SITEMAP

What is a Site Map ?

A Sitemap is “the representation of the navigation structure or the architecture of a website”.

The Sitemap lists the pages that the website contains in an organized fashion and the link to the Site Map can be usually seen in the bottom end of the page or sometimes at the top.

The Sitemap can be easily generated by various tools available on the net.

Here are some reason why you should have a Sitemap:

1. It makes Search Engine Spiders find your pages easily, this is specially useful if your site is new.
2. Visitors can look for specific things easily with the Sitemap.
3. It is useful for sites that contain dynamic content.
4. Helps really large sites that contain a lot of content pages which are not interlinked in the right way.
5. A site map helps get pages that contain Flash or Ajax get indexed as well.

Black Hat Ingredients

• One “aged”, well ranking site (you can choose any niche whatsoever – does not have to be related to the keyword you target) – cedarlakedance.com registered in August 2005
• A really good backlink analysis tool to check your competitors & identify how their link profile is constructed (by site type/link type/ link position/ metrics etc)
• A mix of high & low quality hacked sites where you will put links on.
• A Hacker.
• A cloacking script to detect Google Referrers.
• A Landing Page to convert visitors into Money.

Black Hat Directions

1. Ask Hacker to check the site and find potential vulnerabilities. After this he will need to actually hack it and be able to put a html page on the server. (totally illegal – “DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME”)
2. Don’t modify anything yet. Leave the site as it is.
3. Use a top link analysis tool to analyze the top ranking sites (top 5) and get the number of referring domains they have.

• Analyze even more and classify by
• Dofollow /nofollow
• deep links /deep backlinks
• Profile backlinks by site type/ link type
• Profile backlinks by Authority Metrics
• After profiling their backlinks you will have a number of referring domains that you would target to achieve the No. 1-3 ranking. In our case the site settled to have approximately 600 referring domains in the end.

Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer changed up its offering and now provides an overall summary of a profile (including data from other sources) plus a variety of performance scores via its metrics dashboard:

Advanced Link Manager for Bloggers

Link building is not an easy task, but it is a task made a little easier if you know how to manage your links more efficiently. Managing your links can be both tricky and time consuming, especially if your links number in the thousands. Realistically, there’s just no way of manually finding out just how many inbound links and the quality of each link that you already have. In short, if you want to manage your links effectively, you need some kind of tool to help you.

One tool for managing your links is the Advanced Link Manager. Despite its name, the Advanced Link Manager is actually easy to use and perfect for website owners who are just starting out link building and have a lower level of knowledge than and SEO guru would have. It is also useful for more advanced users who practice SEO as their profession, with the depth/level of information you can get from the tool depending on the version you opt for (Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Server).
The Standard version is already sufficient for those who need a basic overview of their link profiles since it allows you to do the following (and more):

• Find broken links within your site
• Find all incoming links (as indexed by major search engines)
• Check those existing incoming links to see which ones are still alive
• Keep track of your link exchange campaigns to and automatically find out whenever any of your link partners removes the link to your site.
• Categorise incoming links using customisable URL filters
• See how your link profile has changed over time via the backlink evolution chart and search engine evolution chart (The search engine evolution chart shows the number of links to your site indexed by each search engine.)
• Customisable URL referrer settings – You can ask for updates on particular referrers only and get in depth information on the URL referrer such as page title, anchor text used for your link, use of the “No Follow” tag, and URL page rank. This helps you assess which of your URL referrers are most relevant and passing you real value in terms of link juice.
• Customisable updates – You can adjust your settings and choose only the elements you deem relevant to you so that you don’t get overwhelmed by useless/redundant information. This is especially useful if you plan on using the Advanced Link Manager alongside other link management/analysis tools.

Upgrading to other versions will give you even more convenient and powerful features such as fully customisable reports, give you access to their website crawler and analyser (very useful for on-page optimisation), manage multiple projects and create user profiles, automatically find potential link partners, and even use Advanced Link Manager’s Server to easily access your clients’ database.

As a blogger though, the standard features will definitely be more than enough to cover your bases. However, if you manage blog networks and have to handle several projects at once, or want an automated way to find link partners to help you find leads, then the Enterprise version will be more suitable for you.

Deployment SEO Strategy and Checklist

Every time you have a release, do you have a test (automated or manual) that you perform to make sure that everything is good to go from an SEO perspective? This is what we call a deployment SEO strategy. Odds are you might not have one, but you should.

