Rent a Coder will lose Google searches 1st places:) in favor of rent-acoder.com

Some updates

2009-06-05T09:33:00.006+03:00

Wow, long time no post:)

While trying to get some business done, totally forgot about this blog.
With business i mean ive done some really cheap labor design/coding projects, since oversee buyer are really greedy this days.

C'mon, a photoshop layout, integration, custom cms made, for $50?! What are we, a joke?

F*** it...

Seo whitout money to advertise doesn't exist. I mean i tryed in the last year a bunch of methods, but nothing from it. Best deal was that i've got some visitors to my site, but conversion to business, less that 1% from them.

Got lucky with another site, web-jobs.eu, from where i drive some trafiic to scriptlance, to my affiliate. I earned a huge sum of $ 20 in 3 months:))

That is really ridiculos. So if you dont have the money to pay for ads, dont start nothing. I tried a bounch of methods, payed some cheap ads, link exchanges, parkings, great optimisez pages, seo friendly urls, uniq incomming links, they didnt helped me to gain some higher positions in the search engines nor in alexa.

But without struggle there is no fun in life.

Lets see the stats again:(5 iun 2009)

rent a coder
google: 3
yahoo: yahoo sucks..couldn't find my site in the first 8 pages
msn: 5

ok i gained some position in there:)

rent-a coder
google: 3
yahoo: 6
msn: 5

rent-acoder
google: 3
yahoo: 1
msn: 4

alexa: 1,071,327

Alexa rank for rent a-coder

2008-03-17T01:13:00.008+02:00

When i started this year with rent-acoder, i was ranked in alexa 5,500,xxx.

In 3 weeks i managed to brig the site to the rank 1,152,740 - today is 17.03.2008.

I will update this as i grow:).

Target: top 100,000

-------------

I am back after 1 week, Rent-acoder.com has a traffic rank of: 1,037,985 - 24.03.2008

keyword results on google, yahoo, msn

2008-03-11T23:14:00.005+02:00

Tuesday, March 11 2008 -

rent a coder
google: 99
yahoo: 31
msn: 17

rent-a coder
google: 96
yahoo: 26
msn: 5

rent-acoder
google: 3
yahoo: 1
msn: 1

will chekout again in 1 week

After a week and a few days i was dissapointed. My rankigs were worst that before. But today i got curios again, so:

Thursday, March 20 2008 -
rent a coder
google: 79
yahoo: 27
msn: 14

rent-a coder
google: 50
yahoo: 17
msn: 4

rent-acoder
google: 3
yahoo: 1
msn: 1

hire freelancers
google: 5
yahoo: <100?
msn: 6

-------------------

Saturday, April 5 2008
- rent a coder
google: 71
yahoo: 29
msn: 18

rent-a coder
google: 56
yahoo: 25
msn: 5

rent-acoder
google: 1
yahoo: 1
msn: 1

hire freelancers
google: 4
yahoo: 59
msn: 7

rent freelancers
google: 3
yahoo: 1
msn: 5

Obviously i have lost ground here..but i have grown for freelance keyword..

------------------------------

Tuesday, April 15 2008
- rent a coder
google: 56
yahoo: 20
msn: 23

rent-a coder
google: 66
yahoo: 21
msn: 5

rent-acoder
google: 2
yahoo: 1
msn: 1

hire freelancers
google: 4
yahoo: ?
msn: 7

rent freelancers
google: 2
yahoo: 2
msn: 4

its not that good..

Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To "Legally" Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines

2008-03-11T22:38:00.000+02:00

If there's anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it's the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It's practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I'll explain more about why you shouldn't worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it.

The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn't visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More article covers how you can use a different meta tag -- the meta robots tag -- to block pages from being indexed. Users don't see this information (unless they look at your source code), but search engines do.

Meta Tags & Your Header

Meta tags go within the header area of your web pages. A typical head might look like this:

Welcome To Shoe Central!

The header is the section that begins and ends . Between those elements, in our example, you have these tags:

Title: The text here becomes the title that is shown in search engine listings, in most cases.

Description: The text here is text that search engines sometimes use as a description for your web page when listing it (a meta tag lesson for another time).

Robots: This particular tag is configured to ensure that the page isn't described using the a description that the Open Directory might have for it (Meta Robots Tag 101 explains this more).

Keywords: This tag is the topic of this article, so read on!

History Of Meta Keywords

I've long written about search engines and meta tags, but I have never been able to pin down exactly who created the meta keywords tag. There's a December 1995 internet draft memo that's the earliest and most authoritative mention of the tag I know of. It says:

The spaces between a comma and a word or vice versa are ignored....

These 'keywords' were specifically conceived for exhaustively and completely catalogue the HTML document. This allows the software agents to index at best your own document. To do a preliminary indexing, it's important to use at least the http-equiv meta-tag "keywords".

Sounds good, right? Like this is designed for the search engines to use? The issue is that HTML specs like these (especially drafts) are not necessarily used by the search engines. They can use them, ignore them or build upon them as they see fit.

As it turns out, several of the major search engines got together in May 1996 to talk about meta data. That meeting gave birth to a common standard for the meta robots and the meta description tags. As for the meta keywords tag, it was discussed, but no specification emerged.

Despite no specification, both Infoseek (later Go.com, these days no longer crawling the web) and AltaVista (now owned and powered by Yahoo) offered support for the meta keywords tag in 1996. If you looked at their help files at the time, they encouraged site owners to use the tag. Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo) also provided support when it began operations later in 1996, and Lycos (no longer crawling the web) added support in 1997.

That year -- 1997 -- was the last year that the meta keywords tag enjoyed support among the majority of major crawlers out there (4 out of 7 - Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light, also crawling the web that year, did not support it).

