According to MSN Career, Search Engine Optimization is one of the 4 most sought after jobs today. You will agree with me, when I say that Search Engine Optimization is one of the key foundation stones for a successful business online. There is nothing like organic traffic from Search Engines. They are precise, focused and with a purpose.

A career in the Search Engine world can be very lucrative and rewarding, both financially and psychologically. The perks that come with SEO job are numerous. At a corporate level, SEOs are paid as much as $150,000 a year, no kidding, with a starting salary of at least $25,000. Are we all so-called Search marketers qualified for this type of reward? No, definitely not. Can we prepare ourselves for it? Yes, definitely.

While many of us claim to know the Search Engines and boast of our abilities to perform SEO ourselves, how many of you (including myself) have given a serious thought to the knowledge we have accumulated? Have we ever verified it? How much of the knowledge that you and I have gained is junk?

Consider a scenario, where you were to implement a certain SE strategy to boost your rankings and respect in Google, but because of a lack of complete knowledge in the field, you make a deadly error that costs you your precious rankings. What next?

Well, I guess I am asking too many questions. My point is for a successful Search Engine practice, one needs to gain verified knowledge from an authoritative source. If I want to learn English, I will not go to the Cobbler, will I?

Kalena Jordon, one of the first Search Engine professional, and a very respected SE marketer in the U.S has started the Search Engine College to answer this very need of individuals and corporates. Kalena currently lives in New Zealand, and runs Ask-Kalena.com, a Search Engine Q&A blog.

The Search Engine College teaches everything from basic SEO to Link Building to Advanced Keyword Research to Website Copywriting and more. The prices, in my humble opinion are pretty reasonable. They range from anywhere between $195 to $275 per individual course and $695 for the Search Engine Marketer package course.

In addition to the certification provided, the college also helps you get a job in your chosen field. Every student has to have at least 70% in the final assessment to be eligible for certification. Currently, SEC has students from 30 countries which speaks very well of them.

Even though, I do my own SEO and am pretty good at the game, I am personally considering taking the advanced level courses one after the other. I am positive there is something to learn there for everyone of us. Knowing Kalena and her reputation, I can tell you the quality is top notch.

I personally recommend you to take a look and enroll in one of the courses. I have nothing but good feelings about this course. As always, if there is anything negative, I will pen an update later on.

Review Thursday – Search Engine College

For many of us, basic Search Engine Optimization itself is a pain in the rear. The technicalities involved in the game can be very challenging and at times, sensitive. At a stage like that, to think of someone like Dan Thies and his SEO strategies can simply be overwhelming, if not scary.

I have some good news for you. You better believe it when I say Good news. But, before I proceed, as always, please read my Affiliate Review Policy. I do not review to make a quick buck, but to help you, my readers, make an informed decision.

The software I am reviewing today is WP SEO Sniper, an SEO Plugin that makes it easy, even for a newbie to perform SEO tasks on a Wordpress blog;or so says the author. The author, Dewald has studied Dan Thies Search Engine Optimization methodology and has expressed it in the form of the Plugin.

I had a lengthy conversation with Dewald regarding the Plugin. The important question of course “Why should I buy your Plugin?” According to Dewald, it has been a challenge to simplify and possibly automate Dan Thies SEO methodologies for Wordpress. As he was a programmer, he decided to work on Dan’s methodology for Wordpress. The result being WP SEO Sniper.

The following are the features of the Plugin at a glance:

1. Add Title, Meta Description and Keywords on a sitewide level as well as individual posts and pages.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content by applying the Noindex and Nofollow rules.

