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.

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.