Support Dies Off

When new search engines emerged in 1998, such as Google and FAST, they didn't support the tag. The reason was simple. By that time, search engines had learned that some webmasters would "stuff" the same word over and over into the meta keywords tag, as a way of trying to rank better. At the time, search engines didn't rely so heavily on link analysis, so page stuffing like this was more effective. Alternatively, some site owners would insert words that they weren't relevant for.

In July 2002, AltaVista dropped its support of the tag. That left Inktomi as the only major crawler still supporting it, causing me to somewhat famously in the SEO world to declare the tag dead, since it was no longer a major ranking factor for even Inktomi:

Traffick.com's Andrew Goodman wrote recently in an essay about meta tags, "If somebody would just declare the end of the metatag era, full stop, it would make it easier on everyone."

I'm happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine -- Inktomi -- the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. And like Andrew, good riddance, I say!

Since that time, Inktomi was rolled up into Yahoo, which continues to support the meta keywords tag as part of its Yahoo search engine. Or does it?

Search Engine Rep Confusion

Sigh. But if this question still coming up wasn't depressing enough, then the search engine reps starting responding with a load of confusion. To paraphrase:

No, we don't support it. Well, we read it. We read it, but it doesn't matter. Actually, maybe we don't read it.

Even Evan Roseman from Google said at one point that Google reads the meta keywords tag, suggesting no doubt to some that Google uses the tag.

To be clear, Google doesn't. I'll prove it further below, but it doesn't, OK?

I gave Evan (hopefully) some good humored hassle afterward for saying this. He's at least the second Google rep to declare this on panels I've moderated in as many years, and the problem is that the engineers (from any of the search engines) often take the question too literally.

Indexing Versus Retrieval Versus Ranking

To understand, let me talk about three different things a search engine does when it crawls and lists your page:

Indexing: This is where the search engine effectively makes a copy of your page. The search engine is going to read and store the HTML content it finds -- all of it. Evan was right when he said that the meta keyword tag is indexed by Google. Google knows that the tag exists and has recorded what's in it. But that doesn't mean it does anything else with it.

Retrieval: This is where the search engine finds all the matching documents relevant for what you searched for. Most of those documents will actually have the words you searched for on them, in the sections that the search engine searches against (there are some exceptions, such as when anchor text is used to find pages. Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases, Google Kills Bush's Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs and Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American explain more about this). While the search engine has recorded the entire page, it won't search against everything indexed for retrieval. In other words, Google will look to see if words you searched for appear in the body area of a document, but it will NOT look in the meta keywords tag for matching words. The keywords tag, while indexed, is not used for retrieval at Google. At Yahoo, it is.

Ranking: This is where the search engine looks at all those documents retrieved for a search and puts them in order of most importance, according to its algorithm. Retrieval (or what information research professionals call "recall") is about finding everything). Ranking (or what the IR folks call "precision" -- see Tim Bray's excellent On Search: Precision and Recall document) is about getting the best stuff up to the top. Yahoo, while using the tag for retrieval, really doesn't assign much weight to it for ranking.

Testing For Retrieval

Back to my panel experience. Since the reps were unclear, I declared to the audience that I'd just go out and test it again myself. It's literally been about five years since I've last tested the tag, because I (and many others) feel it is so useless. There are better things to do with our time. But since that question needs a big old stake to the heart, I rolled up my sleeves and got cracking.

On the Search Engine Land home page, I inserted this meta keywords tag:

I had searched for all of these words on the four major search engines of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and found no pages that matched. If these search engines made use of the meta keywords tag, I'd know in short order, if my page started coming up.

The tag went up on August 28. I then needed to wait until I could see each search engine had the most current version of my page (Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates explains more on how to do this).

Google: No

It took two days, until August 30, for Google to show the latest version of my page in its index. I searched for each of the words, and my home page didn't come up. The meta keyword tag was not used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Microsoft Live: No

It took five days, until September 2, for Microsoft to show a version of my page with the meta keywords tag on it. As an aside, Microsoft is kind of annoying. It will say something like this in the cached copy of the page:

This is a version of http://searchengineland.com/ as it looked when our crawler examined the site on 9/2/2007. The page you see below is the version in our index that was used to rank this page in the results to your recent query. This is not necessarily the most recent version of the page - to see the most recent version of this page, visit the page on the web.

If you glance quickly at the date, you might think the page has been revisited fairly recently. But as the text explains, it might be older. Indeed, when I looked on September 2 (as is the case today), the copy of the page in the index was as of August 30, as I could tell from the stories shown.

As with Google, I searched for each of the words, and my page didn't come up. The meta keyword tag was NOT used for retrieval and thus not supported.

Yahoo: Yes

It took two days, until August 30, for Yahoo to have my latest page. Searches there did bring up the home page for all words. So the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Ask: Yes

Ask took the longest to show the most current version of my page, not reflecting the changes until today. Actually, when I look at the cached copy even now, it says that the page is from August 13 and uses a redirection URL rather than my http://searchengineland.com address.

Still, I can tell Ask has a version with the meta keywords tag on it since I'm getting back my home page when searching for words in that tag. As with Yahoo, the meta keywords tag IS used for retrieval.

Should You Use It? Sure, For Misspellings

So there you have it -- half of the major crawlers (Yahoo & Ask.com) DO support the tag. Should you begin using it? My advice would be only for misspellings and really unusual words.

As explained, the tag can help with retrieval. A word in the tag is treated as if it were a word visible on the page itself. Now that's handy for misspellings. For example, say you're writing about Basset hounds. You suspect some people might misspell the name as Bassett hounds, adding an extra T. You could misspell the word yourself on the visible page, but that makes you look bad. You could insert the word and then try to hide it using CSS styles or putting it in the same color as the page background. But this type of "hidden" text is generally against search engine guidelines.

Enter the meta keywords tag. Just do this:

Now you've got the misspelling on your page in a "legal" means that will be read by Yahoo and Ask. You're still out of luck for Google and Live.com, but two out four ain't bad.