3. Decide what pages to show up in Wordpress Pages list.

4. Apply Dan Thies 3 Tier rules for Pagerank control.

5. Perform the Third Level Push theory as stated by Dan.

6. Create 301 redirect pages

7. Google Webmaster verification.

8. Add Google Analytics Code.

9. Build a custom Footer page menu with Nofollow option.

10. Advanced Internal Linking.

11. Cloak Affiliate Links

The Plugin in my opinion is a complete solution for Wordpress On-page Optimization. I mean it. Dewald has covered everything. This one Plugin can replace:

1. All in One SEO

2. Robots Meta Tags

3. Duplicate Content Cure

4. Google Analytics Plugin

5. 301 Permalink Redirect

6. Affiliate Cloaker

7. Nofollow

8. Related Post

That is a good list of Plugins and WP SEO Sniper has all of it neatly organized in the Wordpress Admin Panel. You do not have to edit any theme files, a big plus to many of us who dread programming.

Yes, WP SEO Sniper comes with a price. Some may consider it steep. Every business comes with a cost, an investment; and we all know how important an investment like SEO is. Fortunately Dewald provides unlimited personal licenses per purchase. One purchase and you can use it on all your blogs plus free upgrades, bug fixes etc. Dewald is pretty fast in his response time.

Try the Plugin today. Dewald covers you with a money back guarantee, but I don’t see a reason for it, unless you really have no idea what SEO is. Then you shouldn’t buy it.

If I find any shortcoming in the tool, I will definitely update you. So far, I haven’t seen anything except good. Did I sound like a salesman? Read my Affiliate Review policy again. Go Buy WP SEO Sniper.

Review Thursday – Wordpress SEO Plugin

According to Dan Thies, there are 4 goals to keep in mind, while working on the structure of any website.

• Logical Structure

• Dynamic Linking

• Anchor Text and Reputation

• Improve Index Penetration

Let me cover each one of them in brief. Mind you, this is a very important part of the process we call “Search Engine Optimization”. People are so obsessed today with Link Building PageRank that, they have forgotten some of the fundamentals that are equally or more important to gain SERPs. So, pay attention.

Logical Structure – This step is geared towards improving visitor experience in your site and making their journey across it easy and friendly. After all, the primary purpose of any website is to attract visitors, to interact with them, gain their loyalty and hopefully turn them to leads, customers or simply, loyal readers.

According to Dan, the Logical Structure makes up of 3 components. The Home Page, The Roadmap Page or Categories and the Destination Page. Technically he calls them The First, Second and the Third Tier.

The Home Page is the obvious door for your visitors to enter your website. This is where the impressions are built. If the visual structure such as an introduction, sidebar navigational links, etc are in proper place, you have captured your visitors attention. The Home Page is also the area that gets bookmarked more often for future references. The “First impression is the best impression” principle has to work here.

Next comes the Roadmap page or Second Tier. This is the Categories page that organizes information in your site and assists the visitors in reaching their end goal. According to Dan, it is preferable to have at least 5-7 categories leading to relevant sections of the website. This enables better organization of the information in the site. The second tier also consists of a Sitemap page that clearly lays out links to every page in the website.

Lastly comes the Destination Page or Third Tier. This is the ultimate goal of your visitors. The easier it is for them to find this page, the more they will be convinced about your site. So, basically from the Home Page to this, it is about a 1-2-3 clicks. The visitor is happy.

Dynamic Linking – This is all about internal linking and preserving Link Juice, while not compromising visitor experience. In a nutshell, Dan introduces the dreaded “No-follow” tag and goes to show how it can be used effectively to control the PageRank flow in every page’s outbound links. Dan believes that it is very important to control the PageRank value of each page and that one should not unnecessarily waste it by sharing “link juice” to less important pages in a website.

A simple example is the Privacy Policy or the Terms of Usage page. You will notice that on a typical website, every page footer will carry links to this page thus passing some PageRank value to them. These 2 pages are there for human visitors to know more about your company policies, etc and have no Search Engine value whatsoever. It is important that a well optimized site avoids this error. In the earlier days, this was a task by itself, but today it is just about a No-follow tag. By placing a no-follow tag on the above 2 links, a lot of Link juice can be preserved and concentrated on a more important page of the website.

The no-follow tag in short helps eliminate links from an SEO point of view, while at the same time, retaining it from the visitors point of view.

