Original Content Source

Directories can provide a rapid way to get new links to a site. Opinions on how to approach this range from submitting to every directory in site, to being highly selective. This post will discuss what’s happening under the covers to provide some perspective on how you might choose to approach it.
The Basics - Yahoo

The key things that search engines look for in determining whether a directory will pass link juice are pretty basic. They are:

1. A submission policy that states that you are paying for an editor to review your listing, not to get a listing. The key subtlety here is that they can review your proposed listing and decide that they don’t like it, and then keep your money without listing you. The importance of this is that it means that there is real editorial judgment implied by the policy.
2. Evidence that the policy is enforced.

Ultimately, “Anything for a buck” directories do not enforce editorial judgment, and therefore the listings do not convey value to the search engines.

To take a closer look at this, let’s examine some of the key statements from Yahoo’s directory submission terms:

For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted.

I understand that there is no guarantee my site will be added to the Yahoo! Directory.

I understand that Yahoo! reserves the right to edit my suggestion and category placement; movement or removal of my site will be done at Yahoo!’s sole discretion.

The key thing to understand here is that you pay your money, and you have no guarantee of getting a listing at all, and your listing can be changed at will by Yahoo’s editors. You can pay your $299 and receive essentially nothing in return for it. From a legal perspective, what you pay for is the review by Yahoo’s editors.

Now here is the key point that you won’t find in print on Yahoo’s page. Google trusts Yahoo’s editors, and Google believes that Yahoo does in fact attempt to turn away all the poor quality sites that get submitted to it.

Of course, mistakes do happen. Sometimes relatively poor quality sites do get in when they should not. That’s a shame when that does happen, but in general, the editorial policies are real and enforced.
Other Directories

Do search engines respect other directories? Yes, they do. Here is a small sampling of some that we believe do pass link juice, courtesy of The Professional’s Guide to Link Building on SEOmoz (within the PRO Content section):

• DMOZ
• Starting Point
• Business.com
• ExactSeek
• Best of The Web
• Librarians’ Internet Index

The guide shows a much longer list of directories that SEOmoz believes have value.

Note that the search engines do try to use an innocent until proven guilty approach. Directory sites will most likely pass PageRank, regardless of their editorial policy until someone reports them, or a human review is initiated on the directory for some other reason.
Steps for Analyzing Directory Value for Yourself

Now you have a directory that you are interested in contacting. What do you do? You should attempt to make a determination whether or not the directory is truly serious about the quality of their listings. Directories that currently pass link juice may not later on, so you want to be careful about investing in those.

Of course, if you are able to get the sense that a directory currently passes link juice, but is a poor quality directory, the only real downside to buying into it now is that eventually that link will not pass value any more.

But, let’s press on with trying to find the higher value directories. You need to look for clues that they will stand the test of time. Here are some things that you can look for:

1. Was it funded by a serious VC firm, or a major company in a given vertical space? If so, they are more likely to care about the quality of what they are building.
2. Has it already been around for a long time? If so, it is more likely to be around for a while yet.
3. How are the commercializing their business? Assuming they are selling editorial reviews, is AdSense plastered all over the place too? If it is, they are most likely not a serious player.
4. Are there lots of unrelated links on pages that look like purchased text links? If so, it’s a sure clue that someone will turn them in eventually.
5. Related to the prior two points, anything that makes the site look spammy is a clue that they are not a serious player.
6. Does their backlink profile includes lots of purchased links?
7. If they publish other content on the categories they cover, is it pretty cheesy or truly authoritative?
8. Do most of the categories they offer appear to have a significant number of listings in them?
9. And, of course, do they have a clear published editorial policy that makes it clear that you are paying for a review?

Examples of Good Directories

Of course, I should emphasize that based on our examination, these directories appear to be of good quality and likely to last over the long haul, but there is no guarantee.

Example 1: Itrain Online. This has a PR 6 home page, and its topic is computer and Internet training resources for development and social change. Here are some key thing we like about this directory:

1. The site has a strong editorial policy.
2. There is no fee, so money does not bias the acceptance of listings.
3. Advertising on the site is minimal, and the advertising is clearly labeled.

