How To Optimize Your Instagram Account For Search Engines

Instagram has been a very powerful visual platform for digital marketers to take advantage of its various features. In case, you are taking part in multichannel marketing strategy then you should understand that the efforts to market your Instagram profile should extend beyond Instagram itself. But the main issue is that the Instagram accounts are actually notoriously difficult to index and display in the search results.

So, it is not that much tough to optimize your Instagram account for search engines. Below are the quick tips to make your Instagram profile more visible in search engines.

1. Make sure your profile is set to public
2. Set up social profile schema for Instagram
3. Include your most important keyword in your Instagram name
4. Include a specific and keyword-rich bio
   
   It’s a good idea to get at least a few words in your bio that aren’t just hashtags, however, in order to give the search engines a bit more semantic meat to work with.

 

 

 

Worried about Google tracking? Tips to protect your privacy

We all love Google, sure their results are awesome, however if you're concerned about privacy follow this post to know how you can modify the data of yourself that Google already has. Google is the number one search engine in the world now. Yes, it is and Google can snoop into your lives, build a huge profile over your connections and sell them. That's how it has amassed a fortune of making Google a top MNC in the world. Literally, Google is almost owning the internet. 

They read/scan your emails, have built a profile based on you by tracking your web usage activities and advertising preferences of yours linked to a unique advertising id and sells them to the highest bidder at a great price. But unknowingly we take risk on losing our important data, ignoring how should we protect sensitive data from loss or theft.

How and where your data hides?

 Go to https://myaccount.google.com and you will find the shit you have done over the internet. You can delete them and disable all the things.

If you actively use Gmail, Google Drive, Google Assistant and what not? They are free because they aren't selling you the product. It's we the consumers who are the victims or so-called products.

In fact, they are making billions out of your crush's romantic messages, your cute kids pictures or even some of the weird and wild imaginary things your searched for on their website. Google maintains huge archives with a mammoth amount of data.

There have been several instances recently based on racial profiling and discriminatory hiring practices. For this, Google has been warned by several privacy and security agencies for alleged snooping into everything out their on the internet as if they own it! European Union has alleged Google a lot of times.

How to prevent security & privacy breach?

Even if you are a great Google lover, there are few steps that can be followed to be safe while using email/search/cloud services over internet by controlling or avoiding few Google products.

· Opt out of advertising based on your preferences.

· Stop using Gmail and switch to Protonmail/Tutanota.

· Avoid Google Drive and instead use Tresorit/SpiderOak. Else use BoxCryptor or other services to pre encrypt your files before uploading to Google Drive etc.

· If you're concerned about privacy switch to DuckDuckGo/StartPage/Qwant immediately.

· In case, you want an alternate safe search engine then switch to Privado (It doesn't store search history or IPs).

· Undoubtedly chrome is a great browser. Install extensions like Ublock origin, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and Disconnect. If not switch to Firefox!

· If you're using an android device do this as soon as possible: Navigate to Settings >Google>Ads and opt out of personalization and reset your advertising id every month.

· Try avoiding apps called Allo/Duo.

Along with the above steps, open the URL https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and make sure you are signed in to your Google account. Then, make sure all the slider/toggles are to the left ("paused"). If a confirmation box pops up asking you to confirm that you want to pause an activity, confirm it by clicking "Pause". Toggle to pause for Location history, Voice & Audio Activity, YouTube Search & Watch History. Additionally, under "Web & App Activity", uncheck "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services."

There are aspects of Google, both good and bad, that this article hasn't covered because the company is simply too big, and too complicated to comprehend. I'm not anti Google, however being concerned about how our data is used, who uses it and what pros and cons it holds is a consumer right. I am writing this post and sharing my opinion on the basis I learnt and experienced while using several popular products of Google.

Just remember one thing, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product! There is no such thing as a free lunch. I’m not sure how many people are aware of this. But the next time while you’re browsing the internet for finding some information or enjoying a video on YouTube, always remember that Google is watching your every move; because that’s the price you pay for that free service.

I would love to hear from you more on this.

Top Search Engines of 2017

A lot of people don't need hundreds of search engines, especially people who are less tech savvy. All of the internet users want a single search engine that delivers below features:

• More relevant and accurate results
• Uncluttered, easy to read interface and view
• Helpful options to broaden or tighten a search

Let us see how these below search engines serve the best to the internet users who are searching for information over web.

1. Google Search:

Google is obviously the king of search engines, and is the single most used search engine in the world. Without any doubt, Google is fast, relevant, and the largest single catalogue of web pages available since few years now.

2. Google Scholar Search:

Google Scholar is a very special version of Google. This search engine is useful for the people who are preparing and taking part in debates. Google Scholar focuses on scientific and hard-research academic material that has been subjected to scrutiny by scientists and scholars.