Dan also explains the importance of Sitemap page for SEO purpose and believes that one should limit the outbound links from a Sitemap page to 150. He reasons this from his experience that Search Engines do not crawl beyond 150 links in a page. I won’t argue as I have no experience there.

Apart from this, he discusses the Third Level Push, Tiered pairing and the Circular navigation. You have to read it to understand it.

Anchor Text and Reputation – We know how important anchor texts are on inbound links. Today Search Engines place a lot of importance on the keywords used on the incoming links. Dan discusses about using the same strategy when cross linking within a website. For example if you have a page that sells Red Widgets, try linking from other relevant pages of your site to this page using the anchor text “Red widget”. Of course, there is a limit to how many times you can do this, but if you can link in this fashion from as many relevant pages from your website to this page, it will help in SE rankings. Just don’t overdo it.

There is more to this discussion than what I have mentioned. Dan talks about Global and Section navigation, Contextual text links and others. Again, read the book.

Index Penetration – This is the last goal while optimizing website structure. Dan explains the need to get all the pages in a website indexed. Not doing so simply means that those pages won’t come up in the SERPs. He attributes the problem to in-effective linking strategies and poor internal link structure. He discusses Google’s supplemental index, which I believe is no more relevant anymore.

It is at this point that Dan discusses how important PageRank is. If your browse the worldwide web for information on PageRank, you will notice everyone criticizing it, and calling it a “useless innovation”. Dan’s argument changes this perception. It is the level of PageRank that decides the ranking factor for your website. SEO experts talk about paying attention to Link Building and not bothering with PageRank. In reality though, what do Inbound Links really do? They build your PageRank value and thus improve your site index in SEs and give you better SERPs.

Take my Advice. Read the Book.

Optimizing Website Structure for SE Rankings

Dan’s strength in the book is what he calls and describes the “First Tier, Second Tier and Third Tier Pages” and how to control them for maximum Pagerank flow to important sections of a site. It isn’t very easy to understand at first, but Dan has taken the effort to explain the concept pretty well.

I can go on, but my health doesn’t permit me to. The book is about 100 pages long and comes with illustrations and examples to ease the process of comprehension. Without further delay, go to Dan’s website and download the book. Did I mention it was free?

A Fresh Look at SEO for 2008

So, what are we dealing with today? Long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are your entry into highly competitive niches. Long tail keywords ensure that you get a fair share of any niche market you enter, regardless of how fierce and dangerous your competition is. Long tail keyword is also a key strategy in getting ranked in Search Engines in the shortest time possible.

Let us take an example scenario. I want to enter the online “Travel deals” market. I want to start a website so I can provide online consumers best travel deals, saving them a chunk of their cash and earning myself a nice commission. So, I am all excited to commence the project. I plan a nice looking website, research the companies that are offering best deals in the travel sector, while at the same time running an affiliate program. I then move onto planning my SEO strategy. To start, I research Google to get an idea of the competition out there. What do I see?

Travel Deals:

1. Competition: 42 million

2. Monthly Search Volume: 188,000

That’s a mammoth size competition; one that may take me a long time to break into. Suddenly my excitement fizzes out. I run out of gas. The affiliate checks fade away slowly. Everything is blurred.

Then comes John Doe to my rescue. John tells me “Al, why don’t you trace your Long Tails?” I say “Long Tails?” He says “Yes, Long Tails”. He briefly explains to me what Long Tail keywords are. We bid farewell to each other.

I start my keyword research all over, this time focusing on the Long Tails. So, instead of Travel Deals, I pick up keywords such as:

1. Travel Deals Last minute – 268,000 competition and 38,000 volume.

2. Travel Deals Mexico – 9300 competition and 12,000 volume.

3. Cheap Student Airfares – 282,000 competition and 19,000 volume.

Suddenly, my excitement is back and I am on Cloud 9 again. I can see those fat affiliate checks re-surfacing and the blur picture is gone. I am on top of the world.

The above keywords will help me rank better and faster in Search Engines and will also help me get very specific visitors to my travel site that will have a pretty high conversion rate. Now, all that is remaining is the presentation part.

