Any doubts about Michael Jackson’s megastardom should have ended after news of the singer’s death tripped up Google and crashed AOL Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, TMZ and, of course, Twitter. A survey of the epic traffic:

#Leading news websites saw traffic surge to 4.2 million visitors per minute from around 2.75 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai.
#CNN’s traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
#Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama’s election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
#Facebook status updates tripled.
#AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
# TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson’s death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
#The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
#For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren’t working on Google News.
#Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson’s page.

source

The term ‘linkbait’ is a process or tool for websites designed to “lure” or generate incoming links to a particular site. It is there for the purpose of attracting users to a particular site or post.

Link baiting also hels in search engines, as a lot of search engines look at how many websites link back to yours, their quality, and measure your site’s value through these links. One very good example of it is SEOMoz’s Web2.0 Awards, which got more than 100,000 links.

# Blogger  Andy Hagan’ s  guide Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM is one of the most popular one.

# Wiep’s Guide Link Baiting: Which Hook Attracts the Right Fish? which tells you to apply what kind of link bait to apply.

# Patrick Altof’s Linkbaiting: Beginners Guide to Linkbait, is very popular as he managed 50000 links in just 11 months .

# Darren Rowse of Problogger.net also has a post on 20 Linkbaiting Techniques, which is meant to help you in your link baiting campaign which is a must read.

# Jim Karter’s 10 Tips for Link Baiting, is another link baiting guide which explains linkbaiting in easy ways.

# Jim Westergren also have a nice post at  Jim Westergren on Link Bait.

# SEJ’s Link Baiting & Effective Link Building, guide is also a must read for all.

# For niches like real estate business 21 Link Bait Ideas for Realtors, by Andy Beal is a must read.

# Todd Malicoat, one of the top SEOs in the industry has nice tips at The Link Baiting Playbook: Hooks Revisited, which is a must read for everyone.

# Also read John Chow’s guide  The Simple 3 Step Of Link Baiting, which is very simple to understand.

If you are running a startup & looking for VC funding, you need to pitch your product at startup events & to investorspitching.. It’s very important that your presentaion has a good inpact on your lice audience. Here’s a great howto pitch” presentation by Dave McClureat at the first PresentationCamp organised at the SlideShare office in San Francisco.

One of the better way of building backlinks to your website is by making press releases. It normally means writing text containing good keywords & making an announcement related to a website or the products your company sells. You submit your text to a press release site like and you get a whole page dedicated to your release with a link back to your site.
You can say submitting press releases in some ways similar to article writing.

The pros of press releases over article submissions are that it’s easy to write a press release than an article as you can simply write about events/news happening on a website or the launch of a new product. Another advantage is Press releases can often be shorter (300 words or so) compared to an article.

Submission to press release sites in most cases prove successful. Press releases will be linked from the press release site’s homepage and will be indexed very quickly. Often the homepage of these sites have high PR 6-7 – and your article will mostly do pretty well in SERPs for the day or so that the article remains linked on the homepage. It also helps in improving your media relations as you can send your press releases via email to the journalists and users i your market segment.

These are 2 popular distribution services for electronic press releases, but they are paid.

# PRWeb

# PRLeap

But there are also a lots of Free Release sites, You can check out the list of  some Free Press Release Sites .

These are list of the ways websites can link or refer your site apart from direct hrefs that may not be found by using usual link commands, but can be found by SE’s like Google. This can also effect in your SE rankings to some extent.

# another site links to your graphics ( img src=http://www.searchengineworld.com/gfx/logo.png )
# a site links to your javascript files
# a site links to your css files?
# rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
# links in email that some se’s can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
# links marked with noindex
# links marked with nofollow
# raw urls within javascript or js comments
# raw urls within css or in css comments
# urls within meta data of graphics and video files.
# urls within html comments.
# urls within the head section, meta data of a html page, or alternate html entities (alt, name, id, etc).
# links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar.
# the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
# links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
# Domains that have been 301?d with links.
# Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
# non href’ed url’s. (raw url on page http://www.techcrunch.com)
# Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
# blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.
# Domain registrations/Whois and DNS data
# Links in form data.
# Links in other Google produced software (gadgets, widgets)
# NonTraditional pages (irc, twitter, UseNet, Yahoo, or Google Groups.
# Google Adwords.

Internal linking is always a good practice from many perspectives. Apart from enhancing visitor usability,exposure to old posts & increasing visit length of users , contextual internal links also helps in improve a site’s rankings for targeted key phrases.

# Always try to use the same URL when linking to pages.
# It’s always best to use meaningful anchor text instead of using “click here” ” read here”. Try to target long tail keywords than targeting main competitive ones.
# Plan & link to related internal pages using targeted keywords as anchor text.
# Use breadcrumb navigation on sites that will link to other pages often.
# Try to lower the number of template links per page as Template links give less link juice than regular content links.
# Always Limit the number of links on any specific page to less than 100, this includes template navigation links too!
# For internal linking always use  absolute linking.
# Try to link to new content on the home page.
# Try to fix all 404 errors , for this you can take help of Google Webmaster Tools . Set up a 404 page with links to related content, refer to articles like # http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/custom404.shtml , # http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/061499-1.shtml .
# Try to use static URLs always. A dynamic URL l is one that uses the $_GET function within the URL, e.g. http://example.com/?form=charts should be changed to http://example.com/charts. You can do this by using htaccess. For Changing dynamic to static URLs by .htaccess read this >> http://www.intelliwebtools.com/node/131 .