3. Yahoo! Search:

Yahoo! is not only a search engine but it has some other features also like; news aggregator, a shopping center, an email service provider, a travel directory, a horoscope and games center, and several other features.

4. Bing Search:

Bing is Microsoft's product competing with Google, and considered as the second-most-popular search engine today. Bing used to be MSN search until it was updated in summer of 2009. Bing is growing and integrated a lot of search features.

5. DuckDuck Go Search:

Initially, DuckDuckGo.com used to look like Google. But there are a lot of things that make this  search engine different.

DuckDuckGo has some salient features, like 'zero-click' information. It means all of your searched answers are found on the first results page. DuckDuckgo offers disambiguation prompts that helps to clarify what question you are really asking. Additionally, the ad spam is much less than other search engines. It doesn't keep any private search results data into their servers as it is very much concerned about the privacy and security of internet users.

6. Dogpile Search:

Dogpile was better than Google in early 90's because it was considered as the fast and efficient choice for web searching. Later on, a lot of things got changed in the late 1990's, Dogpile faded into obscurity, and Google became king.

7. Yippy Search: 

Yippy is a Deep Web engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search.

8. The Internet Archive Search:

The Internet Archive is the best loved search engine for longtime Web users. The Archive has been taking snapshots of the entire World Wide Web for years now, allowing you and me to travel back in time to see what a web page looked like in 1999, or what the news was in earlier times, the stories maybe 2 decades ago.

9. Webopedia Search:

Webopedia is one of the most useful websites on the web. Mostly people from technology background love this search engines as it serves a lot of the search purposes of those techies. Webopedia is an encyclopedic resource dedicated to searching technology terminology and computer definitions.

10. Baidu Search:

Baidu, a Chinese search engine, offers a lot of services for websites, videos, multimedia files, news, translations and other useful functions, as well as global mapping service Baidu Maps. Baidu was established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are Chinese nationals who studied in Peking University and worked overseas before returning to China. In December 2016, Baidu ranked 4th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings.

11. Yandex Search:

Yandex is a Russian-established web index. This has turned into an exceptionally well-known internet searcher in Russia and also popular in few of parts of Europe as well. This search engine has 55-65% market share of total Search market in Russia.

12. Wolfram Alpha Search:

Wolfram Alpha is essentially a computational learning motor that figures any information. But it  desn’t mean that this web crawler is fundamentally for math nerds.You can even get some information about any reality, and this will give you the appropriate response.  It has got an incredible processing feature that makes this web index additionally pulls your answer quickly.

13. Ixquick Search:

Ixquick is one of the the best search engines if you are looking at the privacy of users. With Ixquick neither of the points of interest of your list items put away and no cookies are utilized. You can even set inclinations. However, you have to reset that following 90 days as they will be erased after that on the off chance that you are dormant for this internet searcher.

14. Ask.com Search:

Ask.com was initially called as Ask Jeeves. This web search engine is still especially the main decision for some clients in the USA. It represents 3% of the aggregate. The prevalent of indexed lists are as yet not that sufficiently much to fulfill the searchers' needs.

Conclusion

If you are looking at overall featured search engine, Google would be the best search engine, but when you’re looking for its alternatives with higher privacy and security, then I would prefer DuckDuckGo. I personally like DuckDuckGo over other search engines. I'd like to know your thoughts on the search engines, in case I have missed mentioning anything here. Also leave your comments below.

The Science Behind Google [Infographic]

This article will give you insight into the intricate inner workings of today’s digital technologies. Google has created, and refined a fantasic solution to a difficult problem. It answers the question “How popular is this web-page”. It does this by counting references to that page and quantifying the popularity with appropriate weightings. Google’s engines can do this with remarkable speed and efficiency.

The infographic below will let you know what is the science behind Google and other search engines. Learn the secrets behind search engines – how they work and how they have evolved.

Source : BusinessDegrees

Google May Lose Search Default In Apple's Safari

Google lost its opportunity for being the default main search engine in Mozilla’s Firefox and now it seems that Apple also excludes Google search from its web browser Safari too. According to online news, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are trying their luck for Apple to become the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser as Google’s contract expires next year. 

Yahoo has already defeated Google by owning the default search title in Mozilla's Firefox. Mozilla’s browser is one of the biggest desktop browser used worldwide. Losing the deal with Apple would be another blow to Google.

Safari is widely used by people worldwide and is the largest share of the mobile market about 45 percent. Its mainly because of the iPhone and iPad users. It is also observed that few Android users prefer Safari over Google’s Chrome. It has already become a hot news that Apple may not renew its search engine deal with Google, which is its biggest competitor in the Smartphone market as of now.

