I am sure you have probably heard of Squidoo by now. It’s basically a Web 2.0 site that allows you to write mini-articles and start lenses (aka blogs) about your favorite topics. It also comes with a bunch of built-in plugins and is perfect for people who are not technical but are very good at writing and marketing. So what the heck is SEOquidoo? This is the approach that used to work brilliantly a while back when you could get real backlinks from Squidoo. You could also move to the top of search engines with the write set of titles and keywords. But then Squidoo was slapped by Google, and a lot of its pages lost rankings. 

If you are a blog owner, you know how frustrating it is to have your site disappear from the first page of Google. The funny thing is that when you argue your way back to Google’s top SERPs, you still don’t realize your previous positions. In other words, things won’t be back to normal when Google unslaps you. But Squidoo is for real my friends. I have used it to get first page rankings on decent terms before. If you are into niche marketing, and you like getting sites out about small niches, then Squidoo is a great way to go. Is it a magic solution? No. Will it guarantee you a top spot for most competitive terms? Absolutely not. Is it worth doing? You bet!

A former boss of mine used to think that longtail keywords are a waste of time and not “worth our effort.” I did explain to him that longtail keywords tend to convert better too, but I guess some people rather take the short way out. The moral of story is, if you want to really have a chance of getting decent free traffic from search engines, you should definitely try optimizing for both short and long tail keywords. There is simply no excuse for not doing so!

So Google Chrome is finally out, and I got to tell you, it is one heck of a browser, if you are into simplicity and the looks. Google Chrome has got to be the most attractive Web Browser there is out there. So it is safe to say that Google has followed Apple’s ways of providing us the ultimate eye-candy.

So what’s to like about Google Chrome? First of all, I like the fact that everytime you open the browser, it shows you your favorite sites in no nonsense way. Every time you open a new tab, you’ll see a visual sampling of your most visited sites, most used search engines, and recently bookmarked pages and tabs, which I think is very handy, at least if you are a heavy delicious user.

Google Chrome is married with Google gadgets, so you can create shortcuts to your favorite web applications without having to access the web, which again is a big plus. One thing that I find very interesting about Chrome is the ability to drag out tabs. I can’t do that with Flock so maybe Flock 4.0 will come with that feature.

Google has paid extra attention to browsing securely as you can browse privately (in stealth mode) or in lockdown mode (where you are protected against phishing sites). The downloads are less intrusive too, which is again a big plus.

I like the lightweight Chrome browser. It seems to be very well designed and intuitive. It took me about 5 minutes to pick up most of the features and fall in love with it. The only downside to it is that it does not have the social features of flock but it never claims to be aiming for that market anyway. Very impressed with Chrome so far.

P.S. Download Chrome here. And don’t forget to share your thoughts on it!

Google Chrome is finally upon us (released today). Google has finally joined Mozilla and other Open source browsers in the browser wars. We also know that IE 8 will be out soon, so Microsoft and Google will be at it again. So why is Chrome significant. For one Google gets to attract more eyeballs to its web services. If you think about it, Google has been methodically working towards its plan to dominate the WWW, and Google Chrome is another piece of the puzzle. Also, IE 8 is going to threaten Google’s ability to watch our every activity, so Google is going to muddy the waters by introducing its own browser (god know how much information Google has gathered from its poor users with or without them knowing).

I am interested to see if Chrome will give us SEO built-in options such as Google SEO ranking toolbar and other features beyond what is offered with plugins for Firefox. I personally don’t mind sharing my information with Google (unless I want to keep them a secret which then I will use another service). For me personally, it will take a lot to switch everything from Flock to Chrome. It should not only be SEO friendly but also SMO friendly, and I just can’t see that happeneing when the program is still in early beta.

So how do you know if you are in the Sup Index? It’s really easy. If you type your domain on Google and search for it (e.g. xyz.com), and you don’t show up on the first couple of pages, there is a good chance that you are either banned or in the SI. You can use the command Site:Domain  to figure out if you have any pages indexed by Google. If you are indexed, then it probably means that your site has been deemed irrelevant by Google. Thin affiliate sites often end up in SI (Google actually has stopped using the term Supplementary Index). But if you are smart about it, you shouldn’t really end up there unless you do something nasty.

Here is how:

• Make sure you have your main keywords on your page. Speard them around your pages, and use proper tagging such as <strong> or <i> to highlight your most important words on each page.
• Make sure you do proper internal and external linking to let Google know why your site is relevant to your main keyword.
• Don’t over optimize your pages. Make sure you watch the keyword density. Don’t make everything bold or anything like that. Google would not like it.
• Don’t add too much content in a short period of time. Many people think that the more content they add to their site the better. While that’s true, you should do that in moderation. There are a lot of people out there who love to take shortcuts. If you add 100s of pages of content to your site, all of a sudden you become a suspect.
• Watch out for duplicate content. Duplicate content almost always gets you in trouble. Whether its ranking drop or complete site exclusion, you want to make sure you avoid putting duplicate content on your pages. Blogs often get into trouble for this issue (due to their architecture), but Google is getting good at recognizing blogs and just ignoring the duplicate issue with them.
• Use Google analytics and Google Webmasters tool to find out what’s exactly wrong with your pages, and how you can fix them. I have probably said this before, but Google tools are almost always the best friends that you can have in the SEO world.

