We have many times heard of many optimization theories. Search Engine Optimizers telling their clients that they guarantee #1 ranking for their sites in google and other search engines. Just thought of sharing a link on Google SEO guidelines with you people, of what google thinks about SEO and its best practices.

Google has launched a free PDF guide, which can prevent people from getting duped by such SEO authorities who guarantee them top rankings in google within couple of months. I am not denying that it can’t be done, with good unique content, good enough SEO, marketing this can be achieved over time.

Here are few questions that google suggest you should ask your search engine optimizer to answer before assigning your project:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

What’s your experience in my industry?

What’s your experience in my country/city?

What’s your experience developing international sites?

What are your most important SEO techniques?

and more…

With these guidelines, I am sure people can help themselves getting more aware of SEO best practices and saving their money on fake SEO’s

Download Free Google SEO Book

How do we find do-follow blogs in our respective niche?  That’s what the question that arises in the mind, when we want to comment on different related blogs and still get the link love from those sites. Do-Follow blogs are those blogs in which the links in the comments section are rel=” ”  (i.e. Blank) or not there in the anchor (<a href /></a>) tag. Now how do we search for these blogs.

U Comment, I Follow.

Here is how to do that. You need to use google image search for this. You need to search with queries like “U Comment, I follow” (it will be more accurate). U Follow, I Follow is kind of a project, under which the do follow blogs place the above image. This will give you a pretty decent list of blogs with Do-Follow links in comments. If you search with u comment I follow (without quotes) it will give you more results. For blogs related to your niche eg. SEO, search with “SEO” appended to your query. To get more varied results go with “U Comment” and “I Follow” queries.

Below are some more methods about how to search for these blogs and websites.

• ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif,
• ifollowmagenta.gif
• ifollow.(gif/png/jpg, take your pick)
• utrackback_ifollow.gif
• ifollow-red.png
• inurl:ucomment
• inurl:ifollow

Here is another way how we can find do-follow blogs, check out this directory DoFollowBlogs which links to do-follow blogs under each category.

These are only a few ways to do that, there are definitely more ways. I hope this SEO technique will be worthwhile in your long run.

Submitting your websites sitemap to as many search engines is the nice way of getting all your website pages indexed and thus creating channels or pathways for the search engine traffic to your website. Bing is the newest of the Search Engine offering from Microsoft. It has taken the world by surprise by getting ominous popularity within a short period of time. It has many improved features than the Microsoft’s previous offering MSN/Live Search Engine.

[Prerequisites] For submitting your sitemaps to Bing you must have a msn, hotmail or live account.

Now please login to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ with your credentials.
Now your will see

• Robots.txt validator
• HTTP verifier
• Keyword research tool

in the sidebar.

1. You will see ADD SITE in the main page.
2. After adding your site to your account. Click on your website link in the Control panel.
3. You will now be asked to authenticate that its your website/blog. It can be done by either placing the tag provided by Bing or by placing an HTML file provided by bing on your websites root folder.
4. After authentication you will see the sitemaps option in the Menu Bar.
5. Now you can submit your Sitemap URL of the Website (http://my-website.com/sitemap.xml).

You can add any number of sitemaps and websites to bing, but if you can authenticate them.

You may also like to see the  tutorial and ways on How to create Sitemaps for your website/blog.

Sitemap.xml file is an integral part of a good and optimized website. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. By creating and submitting Sitemaps to search engines, you are more likely to get better freshness and coverage in search engines. Sitemaps are also preferred to be the first step while doing SEO (Search Engine optimization)

Creating a Sitemap.xml for a WordPress blog can be very easy. You just have to download a effective plugin and upload it on your wp-includes>>plugin folder and activate it and you are good to go.

But generating a sitemap.xml file for non WP sites like portals and forums etc. can be a bit tricky and cumbersome job. In this article today I will list some of the ways and tools on how to create sitemaps for your websites. You can generate sitemaps for your websites by using either of the following ways depending upon the requirements.

• Server side Programs
• CMS and other Plugins
• Downloadable Tools
• Online Generators/Services
• Code Snippets and Libraries.