Safari on iOS is already offering users to choose their own default search engine either Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Somehow it is difficult to find the setting to make the switch, so most users just use the current default: Google.

Lets see the future that Google is going to make regarding its search engine deals.

Mozilla Includes “One-Click Searches” To Firefox

Mozilla revealed the new royalty agreement with Yahoo last week regarding 5 years default search provider on Firefox beating Google. Within a week's time it has come up with another news that Firefox is adding  a feature which enables users to search with a single click. When users type a string into the Firefox search box, they will get a list of more organized search options from the default search engine. And even better, an array of buttons below these suggestions will allow users to choose which search engine or site they want to send the query to.

Lets see in the below example. Suppose, a user types "Mozilla" into the search box, they can search the term directly on Wikipedia.

Firefox is built with a set of pre-loaded search engines that are supported in different languages. Yahoo will be the new U.S. default search engine, Yandex will be the new default in Russia, and Baidu will remain the default in China.

This "one-click search engines" section in the settings helps user who can easily hide and show sites and alternate search options. Mozilla is also keep in introducing MDN, Stack Overflow, Yelp and dictionary sites are possible additions.

As per Mozilla the features are "coming soon to a Firefox near you!" but it didn't reveal when these updates will be rolling out. Hope this will help and take ahead Firefox from its closest rival Chrome.

How To Build Backlinks - Dos & Don'ts

Most of the bloggers want more backlinks to their blogs because all of them want to attract huge number  of regular visitors and subscribers. This is one of the best SEO practices as gradually those blogs will get more and more traffic. It increases your blog's page ranking in search engines making your blog more visible and quick searchable on SERPs. There are various organic or natural ways to build backlinks. But while building links, you need to take care of some guidelines.

Please follow the DOs and DON'Ts for building backlinks:

DOs :

1. Article Submission :

Regularly submit your article to the article directories like - Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com, ArticleCity.com, Amazines.com, ArticleTrader.com etc. By submitting to these higher PR sites you can ensure your quality of writing as well as getting more readers for your blog.

2. Visiting Blogs With Same Niche :

Always visit blogs which follow same niche and cover similar topics. These articles will add aditional value to your knowledge base which can be expressed in your own way.

3. Comment On Related Blogs :

While reading other blogs' posts, you may comment on them ensuring inreaction with other fellow bloggers and take a view or idea from those comments and replies and later on you can make use of it. make sure that you are not doing any SPAMMING business here. Make your comment box available for people so that you can also interact with them and making sure to get a returning visitor to your site.

4. Web 2.0 Usage :

You may use such Web 2.0 websites like Hubpages, Squidoo to get large number of viewers as these sites are already having indexed pages with higher page ranking in SERPs and have large number of viewers and connections with different websites of similar niche.

5. Guest Posting :

Select some good sites within your niche and start posting as a guest author.  It will make you known to other blog's viewers and in this way you can promote your blog too.

6. Forum, Q&A Community Engagement :

Start writing on a forum and take participation in Q&A online communities. This will increase your understanding on the topics and will clear your views ensuring leaving your blog link there in relavant and related topic.

7. Blog Carnival Participations :

Participate in the blog carnivals which have targeted audience and  there is a scope for you to get few percentage of that massive audience to your blog.

8. Upload Videos :

If your blog niche comes under technology and you provide how-to guides. Start making your own how-to guides' videos also so that people who will watch the videos on online video websites like Youtube, will come to your blog too.

9.  Offer Giveaway :

This is one of the best techniques to bring traffic to your blog. Organize Giveaway Contest/Quiz very often ensuring the visitors are taking part on the Giveaway contest and quiz.

10.  Quality and Unique Content :

Obviously this is the most vital rule in the field of blogging. Until & unless you write quality and unique content, you won't get visitors. Readers will be attracted to the posts which are unique and original which will be having good quality and full information.  You can go for a good catchy domain name and start blogging.

Unfortunately, the above things are not taken care by the pre-bloggers, newbies who want their blog be a hit one over night. Nowadays the search engine crawlers are very accurate and can catch false links. They treat the links as spams and may ban your site. Therefore, we have drafted some not to do thing below :

DON'Ts : 

1. Buying Backlinks : 

Don't buy backlinks and get your site linked. There are a lot of software for backlinks builder available over net but stay away of them.

2. Link Exchange Communities :  

In SERPs, links found via link exchange communities will be considered as fake and will not encourage your blog for good page ranks.

3. Article Submission Service : 

Good article submission service will help your blog to grow fast by increasing readers and subscribers but if it submits to cheap and junk directories? Don's make sense. So, be selective before you submit article.

4. Compromising With Quality :

Bloggers do think that it is necessary to post everyday without fail. Yes, it is a good practice that you write at least one article every day but it doesn't mean that you should look for quantities rather than quality. Posting degraded quality contents will reduce the number of viewers.

