Problogger confidential

I just got word of the latest Problogger Confidential series - a call with blogging mastermind Yaro Starak. The call will cover how to make a solid income through part-time blogging.

Register here for the call at 9pm Eastern time on Wednesday

Paid submission...a rip off?

I receive a whole host of search engine related emails and feeds and a common recurring theme from one of them is the old 'Get listed in 48 hours, GUARANTEED'. I've never believed in paid submission to search engines - if you optimise your site properly, you don't need to.

There are some tips & techniques that you can use to get your site into search engines quickly which I'll post on soon. One of them that I've used is to add your site's feed to your personal MSN or Yahoo! page. Effectively, you're telling these search engines about your site...and a short while after adding your feed, you'll start to show up in their results pages. That, coupled with adding a Google sitemap should have you well on the way to being indexed.

What techniques do you use to get listed quickly? Have you ever used a paid submission service? And has it been worth the cash? Leave a comment and let me know.

Choosing the right domain name

Selecting the right domain name for your latest online venture is a major choice you'll need to make...and one which you should spend some time mulling over.

There are a couple of schools of thought worth noting here:

Keyword-rich domains
On the one hand, your domain name could contain search keywords that you are targetting in your niche - for example, www.unique-gift-ideas-shop.com which sells...um...unique gifts. There is some debate over how much having search keywords in your domain helps. From my perspective it isn't the best choice if you're trying to build a brand. After all, flickr isn't called online-photo-sharing.com is it?!

Brand / uniqueness
Another approach is to go down the brand route - build your brand around a unique name (for which, of course, the domain name is available). The down side of this is naturally that when you start out, no one will be searching for your name. But if you structure your site properly from a content hierarchy / SEO perspective and ensure your pages are appropriately optimised (good title tags, keywords in h1 tags etc) people should start to find you. Of course, you'll probably need to work a bit harder to get your brand out there, but once word of mouth starts, you'll begin to pick up inbound links and your rankings in the search results will start to gain ground.

If you plump for the brand route, the next decision has to be a name itself. Businesses can spend (literally) millions on this but it's not necessary to do so. I found a nifty set of domain tools that might at least give you some inspiration - I like the six letter random domain names which have inspired me. The page shows different domains every time you refresh it. Many of them are unpronounceable, but if you persevere you'll find gem or two!

Remember...choosing a domain name is one of the most important things you'll do for your venture. With all that effort you'll put in to building links to it, you'd better make your choice wisely. So take some time.

Let me know how you went about your own domain name choices.

Creating Killer Flagship Content

All bloggers want to be noticed and admired by an active readership...why else spend countless hours writing (ok, well, there is the pleasure of purely recording something, but ultimately without a readership it's a bit fruitless).

So it was with interest that I read Chris Garret's free e-book on Killer Flagship Content. He likens flagship content to the "go-to" stores within a shopping mall...they're the things that attract the mall's footfall...and the smaller stores benefit too with passing trade. In the same way, flagship content on your blog attracts readership, and that readership will generally stick around to see what else you're writing about. It's a nice metaphor - and like most great ideas, it's very simple.

Chris' e-book goes on to suggest 10 ideas for creating flagship content - from tips, to FAQs and more. And then suggestions on how to promote your content. His writing style makes the info-packed 14 pages easy to read so you can devour it in 30 minutes. But go back and read it again to pull out the practical tips that apply to you as a blogger. There are plenty there.

Whether you're just starting out in life as a blogger...dipping your toe in the water...or even if you're an old hack that just needs a few ideas, Chris' book is well worth a read. Grab your copy here.

Right...I'm off to brainstorm some of my own killer flagship content ideas...

E-book image copyright Chris Garrett

Twitter and Jaiku on iPhone

Although I'm a Jaiku fan more than a Twitter fan, you might want to know that you can now Tweet on your iPhone thanks to PocketTweets. Nothing to download, just point your iPhone at www.pockettweets.com and get tweeting where ever you are.

Get updates to the PocketTweets service from their own Twitter stream.

Of course, Jaiku has an iPhone interface too so you can use their superior service as well (and no, I don't work for Jaiku!)

Build links with Jaiku

I just joined Jaiku which, I have to say, beats Twitter with its eyes closed.

Apart from it having a very sweet AJAX interface, it has some nice features which help us SEO-ers. The principle one of which is the ability to add multiple feeds to your Jaiku presence.

Any feeds that you add (which could be feeds from your blog, a Google blogsearch or whatever) show up as entries in your presence with links to the original page...with the title as the link text...all without 'rel=nofollow'. Thanks Jaiku guys, you rock!

So you can build posts with keyword rich titles, pull them into a Jaiku feed and you've got automatic inbound links to your site. Then all you need to do is put your Jaiku presence on your site and once again you've got a nice 3-way link relationship.

It's good to link to LZZR.com

I've just been reading the lzzr.com seo blog with interest. His thoughts on backlinking are worth a read and turn classic site-promotion thinking on its head a bit. Rather than (hmmm...perhaps as well as it better) promoting your own site to gain search equity, promote sites that already link to you. Build their importance and thereby your own by the fact that (more important) sites are already linking to you. Give them some link love and the love will be rewarded.

Of course, you can see both your own visibility in search using the site: operator (like this) and how many sites link to you using the link: operator (like this). By using the latter, you're effectively creating the perfect 3-way link structure which is known to be better than utilising link farms (which of course suck).

But search engines don't generally index their own SERPs (although Netscape results do get into Google SERPs), so LZZR suggests building an intermediate feed of results pages (such as that from Google Blogsearch) that will then itself get included in results.

So in short: add links to feeds of searches that return sites that link to you where ever you can...and watch the love flow in. LZZR suggests places like Squidoo which allows you to publish feeds directly on your lens.

I'll be watching the love with interest and will report back here on this blog.

Cool wormhole camera trick

Wormhole Camera Trick! - For more of the funniest videos, click here

Website grader - how 'good' is your site?

There seem to be website 'graders' popping up all over the place at the moment. I blogged about BlogJuice the other day and have come across another tool that analyses any site you point it at and gives SEO tips about how to improve it.

It's called websitegrader.com and apart from having a nice AJAX interface and a very wacky 'I'm busy doing stuff' animated icon its results are well laid out. You give it your URL, keywords and competitor sites and it'll give you a score out of 100.

For this site, they gave me 49. Plus some useful pointers that I hadn't noticed already (a couple'a META keyword issues). Interestingly, they also flagged up in a big red box "Website running on blogspot.com" and pointed me to this article about why that's a Bad Thing. Some of the points they make there (like the 301 redirect thing) are valid. But the blogger platform is fine with me right now.

More tags means more pages

I discovered something interesting today. I wanted to see how much visility this blog has in Google so I did a quick search. The results showed something which I hadn't really ever considered...but when you think about it becomes obvious.

There were results in the Google SERPS for pages with titles that I didn't remember writing posts for. Such as 'bloglines' in the snapshot below...



Of course, these pages originate from the tags that I've added to each post. Which (of course) got me thinking...each tag represents an optimisation opportunity since it gives my one post numerous different URLs and titles with appropriately rich keywords. Nice.

Is this something you're using on your own blogs from an SEO perspective?