Even though the depth of listings is not always that deep, the overall design and structure of the directory is so clean that it seems likely to be OK. Here is a quick look at the home page of the site:

Example 2: New Zealand Tourism Online. The home page is a PR 6, and the listing pages are PR 4. Here are some key observations about the directory:

1. The site is advertising supported
2. Listings are not paid for, but are editorially selected
3. Listing quantity per category is high

The ad revenue for the site depends on the quality of their listings, which creates a big disincentive to let any bad sites in. Here is a quick screen shot of the site:

Example 3: The Internet TESL Journal. This site has a PR7 home page. The content is highly academic in nature, and features the best new educational ideas direct from practitioners. The home page looks like this:

Here are a few key points about the site:

1. There is no overt link back to the author’s site. This site does not pass PageRank, but read on.
2. Articles do contain the author’s email address.
3. You can cite references in your articles.

Getting on this site is about reaching influencers. You can gain exposure to an audience of educators. You will only value this if you are in the education business in some fashion, but if you are, you may attract the attention of some interesting people by getting your article posted here. You can also leverage getting posted here in marketing the value of your site to others (it’s an endorsement).
Bad Directory Examples

I am not going to list URLs for the risky directories, as the purpose of this post is not to out anybody in particular.

Example 1: It’s a PR7 site with a PR7 directory home page. The overall content is authoritative in nature, so this is good. The PageRank is also great. However, there is no clearly published editorial policy on the site. A deeper look at the site, and it looks a lot like the policy really is pay your money, and you are in.

It’s quite possible that this site currently does pass link juice. However, over the longer term it seems likely that the ability of this directory to pass link juice will get pulled.

Example 2: This one is a PR4 site that has PR4 links pages. There is a little bit of AdSense advertising up top, but not in an overwhelming fashion. Unfortunately, the links go through a redirect, so they may not pass PageRank. However, there are lots of unrelated links on pages at the bottom, which clearly are ads. Those ads do pass link juice.
Pay Per Post

Why don’t these links count? The short answer is that it has already been proven guilty. Pay per post services were marketed as a way to get link juice, which did not help. But the bigger issue is that the basic test of paying money to get an editorial review, which might not result in a link, is not met by these types of services.

Pay per post services pay you for providing the link, and as a result, the link is treated like any other purchased link.
Summary

With our clients, we actively recommend directories as a part of their link building strategy. This includes the major general purpose directories, such as the ones we cited from The Professional’s Guide to Link Building on SEOmoz. These are trusted directories and provide valuable links.

In addition to these, we look for vertical directories specific to the industry of our client. Nearly every business or market space has one or more high quality directories that are really worth getting into.

You can also pursue some other “edgier” directories if you like. If you do this in limited quantity, you will probably be OK, and possibly get some additional link juice. Just don’t be surprised if they stop adding value some day.

However, make sure you stay away from obviously sleazy directories, and keep the quantity of edgy directories your pursue to a minimum. If you are in a lot of edgy directories, and a search engine sees that you have been doing so, you may become flagged for a human review. Nothing good can come out of an requested human review by a search engine.

We don’t even consider these types of directories with our clients. We spend the same time and energy we would searching for those in searching for high quality natural links.

Learn how to locate quality directory links for your site (or client’s sites) and you will be able to quickly pick up a bunch of quality links. Then stay away from the riff-raff so this strategy won’t cost you at a later time.

Original Content Source

To get into the top of the SERP’s, We need keywords for targeting.

So here is my short article about Choosing Keywords, Identify Phrases used by similar web sites, Good keyword Tool, What to do after choosing the keywords..

Lets start..

1) Choosing the Keywords

Choosing keywords is the main or one of the main activity when implementing a search engines placement strategy. Getting #1 on the SERP’s for a keyword which is barely used is useless, While a 2nd Page for a hugely used or popular keyword is really good (We have discussed about this earlier too).