Long Tails basically help you to attack your niche market using multiple entry points. Instead of focusing on a single main keyword and wasting all the energy on it, you dig deeper and pick up 10-20 specific keywords and use them to enter the market and harness the potential. You can easily gain SERP for 10 Long Tails with the time you take to gain for one main keyword because of the competition.

I could honestly go on and on about Long Tail, but I believe, the above example has given you a clear picture of Long Tail keywords and their benefits.

How about you put some of the knowledge into action? Keep me posted on the developments.

Celebrity Bloggers: How Google Found them

I came across a pretty interesting argument at “King” Paul’s UberAffiliate.com about Shoemoney and JohnChow, both excellent marketers in my view, but absolutely useless bloggers. Every time I come across their name, I am reminded of the circus trained monkeys that entertain crowds. Nevertheless, the article is pretty interesting. I could sense Paul’s frustration in the writing.

PepperJam, the Internet Marketing company launched their much awaited Affiliate Network this week. If you are an Affiliate Marketing bum, take a look at their program.

So much for the week. I am sure there are other events, but I can’t cover them all. Let’s move onto the Case Study.

Basically In the past week, I did the following:

1. Acquired the domain officially in my account from TDNAM on Tuesday

2. Setup a Wordpress Blog and necessary plugins.

3. Upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress

4. Performed On-page Optimization with keywords from my initial research.

5. Converted the Wordpress Structure to become more SE friendly.

6. Penned down a brief bio for the About page.

7. Submitted 5 time stamped articles starting from Jan 1^st with a posting frequency of once every 3 days.

8. Optimized each article with an almost perfect keyword density and other SEO factors.

9. Stumbled each of the post for some overnight action, and yes they did.

10. Lastly began the Link Building ritual.

As of today, Google has about a 100+ links indexed according to Google Webmaster Central. Of course, that is no where enough, but I am building them steadily. Haste may lead to waste. Currently, Google has indexed all the pages and has also assigned ranks to a couple keywords. I had started the project with 5 keywords, but during the week, I added 2 more keywords. Here are the rankings in the order of importance:

1. Keyword 1 – Not in Top 100

2. Keyword 2 – Not in Top 100

3. Keyword 3 – Not in Top 100

4. Keyword 4 – Rank 79

5. Keyword 5 – Rank 58

6. Keyword 6 – Rank 35

7. Keyword 7 – Rank 10

So, Keyword 7 has already entered the first page in Google. It is keyword that is searched about 3500 times every month and a exact match competition of 9410 results. Pretty good if I rank number 1. I can definitely attract a chunk of the Search crowd.

So far so good. I will keep you updated on the progress. Just so you know, the case study will run for a total of 12 weeks and we are now in our second week.

Great Sunday!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Case Study Part 2

No more! After four years, indices merged, and now once again, Google calls upon its entire database to match queries with pertinent listings. Sounds good, yet after initially rejoicing, you may wonder how will the merging of the two indices affect your pages SERP (Search Engine Results Page) now that the competition has risen from the ashes, adding billions more pages? Perhaps Google doesn’t love us, after all. Probably so!

First and foremost, Google loves its’ users. Users comprise of businesses, students, shoppers, and families. They connect to the Internet via devices, and it is probably safe to say that 5.6k modems are becoming more of a novelty. Today, most users connect via high speed cable, satellite, and using mobile devices. They drive powerful machines (desktops, laptops) with plenty of RAM (Random Access Memory) and storage, measured in gigabytes. They interact with peers in real time and add their own content to the web with video, blogs, posts, music, and photos. They individually and collectively contribute to a moldable active web rather than staring at a static one.

Reason enough to challenge Google’s ever evolving new services, gadgets, and open source projects etc. Yes, even Google needs to expand and fine tune its services all the time. That’s why I am not surprised that Google terminated the superfluous index in favor to its entire database, enabling to collect and compare a world of information rather than just a sliver of it.