5. Spamming : 

Engaging with online communities doesn't mean that you write anything irrelevant to the topic itself. This useless comments and links will not bring any visitors to your site. Search engines consider these links as spams.

We have discussed about the DOs and DON'Ts while you build backlinks ensuring a good SEO practice on your blogs/websites for better ranking in SERPs.

How To Optimize Your Content For Social Media & SEO

A lot of website owners and bloggers always try to keep track on their search engine ranking. Earlier the optimization technique was only about some keywords and phrases into every web page. Nowadays the "keyword stuffing" concept is gone and a new standard of search and social optimization has arrived. Without social media, your site won't rank quickly or it will not even appear in the SERPs. So, you have to optimize for social media and search rankings. You can start thinking of this now for optimizing.

Social Media and SEO Aspects :

Social media and search engine optimization are interrelated. The goal of both is to raise up rankings but the approach is different. For social media, you have to think engagement and sharing. Social media practices are:

1. Increasing organic reach via paid options
2. Real-time content opportunities via social monitoring
3. Brand, messaging and calendar managed topics
4. Engagement – and view – based performance
5. Short form contents status updates, image tiles and blog posts

For SEO, you have to think strategy, process and tactics. SEO touches everything and enhances the ranking and visibility of a website. Search optimization practices are:

1. Content and social promotion
2. Link building
3. Tactics like quality content generating and more search presence
4. Keyword-managed content and focuses on search KPIs and conversions
5. Topics emanating from actual search demand
6. Technical optimization, including meta descriptions

SEO and Social Media Practices

Optimization doesn't need any mathematical calculation. The below four simple practices make your website healthy :

1: Know the backwards and forwards business model  and focus on their main goals.

2: Optimize for search and share on social media

3: Provide search engines the most relevant and high quality websites and content that meets their search criteria.

4: Website should have tags and Meta descriptions

If you put a little bit effort on the above aspects and implement them on your website. It will surely give you a positive result.

Xbox One Updates New IE Search Bing

Xbox One users might have noticed a new system update earlier this week. The main update includes web results into the Xbox One search function. Xbox One enable users to perform simple, natural language voice searches using the Kinect microphone via its updated Bing as in back end.

Xbox Bing will show games, music, and video results from the Xbox marketplace. It will also provide relevant items from the web .

Official Xbox websites reports as "When you’re searching for content, there’s now a direct link to IE to see related results on the web. New gesture and controller features let you directly zoom and pan Bing and Google maps. And search is even faster in IE – just highlight a phrase on a web page and press the menu button to search Bing and learn more."

You can highlight text on any web page incase you are using Internet Explorer on your Xbox One. Just press the menu button to activate Bing search for the highlighted terms. Similar feature was introduced a few years ago as  Lasso search on Bing for iPad.

How Google Has Changed Research For Grad Students [Infographic]

Google has been dominating each and every industries with its various products and services. Even it has changed the research for graduation students also. In a survey it is found that 94 percentage of U.S. students who equate research with using Google, or other search engines. 75 percentage of students who use Wikipedia and online encyclopedias. 87 the percentage of all US adults using the Internet who also use search engines.

Most of the users according to the age group use Google search for different purposes. But in the search engines battle, Google has been always kept its position as No. 1 with its products and service offerings. Here is an infographic which states how Google has changed research for graduation students.

Source: Visually.

Various Search Engines And Directories

Since years search engines are used and are served to provide various results according to the billions of queries raised by people. Even today also, search engine market has remained mostly similar like it used to be before a decade. Only change is that the algorithm used in these engines. Still the search giant Google is there followed by other search engines namely Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, which combine for hundreds of billions of searches every month in United States. A lot of search engine companies came to market meanwhile and vanished also due to their improper focus and approach on search engine market.

We will discuss on some of the major search engines, the history and the facts :

Google : 

It was started in 1998 as a university project by Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Now no need for any introduction, Google is the dominant search engine used by billions of information seekers. In fact, in June of 1999 Netscape Search was updated and AOL/Netscape search began to be powered by Google bringing their search volume to approximately 3 million per day. The number was really huge at that time.

On June 26, 2000 Yahoo Selected Google to provide its organic search results which was known as Inktomi with its impressive index of more than 25 million pages. Again a huge number for that time. Now the word Google is used as a synonym with the word "search" and we very often say "Google it" instead of search it.

Bing : 

It was founded in May 2009 as an upgraded version from Microsoft's MSN Search. After the launch of Bing, Microsoft's share of the search marketplace has more than doubled. Recently the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo for Bing to power Yahoo's organic results and Bing crosses over 25 percent of search.