You can ask your colleagues, friends, classmates, business friends and Internet friends that what keywords this use in the Search Engines in your Business Niche and what keywords they expect of your site in the Search Engines.

Collect this list into a master list on a spreadsheet, for use later in WordTracker Tool..

2) Identify Phrases used by similar web sites

Do one thing, Enter the keywords which you are targeting in the Search Engines, You might find similar sites like yours, Just visit them and view their websites “Page Source” and identify the Meta Keywords Tag. The keywords might be appropriate for your Website. Add all these keywords to your master list.

3) Keyword Tool

A good keyword tool is WordTracker which does the work of finding similar sites and extracting out the meta keywords from it and sorting them out for you (As discussed at #2)

4) Final Process

Once you have the list of keywords ready for your website, We probably want to pick the best of it. We will use 3 indicators which combine and give the best phrases to target which consists of checking of each phrases for

• Phrase popularity which is seen on GoTo Keyword Tool which will show you the prior months keywords and phrases
• competitiveness of the phrases using the number of pages targeting AltaVista.

• Value of the Phrases in the market at #1 position in GoTo which is a PPC Search Engine.

Then we combine the keywords which give us the best results, The ideal phrase is that which is used a lot but it has a little competition and has a lot click cost.

Condensing the keywords into 10-12 phrases which sum up the business and give you the best of the best keywords to boost up your Business.

Thanks for reading at TopSEOTricks

Content written by Apoorv Agrawal, TopSEOTricks Admin.

You’ve probably heard of people claiming significant traffic to their site after achieving a top ranking on Google or Yahoo. But sometimes you hear from someone else who also achieved a similar top ranking but they were disappointed when no one arrived at their site. How can two people achieve a top ranking and have such markedly different outcomes? Simple. The person in the first example selected a keyword or phrase that many people are searching on, and the second did not.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to brainstorm your own list of keywords, only to find out later that they are not as popular as you first thought. Keyword popularity is essential to success in search engine marketing.

The question to ask yourself is how do you really know if you’re optimizing your pages for keywords that Web surfers are looking for? There are several good techniques you can apply:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience.

   For example, you may have a “clothing business” where you “sell clothing.” While those phrases describe what you do, they are not necessarily the words that your audience would enter into a search engine to find you. How many times have you went to Google and typed in “sell clothing” in order to find a particular shirt or hat?

   Therefore, you must change your point of view from the person selling the product to the person that wants to buy your product. For example, popular phrases to target in the clothing category would be “plus size clothing,” “mens clothing,” or “womens clothing.” How do I know this? I used the new WordTracker Keywords module found in WebPosition. When I typed in the word “clothing,” it instantly pulled up a wide range of related keywords from which to choose, all ranked by popularity.

   I must admit, I was rather surprised to see such unusual terms like “medieval clothing” and “gothic clothing” was ranked high. However, that’s the thing with keywords. It’s next to impossible to simply guess what the most popular phrases will be today.

2. Target Niches.While “mens clothing” in the previous example may be one of the most popular clothing related searches, it unfortunately has a lot of competition. If you do a search on Google, you’ll find it returns over 1 million results for that phrase. While this type of phrase may gain you a lot of traffic, achieving a top ranking may prove difficult and time-consuming.

   In addition, you will normally find visitors who search on very broad keyword categories purchasing less often than someone who knows exactly what they want. A good example of such a niche phrase would be “custom baseball hats.” The benefit of “custom baseball hats” is that it’s both a popular search phrase and it only has about 2000 pages on Google competing against it. That’s much less competitive than the 1 million results returned for “mens clothing.”

   WordTracker calls the popularity and competition ratio the “KEI” or Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the more effective the keyword will be for you.

