TheAnand

It is a known fact that backlinks are one of the major factors which Google consider while indexing our websites in their search results. The more you have the better. But it is also important to take care of the quality of backlinks that you get for your website as building backlinks the wrong way can screw you over with the Big G.

Google looks at many factors while ranking a website and some of these which I personally consider important are:

• Backlinks – The count and the quality
• Age of the domain and if its static or frequently updated.

This week I am in mood for some link building! Anyone remotely interested getting more traffic to their website will be interested in knowing the various options to build links to your sites. After some hours spent on my mindmap on building links, I plan to tell you the various avenues to build links to your websites the easy way and get traffic to your website.

I plan to cover this mini-series in the next 5 days unless something else comes into my already hectic schedule at my startup.

What is Link building?

A New age proverb says an image is probably worth a 1000 hits on Image search engines if you optimize it right. If you run a celebrity wallpaper like me, you should probably know that the majority of people looking for good wallpapers and shots of half naked celebs come from Google Image Search. There are not many ways to SEO  images for search positions, this article tries to cover a few of the common methods.

1. ALT Image text – Probably the old school method of SEO. You stuff in your keywords into <img alt=”image-desc”>and you are done. There is a beautiful wordpress plugin that automatically optimizes your images with appropriate title and alt tags. Grab it here.

Google and Bing, the two major search engine competitors are currently on a race to integrate real time search into their results. This brings micro-blogging services mainly dominated by Twitter into the main-stream media.

But, I am not convinced. Will real time search really define the future? As a SEO consultant, this brings nightmares. First Google wanted unique content dripping frequently into a site and now it favors real time updates more in its search positions. Can there really be a perfect and reliable real time update?

This post is the second post in the series of posts I plan to do on creating a niche blog.

I have been making niche blogs for about 3 years now and with each site I make, I learn a ton about making money online with niche blogs. Each site takes a different monetization approach once it hits a resonable traffic. I have been mainly monetizing my sites with Adsense and Chitika and very recently with MarketLeverage and Pepperjam.

I just finished putting my little health niche blog online and have been taking notes for the process so that I can share it with you guys.

Today a friend of mine Nomar pinged me up on chat and challenged me to do a competition to create a low mantainance niche blog on a topic and make money off it with adsense. Though I see some good money with affiliates, adsense has been my favourite way of earning. It is low work, consistant returns and long term money maker.

I get a lot of questions about making money with adsense and online in general and SEO and stuff. So, I thought I would take a clue and build a site with you guys and show you first hand on how it is done.

When I was starting my money online ventures almost 3 years(woo, the anniversary is comin up!) back I had adsense on my personal site in geocities and stuck up adsense chunks on all the three pages of my site and was waiting for revenue to roll in. But then, if you have had your hands dirty with adsense, you probably now know that it does not work that way

I got my account activated on the 3rd of November 2005. And that was my first years income on adsense! But unlike most others, I did not quit Currently making a decent money on adsense, I guess I can talk about a few reasons why you do not make anything out of your adsense sites.

Today I am in a mood of giving something back to the community. Today, I am celebrating the birthday of someone special with you my readers! For all you out there this is a small contest where you can win a few stuff and wish Happy Birthday to someone very special.

What is on the winnings table?

1. 2 Free domains – EnterSurf.info and Freedombabe.info
2. SEO consultation for your site – 2 hours.
3. 2 months of free link on my blogroll.

What are the advertising offers?

• 15% off on any advertising on my site. Check the advertising page for more information

Happened last weekend and I absolutely have no idea why it happened. I added my site to the webmaster central and within a week my PageRank is like poof! Gone! It does not really mean much to me on this site since I do not sell pagerank here, so advertisements are not a reason.

Alexa ranks hates this blog since every other week its only going downwards, so does PR now. Technorati refuses to index my new links and hence a stagnant ranking there. All this makes my blog pretty much useless to potential advertisers. The traffic to the blog has only been growing all these days and I end up being bitch slapped?

I wanted to do this for a long time now, but had decided to do it only after my blog has some decent statistics worth bragging talking about. I always think linking out to others is a great way to grab their attention.Vandelay Website Design blog is one such blog who has used post level link exchanges to get some great linkbacks from the blogosphere.

Here is what I propose to do:

• Write a small paragraph about my site in your blog and include one of my posts in your entry.

If you are anything like me, you usually spend a great deal of time online, chatting, hanging out at the forums, researching new niches and ways to make money online. The amount of information that you intake each day is simply enormous. Have you ever taken any action on the information you know yet?

While you have nothing apart to do online, I usually engage myself in my sites stats which usually make no sense like our stock markets One set of stats I always keep an eye out for is my search engine keyword traffic. One one side, its a good SEO practice to write information on stuff people are looking for, on the other hand its a sneaking up into what people use to find my site

I have this really nice plugin called Search Meter for WordPress which shows you what people are searching for in your wordpress blog. I find it amusing to see what people search for in my site. Here is a screenshot of one of the best parts:

What if I told you that I can tell you a trick that will help you own unlimited .edu blog for free? What if I told you that .edu backlinks are most sought after links by most link builders and SEO Gurus everywhere? Guess you already knew that.

Just to clarify my status, I just wanted to tell a few fans (mainly myself ) of my blog and other readers that Anand is not dead yet! I was putting up posting to the next day all these days mainly due to laziness and pressure at college and other not so life threating problems. So what was I upto all these days?