After merging up of Microsoft/Yahoo alliance also came the affect that Yahoo's paid search platform would be used to power both Yahoo and Bing's paid results. 

Yahoo :

It was founded in March 1994 and once upon a time Yahoo was a major leader in the search field. Before Google was introduced, Yahoo was the only popular search engine avaible over net. It declined its position by making multiple bad decisions, announcing layoffs unnecessarily and proved their moves as one of the worst business decisions in history when they turned down a takeover from Microsoft valued at $33/share. Yahoo shares turned down after that and have never been anywhere close since.

Since years until 2012, it seemed that everything was going on wrong directions. But in July 16 when the announcement came that they had appointed Marissa Mayer from Google to become CEO. This one was obviously the biggest news and might be a very good news. It made people wondering whether this effort would change of direction that the company has been waiting for.

Other Major Search Engines :

We all know that Google dominates most of the part in the world, but not everywhere. Yahoo and Bing together also found very hard to make footprints in Google's search market share on other continents, but a couple of search engines in other countries have managed to stay ahead. 

Here are the search engines :

Baidu :

Baidu is the major player in China with more than three of every four searches conducted on their engine. Baidu uses a hybrid approach wherein they have pay for performance (P4P) results. P4P is basically an approach where users bid to have their websites place at the top of what would appear to be the organic results.

Along with search, Baidu offers PPC which, similar to AdWords, is displayed at the top or right of the standard results. But looking at the interface one can say that the existence of the PPC-like results further confuses the users clicking on the standard results area into believing they are organically generated.

Some investors consider Baidu to be overvalued as a stock, their earnings are consistently high. Understanding Baidu to market into China is not an easy but if used properly can be useful for business.

Yandex :

Yandex is the best and most popular of all Russian-language search engines with significant market in Russia.  On October 1, 2012, Yandex launched their own browser and mobile app to keep their position secure against competitor Google in Russia. Yandex's advantage in Russian seems to be based on an algorithm that performs better and used unique syntax and integrating that into the results the user is likely looking for ; like the search string a question or simply keyword entry.

Directories

Directories are very useful and very interesting topic. It creates an repository which proves billions of links into it and resulting page rankings.

Yahoo Directory :

The Yahoo Directory was started in 1994 under the name "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" which is laten on named as Yahoo. It used tobe a directory with search functionality. The unique part was that there was no such SEO practice was carried out at that time.

Later on it was found that Yahoo tried releasing a web portal and in 2000 even signed a deal with Google that would see Google power Yahoo's search functionality. Their focus at the time was to acquire users through acquisitions such as GeoCities which was later on discontinued.

BOTW :

Best Of The Web is one of the most favourites of the general directories. They allow for a permanent listing. It was founded in 1994 as a listing of the best of the web. In 1998, the site seemed down to the market trends and when purchased in 2002, it is known as general web directory.

BOTW is a human edited directory. They will decline your listing if they don't like the site. A submission is $150 annually or $300 for a permanent listing.

DMOZ :

DMOZ needs no introduction as this is one of the best directories over net. DMOZ was founded in June 1998 as Gnuhoo. Later on Netscape purchased it in October of the same year and discovered as Open Directory Project. In 2000, it finally surpassed the Yahoo Directory in number of URLs in it's index and currently sits at about 5.2 million.

Business.com :

Business.com was founded in 1999 as a search engine for business and corporations categories. Unfortunately they were about to bankruptcy during the dot-com bubble bursting. Later on,  after doing major layoffs and restructuring of the organization they started making profit in the year 2003.

Link building is a better strategy which would be useful to get maximum output from the directories. We would suggest you to save this page and submit to a few and as you're building more links using different strategies.  Starting with 1 or 2 directory submissions would give you better result. Find below some free and paid directory listings :

• Jayde – Submission is free.
• 01 Web Directory – Free submission option or $49 one-time.
• JoeAnt – $39.99 one-time fee.
• Ezilon – $69 annual fee of $199 permanent.
• Alive – $75 annual fee or $225 permanent.
• Aviva – $50 annually or $150 permanent.
• SunStream – $29 annually or $49 permanent.
• Wow Directory – $43 for a permanent listing.'
• GoGuides – $69 one time.

General Directory Tips :

Top 4 common and universally applicable directory tips are as follows :

• If a directory list you automatically then it's not an editorial link and either doesn't carry weight. It should be avoided.
• If it requires link back when a paid is available then it should be avoided.
• If a directory with a PageRank of 3 or less carries no weight. You should always look at PageRank 3 directories in the case of niche directories. And don't even consider anything less than a PageRank 4.
• If a directory does make sense that this link should have weight for your site then you can be pretty much sure that it would be an useful link.