   Therefore, targeting relatively popular niche keywords has the following four advantages:

   1. Niche keywords still produce a nice flow of traffic if you’re careful to pick ones that still have good popularity.
   2. Niche keywords will significantly increase your chance of success. Achieving a top ranking will be much easier with a niche keyword phrase versus a very broad, highly popular phrase. No top ranking can be guaranteed in an organic search engine like Google. There are simply too many variables. Therefore, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success by choosing less competitive keyword phrases. Work smarter, not harder as I like to say.
   3. Niche keywords will save you time. While you could use various tools and research to achieve a top ranking for “mens clothing,” the time required to do so may not be worthwhile. Let your competitor waste their efforts on the ultra-competitive phrases. In the same amount of time they spend trying to achieve a single top ranking for your industry’s most popular phrase, you could achieve top rankings on twenty other phrases.
   4. Niche keywords yield more sales per visitor. That’s because these keywords are more targeted. Therefore, these prospects have a better idea of what they want. If they find it on your site at the right price, then your chances for a sale are much greater.
3. Brainstorm for keywords in your categoryThere are many ways to brainstorm new keyword phrases. You can examine the content and the meta tags on your competition’s Web site to see what phrases they consider important. While this is a good place to start looking for ideas, there’s no guarantee they are targeting the best keywords. You must check these keywords against the corresponding popularity and competition factors. You could also consult with your thesaurus for synonyms and related phrases and correlate these to popularity and competition. Fortunately, WordTracker will do this for you within seconds. Simply type in the word “clothing” and it will return dozens of the most popular keywords, with the ability to drill down to hundreds more. In fact, the phrases you find here may trigger many new ideas to expand or grow your company’s business into areas you had not previously considered.
4. Choose only relevant keywordsJust because a keyword is popular with a low competition factor, doesn’t mean you should target that keyword or phrase. You may be tempted to optimize for phrases that are only loosely related to your site’s content — but DON’T.

   The phrases you target must be relevant to what you have to sell. It must also be applicable to what you have to offer on the specific Web page you are optimizing. How many times have you searched Google, landed on a page, and then backed out within 5 seconds of arriving? That page had a top ranking, but it did not have what you were looking for.

   Perhaps the Web site did have what you wanted, but the product resided elsewhere on the site. Unfortunately, your visitor may never know this. If you target a keyword or phrase, then the page they land on must offer the products, services or content that they expect, or you’ll be wasting your time and your visitor’s time. At the very least, the page should offer direct links to the potential products and services they may expect to find there.

   How do you know what people are looking for on your pages? Simply check your Top Search Phrases report in WebTrends for a list of the keywords people searched on to find each page of your site. You may be surprised to learn that pages are ranking well on phrases that you had never considered. You can also see which keywords and phrases are driving the highest conversion and revenue, to ensure you maximize the return from your SEO effort. Once you identify these pages and search phrases, make sure you are giving the visitor exactly what they expect to find based on the phrases used to find the page.

5. Understand that keywords can have multiple meaningsIf you have a travel business, then your first thought might be to target the word travel. However, if someone is searching on just plain old “travel” are they:
   • Helping their child with a paper on some aspect of “travel?”
   • Looking for the “travel channel?”
   • Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
   • Preparing to take a business trip?
   • Day dreaming about time travel?
   • Looking for driving directions for their travel across the country?
   • Looking for a travel club such as AAA?
   • Looking for the perfect backpack or hiking supplies for a travel expedition?

   If you own a travel agency that specializes in vacation cruises and optimized your site for the single keyword “travel,” only a limited number of the people identified in the example above would be qualified prospects. This of course assumes that travel was not too competitive to begin with.

   While a top ranking on travel would yield a great deal of visitors to your site, many of them would select the “Back” button in their browsers, turn around and effectively walk out of your store! That’s not the outcome you’re looking for. When you select more targeted keyword phrases such as “Alaskan Cruise,” there is a much higher likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right audience. It’s the difference between attracting actual buyers versus tire kickers.

   Doing a quick search in WordTracker is a great way to get a feel for all the keyword variations that your audience may be searching on. You’ll also discover which are the most popular, and least competitive. This is not only invaluable in regard to search engine marketing, but for your marketing efforts in general. If you haven’t tried WordTracker yet, simply download the free trial of WebPosition and click on the WordTracker Keywords icon.

Original Post Entry

The best thing about a blog must be that they have the power to attract traffic from Search Engines which come Naturally.