Now let’s get to the question of how Google’s powerful new search capability affects web pages. I say, aside from eliminating the stigma of the supplemental index, not much has changed. Proportions have changed, that’s all – more pages more results. The good news is, RSS feeds don’t get indexed any longer, reducing duplicate content automatically for your websites or blogs. Yet as before, good pages will make it to the top of the Google index; others may end up on the SERP #365,000 or so. In summary, the problems that sunk pages into the supplemental index or hell, so to speak, still remain. Although, those low ranking pages are once again in the system, making it much easier for the webmaster to get them back on track to Google’s first page.

Oh well, wouldn’t you rather deal with the competition than trying to rescue pages out of a sand box never knowing all the little secrets on why they have gotten there in the first place? I would! What do you think?

For good Google SERPs do the following:

• Keyword/keyword phrase research
• Include keyword/phrase in title

Avoid duplicate content:

• Publish original content

• Redirect http://site.com – to http://www.site.com (* see WP plugIn)

• Edit robots.txt file to pages you don’t want spidered and indexed (admin or about pages)

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Duplicate Content Url Issue

Redirect WP plugIn

All In One SEO pack

Google Supplemental Index Re-visited

This case study was basically an inspiration I received after purchasing Micro Niche Finder. I decided to run a live experiment to rank a Micro Niche keyword in the first page of Google. I already did my research in the beginning of last week and picked up a fairly profitable niche that has about 50,000 per month search count in Google and an exact match result of 800,000. I am sure you are keen to know the niche, but I fear the Devil. I have already received a threat:

So, I have decided to keep the niche a secret at the moment. Let the ball roll and I will reveal it. I have chosen 4 other keywords apart from the main niche word to rank for. The following are the tools I will be utilizing extensively all through the experiment:

1. Micro Niche Finder: Though the initial job of finding the Niche market is over, I will continue to use it to find better keywords to rank for, within the niche.

2. Keyword Elite: I will use it basically for Keyword research purpose. Very helpful tool.

3. SEO SpyGlass: This tool will help me spy on my main competitors and give me an idea of the level of competition and help me gauge my progress.

4. Rank Tracker: This software will enable me to research my keyword positions in Google and other Search Engines on a week by week basis.

I have decided to go with a Wordpress Blog rather than a static website, simply for SEO reasons. The following are the plugins I plan to use on the Blog.

1. Akismet anti-spam

2. All-In-One-SEO

3. Challenge

4. Google Analytics

5. Google XML Sitemap

6. Maintenance Mode

7. Open Web Analytics

8. Permalink Redirect

9. StatPress

10. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

11. Duplicate Content Cure

12. WP-Sticky

Each one of them has a purpose in assisting me in my journey. I have chosen them after careful consideration.

Domain name: I had a choice of registering the perfect domain name for the niche, but instead I went to TDNAM and picked up from the Live Auctions there. You ask me what is the benefit. I did it mainly to avoid Google’s Sandbox and delay the results. The domain I now have is over a year old and is indexed in Google. It also has 4 active and related backlinks from a Pagerank 8 authority source. Lets say I was lucky. It cost me just $13. The owner probably wanted to do away with the name. I was his messiah.

My goal is to have about 50 pages of original and quality content in the Blog. I have found a Lady writer from the U.K who has agreed to deliver the content. I can probably settle for 10 pages of good quality content, but I want the SE spiders to visit the Blog regularly and in order to maintain their visits, I need to feed them good content constantly.

I plan to maintain a posting interval of 1 article every 3 days. As of now, the Blog has no articles at all. I plan to post the first one tomorrow and take off from there.

I know this post was pretty boring as it contained pure facts and no spice. But stick with me and I promise you will love it. It will be a great opportunity for you to gain live “as it happens” knowledge and someday probably repeat the experiment on a personal level to make your fortune on the Internet.

Stay Tuned!

Sunday Blogbits – Micro Niche Marketing Case Study Part 1

Why should you offer a partial feed?

1. If you offer a partial feed, your readers have to visit your blog every time they want to read your article. This counts towards Alexa average and pushes your blog up in ranking.