You need a deployment strategy for two reasons: first, accidents happen. Second, not everyone knows SEO. This posts highlights problems to look for when when you're testing a deployment and tips on how to create a deployment SEO strategy that works for you.

Automated vs Manual

When I was working in-house, we had all of our internal links become nofollowed; the nofollow tag was copied over from a dev environment. After learning from this experience, I began doing manual testing following every deployment to ensure that each one was rolled out properly. With weekly releases and multiple sites, this task quickly became quite time consuming. Fortunately, we had a QA team that I trained to handle the testing themselves.

I started the manual reviews by going to pages that needed to be tested and verified that the SEO elements were all in proper place. To automate the process, I oversaw the development of test scripts built by the QA team to verify everything was in order. This was a much more efficient solution.

Big sites with frequent releases should be doing automated testing. Work with your dev team to get these tests created for you. Further, you should also have a QA team that should be capable of running the tests once they are trained. If you're unable to get the resources necessary, well...try to persevere until you can. You'll still have to do the work manually, but this issue is far too important to ignore. If you can gather the dev resources, you'll still need to perform manual tests until automated testing is created.

If you run a smaller site or don’t have frequent releases, manual testing is probably the better solution for you. Sure, it takes some time, but if you aren’t doing it every week, odds are the manual reviews won’t drive you insane.

Increase Alexa Rank of your Blog

 

Claim you site: By claiming your blog/site you are placing the alexa ID inside the header, thereby allowing alexa to assess your site in a better way. Site description, country name and your profile is most important while claiming. Always use the keywords related to your niche while describing your site. Although not in a big way but it actually helps to increase the alexa rank of your blog.

Install the alexa toolbar: Install the alexa toolbar in your favorite browser from your favorite laptop or desktop. Here favorite browser and laptop is most important. You have to update your blog using the same browser on the same laptop every time. It has a significant effect in increasing the alexa rank of your blog.

Updates your site frequently: A great way to increase your alexa rank. Alexa love fresh content very much just like Google. A study suggests that updating a blog 7 to 10 times / week help to improve the alexa rank in a big way.

Quality content: Alexa also considers the page views, bounce rate and time spent by visitors while ranking. And, unique and fresh content can only force a visitor to spend more time on your blog, thereby increasing the page views. Always stick to your niche, writing blog posts on different subject matter affects the alexa rank adversely.

Link building: Alexa counts links. The momentum of your link collection is directly proportional to the increase of your alexa rank. One of the great way to link building is – Content syndication i.e. guest blogging in exchange of back-links. Develope a habbit of guest blogging, at least 1 to 2 quality guest post/week on blogs having Google page rank of 3 or more.

Blog commenting: Very surprising, but it works if you do it in a moderation. You must be aware that more than 99% of blogs have NoFollow attribute in their commenting system. It doesn’t help to increase your Google page rank. And, if you do it aggressively for long period then you may be a victim of spam mass by Google. Don’t be afraid. You believe it or not, Google search engine always looks for intention. If you post constructive comments using your meta keywords judiciously, it sends a positive signal and helps to increase your alexa rank.

Special blog post for webmasters: Almost all webmasters and blog owners use alexa toolbar in their browser. If you specially write posts for them with optimal search engine optimization then your alexa rank will increase very rapidly. B’cos they will visit your blog from their browsers withe the alexa toolbar install in it.

Go for alexa-pro: Yes, go for alexa pro for once. It fine tunes your blog by assessing the exact number of visitors, both organic and referred, as well as direct traffic by typing your blog URL directly in to the browser and traffic from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon etc.

    If you are a serious blogger then don’t involve yourself with any type of link scheme, even stay away from link exchange also. Google detects this very easily and penalize blogs and websites very heavily. Do not try to manipulate alexa rank of your blog by using any type of software. Advertisers are not so fool to be fooled by your high alexa rank without any real quality traffic.

Major Directory Search Engines

The major directory search engines

dmoz.org    
The Dmoz directory is used by an endless number of searchengines. Getting a listing in dmoz.org is judged by human editors. This is the top-of-the-pops!

It can take up to 4-6 weeks to get listed in the Open Directory.

Go to the us-list for more general information on Dmoz.org

looksmart.com    
Looksmart.com Pay-per-Click / Pay-per-Ranking URL Submission

Looksmart provides directory results to Altavista, and MSN Search (amongst others). Go to the us-list for more general information on Looksmart.

yahoo.com    

Yahoo still is one of the most popular portals on the web. Getting listed in their directory is worth a lot. Go to the us-list for more general information on Yahoo!