Blogs like wordpress already are well structured and every link are setup to link back to the main page.

Now, You should submit your sites to directories, I have discussed about directories before !

Directories are a great source of generating one way links.

These are 5 Blog tips for increasing Search Engine traffic to your blog.

1) Keyword Choices

It is upto you,

a) Target a keyword which gets very very high traffic and ranking low in the SERP’s and getting little traffic.

OR

b) Target a moderate keyword with moderate traffic and rank high on the SERP’s and get nice traffic

This traffic might not bring you many many hits but they will bring you huge profits.

I mean to say, this traffic can bring you some buyers of your affiliate products where as the other traffic won’t !
The best thing about your blog is that they can get indexed and show up so well that you can get indexed for even any 4 phrases of the keywords which match your industry.

2) Keyword Placement

You can repeat the keywords which you want to target as many times in your posts.

They can be done by putting them on your Titles of the Posts, The Category Titles, URL Titles (Permalink) or even on the technorati tags which are really helpful.

3) Posting Timely

Instead of posting every 15 minutes or even pining your posts after every 15 minutes, It is better that you post around 3-4 Times in a day.

Check your web stats on Statcounter, Wordpress Wassup plugin or Google Analytics or any other web stat for checking that if you are getting spidered weekly or monthly, You can increase spider visits by blogging on the anniversary time of the spider visit, Keep it doing regularly, In no time it will become predictable that when the next spider comes.

4) Blog Feed

Use your site feed in forums as they will help you promote your blog.

The feed title will get indexed and increase a backlink, all those backlinks will help to get a better rank in the SERP’s which will be observed by the spiders.

The effect would be better when once you are there and skewing your blog to the Search Engine Friendly Side.

5) Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more the spiders food increases, This might result that the spider will crawl less and the content keep building, Which won’t help !

For example, I have a blog and I post frequently and get spidered regularly, and I do not post for one week and the spider doesn’t crawl gives us a better result of getting indexed and our blog will look better in Google and other SE’s SERP’s.

This will help you to get a better rank on your next product/content you post !

So this means that you should do less blog posts and earn great Google and Yahoo etc. Traffic

Thanks for reading at TopSEOTricks

Content written by Apoorv Agrawal, TopSEOTricks Admin.

We will learn HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM BLOGGING

Here are some link building tips and tricks

In my blog you can see many SEO Tips, SEO Tricks, Blogging tips and more.

We have learnt and had many articles on link building and increasing backlinks here.

In this article I am ready to give out only 6 basic tips for acquiring more backlinks.

These tips are helpful to increase your pagerank which means increase your blog’s money, also it will help to acquire a better Pagerank !

So lets start off,

1) Commenting on others blogs (No spam please)

When you add a comment on a blog, they get indexed and you get a backlink.

In the comment field, enter your name, website URL, email address and comment. Please DO NOT include a link in the comment or it will be marked as a spam by akismet or the administrator. Comment on useful blogs and not on all blogs which you find. Comment something useful rather than commenting “wow thanks”, “nice tips” , “thanks nice post” ..

2) Directory Submission

Submit your site to directories and free directories, they might cost a bit, but they are good, find some free and paid directories here

These directories better your PR and increase your backlinks

3) Link Exchange

If you are new to the term Link Exchange then please read this post about Doing link exchange

4) Participate in Forums

Use your site link with a nice anchor text on the signatures of Forums. Keep posting on forums and they would probably increase your backlinks. Don’t make them spammy as they would be deleted by the moderators there at the forums.

You can search for forums or I know a few of them:
Digital Point Forums

SitePoint Forums

SEO.com Forums

Web Talk Forums

SEO Talk Forums

You would be interested in finding more !

5) Bait your link

This might be a new term for you, Link baiting means creating a controversy and an interesting post in your site and telling about it to others on forums, this will help in increasing backlinks and also other will talk about your blog, so backlinks keep increasing !

Thanks for reading at TopSEOTricks

Content written by Apoorv Agrawal, TopSEOTricks Admin.