2. Every time your readers come online, there is a chance that they might buy an advertising spot there. After all repeated exposure can lead to such an action.

3. You do not want to post full posts in your blog. You always use the “<more>” tag for people to click to continue reading. You basically do this to stack up more posts in the front page.

Why you should offer a full feed?

1. If you offer a full feed, your subscribers do not have to go through the “inconvenience” of visiting your site every time you post an article. They can read it right from their desktop or online reader. After all they have subscribers to many other blogs too.

2. The chances of retaining your readers are high. Even if a subscriber doesn’t like your content, he may stay for the heck of it or due to laziness of having to manually un-subscribe.

3. It also portrays the picture of a responsible blogger who cares for his readers and wants to make it as easy as possible to read and benefit from your content.

Personally I like full feeds. I offer full feeds to my readers too. I share my sentiments with them. So far all the feeds I have subscribed to offer a full feed except one. His name is David Ledoux and he is a make money online “expert” who shares his money making “tips” at didyousmellthat.com. Oh, you are wondering why the quotation marks. Well, read on. I have been a subscriber of his blog for sometime and even though he offers a partial feed that drives me nuts, I have not closed my subscription. I may never. He amuses me with his content. He really does.

Out of sheer concern, one day, I penned a comment. You can see it in this link.

“Hi,

Been reading your blog for sometime now and I think you should avoid posts like these. I come here everyday hoping to find something valuable and get disappointed seeing these. You may want to meet them, but how will it help me?

Kindly take my feedback positively.”

My comment was out of a genuine feeling and I decided to let him know so he could do something about it. Pat came the reply:

“If you were on the list you wouldn’t say things like that…

How will this help you? Why is this not valuable? Allow me to enlighten…

Do a search on Google for “link bait”. And then do a search for “Google Alerts”. I have a Google Alert set up for anytime my name appears on the Internet. So do a lot of celebrities with publicists…some of which are web savvy and want to get blogged about and appear on Dave TV.

Incidentally…I blog for myself. Not you. Sorry my trained monkey act didn’t entertain you this morning. Feel free to post a rant in the forum about how shitty I am at xyz forum”.

I was blown away. What an attitude. I wasn’t even offering help, for him to feel so inferior. My comment had victimized him after all. I thought we bloggers were community people and so expressed my thoughts about his content. Re-read his response in red. He says he is blogging for himself. Wish I knew that before. So, I concluded that he was a make money online “expert” sharing his “tips” for himself and not the world. I wonder what kind of ROI will I get if I advertise at his place.

The above is the reason why I decided not to close my subscription to his blog. He amuses me, you see.

I apologize I got carried away a bit, but reading this experience should be a lesson for you on a better behavior with your blog readers and not the “Trained Monkey Act”. LOL.

So, if you want to offer a full feed while offering a “Continue Reading” option in your blog, here is a sweet little Plugin for you. It does all the job for you. Just install and activate. Its called Full Text Feed and can be downloaded here.

Lastly, make up your mind, what you want to offer your email and RSS readers. If at all, I land up at your blog, I definitely will be looking for a full feed.

Full Feed Vs Partial Feed: The Debate Continues

Before I proceed, I assume your blog has at least a couple posts for the Search Engines to devour. If not, go ahead and fire up your creativity and pen down an article or two.

Lets proceed.

Google Webmaster Account: Google Webmaster Central is every Blogmaster’s traffic arsenal, if utilized properly. This in reality is your first step to getting indexed in Google as well as going forward, a good ranking in the same. In layman’s term, Google Webmaster Account is a simple set of tools created by Google to help Webmasters and bloggers optimize their sites for better Search engine crawling experience.

Here is what you have to do. Go to:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Create an account there or use your existing Gmail account. It will work perfectly. Once you are logged in, this is how the overview looks like:

You can see the list of sites I have added already. It is pretty simple. You can see the header called Dashboard. Right below it is the box where you type the URL of your blog or site and click “Add Site”. Here is a bigger picture.