All the below mentioned tools and services are completely free ways of generating sitemaps. There are paid services also to do some additional customizations to your sitemaps.

Server Side Programs

• The first way to build a sitemap for your site is by using the Google Sitemap Generator. For Install instructions about this sitemap please refer to http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/gsg-installation.html
• Python Sitemap Generator

CMS and other Plugins

• Drupal Website Sitemap Generator
• VBulletin Forum Sitemap Generator
• ASP .NET Sitemap Generator
• OSCommerce ECommerce Website Sitemap Generator

Downloadable Tools
GSiteCraweler (For Windows)

Free Online Services

• XML Sitemaps
• Free Sitemap Generator
• Simple Map Doc
• Automapit

Class Libraries for Sitemap Generation

• PHP Library
• ASP.Net Library

After you have created your sitemap its time to submit it to the google with Google Webmaster Tools. If you have any questions about Sitemaps please feel free to ask via comments.

All though the wordpress blogs are 80%  all ready on-page optimized for Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but there are still some ways to further optimize it to gain rankings and to remove some basic defects.

The most useful tool that comes in handy is the All in One SEO Plugin for WordPress.

This is one of the plugin I can’t live without. Some basic facts about this plugin.

• Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

So what  a beginner should really know about this plugin in detail

• With this you can set the Title and Meta tags such as Description and Keywords for your Homepage without having to touch any code. This makes it easy for people who don’t know HTML to optimize their sites.
• It helps to recreate your URL’s in a way that stop words are minimum in them. It takes care of recreating the URL’s whenever you change the permalinks structures of URL’ s in your blog.
• You can automatically avoid your categories, archives and tags to be indexed (noindex) by the search engines, as categories and tags contains the same content as the blog posts. By doing this you save yourself from the penalty of duplicate content.
• You can enable the option of using Categories for META keywords. This will further classify your posts and help search engines.
• With this every page Title format looks the way you want it to be blog pages, categories pages, tag pages, archives, 404 page and descriptions can all be customized.
• Their is an option under every post to set the desired title and Meta descriptions and keywords.

It help you achieve extra 10% making it to 90% of on page SEO aspects. The remaining 10% aspects are a bit detailed and you need to Tweak the WP code for that and I will discuss about them soon. Offcourse off-page SEO efforts are still needed if you want your site to gain rankings and traffic.

You can catch the creator of this plugin at http://twitter.com/michaeltorbert/

Sitemap is an integral part of any good website or blog. I must say that search engines love to see it. Sitemaps is also a good way of getting all your web pages indexed. While doing SEO the Sitemap is a great tool for SEOs.What sitemaps tell the search engine about your website is about the frequency of of changes in the pages of your website, the links to be indexed by the Search engine, the priority of the changes to different pages across the website.

Some of the types are:

• XML Sitemaps
• HTML sitemaps
• ROR or Archievd Sitemaps
• Mobile(XML) Sitemaps

Some of the Google Guidelines about why you should have the sitemaps as part of your website.

Your site has dynamic content.

Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.

Your site is new and has few links to it.

Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Assuming that you have created the sitemap for your website or blog, lets start with how do we submit all these sitamaps to google which is the major search engines with nearly 77% of the total market share.

Google – Submitting a sitemap to google is easy. Just follow these steps

1. Go to Google Webmasters Central tools. Here is the link http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
2. Now login to your account. This will redirect you to the webmasters control panel.
3. Add your Website for which you want to submit the sitemap, by clicking Add Site Button.
4. After you have added your website, next step is to submit your sitemap.  In the sidebar of the control panel you will see the option Site Configuration.
5. Click the plus sign and you will see Sitemap option under it. By clicking this option you can submit your sitemap. SUBMIT SITEMAP.
6. Usually the Sitemap is downloaded by google withing 24 hours and the links in that sitemap begin to be indexed.

Now in the next post I will talk about how to create these sitemaps for every type of website and how to submit them to Bing and Yahoo. Comment about the problems you have whne ubmitting your sitemap. I am ready to help you.