There are a lot of great niche directories. Try to put them all on a list and add to 1 or 2 each month while at the same time you have an updated site for Google. You should have good content liked by directory editors, bloggers and most the educated readers.

How To Build Organic Backlinks

Organic backlinks are naturally built and there is no manual way to build these kind of links. But yes, you can follow few effective steps which will be helpful in getting backlinks for your blogs over time. It is obvious that writing quality content and sharing it via social media is the best and oldest technique till now. Along with it,  it’s necessary to have some quality backlinks to your website. 

Matt Cutts (Google) has always been talking about link building and getting higher ranks in google search. We have articulated this post with some useful tips.

What do we mean by "Organic Backlink"?

Organic backlinks are basically the links that are naturally built and can be found via various sources in search result, and those links are built by the readers who found your blog to be useful. But for that, you have to focus on great quality with unique content and spend hours to compose that. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward link to your blog or website from a website or blogs. Backlinks are a very valuable commodity in regards to search engine rankings.

How "Organic Backlink" are built?

This is very commonly asked question in the field of SEO and here are some effective steps :

1. Unique & Quality Content :

If you have good idea on a topic then do a research on that to learn more and try to make an article by your own words. This could be an unique and useful topic in search engines. Publish posts like How-to guides on your blog. This is how unique content can be found in google search and organic backlinks will be automatically linked to your posts gradually.

2. Sharing via Social Media Websites: 

Since years this is the only and easiest way to spread out your blog posts over the net and engage thousands of readers and subscribers to read it and re-share it. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg, Pinterest and many more, which help to distribute articles among the connections we have over social media sites. 

3. Giveaway :

Offering Giveaway to subscribers/readers and getting backlinks is an old but still now powerful strategy. Getting backlinks are time consuming and you have to have patience on that which lead to collect some quality backlinks over time. Of course, it basically depends on the quality and type of Giveaway you are offering ranging from free premium template or a free theme or a free document or sometimes electronic gadgets (in case of technology/gadgets related blogs) then there would be chances for getting links quickly. We can also do creative things and give them away for free to subscribers.

4. Online Communities :

There are plenty of online communities and forum over Internet. Get engage yourself in those sites and  share your contents also your queries and get links to your blog. Post an article or list out some resources, links to the articles on other blogs also helpful. Again it depends on the author of the article and  it is very much necessary to establish good connections with fellow bloggers to promote your blog.

5. Video Sharing :

Sharing over YouTube channels are very much popular nowadays so why not making use of it and make some videos by yourself on any informative topic and share in YouTube. For example, making a video on gadget reviews. Viewers will watch them and gradually it will be shared among several circles increasing your scope to get backlinks.

6. Controversial Topic :

No matter which field you are from but controversies are always helpful to be more popular and known face in media. Either it is Entertainment Industry, Business Tycoons, Sports or even Websites contents, controversies play a big role in promotion of a brand, product or services. But you have to engage yourself in this very safely and have to be in touch with trending topics. Everybody knows that "words have great power" and with a single blog post you can grab the attention of the whole media over the net. But be cautious! Keep playing safe or otherwise you may face some legal issues and get banned on web.

How To Solve Commonly Overlooked SEO Issues

There are some common overlooked issues which can be taken care at the time when we work on SEO but somehow we overlook them and later it creates lack of optimization issue. Here we go with the discussion on this topic:

1. Normally when we search for a site or info, a lot of links are displayed which are all pointing to the same location.

This happens only because these contents can be viewed by calling up on multiple URLs. Likewise in the most common ways this happens is by making both the www version and the without www version point to the same location. For example both "http://www.example.com/category"  and "http://example.com/category"  would display the same page.

Image Credit : Google

Here we can see the second URL doesn't contain the www. and shows only the main or root domain, whereas the first one is calling on the sub domain i.e. www.. In fact a lot of people don't realise that the www. is a subdomain in the same way like blog. or tech. can be treated as subdomain.

This doesn't seem any issue while seeing but may occur some issues if not correctly implemented.

2.  One of the major issues is that when you are displaying the exact same content on different pages across your site. This is basically known as Duplicate content. It can be an issue while indexing as you can end up with the search engines indexing half of your site with the www. format and the other half without. It may lead to penalties for your site by stating duplicate content.

This issues is most common with the homepage, with sites often having links to both the www. and non www. versions which in deed purely treated as duplicate contents.

How to correct it?

To solve this issue effectively, it is necessary to implement a canonical 301 redirect via a .htaccess file. By doing this you are redirecting any page that doesn't have the www. to the www. version or vice versa.

For this you site should be hosted on Linux for the redirect to work properly. If you are using any other platform then you need to have a look at redirecting through IIS: http://www.google.com/search?q=301+canonical+redirect+IIS

Find the below steps :

1. Create a new text document by opening up in notepad and save it as “.htaccess” (remember that it should not be .htaccess.txt or something like that). You should save it as ".htaccess" only.

