Archive for ‘SEO’
The importance of link popularity
Gaining high link popularity is perhaps the single most important factor when trying to reach the top page on the major search engines. It appears that all the large search engines are using link popularity as a way of calculating the importance of a page, thus giving it a higher rank.
Some people in the SEO business argue that link popularity is widely overrated, and are instead claiming the relevance of the link to be of much more importance when calculating the final SE position. According to this theory, a few links from highly relevant pages would mean much more than many links from pages with lower relevance to your website.
Other SEO theorists argue link popularity to be the single most important factor, and are often using nothing but the anchor text (the word or phrase actually linked) to target their keywords and phrases. According to this theory, one could reach a high SE position by a massive amount of links with keyword rich anchor texts.
Using any of these techniques will surely raise both your link popularity, and your SE position, but I see little reason not to go both ways. If getting many links would improve your ranks, and a few relevant would as well – getting them all would surely improve your ranks even further.
Reviewing John Chow dot Com
I’ve always been a fan of John Chow dot Com and love the way he writes about technology and SEO stuff in such a humourous, personalised manner. So when my favourite tech blog (apart from LiewCF, that is) decides to give a free link back for every review he gets, its too good of a chance to pass up. To date, he has categorised his reviews according to batches (10 blogs for each batch) and currently it is at batch no 17. According to him it won’t be long before it goes into batch no 18 and who knows when this offer will end. No, I am not interested in the USB MiniTV prize, I am more interested in getting a back link and much needed exposure 
So I decided to jump on the bandwagon and review his blog now before I miss out.
Anyway, I find John Chow dot Com to be more of a personalised SEO/technology blog of a person who has been slowly climbing up the online money-making ladder and sharing his experiences with his readers on how exactly he did that. The posts that are contained in the blog are very useful and I love the tips and tricks on how to optimise your blog for SEO in order to gain traffic and readership. And of course, more moola. He also does paid blogging from ReviewMe, and it is interesting to see that his reviews are honest and unbiased even though he is being paid for the job. Well, I am certainly quite far away from achieving what John Chow has achieved (this blog is after all a miserly PR2) but I wish him well and certainly he will find much success online.
Now, can I get my free back link, please? 
Cutting down on blog categories
Having too many blog categories for your post may be bad for SEO, according to this blog post from Take More Risks. According to the blogger:
So how many’s too many? I guess you have to take it on a blog by blog basis. Take More Risks is 5 months old and has just over 220 posts, I hardly think it’s deserving of over 30 categories. It seems as if I’m diluting my link authority by focusing on such a broad range of topics. It’d be beneficial to either remove all of my categories altogether or define broader types and move the posts to there. Topics like PHP, Javascript and Web Design might fall under “Technology†or something similar.
Well I have somehow managed to keep the categories of this blog to a minimum, even though the blog has been running for four months or so. He may have a point as having too many categories will duplicate the pages in a blog and the Google spider would detect it as duplicate site content and will not take it into consideration for their rankings, probably even to the extent of penalising the blog for duplicate content, as SEOBook documents. See how Shoemoney had managed to increase his Google search traffic by 1400% this past month by preventing some of his pages from being indexed. In short, cutting back on blog categories will be good for your blog in search engines in the long run. Trim up the fat and give more generalised categories for your blog posts.
SearchStatus toolbar for Firefox
I am currently using the SearchStatus toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and I truly love it. It displays your latest rankings from Alexa, Google and your backlinks from the major search engines. As you may have thus guessed, this is good data for your SEO needs. According to the developer:
SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy.
You can download this SEO toolbar here. And if you are using Microsoft IE, dump that stupid browser and use Firefox instead!
I got Z-Listed!
Many thanks to Noorullah Online for including me in the Z-List. I notice that there are many visitors to this blog. I like this concept very much as I am sure that it will work for SEO so I am going to participate. Therefore here is the Z-List, the emporia way. All you need to do to participate is just grab the list, post it in your blog and wait for someone to take it. And make sure you follow these very simple instructions to the letter.
Key Points
1) Create a new post on your blog.
2) Copy and Paste the entire list of blog links below
3) Add any blogs that you want to include near the top of the list. (Optional)
4) Include the blog where you first got the list from, on the list in your post.
5) Do not include your own blog links on the list in your post.
6) Make sure that all links are copied intact.
7) Publish the Post.
The List
I add:
Diana Tan
Blog.Jiboneus
Anthraxxxx
GeekySpeaky
Jundullah Business Blog