But I Want To Rank!

What about ranking better with the tag. I mentioned already that many experienced SEOs don't find it useful. Believe me, if just putting a single word into that tag was going to rank your page better, everyone would be doing it. Instead, search for anything on Yahoo or Ask. You'll see plenty of pages ranking well for words without those words appearing in the meta keywords tag. And if you do see the words in the tag, it's more due to coincidence -- the words also appear in the body copy, in the title tag and often in links pointing at the page. The words in the meta keywords tag aren't the primary reason the page is ranking well. Promise.

Back to our Basset Hound example. Sure, you can add the correct spelling to your meta keywords tag. Go ahead, if you want. Just understand that it is not likely to make you rank any better than if you didn't include it at all. Moreover, beginners are especially likely to spend far too long worrying about getting the "right" words in the meta keywords tag rather than just writing good body copy.

Comma Conundrum

One of the most common questions I used to get way back in the old days was over using commas in the meta keywords tag. Consider these options:

Sigh. See why I hate this tag so much, when I've had to deal with people wondering about commas and spaces and variations like this. Let's take it from the top, as to the motivations behind these versions:

This is someone who thinks that each word should be on its own, separated by a comma and with a space in front of the next word.

This is someone who thinks that getting rid of the spaces means they can squeeze in more words.

This is someone who thinks that if there are particular phrases they want to be found for, those phrases should be together and set off by commas.

As with three, but losing the spaces to squeeze in more words.

Similar to three but thinking you don't need commas at all.

This is Mr. or Ms. Paranoid. They're concerned about saying any word too often. So they lose the commas, restrict repetition and hope that proximity will help (IE, put "basset" behind "hound" rather than in front and maybe you'll still show up for "basset hound."

Which way should you go? I'd suggest number three, for these reasons:

Yahoo has long recommended using commas and in particular supported them as a way to separate out distinct terms for those in their paid inclusion programs. I'll update this page with the latest advice, but commas still seem to make sense.

Spaces just make things look nicer, and you shouldn't be shoving a ton of terms in the tag anyway. How long is too long? No idea! In the past, the search engines just wouldn't index content beyond around 250 to 1,000 characters. Maybe I'll test this in the future.

You do want phrases kept together. "bassett, hound" is probably going to be seen as "bassett hound" anyway, but why risk it?

Other Uses

I mentioned that misspellings were a key use for the tag. You could also use it for synonyms. For example, if you have a page all about shoes and you never say "footwear," you could put that word in your tag. However, it's far better if you just find a way to make use of the word in the body copy itself. That text is retrieved by all the major search engines, not just some.

Aside from synonyms, perhaps you have a page that's all Flash or all images. Use the meta keywords tag to describe the page. Just remember that you're still not likely to rank better than other pages that have textual information. Search engines are textual creatures. Give them what they want.

Some Official Guidelines

The W3C has guidelines (and here) in HTML 4.0 about meta data and search engines, while the XHTML specs don't get into it at all. Ignore the specs. YES, IGNORE THE SPECS. Some of them are wrong; some are outdated. The only thing I can see that they explain is the difference between these:

See how the second tag ends /> rather than > in the first? As best I can tell, this is because a meta tag is an "empty element" in XHTML, where there's not a "start" and a "finish" (as with a paragraph element:

is the beginning, with

the end). Empty elements in XHTML need that /> format.

I haven't tested things without the />, but there are so many (so very, very many) pages out there not following that syntax that it is virtually certain Yahoo and Ask will read the tag either way. Doing it fresh? Do it /> style. But don't go back and start changing things.

Aside from that, if you want to know how a search engine deals with meta data officially, you go to the search engine itself. Ask's webmaster guidelines don't mention the meta keywords tag, so that leaves Yahoo:

Yahoo Quality Guidelines: "Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page." This is telling you don't lie with your keywords. Don't insert words that aren't somehow related to the topic of your page.

How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results?: "Use a 'keyword' meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page." Note that it doesn't say you'll automatically rank better by doing this. Also, unique words for each page would be my advice, as well -- but do NOT worry if you decide to use the same set of key terms on each of your pages. It isn't that big of a deal.

Looking for the exact format that you should use for the meta keywords tag from Yahoo? You know, commas, spaces and all that. Sorry -- they don't provide it, which is another sign you're probably worrying too much about it.

Blog traffic exchange and adsense

2008-03-11T22:23:00.000+02:00

Add blogger search box

2008-03-11T22:14:00.000+02:00

The Google Navigation bar at the top of your Blogger blogs has an embedded search box. However, you may want to include a similar box in the main body of your blog (like what I have done), or the sidebar. Other than the convenience for users, the added advantage is that unlike Google search box, the search results of this Blogger.com search box appear in the main body of your Blog.

Under Template->Page Elements tab, click “Add a Page Element” at the place where you want your search box to appear. Select “HTML/JavaScript”.

There are several HTML codes posted on the net. I tried a few, and found the one that works as follows:-

<p align="left"> <form id="searchthis" action="YOUR BLOG URL/search" style="display:inline;" method="get"> <strong>NAME OF YOUR BLOG<br/></strong> <input id="b-query" maxlength="255" name="q" size="20" type="text"/> <input id="b-searchbtn" value="Search" type="submit"/> </form></p>

Remember to change YOUR BLOG URL to the URL or web address of your Blog. Also, change the NAME OF YOUR BLOG to that which you want to call your site. For instance, if your Blog Name is long, you may want to write something like “Search Here” or “Search this site”.

You can also change the “Search” button to say, “Hit” or “Go”, by changing the Value.

Save the code and refresh your page. If you want a longer or shorter search box, you can play around with the size. The above example of a width size="20" and value="Hit" will give you this:-

Whereas a width size="30" and value="Go" will give you this:-

The size of the search box is a matter of appearance. You may have noticed that the maxlength="255". This indicates that a user may enter up to 255 characters in the search box, which I think is sufficient and need not be altered.