2. Put this file to the root folder in your website.

3. Think and decide on whether to use www. or non www. as users are more familiar to www. rather than the non www. version. Hence we would recommend to use the www. version.

4. Put the proper code into the .htaccess file :

If you want to redirect "example.com" to "www.example.com" place this code in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to redirect "www.example.com" to "example.com" place this code in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

5. Done with editing. Now please upload the modified file and test to make sure everything works fine. It is very much important point as 301 redirects can go messy if they are not properly configured.

All the 301 redirects pass on a major amount percentage of the weight of the page that is being redirected, so  this may help to minimize a lot of issues and give your blog or site pages a nice boost in the SERPs. Hope the article helped you to solve some common SEO mistakes.

Google Panda - What To Do Or Not To Do

Since last few months Google Panda has been the hottest topic on the web when it comes to search engine algorithm of Google. A lot of copied contents were posted across the web directories and getting spread across the web. If you come across hosting any forum site then you might have noticed some 'profile links' and a lot of contents copied from different source were pasted on it. No ways we can do anything as after all it's web and open to all. But a SEO professional would have known that it had to come to an end one day. And yes, that day actually came now.

Image Credit : Google

 Now the question which will be tough for the SEO professionals is whether or not to do the off-page optimization. If you see the past updated from Panda and being a SEO professionals we would   recommend you that the time has come for quality off-page optimization and we have not seen as much as better time to do it in the last 2 years.

Behind this a lot of  reasons are there as why we are  saying and recommending this. Here we go:

1. The off-page optimization is no longer a quantity practice. It's true that the techniques did work well earlier.

Now, one quality link makes more sense and brings more value than a bunch of duplicated contents or links. And this one link can move search engine rankings up just because of it's uniqueness and quality.

2. Reduce the time spent in writing sub-standard content and don't share it across the poor blog networks. with these contents and links the effort you spent will be waste  in acquiring one good quality link. It will affect on SERP rankings, and quantify that impact as well. Instead of doing this you can build one single link which will be more useful to readers and unique than those useless article or profile links.

The reason behind is that we are now moving to a new phase of organic search-engine optimization that provides more importance to having relevant content on your website. Your website's own optimization should be the first-point of action. With this, the off-page optimization needs to considered as a strategy that is based on 'quality' rather than 'quantity'. Today's Google search engine doesn't give you good rank just because you have a good quantity in numbers rather than excellent quality.

3. We should ignore all the paid links, automation tools and blog networks (hope you understood what is meant by these terms). One and only thing is to concentrate on writing an original content and post it on sites. It is the best practice.

4. Always use the Social Media to connect with good amount of people / readers and the links will follow accordingly.

5. Make sure that you are getting quality backlinks from quality sources. It includes good directories which are solely human-edited and managed by humans. Link with some of the good article directories that have a solid-human made contents/posts. In this way, if you acquire backlinks from sources that is human-edited or human-controlled as per the level of quality concerns, then you are in right track and meeting the goals of the 'Panda' update. Your aim to make the web a better repository of the original, useful and quality contents, will come true.

How To Hide Your Facebook Profile From Search Engines

Nowadays people can find your Facebook profile in almost all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, ASK. Since facebook is considered as the topmost brand among all the social networking media and have alexa rank #2 with Google PageRank(PR) 10/10 so all the major search engines mostly Google indexed all most every pages of facebook including your profile page and brings into the first or second pages. It becomes very easy to find their friends or family or strangers easily by Google search engine by typing their real names.

There are a lot of people who don't want to expose their identity of Facebook profile into Google or other search engines and don't want to get unwanted friend requests even. In this case you can prevent your Facebook profile getting indexed in Google and other search engines. Here I will discuss how can you do that with some easy steps:

1. Log in to Facebook Account. 
2. Go to Account (on top right) -> Click on Privacy Settings 
3. Go down and click on Edit Settings under Apps and Websites. as shown below:
   
4. Then click on Edit settings under Public search. as shown below:
   
   
   
   
   
5. Here you need to unchecked Enable public search under Public search. as shown below:
   
   
   

      6. Make sure you have unchecked the box and immediately a popup will come up asking to                  Confirm.

Now I have done with all the steps. Normally it takes time and will not index your Facebook profile in various search engines.

Basic Tips For Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the acronym for "Search Engine Optimization" or "Search Engine Optimizer" which gives us a series of clues and techniques to interpret the mode of operation search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines manages and show their results through algorithms that undergo analysis with hundreds of factors. Each company uses a different formula for maintaining the SEO standards.