These are some methods I have learnt while doing the SEO For my websites or Newly made websites.

Step 1: Positioning !

This is the easiest procedure in our Article, Google searches for words which are in the same sentence, it is not necessary that those words should be in the same order.

Running a SEO Blog was never easy, Or I might say, it is Hard !

Also string your keywords with each other so you can rank for a number of things. For example the following sentence:

The more big or large your blog is, The Better SEO, SEM tips blog

…can rank for :

1. SEO Tips
2. SEO Blog
3. SEM Tips
4. SEM Blog
5. Blog SEM
6. Blog SEO
7. Blog Tips
8. Big Blog Tips
9. Big SEO Tips
10. Big SEM Tips
11. Better SEO tips
12. Better SEM tips

2) Mixing and Matching the Meta Tags and Your Titles !

This is where we do the main part of our process i.e by adding Meta Tags and Titles !

For example if you are trying to land the keyword : SEO Tips
You can try..:

Page Title: Webmaster Blog- Search Engine Optimization and Blogging Tips

• Meta keywords : seo, blogging tips, tips for bloggers, search engine marketing, , search engine optimization - Note: from small to long keywords help us in ranking better
  
• Meta description : Top Search Engine Optimization and Blogging Tips, Easy and simple strategy
• H1 on-page : SEO Tips
• H2 on-page : Step 1: When you start your blog….

3) Micro Link Exchange (MLE) !

Micro Link Exchange (MLE) means to buy BLOG POSTS i.e Links within an article on other sites to get better SERPs but this case just ask for a link on an already existing article in return they get the same from you, and at no cost!

I call it MLE because although the link is on just one of hundreds of pages a site has it holds alot more value then a site wide link specially because its an in-content link, that’s more like a reference then just a link, a reference is considered much stronger and juicier then a header/sitewide link with tons of exposure, its for google anyways so lets stick with tactics and not traffic

4) Link Strength !

If you have a page that’s going down in SERPs then you need to find pages/sites that are relevant to yourtopic but have much more info and strength then yours has then link to them to get a better ranking as well as more satisfied readers. There are many commonly linked site but the most commonly linked site is Wikipedia because if you are linking to wikipedia google will start crawling and get interested in your stuff.

Check your SERP at: ShoeMoney SERP Checker

Thanks for reading at TopSEOTricks

Content written by Apoorv Agrawal, TopSEOTricks Admin.

The aim of a reciprocal linking strategy is usually twofold: First to attract visitors from the linking partner to your own site and, secondly, to improve your page ranking with the search engines. A higher page ranking, especially with Google, indicates more relevance when inquiries are made on a given keyword. Relevance encourages the search engines to send free, targeted traffic to your website.

Important Considerations

1. Build online relationships. Exchanging links with other relevant websites is a great way to start building partnerships with other website owners and may open the door for future joint venture requests.

2. Build your link popularity. Most search engines view sites that have many links to them as being important. So, the more sites that link to your site, the higher your site might rank. But again, make sure that all reciprocal links are relevant to your site or the search engines will penalize you.

3. Avoid exchanging links with sites that have a huge link directory. If your site is listed on page 43 in your category of another site’s link directory, few people will ever see your link. Although a link will be generated to your site for the search engines, you will not receive much traffic from the link exchange. Try to exchange links with sites where your link will be displayed on the first, or at the most, the second page of another site’s link directory.

4. Don’t exchange links with everybody that asks. What advantage is there in exchanging links with a site that sells wedding favors when your site is about dog training? Anyone that visits the wedding favor site will be looking for information concerning weddings, not dog training, and very few will click on your link regardless of how high the page rank is for the wedding site. The key here is to exchange links only with sites that are relevant to your site or to your keywords.

5. The main goal of any linking strategy is to get more traffic to a website. Reciprocal linking can work for or against you in this matter depending on the site that you exchange links with. If you exchange links with sites that receive a lot of traffic, some of that traffic may be diverted to your site. On the other hand, if you exchange links with a low traffic site, you may divert some of your traffic to the other site without seeing a similar return. The solution is to exchange reciprocal links with a site with a page rank no lower than one level below yours and to try to exchange links with many sites with a higher page rank. Ideally, you would seek to exchange links with sites that have at least a PR 4.