By following these properly will surely improve your website’s  over all usability & search rankings.

Everyone tries to find new ways & techniques to make his blog more search engine friendly. Though there are many blogging platforms but wordpress is always my favorite as there are so many plugins for different needs. To make your site rank high in search engines there are many useful wordpress plugins. You may have heard about some of them but there are some which maybe you have never used.

Google Sitemaps – This Generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of the WordPress blog. The Google sitemaps program is part of the “Google webmaster tools” owned by Google.

SEO Title Tag - This plugin is  useful in overcoming several limitations in creating search engine optimized title tags for blog posts and for Pages in the WordPress blogging platform.

Head META Description – It provides an automatic meta description tag for the blog by inserting a dynamic description depending on the search query-type.

Ultimate Tag Warrior – One of the top Tagging system for WordPress. it makes it easier by searching through the tags you made for the posts.

Related Entries – This plugin shows up related entries of the posts throught similar tags, and words. It’s good  for SEO as more links within the site, great deep linking & also helps in increasing visit lengh as user can browse through more related articles.

Apart from these there are many other plugins too which can be used for better search engine rankings & blog optimization.

What is the supplemental index?

The supplemental index is a secondary index for lower ranking pages. Pages found in the supplemental index tend to be crawled less often and will never be assigned Page Rank. As a result, these pages tend to appear lower in organic search results. There are many reasons but these are the common ones :

# Low quality content (1 line posts).
# Internal duplicate content noise or scraped posts.
# Lack of external links.
# The number of query string parameters exceeds Google’s algorithm.

So the Supplemental Index Ratio tells you what percentage of pages from your website are supplemental results. It is better if your site have a lower Supplemental Index Ratio. So it’s like In short, the Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator, gives:

# With http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adomain&filter=0, it finds out the total number of pages indexed by Google from your website.
# Finds the total number of pages in the main index http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adomain+-inallurl%3Adomain&filter=0

You can also calculate it by SEO tool, known as the ‘Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator’ .

See a example if you want to do it normally without a tool:

1>Go to google and search for site:yoursite.com , example http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Afusioncharts.com&btnG=Search it says 7,710 results (This includes all the pages regular and supplemental approx)

2> Now do site:yoursite.com/* example http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=navclient-ff#hl=en&q=site%3Afusioncharts.com%2F*&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=site%3Afusioncharts.com%2F*&fp=Q9hKAq0-8-0 (It says 1,300, this is the regular pages only approx)

3> Now (7,710-1,300)/36 = 6410/7710 = 83.13% is the supplement index ratio for www.fusioncharts.com which seems high.

But nowdays Google is not giving so much importance on supplementary results. Refer :

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

This is a very nice graphic with lots of optimizing tips from top industry experts like Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Michael Gray & many others. Below  is a snapshot of it & you can also download the high resolution PDF of the universal search chart.

Some days back I had published a document at Scribd on basic tips on maximizing adsense earnings. If you search at Google with “effective adsense tips” you can see that document shows up as the first result, it also shows that document sharing sites sp Scribd do very well in search results of Google since “adsense Tips” is quite a competitive keyword.

These are some basic tips which will ensure better earnings from adsense.

1> Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. For doing this create open topic one page, use your keywords in page title, also check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic.

2> Increase your keyword density. If you use the proper keyword density in your content,you will attract more targeted ads. Your visitors are far more likely to click on a relevant ad. Targeted ads usually pay more per click too.

3> Use Online Keyword research tools like Overture Keyword Tool, Google KeywordResearch Tool and Goodkeywords.com. You can also try the free trial of Word Tracker and if you like, pay for the service. Other excellent paid keyword research tools include NicheBot and KeywordElite.

4> Use wide ads (336×280, 300×250 or 250×250). Because there are the best performing ads.

5> No Border ads. One of the best ways is to erase the borders of Adsense ads and make them merge with the website’s background color.

6> You can embed your Adsense ads in your content. You should surround the ads with the content of the page. This is where your visitors will be looking, so you should also give them ads to read and maybe click on if they’re interested.

7 > Place an image near your ads because user tends to look at this section.

8> Rotate Google Adsense Ads Colors to Reduce Ad Blindness. To prevent regular users from ignoring the ads, you can officially rotate up to 4 different types of color palettes for your adsense ads. When you are selecting the color scheme for the adsense ads, press the Ctrl key, scroll up or down with the arrow keys and select multiple color schemes with the SPACE bar.

9> Track your ads. Google gives you up to the ability to track ads by web page or by the type of ads displayed. They give you up to 200 custom channels for you to use. Experiment with different ad types and positions to see which suites best.

10>Use the Adsense for search box. It’s always a good idea to give your visitors the ability to search your site. If you use Adsense’s search box, you would be paid for visitors who click on the ads in the search results page.

11>Do not rely on one website. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential to get clicked.

12>Use site maps. Use Google’s site map. It visits your site and will crawl it much sooner than any other submission process.