Image instead of Search button

Just for the fun of it, if you want readers to click an image instead of a button, you will first need to do up a small picture. You can also resize a picture you already have with photo editing tools like Google's Picasa. After creating a picture, upload it onto a free server like GooglePages or Google Groups, or other free hosts that offer direct links to the image files. Take note of this IMAGE URL.

The HTML code to insert is this:-

<p align="left"> <form id="searchthis" action="YOUR BLOG URL/search" style="display:inline;" method="get"> <strong>NAME OF YOUR BLOG<br/></strong> <input id="b-query" maxlength="255" name="q" size="20" type="text"/> <input id="b-searchbtn" type="image" src="IMAGE URL" align="top"/> </form></p>

Remember to insert into the code the IMAGE URL, where your picture is uploaded. You can align the image to the top, bottom or set a horizontal space between the bar and the image by using a hspace tag. For more examples on alignment of images, you may refer to the article Hyperlinks and Image Links (II).

While it is alright to replace the button of your Blogger search box, you may not want to do that with the Google search box since their T.O.S. disallows any alteration of their code.

Add Favicon icon to Blogger URL

2008-03-11T22:12:00.000+02:00

Have you wondered how these little icons appear next to the web addresses, like the one you see above? When you visit the sites or bookmark them, these icons will make these URLs stand out. These are “Favicons” or “Favorite Icons”.

You would first need to have an icon which you would like to use, bearing the extension .ico format. If you search your hard disk, you might find some icons which are generic. I would suggest that you create one to represent your own unique identity. There are quite a number of free icon editor software which you can download from the net.

As for myself, I went to Download.com site and downloaded a very small program called Imagicon which can transform images into .ico format. I created an image using Photoshop. You can use any image or pictures if you do not wish to create one. Next, run the program. It is rather simple to use. While you can create icons in 2 sizes – 16x16 and 32x32 – I would think a 16x16 icon is preferable since it is readable in most older browsers.

If you do not wish to download any software, you may also try creating an icon online. Just enter the keywords “online icon generator” into your Google search bar, and you should be able to find several programs that you can try.

Once you have created an icon, save it into your hard disk. The next step of attaching the icon is a little tricky. Ideally, all you need to do is to save it in the root directory of your blog site. Nevertheless, there is no way this can be done. For one, if you try to upload an icon image, Blogger will reject it. Two, any file that is uploaded will not go into the Blogger root directory.

The only method to use will be to upload the icon into some web folder, and create a link. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We have also a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and allows uploading of .ico files.

Once you have done that, take note of the URL of your icon. If you are using Google Page Creator, hovering your mouse over the link, you will see that the file is stored under a directory which looks like this http://yourname.googlepages.com/iconname.ico

where “yourname” is your Gmail account name, and “iconname” is the file name. Copy this URL.

Go back to your Blogger dashboard and under the Template tab, go to “Edit HTML”. Near the top you will see a line like this:-

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Update:

Copy and insert the following code below the line:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

Inserting this will also work but the former is preferred:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>

Remember to type in the “URL of your icon file”.

Save the template. When you refresh your blog site, you should see your nice little Favicon next to the blog address.

Other image types

The .ico image format has been used by many but you can also create an image under the .png or .gif format. Ensure that the size of the image is either 16x16 pixels or 32x32 pixels.

If you have a PNG format image, the link to insert is:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/png'/>

If it is a GIF format image, the link is:-

<link href='URL of your icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/gif'/>

External Domain

For those who have hosted sites in external domains, insert the link in the root directory as well. Otherwise, you can upload the file into the root directory and name it favicon.ico

As an example, if your domain name is www.domain.com, the URL of the favicon will be www.domain.com/favicon.ico

This method is not preferred but a number of browser versions are able to process the icon. Since we do not have external domains to try out this alternative, you may want to see if it works for you.

Compatibility

While you can see the Favicon in Mozilla Firefox, many have problems seeing the Favicon in Internet Explorer. This is a known problem and has been a sore point with many IE users. In some versions of IE, bookmarking the site will display the Favicon. This is not necessarily so in IE7 that we are using. In fact, when we bookmarked the highly popular search engine sites, their Favicons don't show in our IE bookmarks too although they show well in Firefox. Perhaps this is one more reason to download Mozilla Firefox if you have not already done so.

SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimisation and more

2008-03-11T21:45:00.000+02:00

What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.

Search Engine Optimization

We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.

With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.

Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings

After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com

We had explained how to submit Blogger sitemaps to Google and Yahoo!. When the sitemap industry standard was first announced in 2006, Microsoft's MSN was one of the three major search providers which supported the protocol. Submitting your Blog's sitemap to these search engines will enable them to index the pages and contents of the site. Needless to say, having all the pages indexed will essentially avail your contents to more internet users and improve your site's page rank.

Blogger Sitemap

If you own an external domain site, you can search the net for sitemap generators which help you create a sitemap file. Upload the file onto the root directory and call it sitemap.xml. The full URL of the sitemap will then be something like this:- “http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml”

However, we cannot upload files onto the root directory of Blogger blogs. Hence, when asked to insert a Blogger blog sitemap, it will have to be either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Replace YOURBLOGNAME with the name of your blog. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. As an example, our blog's sitemap will be http://blog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Submit Blog Sitemap to MSN

Unlike Google and Yahoo!, MSN does not have a set of procedures or an address where you can submit sitemaps to. In the latest post in their Microsoft Live Search Weblog, they had invited webmasters and developers to help build a New Webmaster Portal that would include sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, very much what Google and Yahoo! already had. Once MSN has that user interface, we shall update this article.

The MSN team had suggested that webmasters add this to their robots.txt file to have the MSN spiders crawl the sitemap file:-

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml

Again, we do not have root access to the Blogger server and this will not avail to us.