• I had the first flight travel of my life on 18th Oct. 2007 to Chennai in Indian Airlines from my home town Cochin. And good things come in a big box, I had my return in the evening in Deccan Air.

I am going to share some really useful tips on how you can get guaranteed top listings for any term you want. Do let me know if I missed anything in your comments below the post. Here goes! Before starting off, please do not read about my other SEO tips.

1. Cloak your pages. This means putting in loads of keyword stuffed paragraphs and coloring them the same as your page background. Normal visitors will not see it, but search engine bots will. Yeh! super tip…

How NOT to SEO

I recently noticed that I rank pretty high for the keyword “Web Designer Cochin” on the first as the 4th result. I got all happy and then I decided to have a goal to reach the top to topple the currently numero uno. I with my knowledge of search engine optimization, I optimized my pages with keywords in the title(I did not have it before), keywords in the body and stuff like that. But to my astonishment, I found Google kicked me to the second page for all my good ranking terms. Now I have been going up this week again to reach the 6th position. So the moral of the story is – “Do not optimize your sites too much for keywords, anchor text is important and don’t live by Google!”.

This is an antique debate on using the do-follow plugin on your blogs. Are you looking for more comments on your blog or are you concerned about having a blog that “leaks” pageranks? I had some thoughts on this since I started blogging about a year back. But when JohnChow decided to sell do-follow on the comments on his blog, I decided to take some steps to make commenting more prominent on my blog too.

Recently I noticed that Court was doing a bit of SEO for wordpress themes by checking their code and tweaking it to get the most out of them. I must say that I am pretty much satisfied using the themes he had optimized for SEO, since my minisite ranks pretty google for its terms.

So I asked him if he could look at my first wordpress theme – Arabian Sea and optimize a bit here and tweak a ‘lil there. And he did and now you can get my theme all SEO’d for free! He has made some minor tweaks to some of the files to give your content more attention and to prevent other page elements to steal focus of the search spiders. Read about the changes he made and to download the optimized theme.

I found that a lot of people are using minisites about different topics to make money with adsense and other programs. Lot of webmasters feel that they should have a lot of sites in different niches to get a decent income without much trouble.

What are minisites? They are small sites with information about a topic and the subjects around it written with SEO in mind to obtain high results for a set of keywords to bring in traffic.

This post is Sponsored by OrkutBase – Your Orkut HTML Codes base!

If you are a regular user of Orkut you will find out that they have added a new friends update feature which shows what your friends have added to their profile. This is a very useful feature which I liked a lot in Hi5. But it can be a reason for embarrassment too as I recently discovered my friends interest in hot videos )

Though this has been around for sometime, not many people look at it as a way to promote their site. Finally after a bit of debate, I decided to do a bit of article marketing myself for Shymz. So, what is this Article Marketing?

Article marketing is a type of advertising by writing short articles related to business’ respective industry. Once written, the business makes these articles freely available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a ‘bio box’ and ‘by-line’ which include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of gaining the author business credibility within his or her market, as well as new clients (via Wiki).

Are you the #1 out there? I am usually asking this since I have seen a few #1′s being toppled off by others. These new #1′s are then toppled by others and so on. It is usually very easy to target the numero uno and try to overtake them. But staying at the top is pretty difficult since you have to do things done by none, you have no guiding light and have to tread ways untread paths.

I have been terribly busy the past month looking at ways to increase my revenue and presence online. Also I am a bit pissed off by the pending page rank. As a webmaster or as a money seeker online, you must know the importance of page rank. It is what determines your ceiling to make money on the web. I am angry with this update since it is not being fair to me. I build a lot of sites build links to them and wait for the Pagerank update, but where is it?

I was thinking on the lines of a competition for my new top secret project: Shymz which led me to look around for fresh ideas. I found that a lot of sites are running new competitions for various prizes and stuff to be won.

With blog contests becoming a rage all over the blogosphere, I was wondering if it will help you in anyway to increase your statistics online.

By stats, I mainly refer to:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rankings
• Technorati

I got back from my vacation. But I am in a strange problem. My site is having a problem with www. and without www which is showing different versions on this site. I have no idea which server I am posting this on.

If I visit theanand.com/blog without the www., it shows a post dated 5th Aug. And then when I go to www.theanand.com/blog it shows a post dated 8th Aug as the latest post. Also some comments go missing. Has anyone else experienced this somehow? What am I to do other than mail my host and wait? All my SEO efforts will go down the drain if it stays much longer on the one without the www. since it is redirecting to the URL without www.

I usually take some time off to optimize my sites once in a while. I always thought that Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic for a blog. Since this traffic is highly targeted and they reach your blog looking for something specific and they are more likely to click on your contextual ads since they relate to what the visitor is looking for.

Today I went around digging my own archives again to find some of my well received posts. Those who are new to my blog might find it interesting. Tell me what deserves a kudos or a kick!

• Made for Paid Posts is the next big thing!
• My Cash Giveaway, are you in yet?
• Who is the best of PHP, ASP and JSP?
• Make money with your blog.

These are some of the posts I found to get some good traffic from searches too. Tomorrow on, I will be tell you some really helpful ways to get your blog some fast and easy linkbacks for some PR and Google love! Maybe I am turning into a SEO blogger now.

This seems to be hitting the web recently. Search engines are biasing their results, especially Google is manipulating its own results to get more attention to its own products. I had this doubt since ages, but never gave it much of a second thought. It is only logical that Google will do this to get more attention since they are a late entrant to many markets like messenger, email and other things. But it seems to be true and you can find it in action too.