Chrome OS or what is all the fuss about?

Few days ago Google led live webcast of the update on Google Chrome OS.

First what is Chrome OS?
Google Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system, under development, intended to be fast, secure and web oriented. It targets mainly netbooks and even a new term was created – chromebook.

You can learn more from the Official Google Blog here and this Google video:


And Google Chrome OS Demo:


Security principals


chromebook is a term I found on Matt Cutts blog here. It sounds kinda cool.

Content

Articles Content 

SEO and marketing basics, first steps

SEO basics - start here if you are newbie
What are SMO and SMM?
SEO and Ethics
Nofollow
Backlinks
Good on-site optimization 
Basic SEO resources
How to get indexed fast
Use keywords in titles
SEO campaign
SEO with blog
SEO for a country
Getting traffic from your images
SEO career
How to learn SEO - top three ways
After publishing new article
How often to post?
Blog planning - how to strart a popular blog?
The basic SEO rule
SEO errors during website development
Canonical link element
Landing page
Blog comments
What to do when somebody steals your content
Blogging tips
Viral Marketing Intro
Sitemaps basics
Press Release Intro
Blogging

Twitter

How to successfully market on Twitter?


Getting traffic and quick lists

How to get traffic through forum posting
42 tips to get more traffic
10 easy ways to improve your traffic
15 easy and free ideas to get more traffic

Link building

Link building strategy
Abstract view on link building process
Link building - good vs bad web directories
Link building - the right way
Link Building - how different link types can affect ranking


Make money online

Worst blog niches for making money with PPC
Make money blogging
How easy making money online is?

Lists and resources

Top social bookmarking list
Top SEO forums list
Free directories list

Tools

Google Friend Connect

JavaScript

JavaScript and SEO

Fun

Meet our team

For SEO clients

How to choose the right SEO expert

Geographic targeting

A video about geographical targeting with Google Webmaster Tools.

Blogger tricks - limiting the posts shown per tag page

Blogger is quite useful and configurable blogging platform but most of the users simply don’t pay enough attention to it. Users have the freedom to change a lot of stuff on their blogs.
I’ll share some tips I find useful here and in some future posts.

How to limit the post count shown at a tag page
The tags are useful in order to maintain your content but the tag pages are too big – the default 20 posts may take too long to load even if your blog don’t have many images or videos. If you have a gaming blog with screenshots – the loading process may look insane.
How to solve this issue?

The solution is simple but first – back up your template.

If you don’t know how to back up it, here is the path:
Go to your blog’s layout page and select the Edit HTML tab. You will see a link – Download Full Template. Click it and save the file on your local disk. Voila, you have your template saved if you mess something later.
If you fail later, use the Upload template form to restore your template from you local hard drive.


Limiting the posts on a label page

What we need to achieve?

Ok, let’s look at a tag page. For example:
http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/search/label/blogging

We need to set the variable max-results to something appropriate – let’s say 5. So we must add ?max-results=5 to our url.

http://bestseostrategy.blogspot.com/search/label/blogging?max-results=5

One way is to hardcore the tag urls but this requires too much efforts. The other way is to change the blog template.
Again go to the Layout – Edit HTML tab. Check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox. Now, you can see the full source code of your template.

Find the text

expr:href='data:label.url' 

and change it to

expr:href='data:label.url+ "?max-results=5"'

You may find it multiple times, depending on your template. Fix it everywhere. Save the template and try your tags. They must work fine, now.

If you meet some problems in the process, revert back to your original template and try again. I wish this tip will help.

Blogging, technically

Blogging may look very easy but creating a high-quality, money making blog requires a lot of efforts. Just posting content won’t make you rick. Your blog will need a lot of maintenance and technical work.

In order to grow a money-making blog, there are several things you need to know. Here I’ll generalize the basics.

• Select a blogging platform
  
  Part of the planning process is the selecting of a blogging platform. Here you must answer to several questions. The first and most important of them all is – do you have an initial capital? If the answer is no or you have a limited budget I’ll recommend a free blogging platform. There are several large scale and professional blogging software available for free. The same question is in force for the blog hosting. If you want to spend some money you better go for a free blog hosting.
  
  
• Know your platform
  
  The next part of a planning process is getting to know your blogging platform. Start with reading the available documentation, license, user agreement. You better know what to expect because changing the platform or even the service later will be painful.
  Some experimenting with your future blog will help you solve some future problems in advance.
  
  
• Help and Support
  
  Find if your selected platform or service have some support. Search for user feedbacks and opinions. Be sure you can relay on a professional help when needed. Check the community forums and read the newbie and tutorial section there.

Blogging is a serious occupation and money-making through blogging is a serious business. If you want a success there you need to approach every part carefully and plan your strategy in advance.

Link building – how different link types can affect ranking

SEO optimization of a website consists of two main parts – on-site optimization and off-site optimization. On-site optimization is the process of improving your content and your site accessibility. Off site optimization is the process of link building, marketing and so on. They may seem not related but it is not exactly true.