The alternative solution in the meantime is to submit the Blog sitemap to Moreover.com. It seemed that there was a standing arrangement for Moreover to provide the submitted feeds to MSN for crawling and indexing.

Whether or not the arrangement still holds true, there is really no harm in submitting your sitemap to Moreover.

Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you have submitted it correctly, you should see this message:-

Thank you for your ping. The moreover database will be updated with the new data from your url - http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml as soon as possible.

Submit Blog Sitemap to Ask.com

Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves, is the next major internet search engine. The sites that it owns include Excite, Bloglines, MyWay and iWon. It is also a participant of the Sitemaps protocol program.

Submitting the sitemap to Ask is easy too. Copy and paste this line into your internet browser, replacing the portion in red with the name of your Blog:-

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you are successful, you should see this screen:-

Submit Sitemaps to other search engines

Progressively, there should be more search engines that will join this Sitemaps program. More likely than not, they will use the recommended ping submission format:-

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you are unable to find a submission link in that search engine site, try the above and keep your fingers crossed that it is the correct ping address.

Finally, submit your Blog to Blog Directories and Feed Directories to let more people know about your Blog. As well, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!

Publicize your site by having your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site included in Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search. I went to the official Yahoo! submission of URL page and clicked the link “Submit Your Site for Free”. You will be prompted to log in using your Yahoo! account. For those of you who do not have a Yahoo! account, simply sign up for one. It is Free.

After you have your Yahoo! account, and are logged in, you will see this screen.

Select “Submit Site Feed” and enter the URL of your Blog's site feed. You can use either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once the Sitemaps are submitted, click the “Authentication” link shown at the top right hand corner of the page.

You will now have to authenticate your site ownership with Yahoo!, by either uploading a verification file to your site, or adding a META tag to your site. The authentication via a META tag was only introduced by Yahoo! recently, on Jan 30, 2007.

Note: Blogs created under Blogger.com or Blogspot.com cannot upload a verification file in the root directory. The first method is therefore NOT applicable to you.

The only way to authenticate your Blogger.com and Blogspot.com blogs with Yahoo! is to add a META tag. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the META Tag as follows:-

Remember to replace the META Tag with the code generated by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Yahoo! Site Explorer, click the button that says “Ready to Authenticate” as shown below.

You will see a message that says “Your site is pending authentication.” Check back later, and you will notice that your site is now indexed and crawled by Yahoo!

According to the Yahoo Site Explorer instructions:-

“If you have added the META tag, please keep the tag in your site's home page. We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this META tag regularly.”

It is alright to leave this meta tag as well as the Google sitemap meta tag in your template.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Submitting your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site to Google Webmaster will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new Webmaster profile.

Upon logging in using your Gmail account, key in your blog site URL, and click OK. You will then be asked to verify your site. This is to ascertain that you are indeed the owner of the site.

There are two ways to verify your site. You can either add a Meta Tag or Upload an HTML file. If you are using the Meta Tag method, Google will generate a Meta Tag code. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the Meta Tag as follows:-

Replace the META TAG with the code generated by Google Webmaster. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Google Webmaster site, you can click the button that says “Verify”.

Note: The second method of uploading an HTML file is NOT applicable to Bloggers using Blogger.com or Blogspot.com because this requires you to upload a file to the root directory of your Blog, which is not possible. There is therefore only one method for you to verify your site, and that is by inserting the Meta Tag as explained above.

After you have had your site verified, click on the Sitemaps tab as shown below. By adding a Sitemap, you will be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the Sitemaps tab, and index your Blog site at a faster rate.

Click the link that says “Add a Sitemap”. This will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The Sitemap URL for any normal website is usually the index page that is stored in the highest-level directory of that site. In the case of Blogger.com or Blogspot.com, the only way to add a Sitemap is to use either of the following 2 Sitemaps:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once you have added your Sitemaps, you will receive a confirmation telling you that reports are being generated but “may take several hours to update”. Congratulations! You have successfully added your Sitemaps. When you login to your Google Webmaster days later, you should be able to see the indexed pages and statistics of Google webcrawl of your Blog.

Leave the meta tag in the template if you want to view the statistics of your site. If Google can't find the meta tag, it will show an error message in your webmaster toolbox and you may have to verify your site again.

Submit Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.

5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.

Website Submission Services

There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.

Submit Blog to Blog Directories (I)

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.

Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “tips for new bloggers” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is name.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog. You may read my earlier article for a more detailed discussion on traffic exchange programs.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist

A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.

Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea

A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging

Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll

I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews. For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

Submit RSS Feeds and Pings

In this article, we list all the Feed Directories to which you can submit your feeds for Free. We shall also list the Ping services that you can use to ping whenever you update your Blog. This should help increase awareness of your new articles and attract more readers to your Blog. As the list is ever-growing, you might want to consider bookmarking this page as we shall update the list whenever we come across other useful services.

This article is a follow up on our earlier articles Submit Blog to Blog Directories, Submit Sitemap to Google, and Submit Sitemap to Yahoo. Get more visitors to your Blog by submitting your site to these Blog Directories and submit your Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com as well as these various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

Even if you are not familiar with feeds, you would have probably seen this icon in your web browsers. When you come across a page with contents that are viewable in web feed formats, you will be able to click the icon in your browsers to subscribe to the feed of that page. These feeds may either be a full text or summary of the content. The content can be read on a feed reader or aggregator which checks the sites regularly for new content. The terms RSS and Atom are feed formats.

To ensure that your Blog is able to syndicate the feed content of your Posts, login to your Dashboard and go to Settings -> Site Feed. Make sure that you have set “Allow Blog Feed” to Short or Full. Save the settings.

