We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

Nowadays, with much attention going to social media marketing it is important for SEO companies to offer related services. Google Social Search is one of the ways you can help in your client’s audience analysis and targeting. With social search you can get information on the existing network (customers) of your client. You will be able to find out what really interests these people with their public content (from tweets to blog posts) as well as get leads from the name of the friends in their social circle.

If you haven’t been using social search make sure you update your Google profile (and your clients’ as well) and activate the social search feature. Things you will see as part of search results due to social search would be publicly available web content from your social circle such as blog posts, status updates, tweets, and pictures.

To active Google social search:

1. Make a Google Profile
2. Add links to Twitter, FriendFeed, your blog, etc…
3. Opt-in to the Social Search experiment at google.com/experimental/
4. Search while signed in

Remember you need to be signed in while searching to actually see results from your social circle!

So what exactly is Google caffeine?

Google caffeine is Google’s biggest and baddest change in search algorithm. The key to this change is that it is an actual change in the formula and not just minor tweaks. Parts of the entire search infrastructure was, according to Google, completely rewritten. The results? A search engine that will “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions.”

Of course with the Bing hype people immediately asked whether Caffeine was Google’s answer to which Matt Cutts promptly said no. As Matt Cutt’s said, “I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for month.”

For SEOs the even bigger question is how this will affect our SEO strategies. The best way to figure things out is through the same old fashioned method of experimenting and keeping track of how well the websites we maintain are doing in Google Caffeine’s SERPs. Of course it is also essential to keep tabs on how other’s SEO efforts are paying off so make sure you keep track of discussions going on in different forums and groups about Google Caffeine.

To try out Caffeine just go to this link: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Sitelinks are desirable because it allows users to see with just a glance at the search results the other relevant pages in your website. This leads to a higher chance of users clicking on your link, although not necessarily the link to the main page, because they can now go directly to the more specific page where their chances of finding the info they need is also increased. What this also means is a higher chance at retention and conversion since again everything is filtered further.

Now for those that have particular pages that you absolutely do not want to appear as a sitelink, you can always block that page from being viewed using Webmasters Tools. Note though that you have no direct control over which pages will appear as sitelinks for each search result. No need to worry though because Google’s algorithm makes sure that the most relevant sitelinks will appear.

For more details on sitelinks read Doantam Phan’s post on One-lin Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In the user-perspective having 100 links is simply not a good idea because it will results in your page/site:

To end, remember that 100 links in a page is no longer a problem SEO-wise but should still be avoided for your users sake.

Thanks to Google Alerts we have one of the most convenient ways of knowing if a hacker has got to your site. All you have to do is use Google to monitor queries for common spam keywords and phrases like credit, Viagra, etc. What will happen then is that Google Alerts will email you each time any of the keywords appears on your website.

The problem with this approach is that first of all you’ll only find out from Google Alerts after the fact the spam is already in your site. Second, you’ll probably overlook some spam phrases and not set up an alert for them. However, even with these issues using Google Alerts in conjunction with other methods of keeping hackers out can still be useful. At the very least you’ll find out fast enough when your site is hacked without having to check your site for hidden keywords every single day. As for the keywords and phrases you might miss make sure you prepare by compiling a good list so that you’re at least sure you remember most of the spam keywords.

I wrote something on link baiting in the previous post. Now who would not want to get some other sites to link to his or her blog, right? Well, one way by which you can do that is to stir up some controversy. Get right into the heat of things and get people to notice you!

You know the saying that nice people always finish last? It is something like that, except that you do not have to be “un-nice” to stir up some controversy. The idea is to pick one of the hottest topics that people are talking about and then to go against the flow. That is, if your opinion is not the same as the popular opinion, go right ahead and declare it to the world. You’d be surprised at just how many people will take notice of you.

Matt Cutts gives an example. You know many people love Google? Gazillions of them. And what does one get by being anti-Google (and making sense of course)? This:

Saying something controversial. You can be cheeky, like Threadwatch, or you can be incredibly earnest. I give the creator of Google Watch credit for staking out the “anti-Google” territory way before anyone else. Later, Andrew Orlowski probably realized that taking potshots at Google or blogs was a way to generate lots of discussion.

Yep, picking a controversial issue and going against the grain will certainly bait you a considerable amount of links. Try it and let us know how it goes.

I have to be honest with you – there is no clear cut answer to this question. It would be so easy to just pick one and justify my choice. However, the fact of the matter is that both kinds of keywords have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s look at short tail keywords first. They are the more general keywords, remember? The biggest advantage when using short tail keywords is that they are the words most used by people when conducting searches on Google and other search engines. This means that the volume of traffic generated by short tail keywords is immense! Now, all would have been well and good except for the fact that the competition when it comes to short tail keywords is just as intense. This means that you might not be able to get that much traffic using these keywords.

Now on to long tail keywords. These are the more specific keywords. The biggest advantage is that the competition is not so tough. Not many people focus on long tail keywords, that’s why. This means that you can actually get higher rankings for these keywords and that can translate to more traffic. However, the disadvantage is that you might not get that much traffic anyway because not too many people use long tail keywords to do their searches.

The bottom line? I think that it would be a good idea to use a good mix of long tail and short tail keywords. Also remember that you are not supposed to be focusing on keywords alone anyway.

Photo courtesy of mushon

More often than not, we are initially exposed to short tail keywords. That’s where it all began after all. However, there has been a strong movement promoting the use of long tail keywords over short tail keywords. So which is which and what does each group mean anyway?

Short tail keywords are the words or phrases that are quite broad in nature. More than that, they are targeted by many web designers and web owners. As such, the competition when it comes to short tail keywords is quite stiff.

On the other hand, long tail keywords are those which are less competitive. They are also more specific than short tail keywords. It was Chris Anderson who is believed to have coined the term long tail keywords.

How about a specific example? If you are trying to promote your blog which is about free Blogger templates, what keywords would you use? If you go the short tail way, you would probably use “blog templates.” However, if you go the long tail way, you can use something like “free 3-column Blogger templates.”

Which kind of keyword should you use and why? Let me answer this question in the next post.

Photo courtesy of yeliseev

Uniquely interesting titles are good. When they are outrageous and cryptic, they do tend to get more clicks as human readers would wonder what the post might be about. However, if you focus solely on this consideration, your post might not even make it to the first 5 pages of the SERPs. And what good will your cryptic title do you when people cannot find it in the first place?

My suggestion is this – try to work on your post title getting to the top of the SERPs. At the same time, don’t hold back on your creativity. So how can you work on getting to the top?

One way would be to incorporate keywords into your post title. The idea is to make use of words or phrases that are commonly used in searches. Now how do you find this out? Make use of keyword tools – there are so many out there! You can even use Google’s free tool, Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you wish to do so, you can search for other keyword tools that can help you figure out which keywords are most used for certain topics. Once you have determined these words, then you can craft a post title that is engaging and SEO-friendly at the same time.