Quality content can bring you a lot of good and high quality links. People will link naturally to your website and your inner pages. Off site optimization is the way to speed up this process. Doing SEO on a meaningless content is a waste of time.



How important are the quality links?

The links from a high traffic and trusted sites can bring you more value than a high number of low quality links. Links from authoritative sites in your niche are the best. The thought behind is that if a trusted site links to you, you must be a trusted site, too.

How important is the quantity of the links?

People tend to overestimate the value of the links but links from a website not related to your niche or with no search engine value won’t help you to rank well. They can even harm your ranking for a while. Even building them too fast can be suspicious and some of the search engines can mark you as a spammy content.

Relevant links

Links relevant to your site topics are better than ones that are not even if they are not high ranked. Unrelated sites won’t bring you targeted visitors or search engine ranking. There is no point of building them.

Link position
Links from the main page of a website have more value than links from the ‘Links’ or ‘Friends’ page. The number of links is also important for the value it ads to your site. If your link is at a position 100 in a list of links it won’t bring you much attention.


Reciprocal links

Many search engine optimization experts think that the reciprocal links are ranked slightly lower than normal, one-way links but I haven’t seen a confirmation of this statement. Most of the sites with two-way linking strategies have a lot of outgoing and ingoing links and my personal opinion is that harms their ranking more than the two-way links.


Outgoing links

Outgoing links can help you rank better or can hurt your ranking badly. If you link to related, trusted websites in the niche of your articles you will gain only profit. In other hand if you link to a low quality websites – your ranking will go down. Also big number of outgoing links can rate down your website.

Press Release Introduction

Press release is a message, written communication (or some other form like video, audio, etc) oriented towards the news representatives like newspapers, websites, magazines, Tv Stations or even bloggers.
Press releases are used to announce some sort of information as products, release dates, researches. Press releases can be mailed to different medias or stored on the announcer’s website as an electronic press kits.
A press release usual format is an article but it can be in a form of screenshots (game publishing) or a short video.

Press releases are common source of information for newspapers, news websites, magazines, radio and television stations. A lot of websites and blogs exist publishing only press release information from different sources. This is a common phenomenon in the gaming, software and hardware niches but it also occurs in several other topics.

Publishing your own press release will help the news media to discover your product. Press releases usually bring back good brand awareness and excitement. Press release can bring you a lot of attention, backlinks or even new customers.

Choosing press release format
The form of your own press release must depend on the type of information you want to announce. The basic written article stile is good for announcing some basic information and it is easier for publishing on almost all kind of media. Your final audience must be a considered too.

Sitemaps basics

Sitemap is a special page on a website that contains information for the accessible pages of a website. Sitemaps help visitors and search bots to find pages. The sitemap is important for SEO of a site because it ensures that all desired pages can be crawled. Even if your website navigation uses JavaScript, your pages will be crawled if they are correctly described in your sitemap.
Sitemaps are very helpful if you have pages on your website that aren’t discovered by the search engines.

Sitemap formats

XML
The most widely used sitemap format is XML. Google first started to use sitemaps in 2005 and later most of the big search engines announced support for the protocol.
The XML sitemap format is relatively simple. The document must consist of these XML tags:

• urlset – the base tag. All other tags must be parts of this one.
• url – the base url tag
• loc – the full url of the page
• priority – the priority of the page relevant to other pages of the site
• changefreq – How frequent the page changes
• lastmod – last modified

Feeds
Site feeds can be used as sitemaps in most of the search engines. In fact Google uses the site feeds to crawl blogs hosted on blogger. This method has some drawbacks but in most of the cases it is pretty convenient.

Text file
You can use a text file for your sitemap. It can be any extension you like but the best way is as a .txt file.

Submitting Sitemaps
Most of the search engines offer a way for webmasters to submit their sitemaps. For Google you can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap.

Viral Marketing Intro

Have you heard the term Viral Marketing? Ever wonder what is it exactly? Why people pay so much attention to it?

What is Viral Marketing?
Viral Marketing is a marketing technique that uses word-of-mouth and social networks to achieve its goals and reach wider audience. It can be used for many marketing goals like increasing brand awareness or sales.

Tools of Viral Marketing
Many new technologies can be used in a Viral Marketing campaign. For example videos, flash games, software and e-books are very common.

High-tech social networks like Twitter, Digg, YouTube are common tools in many campaigns.

Very popular approach is the viral video method. In it a video (usually a fun video) is spread all over the internet through services like YouTube, blogs, instant messages. Have you ever received a fun video from a friend? Some people tend to send such links to all their contacts without even a vague idea for their role.

Viral Marketing relies on the sharing instinct of the masses. It is considered for one of the Internet wonders.

With the increasing number of online communities the viral market became easier and cheaper to achieve. More and more big companies turn their sight on it. You can see their profiles on Twitter and other similar services - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.

The future
If you thing this is too much, be prepared for the future. Many marketing specialists tend to say that Viral Marketing is going to play larger and larger role on the market.