Next, key this URL into your browser, substituting YOUR-BLOG-URL with the URL of your blog beginning with http://

YOUR-BLOG-URL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Do you see your Blog feed? Next, test with this URL

YOUR-BLOG-URL/feeds/posts/default

You should be able to see the contents of your Posts, either in summary form or full, depending on your Settings. These are your Blog Feed URLs. You can submit any of them to the Feed Directories that we list below. If you have syndicated your feed to other services like Feedburner, you can submit that Feed URL too.

To confirm whether your URL is correct, you may also enter it into this RSS Feed Validator.

Submit Blog Feed to Feed Directories

1. General

2RSS

4Guys from Rolla - For resource RSS feeds.

ASP Index - For resource RSS feeds.

Blo.gs

BlogDigger

Bloglines

Blogz

Bloogz

BulkFeeds [Update: Site inaccessible]

Chordata - Register to submit RSS feed in relevant category.

Daypop - For news sites.

DayTimeNews

DevASP

Feed24

FeedAge - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedBase

FeedBomb - Select a category to submit RSS feed.

FeedBlitz - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedBurner - Register to submit RSS feed.

FeedCat - Register to submit feed in relevant category.

Feed-Directory

FeedDirectory

FeedFury

Feedmap

Feedooyoo - Submit RSS feeds and keywords.

FeedPlex

Feeds2Read

Feeds4All

FeedFarm – For news related RSS feeds.

Findory

FindRSS [Update: site inaccessible]

FreeRSS

FreshPodcasts - For podcasts.

GeneCast - Register to submit your news feeds.

GoldenFeed [Update: error message when adding feed]

IceRocket

JordoMedia

Memigo [Update: site inaccessible]

MoreOver

NewzAlert.com - Register to submit RSS feed.

nFeeds

Octora

Odeo - Register to submit RSS feed.

Plazoo

Postami

ReadABlog [Update: error message when adding feed]

RedTram

RocketInfo

Rojo - Register to submit RSS feed.

RSSFeed - Register to submit RSS feed.

RSSFeeds

RSSKnip - Add RSS feed at the bottom. [Update: not accepting new feeds]

RSSMad - RSS feed submission at bottom right.

RSSMicro

RSSMotron

RSSNetwork [Update: error message when adding feed]

Rubhub [Update: site inaccessible]

Search4RSS

Sourceforge - For news feeds.

Syndic8

Technorati

TheFeedDirectory [Update: unable to add feed]

Videocast - For videocast or vodcast.

WeBlogALot

2. Specific

Auto Feeds - For automotive feeds only.

Nooked - For corporate feeds only.

Educational Feeds - For educational podcasts and RSS feeds.

Finance Investing Feeds - For finance or investment related RSS feeds.

Government Feeds - Only for feeds from local and federal government agencies.

Medical Feeds - For medical care or health related RSS feeds.

National Lib for Health - For medical and health RSS feeds.

Political Feeds - For political podcasts and RSS feeds.

Realty Feeds - For home related RSS feeds in the appropriate category.

Religious Podcasts - For podcasts relating to religion, sermon or spiritual beliefs.

Science Port - For scientific news feeds.

Security Protection Feeds - For security or protection related RSS feeds.

Sports Feeds - For sports related podcasts and RSS feeds.

3. Regional

1470 - Japanese RSS feeds.

31engine - Japanese RSS feeds.

Bakeinu - Japanese RSS feeds.

Bitacoras - Spanish blogs.

Bitacoles - Spanish RSS feeds.

Blogblogs - Brazilian blogs.

Blogbot - Danish RSS feeds.

Blogg - German RSS feeds.

BlogPeople - Japanese RSS feeds.

Blog-search - Japanese blogs.

Blogstyle - Japanese RSS feeds.

Feeds.com.br - Portuguese RSS feeds.

RSS Israel - Israeli RSS feeds.

RSS Nachrichten - German RSS feeds.

RSS Verzeichnis - German RSS feeds.

Technorati.jp - Japanese version of Technorati.

Veneblogs - Venezuela blogs.

Weblogues - French RSS feeds.

Submit Blog Pings

Now that your Blog appears in several Blog and Feed directories, you would want to keep these directories and search engines notified of your latest blog updates. By pinging some of the services, they will be able to crawl or visit your site to index the latest blog contents. You can ping them when you have created a new post or updated an old post. Fortunately for us, there are a number of useful services that make it easy for us to submit the pings to the tracking sites.

First essential step. Go to Settings -> Publishing and under “Send Pings”, select “Yes”. Whenever your blog is updated, Blogger will ping certain services that track blog changes.

Rather than pinging individual tracking sites, we have been using services which help us update different sites and search engines that include Verisign's Weblogs.com, Yahoo!'s blo.gs, Technorati, Newsgator, Feedburner, Moreover, Bulkfeeds and Syndic8. All we need to do is to enter the Blog URL and Blog Title and they will send the pings to all the sites we select.

Ping Services

Google Blog Search Ping Service - We thought we should mention this. For new bloggers who do not find their sites when they key them into the NavBar search box, ping this site.

Pingoat - A very comprehensive list of sites that you can choose to ping. The service is also very fast and it is done within seconds.

Ping-O-Matic - Less comprehensive list.

Blog Flux Ping Service - A list of sites as comprehensive as Pingoat's but the ping takes a much longer time and is not often successful.

Feeds Pings - A short list but has pretty relevant sites.

There are other services which volunteer to send the pings on your behalf. Some of them are services provided to members only. You may also ping individual sites like Technorati. However, we think that the above services would have sufficiently covered many of the popular tracking sites.

Blog Traffic Exchange and AdSense

After doing up nice websites with interesting contents, the webmasters' dilemma is usually one of attracting visitors to their sites. Having more visitors is gratifying; it is a reward that website owners deserve for putting time and effort into their sites.

