on an unknown website. Obviously, my content was stolen. Later I found some more websites with my articles on them.

Several sites were using its RSS feed to publish my articles without link or mentioning, stealing my traffic and Google SERP. In fact my site got penalty for duplicate content. My own content!


So I did a little research what to do when site content is stolen.

How to find stolen content?
If your search engine traffic is going down no matter what you are doing or you don’t receive any visitors for your new, fresh and good articles, check for scrapers. The fastest way to find stolen content is to run a search with some specific text from your article in quotes.

What to do when your site content is stolen?
The first thing to do is to contact the scam site owner to remove your content. This part can be easy if he have a proper contact form or email on his site. In my case both sites hadn’t email or contact form. So I used WHOIS service to get their owners details. I got anonymous mails and I mailed them. No response.

Let’s see what Google says.
I found a post in Google Webmaster Central Blog - Duplicate content due to scrapers and this one on Google Adsense Blog - My content, your content, other people's content.
In short you can use this link https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport to report spam site. If you have problems with your traffic, you can try and ask for reconsideration from Google Webmaster tools. And you can fire a DMCA. Here is detailed information on how to do it - http://www.google.com/dmca.html.

You can contact the scraper’s hosting company and try to ask them for action.

In some of the above links I found one very useful advice. Always include your full link in your posts.

Stolen content is a very sensitive topic. It is not always easy to defend your work from cheaters. Most of the time search engines filter scam sites correctly but there is noting perfect. If you find your content stolen don’t panic and take the right actions.

Stolen Content on my SEO Strategy Blog.

Oct 7, 2009

Optimize your blog for search engines and human visitors

Blogging is a popular way to express your self and share your thoughts with the world. With the invasion of PPC services blogging became a way to earn a living. This is the reason for increasing number of blogs in any niche.
Getting new visitors become harder and harder in this competitive environment. Many niches became saturated.
Every blog needs more visitors despite the reason it’s created. To draw more visitors you need to put in some efforts.

Content
Have you heard the phrase “Content is king”. It’s a controversial phrase but not fully true or false. Good content will bring you loyal visitors. Good content can make your loyal visitors to share your blog with their friends. And search engines like what people like (most of the time).
You need to update your content regularly to get the attention of the search engines. The biggest ones give most credits on new and regularly updated content so if you want to go up in SERPS update, update, update!

Links
Link building is very important for your SEO campaign. You need quality links from prestigious websites with high PageRank.
Of course you can start with submitting your website link to many blogging networks like TopOfBlogs, BlogCatalog. Find a list of dofollow social bookmarking sites and submit your post links to them. Create both regular and deep links.
Submit your blog to general and niche link directories.

Forums
Find a list of forums related to your niche and start posting in them. Create fun signatures with your link in them. Post controversial topics and use linkbaits. Forums can bring you readers and links so don’t forget to write quality posts.

Platform
Best blogging platforms by my opinion are blogger and wordpress. There are many pros and cons to use either of them but I won’t discus which is better here. Both are well optimized and you won’t have many SEO problems with them.

Design
You need human and SEO friendly design. To be SEO friendly your site needs to satisfy several requirements. Here are some of them:
  • Use regular links for menus.
  • Use tags and categories.
  • Don’t use JavaScript for menu navigation.
  • Your main content must come before the sidebars.
  • Use SEO-friendly urls.
  • Optimize your images.
  • Don’t create deep navigation trees. Every article must not be further than three clicks away from your homepage.

Social Networks
Join Twitter, Digg, FaceBook and start to make friend and followers. Select your best posts and share their links with few words of explanation. Write tweets and posts with 20% to 50% general talk, 30% your niche information and 20% with your links. Don’t spam with links cause people tend to unfollow persons with such behavior.


Work regularly. Don’t stop to improve your blog. Learn from other bloggers and don’t be afraid to experiment. Many successful bloggers have published their stories on internet – read them and find your inspiration.

Oct 3, 2009

Google Wave

Currently, a new wave of talk shows on internet. Bloggers make a lot of buzz about this.

Google Wave is a new communication tool presented by Google. With it people can interact with one another in real time. Wave can be used for work and free time as it can work with maps, rich text, images, videos, and so on.
I wasn’t surprised to see Google Wave as trending topic in Twitter for some time.

As a communication product Wave looks very promising. Google Wave API makes possible for webmasters to embed Google Wave in their website or write bots for automated tasks.




Links:
Google Wave
Google Wave API

42 tips to get more traffic

  1. Use high quality content.
  2. Keep adding content on a regular base.
  3. Use SEO friendly URLs.
  4. Use keywords in page titles.
  5. Use linkbaits.
  6. Use pictures.
  7. Use videos.
  8. Use presentations.
  9. Be creative.
  10. Be unique.
  11. Write about hot topics.
  12. Write controversial posts.
  13. Do a keyword research.
  14. Tag your content.
  15. Remove broken links.
  16. Study your logs. Value what visitors like.
  17. Build a brand.
  18. Write press releases.
  19. Post to related mailing lists.
  20. Invite guest bloggers.
  21. Be a guest blogger.
  22. Do offline advertising.
  23. Make lists like this one.
  24. Submit to directories.
  25. Submit to social bookmarking sites.
  26. Write articles and submit them to article directories.
  27. Use trackbacks.
  28. Comment on other blogs.
  29. Use your links in forums signatures.
  30. Run contests.
  31. Give away freebies.
  32. Join Twitter and make a community.
  33. Tweet regularly.
  34. Join Digg and make a lot of friends.
  35. Join SpicyPage.
  36. Join MyBlogLog.
  37. Join Blog Catalog.
  38. Create MySpace page and make some friends.
  39. Answer questions on Yahoo answers with link to your blog.
  40. Use StumbleUpon.
  41. Add your blog to Technorati.
  42. Use viral marketing.

Oct 2, 2009

How easy is making money online?

Is it easier to make money online? Can I make money online fast and without efforts?

No. The answers of these questions are no and no. Money from internet aren’t easy, most of the time working online is even harder than a regular job. In your regular job you have a job description, you have a schedule and you don’t have to work fast and have overtime. There are regular jobs with a lot of stress but it all depends on your decision and state of mind. Overworking is relatively rare.

In other hand working online is not scheduled. You have to do many different kinds of work. Communicate with clients, hire professional or do something specialized yourself. You don’t have to work eight hours every day, sometimes you have to work more than 12 hours daily to make a living.

Working online requires knowledge in many different fields – marketing, SEO, web design, client management and much more. If you sell products online you have to study your products and their market. Research their target audience.

Of course, you can hire experts to do every specific task but most of the online businesses start with few or even no initial money.

Yes, online you can make money. But forget the fast part. Only scam businesses promise to make you rich fast. Every online business must start with building a community. You need to earn your clients trust and this is a slow process.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of pros to make money online. The feeling that you depend only on yourself and your skills is irreplaceable. Your efforts are not in vain and the key decisions are all your doing. To grow a business is something that can inspire almost anyone. If you a good enough you will eventually get more money than your regular job.

Making money online is not easy. You need luck, you need knowledge and you need to work hard sometimes more than 10 hours a day, 7 days a week.