Here are some basic tips for optimizing your blog for better visibility in various search engines with simple SEO practices.

1. Content Type

The first thing is that what users see and what are the search engines. Users can see and / or read the website but search engines can only read the programming code with which they are developed and, even today, still cannot read them all equally, for example, Flash has recently joined Google results but cannot be optimized as HTML. Graphics, sounds and videos are part of a page that search engines cannot decipher it is for this reason that the positioning work is based on HTML tags and text.

2. Index-ability of webpages

It refers to the published webpages to be properly indexed by search engine robots, allowing access to all corners, facilitating navigation and showing all its contents clearly. So we should index our web pages in all web directories.

The Meta Tags

These are code in the header is not visible on screen when displaying the page. There are several types of Meta-Tags and they do a description of the content and features we want that search engines take into account.

Meta Robots : This tag is only necessary if you want that page is not indexed in search engines.

Meta Description : This tag is important because it allows us to make a more profound than in the title, which we refer to the page content.

Meta Keywords : Perhaps the most important. Any other Meta tag is not considered by most search engines, only for some very specialized, you must use all the techniques to be successful.

Over all, the main goal of HTML tags for a good positioning are:

Title of pages:

Before setting up any other theme it is important to define the titles of your pages, which should make a brief reference to the content of the page to which you are presenting to web directories, should look into including the most important word describe the page or section.

Description:

Short description or abstract of the document as a meta tag that summarizes in a brief and concise content of the document and that may appear below the title in the "SERP's (search results pages of search engines.)

H1, H2, H3, ... Hn:

Correspond to the holders of any websites, so that the text you include in this tag will be taken into account for the contents of the page. Its importance depends on the number that accompanies them, H1 being the most important and so on until H6. You should only use a single level page and not found much use beyond the H4.

The URL:

Well! Here you should be as descriptive as possible and also facilitate proper indexing of the document. As an example: www.nombreempresa.com / activity-main.html

To strengthen the content of the page and improve your position in search engines it is important that labels view the URL above and have the same content.

Pictures:

A picture of a pen drive with name as "xyz.jpg" is not very descriptive, but if you change it to "usbdrive.jpg" and you're telling the search engines what is that picture. And you can add the ALT attribute, very important for accessibility of documents and for proper indexing, with a description of the photo, in this case ALT = "a 16 GB pen drive”.

Outbound links:

Always try to add value to the user through the content with outbound links. Since your users can not navigate all the available web pages, hence transform your reference page with unique content that extends and complement the information.

The map:

Last but not the least, your site should include a file sitemap.xml , a map of your site to facilitate proper indexing by search engines. Reference Google URL : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

3. Proper Keywords

Most important factors in the managing natural results are the key words, as in any book we are informed of the contents of the page and to be text, are perfectly understood by search engines, you should avoid using text as: "Home Page", "Home," Name of the Institution. A reader or info seeker wants to find a page on the Internet, usually through a search engine.

Positioning campaign must begin with the analysis of the keywords or keywords for which you want to optimize the website. Keywords means those words such as "blogging" or strings of words such as "blogging in technology”, and your choice will depend on the content and finally the target to which you want to address.

Summary at a glance on SEO:

i) Content: Basis of SEO, without content you have nothing to position. The content which is created, has quality and is accessible and readable by search engines.

ii) S.E.O.(search engine optimization) & Keywords (keywords): The bases for the classification of any form are the key words, for according to the words that we include on our site, we store the search engines. So choose the best keywords for your site is one of the great challenges of SEO.

iii) Optimization: Once you have the list of keywords you're using should try to take the best advantage of optimizing your content using tags , as the title (title), headers (h1, h2, h3, ...) and description (short summary of your page.)

iv) Link building: Making other sites linked to yours is what is known as link building. Since the content is not sold by itself is important to promote related sites, portals and social networks and eventually cultivate relationships with other bloggers and with your own readers, it is the way that can help you promote you by word of mouth.

Most the bloggers monetize their contents by keeping in mind the above tips which in turn brings money to their accounts and provides a source of income.

4. Services by professionals

If you have followed all the above steps and still think you are not getting good rank in the site then you should hire an SEO which/who can improve your site and save time. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

• Review the content and site structure.
• Technical assistance in the development of web sites like hosting
• Content Development.
• Campaigns for online business development.
• Research of Keywords.
• Training on SEO.

During the journey from pre-blogger to pro-blogger, you can keep learning how to write a SEO friendly article or you can engage some source or an expert who can help you in that. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in search results, appear in organic search results is free. There are free resources such as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Webmaster Central blog and forum, which can provide sufficient information about optimizing your site for organic search in search engines.

Hope the above article helps you to get some idea. Now its time to start a blog and get your site’s rank better in search engines.