Traffic exchange networks were designed to promote visitor traffic to websites or blogs. The idea is simple – members of the network surf each other's sites. Upon setting up an account with a traffic exchange program, you will be entitled to earn 'credits' by manually surfing other members' sites. Depending on the program, you may have anything between 0.5 to 1.0 credit for every site you visit. There is a timer at the top or bottom frame of the page to compel you to remain at the site for a period of time. This can range between 10 to 30 seconds. You are then required to click one of the images to correspond with the given image in order to proceed to the next random site. This is to prevent autosurfing hacks that may cheat the system.

With the 'credits' you earn, you can assign them to your blogs. For every visitor you get to your blog, 1 credit will be deducted until all your 'credits' are spent. In a nutshell, the more blogs you visit, the more visitors you get to your blogs.

Alas, no program is perfect. While the concept of traffic exchange sounds good, there are the negative aspects that you should consider as well. I'll summarize the good and bad points of traffic exchange.

Pros of traffic exchange

1. The programs are free, that is if you are not buying the 'credits' but earning them.

2. For some programs, you can specify the category of blogs you would like to view or the sort of visitors you would like to have. The traffic is therefore targeted.

3. While viewing other member blogs, you may come across a couple of interesting ones that you can re-visit or learn from.

4. Since the programs work well only if they have a wide network of members, the administrators often conduct mini contests and games to interest the members. You may find some fun in these communities.

Cons of traffic exchange

1. The biggest negative point is that such traffic exchanges run counter to many advertising programs, especially those that pay you based on impressions you get to your site. A notable one is Google AdSense. If your site's traffic is mainly through traffic exchanges, be prepared to receive reminders like this from the Google administrator:-

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.”

2. A number of the sites that register with traffic exchanges are new sites and are not worth the time reading. Many of the established ones that have a good following of readers do not need such traffic exchange programs to boost their traffic.

3. After surfing for a while, you would also find yourself looking at the same sites over and over again, simply because only a fraction of the members are active users. It may be boring in that sense.

4. While I make it a point to read some sites, I believe that many people don't. They may be doing their homework or watching television, and mindlessly clicking the image after every 30 seconds or so. You may be getting more visitors but these are not the people who appreciate your blog contents.

Blog Traffic Exchange sites

If you want to have a go at it, here are the ones I think you can consider.

Blogmad

This has a 1:1 ratio, which means that for every site you visit, someone will visit yours. The surf timer is 25 seconds and the site layout, ideas, and image icons (with the two big eyes) are pretty nice.

Blog Explosion

The surf ratio is 2:1, i.e. for every two blogs you visit, one person will visit yours. The saving grace is that they have about close to 50,000 blogs registered, although I have an inkling that only a small percentage of these are active. They do run contests like Battle of the Blogs which add to the fun of using their service.

Blog Soldiers

Another 2:1 ratio traffic exchange. Nothing fanciful about the site, and the administrators should do more work to build up their membership base.

Blog Advance

Their surf ratio of 1:1 sounds attractive, and like a few other programs, they throw in free bonus points when you log in or surf. What I didn't like was their lack of response. I raised a technical problem concerning adding a site and despite 2 messages, they have not replied. Such a contradiction to their statement that “at Blog Advance your voice doesn't fall on deaf ears.” Also, I received error messages on a few occasions despite having clicked the correct surfbar images and was unable to proceed to subsequent blogs. I guess there are unresolved bugs in the coding of their program. (Update: This service is no longer available and link is therefore removed.)

EasyHits4U

This is another 1:1 traffic exchange site that seems to have more commercial sites registered with them than blogs. It has a 30-second timer giving viewers a lot of time to view the blogs. The thing that stands out is that they pay you cash for active surfing ($0.50 for 1000 sites viewed)

TrafficG

This is not blog specific, and you will see a number of non-blog websites. The ratio of 1:1 is good, and the longer surf time of 30 seconds means that you might get more quality traffic, people who browse your blog contents.

Blogazoo

They have a 4:3 ratio, and credit incentives to read blogs and find the 'gazoos'. (Update: This service is temporarily not available and link is removed.)

Linkreferral

I happened to come across this site last week. Essentially, when you register your blog with them, other members can review your site, give a rating and post comments. The more sites you visit or review, the higher your blog rank will be, and the more likely that your blog will be seen by others. Unlike the other programs, you will expect visitors to go through what you write in order to review your blog.

Conclusion

If your blog is new, traffic exchange may do wonders in sending visitors to your site. Surfing other members' sites is also a good way to learn useful tips to improve on your blog. For a wider exposure, you would want to have your blog listed in Blog Directories, Feed Directories, and search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines. Nothing beats content though, and if you have good quality writing, you can be sure that your blog will be read.

I have tried out the traffic exchange sites for the purpose of this writing. With the credits, I have bought banner and text link ads since advertising a blog is not against Google's TOS. These ads appear at the traffic exchange sites when members are surfing, and make your site more visible.

Feel free to share your experience on the above sites, but please refrain from posting suggestions of new traffic exchange sites. There are hundreds of them and if you'd like, do a keyword search and try them out. New traffic exchange sites are created practically everyday. Run an eBay search and you will see a number of them being sold too.

Free SEO Tools

After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.

To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.

Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.

Suggested SEO Tools

Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-

a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.

b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.

c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.

d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.

e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.

f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.

g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.

h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.

i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.

j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.

k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.

l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.

m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.

Basic Tools

Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.

Yahoo!

To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.

1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages

The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!

2. Yahoo! Backlinks

Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.

Google

The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.

1. Google Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in Google.

2. Google Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: for details of the backlinks to your site.

Microsoft Live Search

Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.

1. MSN Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in MSN.

2. MSN Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: to view the backlinks.

Page Rank Checker

This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.

Alexa Rankings

Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.

Take everything from a link exchange program!

2008-03-10T13:54:00.000+02:00

Well, its simple.
After you signup for a link exchange membership and you do the link exchanges, you can profit from that tremendos information that you get from the links.