If you provide quality content and don’t take shortcuts, there is a good chance that you won’t have to deal with the SI. But if you are ever in trouble with Google, just follow the above steps, and allow Google time to get you back in the main index. As long as you are not banned for doing something serious, you should find your way back to Google index in no time.

If you own a blog, you are probably familiar with the concept of pinging. In essence, when you publish a piece of content, you want to let syndication services such as Technorati to come and pick up on your new content. This is all fine and dandy if you do it moderately (don’t do it 5 times a day and when you have no new content as you will get banned). Pinging allows you to get extra links and traffic from around the net and who hates that, right?

It all looks harmless really. You publish content, you let others know about it, and you get traffic and links that can help you climb up the rankings. If you are just pinging sites such as Technorati, then you should be fine. But be aware of pinging tools that are out there. You have probably seen tools such as Pingoat. The problem with these tools is that some of the directories that are posted on them are unreliable. So you need to be extra careful which ones you Ping. I have personally had my site penalized for pinging the wrong service (a Japanese service). The truth of the matter is that there are many who don’t want to work hard to create content for themselves, so instead they steal your content (through web scraping). Sometimes, Google does penalize your site for that. You don’t get dropped by the engine, but you lose significant ranking. So you want to make sure you know the service you are pinging.

All hope is not lost though. There are tools out there that can help you gain competitive edge and stay atop of your market. One underrated tool that you can use to help you figure out whether you are on the right track is Google Adwords Keyword tool. I often hear people talk about how they subscribe to WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery to do better keyword research, but you should never ignore the tool that is offered by Google itself. Google Keyword tool is an excellent tool to find out what Google thinks of your website.

Google Adwords allows you to find out two key important items about your SEO campaing. By generating keyword ideas based on description, you can figure out the top keywords that you can target in your market. Not only that, you can also check to see whether you have enough relevant content on your site to keep Google happy as far as LSI is concerned.

The 2nd option is absolutely powerful. So you create a site, and you think it is optimized for the word “SEO.” But how can you be sure? That’s where the second option comes into place. You can check your own site with the keyword tool to see what Google thinks of your site (keyword-wise). It’s amazing that many don’t even notice these options. But I guess we all want to believe that a paid tool is much more powerful than a free tool. Don’t get me wrong. WordTracker is a must have, but when combined with Google keyword tool, you can take your game to a whole other level.

Uncertainty is the nature of search engine optimization. Google provides us all with a guideline on how to keep our pages optimized for its bots, but it doesn’t tell us which factor is more important, or what truly determines the ranking for a site (for a specific term). So, it’s only natural for SEOs to make up stories to make more money. One of these unfounded claims is the fact that you can hurt your rankings by putting Google Adsense on your blog or website right away. Now that can’t be further from the truth. I have done numerous experiences with Adsense, and I can tell you that Google would not discourage its Adsense users from putting ad units on their sites. Having said that, Google does care about the quality of content that you put on your site. Google has been specific in the past about the fact that it hates “thin affiliates.” It’s easy to use software packages such as HyperVRE to create Adsense pages on the fly, but you need to make sure you add quality content to avoid ranking penalties. But if you are not just slapping useless content on your pages, then Adsense will not hurt your rankings. Anybody who’s telling you otherwise is either misled or trying to make some cash.

When I posted a story about the new search engine, Cuil, a while back, I never thought that Cuil had the potential to surpass major search engines in the short run, as far as driving traffic to my site. After testing Cuil for a while now, I am personally stunned that it is driving more traffic to my site than Yahoo! (I am actually getting traffic from Yahoo! and Live). I have a very small niche site that gets about 100 visitors a day from Google, about 20 visitors from Yahoo! and about 10 visitors from MSN. I do get traffic from Twitter, which is my 2nd highest traffic generator, but that’s pretty much the order. Cuil brings me about 30-40 visitors a day. It’s not huge traffic, but it’s still about the amount of traffic that I get from Yahoo! and Live combined. The results are still not significant enough for me to go out and focus on Cuil specifically, but if this trend continues, I may have no choice.

Are you seeing similar results with your sites? Have you had any success with Cuil?

You may have heard stories about how Digg can help you move up the search engine rankings and double or triple your SEO conversions. But is that really true? The simple answer is yes and no. Digg, Wikipedia, and all other Web 2.0 social networks have pretty much implemented the no-follow tag on their links. So you get a link but it is pretty much ignored by search engines. Does that mean that you should not go after these links? That’s not true at all. Unlike some SEOs claim, no-follow links are actually very valuable, if they are obtained from the right sources. For instance, Digg links don’t help your rankings directly, but if your story shows up on the front page of Digg, you can get a thousand or sometimes more backlinks from various sources. Not every story shows up on Digg’s home page, so you can’t expect to get those results. Nevertheless, adding Digg and other social media sites to your SEO campaign can help out a lot in the long run. But whatever you do, you want things to happen natually. Anythin that looks unnatural is bad for you and your business (Whether its adding 1000 links in a minute or digging 20 of your own stories on Digg).