Recently, SEO has been getting some bad rap. It may deserved or undeserved, but that really shouldn?t concern you if you stick within what is called ethical SEO. Experts would say that this is the best way to get search engines to notice you and give you lasting results.

So what is ethical SEO? The main point in ethical SEO is not to use any illegal means to advertise on your website. Neither does it cover the use of ?shady? methods to increase traffic. The major drawback to ethical SEO is that it does not give immediate results. It is a strategy that requires A LOT of patience and hard work. You have to develop and form your own strategy to suit specific needs and target your specific market. There is simply no shortcut to ethical SEO. On the other hand, with ethical SEO, you get lasting and real results. With impeccable content and excellent service, your hard work will pay off and you will gain the trust of your customers as you continue to rise in the page rankings. With ethical SEO, you get reliable results and permanent benefits. At the end of the day, that?s what really matters. You may get to your goal slowly but you?ll get there eventually, and when you do, you will be ready for the windfall.

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.

Ezines can give you very targeted visitors which means they buy more of your product

If you advertise in the right ezines, you can get fantastic results. However the results will vary a lot depending on the quality of the ezine. What you want is an ezine that people actually read. A quality ezine that delivers valuable content to the reader. And, you want the ezine to be targeted to the same or similar niche as the people who buy your product.

If you get these two things right, then ezine marketing can work very well for you.

Here are 5 tricks that can massively change the response to your ad.

Here are some things you can do to increase the response:

1. Make sure that the ezine has only 2-3 ads per issue. If it has dozens of ads, yours will get lost, and is unlikely to be read.

2. If you can, ask the editor to mention your product or review your product in their newsletter. This will massively increase your sales because it will not “seem” like an advertisement, and instead will look like a recommendation. The editor may not be willing to do this, but if you have a good product, perhaps even giving it for free to the editor to try, they may be willing to do it.

3. Another way to do this is to offer to write an article for the ezine, that happens to mention your product. This way you may even be able to ‘advertise’ in the ezine for free!

4. Make sure you test first with a small number of people. If the ezine you have selected has 50,000 subscribers, ask if you can send your ad to 1-2,000 subscribers first, and then if it works send it to the whole lot. Or even better, try 3 or 4 different ads and send them out to 2,000 subscribers for each ad and track the results. Then use the best performing ad for the whole group.

5. If you can, get the ad at the top of the ezine, as it is likely to have a much better response because more people will see it and read it.

So what can we make of all this? Well it all depends on how how you look at it. For an ordinary domain owner you should probably rethink stopping payments for your domain (they are pretty cheap after all) even if the domain name is as weird as Yelp and Twitter. Who knows, some company might buy it out from you eventually. When it comes to the pricing make sure you don’t give it away at once. Research on the company or person you’ll be selling it too and find out if you can ask for a better price. DO NOT go squatting but there is no problem capitalizing on domains you own today. Remember though that in the meantime it would of course be better to put solid content in the website and not let it go to waste. Go ahead and optimize the site to build its page rank but if it is just an extra site for you, you don’t have to sweat the ranking too much. However, if you want to be able to ask for a better price a better page rank will surely mean a better price in the future.

There are basically four things you can do when using Bloglines.

1. Subscribe to blogs, email groups, and websites.
2. Publish your own blog.
3. Search billions of articles.
4. Share your favorites (subscription favorites) to your friends.

However there’s much much more that Bloglines has to offer. According to their website this is the list of their key features:

* All-in-one Blog and news feed search, online subscriptions, news reader, blog publishing and social sharing tools
* Available in 10 languages
* Mobile version optimized for hand-held computers and cell phones
* Email subscriptions help manage your e-newsletter traffic
* Package Tracking (UPS, USPS & FedEx)
* Custom weather forecasts
* Quick Pick Subscriptions get new users started quickly and easily
* Personalized recommendations to find new subscriptions
* Bookmarklet for single-click subscriptions to any source
* Notifiers for all browser types to remind you when new articles have arrived
* Bloglines Saved Searches deliver future articles matching your key words and phrases
* Most Popular lists show the days hot topics and which blogs are getting the most noticed
* Handy add-on tools for bloggers such as automated blogrolls, subscription buttons

Last post we discussed Bloglines’ perks for ordinary bloggers. This time we’ll be touching on the perks it offers to developers.

According to their website there are different uses for the Bloglines Web Service especially when it comes to developing applications. Some of the uses include:

*Desktop aggregator developers can use these calls to sync aggregators across multiple computers, while at the same time giving their users access to the most full-featured web-based aggregator available
*The Bloglines Web Service can be used to develop more advanced notifiers
*Feed and subscription data can be incorporated into blogs and other information resources

Aside from these the API Documentation is also a valuable resource for developers when it comes to accessing Bloglines account information. They can also find the list of feeds that Bloglines publishes by simply going to the Feeds Section.

Bloglines is useful for both ordinary bloggers and the more technical web developers.

Ordinary Bloggers

For ordinary bloggers we have already mentioned the uses of Bloglines in the previous two posts especially when we spelled out the key features. Blogger who use bloglines to publish their own blogs will find that they also don’t need to worry about generating their own feeds. Bloglines automatically does this IN MULTIPLE SYNDICATION FORMATS so that whether your users prefer using RSS 2.0 or OPML you won’t need to worry about supporting these formats since it is automatically done for you. And lastly, as I’ve mentioned in the Introduction to Bloglines, one of the nicest perks it gives is that it helps increase traffic to your blog by allowing other users to search for your blog and by helping market your blog through subscription recommendations.

Alexa Internet started in 1996 with the “vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.” Right now Alexa has plenty of services offered including the Web Search Platform, which is still in Beta, the Alexa Web Information Service, Alexa Toolbar, their website, and other services that the usual users are not always aware of including their Webmaster Services and Data Services.

Though Alexa has plenty to offer, an SEO conscious blogger is probably familiar mostly (and only) with the Alexa Rank. It is after all the seventh determining factors for your blog’s traffic. Alexa actually ranks ALL websites and not blogs, but of course the higher your Alexa Rank is the more traffic your blog can expect to have. Alexa ranks your blog by looking at the traffic details of each site that they crawl including the number of page views and number of users that Web sites receive. More on how the Alexa rank works on my next post.