Like the link text and the website description.

If you set up your link exchanges to/from a database, then your seo ranking will be higher using the following method.

You already know that the search engines love if you have a lot of pages on your site.

I did the following. In the link exchange page, after every link is displayed dynamically from the database, i inserted a new link to a single page on my site. The link points from the link exchange description to one file, like filename.php?linkname='urlecode(the link exchange site description here'.

So, when the search engine crawles you newly generated sitemap, it will find more pages on your site, every one with a rich text name in it.

If someone has comments on it, please submit them.

Seo for my rent a coder site

2008-03-05T15:36:00.002+02:00

My first Seo project was for a lawyer from the states, did everything i knew than, inluding robots.txt, ror, sitemap, manual sumission to search engines.
So as a good news, in one week, the site was in first place for numerous keywords, combine with kentucky, lawyer, avadia.

That was my first seo succes.

I tryed to replicate everything for another website, for same client, but he wanted to play around with the keywords, so different keywords on each page(around 6 pages). No luck.. Nothing sowed up in top 5 in Google.

I started to study whyte hat and black hat seo about one year ago, but that also was just so, to inform me, not to be a guru.
I knew the main things before that, to usage of meta tags, alt tags, title tags. Those are indeed good for the search engines, to collect as much text as possible.

Now, tables or tableless, i don't care. Maybe its a huge difference, but i made a lot of table rich pages that don't have any problems with seo.

Today i advanced. As i change almoust weekly my pages, adding new ones, normally i would need to always update the sitemap. I found a nice script, it was 19.99$ that can be called from a cron job and regulary updates your sitemap and search engine main files.

I will update a bit the script and place that later for sell, at half price. Don't judge me, i have bills to pay also!

So what boosted me in Google's first place?

I tend to believe that untill now, only a good seo coding and a few reciprocal links. No on way links yet, just reciprocal ones. When i say a few, i mean a few. Around 140. I don't think that much. That's nothing. From those, searching tru engines for links, they don't show up yet.
Hopefully in 2 weeks will have much better results.

Also blogs, rss feeds are necesary for good seo.

What do you understand from the words 'unique visitor'? I guess it mean that if someone visits your site, his visit is recorded, right? But let me ask you, if he reload the browsers page, or it navigates on the site, does that count? Normally offcourse not.

But i found a script, used by a loo0t of sites, that thinks about the upper words differently. At page reload(refresh or F5), he records another visit. That is not fair. I usualy like to reload my pages. This way i am helping the page owner to increase that recorded value.

I have developed a similar script, that actually works just fine, as it supposed to. So even if next year you acces my site again, your visit will not be recorded, since Unique Visitor means exactly that.
It will be placed for sale as low as 5$ and will include/display many seo stats for your site.

Keywords for 1st place in Google

2008-03-05T15:07:00.000+02:00

I will try to list here all the keywords that places me in 1st place in Google, or at least above original rent a coder website. I will try also to insert a screenshot, as a proof.

The first keyword and the one about i am trully happy, is

rent acoder

proof:

rent a coder, hire freelancer

proof:

hire acoder

proof:

Moustly every word starting with rent acoder will bost me in first places. I think this is because about 4 mots ago i hade my title and keywords starting with Rent ACoder. So the search engines have not updated yet the databases. I hope that in 2 weeks i will gain supremacy for a few keywords starting with rent a coder.

How www.rent-acoder.com was borned!

2008-03-04T12:56:00.003+02:00

I never was the blogs adept and never will be! That's a fact!
Bloggs are written by people who are having too much time on their hands!

I created this one only for experimenting in the SEO for my website. The small http://www.rent-acoder.com/. And maybe to share, if succesfull, some nice SEO tricks.

Let's get back to serios business.

Started in late 2006 with the registration on the rentacoder site(named rac from now on).
About 3 weeks i never won any bid. And i was bidding low, on as many projects i could (the ones that fitted my needs and expertise).

Finally i get choosen. Everything seemed fine, untill an idiot webmaster came and opened an arbitration. That was the start. You can win easily an arbitration, even if you are a beginer freelancer.

The main issue was at the rentacoder staff. Really dont know what kind of employes they have, or maybe this is a rule of them? Offcourse, its quite good from the business point, to disadvantage the coder/freelancer/designer. Maybe they didn't take in mind that sometime a pissed of and unfairly arbitrated coder will take a chance again them..

If they have a good business, that doesn't matter that they need to look down to everybody. They are low species of people for me! Period.

Anyway, i have completed 34 projects on the rac site, most of them with 10 rating, a good review. But i had also about 8-9 lost arbitration, and guess, rated with? -3

In case of loosing an arbitration, the other party isn't allowed to post a review for you(negative). I had a case when both the arbitrator, and the webmaster left me, each of them a -3.

Please do not make yourself a bad idea about me or rac, i don't want to try to deface rac, i am only listing some tru stuff here, the reason why this site started and i am where i am.

Meanwhile i did some stuffs there and they frozen my account.

I was sending them daily email in order to clear my name.

Ok, so i was angry because they didnt replyed for 7 days to clarify the cause of freezing my account. I searched all the pages from rac, in ordet to find a point where it clearly states that you are not allowed to do what i did..

Guess what? It doesn't say that anywhere!

I asked them numerous time for an explanation why they frozen my account. I've emailed them daily, to about 4-5 email adresses that i had, includin to the owner. But i never got a responce from neither of them.

Another interesting thing that i remembered, about one arbitration, where the buyer actualy lost! Do you believe, it lost! I have did my work for him as per requirements. That was my strong Defence against the buyer and mediator. We completed a test and everything, got tru the whole arbitration process.

What kind of system is that where if the coder is rigth, he is unfaired? Maybe they have some rightfullness there. I think they did this way because the buyer agreed to some terms and conditions when he posted the project.