Google will add your site to their crawl database and provide you certain information in the next page. Here is the info I got:

It is telling me that the blog I submitted was crawled last on December 12^th. It is also telling me that some of the pages from my blog have already been indexed. Of course, if your blog is new, it will be different.

Next, you have to verify to Google that your blog belongs to, of course you. In the overview image above, you can see a rectangular box with a message -

“Verify your site. By verifying your site you can access comprehensive statistics and crawl errors about the pages in your site”

Click on the link Verify your site. You will be given 2 options for verification. You can either add a meta tag to your blog’s index page or upload an html file with a name provided by Google. Once done, a Google bot will crawl your blog and look for the file you uploaded or the meta tag you added. Upon confirmation, you will received a verified status in your account.

Next, you have to add a Sitemap of your blog to your Webmaster account. Wordpress has a popular Sitemap Plugin called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator. You can get it here. Upload the Plugin to your Wordpress Plugin folder, go to admin panel -> Plugins and activate the Plugin. It will create the Sitemap automatically. By default, your Sitemap URL will be -

http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

So, once you have setup the Sitemap Plugin, add the above URL to your Google Webmaster account. On the left of your account, you can find a link called Sitemap. Click on it. In the next page, click “Add a Sitemap”. You have a choice of 4 types of Sitemaps to submit. Choose General Web Sitemap from the drop down. The page will expand offering you the option to add your Sitemap. Add your Sitemap URL and click “Add General Web Sitemap”. You are done. Google will show a pending notice and will activate it after it has verified, a process that completes in about an hour after submission.

We have won half the battle so far. Another half and we have conquered our space in the Search Engine Land. Yay! Yay!

Essential SEO for your blog and posts: This is the next step. You need to optimize your blog with very good title and description so that when the Search Engines that you released from your Webmaster account come, they can recognize the potential in your blog and hopefully offer it to the visitors. Your blog will get indexed even otherwise, but will not come up in Search queries because you haven’t briefed your SE guests what your blog is all about.

You can’t afford to do that can you? Nope, you cannot.

You have 2 options here. You can download your index file and add a meta description and title and a few keywords and then repeat the process for all the subsequent posts and pages you create, or, if you are smart like me, you use a Wordpress Plugin called All in One SEO. I have written a separate post about it, which you can find here as well as the link to the Plugin.

Pinging Social Bookmarking Site: Since the advent of Social Marketing, Social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Ice Rocket and many others have become extremely popular in syndicating blog contents in their database with a public display option. These are Social Bookmarks. Unlike your private browser bookmarks, these are available for public viewing, which means, these are accessible to the Search Engines who crawl these Social sites several times in a day, which simply means you are creating another outlet for Search Engines to access your content.

How to set this up? I have explained in another article that you can read here. Read it, and set it up the right way.

Social Marketing: Some believe this medium has just gained popularity and some others believe we are closing another bubble burst. Whatever be the opinion, this medium can be very helpful in not only getting your content out to the world, but also in building backlinks and getting your blog contents indexed.

Social Marketing sites are highly visited by everyday people to read news and all sorts of odd information and so they have a very high placement in Search Engines. Google Bot and other Search engine robots roam freely in these sites all the time, indexing whatever content they come across, unless they smell spam. So, your best bet is to submit your posts to several of these sites so one of them can deliver them to Search Engine robots. Again, I have written a How to article here. Read it. Implement it.

Miscellaneous: Create a robots.txt file in the root directory where your blog is installed. Robots.txt is an important file that Search bots crawl when they visit your blog or site. This is a text file in which you can type in certain commands that the bots will follow. In case, you do not want the bots to index a certain post, you can inform them through robots.txt. In addition to that, the Sitemap Plugin uses Robots.txt file to inform the bots about the Sitemap. So, create this file and do not forget to give it write permission, so the Sitemap Plugin can input info.

Once you have done the above, wait for the Search Engines to come to your blog and hopefully pick your content and index them. From hereon, it is a game of patience.

How the Pros do it: Getting your blog indexed in Google