How To Set Up A Link Page

The optimum way to set up a link page is to enter all links manually. Yes, it is time consuming but when you are starting out, this is the best way to do it.

You would first need to set up a page on your website just for your link categories. You can call this page anything you like such as Links, My Partners, Link Partners, My Link Partners, etc. Set up this page with the major categories and subcategories that are relevant to your site. Then, set up a page for each subcategory that will contain the actual links. Test to be sure that whenever anyone clicks on a subcategory that they are taken to the appropriate link page.

Prepare a short 3 - 5 line ad about your website or your product and include the URL to your website. This should be in HTML code for easy uploading. Each linking company has their own procedure, but generally, each time you ask to exchange links, you’ll need to copy and paste the other website’s HTML code onto your link page under the correct category and subcategory. You will then need to upload the updated page to your website.

Once this is done, let the other website know on which of your pages they can find their link. If the other website owner approves the link exchange, they should add your link to their link page and inform you on exactly what page you can find it.

Check to make sure that your link has been added to their site. If they have not added your link, you have the option of contacting the website owner as to why or of removing their link from your site.

Mention reciprocal linking on any internet marketing forum and you will be sure to get a barrage of heated replies. There is a continual debate about the advantages and disadvantages involved in reciprocal linking and both sides make convincing statements.

If you do decide to get involved in reciprocal linking, join only well established link exchanges that allow you to approve or disapprove the link. Avoid link farms or link exchanges that will automatically exchange your link with their entire database regardless of the relevancy to your website.

Download the LinkEx Script here: http://linkex.dk/

LinkEx will help you to do reciprocal link exchange and better your link building !

Let me first say link exchanges are far from my preferred source of links. Google has made it pretty clear they don’t care for these kind of changes and while that doesn’t mean all link exchanges are bad, mass reciprocal linking is generally frowned upon as a useful seo tactic. I’ve never engaged in link exchange networks and have no plans on doing so in the near future. Still there can be times when it makes sense to reciprocate a link and there can be times when a direct trade of links is perfectly natural. Think trackbacks for an example of a natural reciprocal link.
Quality Link Signals

The following list is far from exhaustive and in no particular order, but here are a few signs to help you recognize a quality link.

1. Links from related or topical sites
2. Links from trusted/authority sites
3. Links that can be crawled
4. Links that can send direct traffic
5. Links with relevant anchor text
6. Links to deep pages
7. Links that are contextual
8. Links that have aged
9. One way inbound links

If you look at the list above you’ll notice that most of the items on it can apply to reciprocal links. There’s no reason why you can’t trade links with an authority or related site. You can certainly set your own anchor text and have the links point to deep pages. Some of the reasons for the popularity of link exchanges a few years back likely had to do with how much control you could exert over the links back to you.

Of course there is that last item on the list. Reciprocal links are clearly not one way and three way links are only one step removed from being reciprocal and probably not that much harder to detect.

Questions about the value of link exchanges seem to come down to a few major points. How much weight is given to one way links as a ranking factor and how hard or easy is it for a search engine to detect the exchange? And once detected what will happen to a site with too many reciprocal links?
Is There Value in Link Exchanges?

Maybe, maybe not. Let’s first consider the question of how hard or easy it is to detect link exchanges. It should be relatively simple to detect direct reciprocal linking. Compare the incoming and outgoing links for any page and if there’s a match, bingo, we have a reciprocal link. Step up to three-way links and it becomes harder, but far from impossible to detect. Compare those same incoming and outgoing links and then also look at the pages on the other side of those links.

Add another level of exchange to four way and it becomes harder to detect. The further you get away from a direct one-to-one exchange the harder it should be for a search engine to detect, however once one site in the linking network is detected the rest of the sites in the network can often fall like a house of cards. And regardless of how difficult it might be to detect today I think it’s a safe bet that search engines will be looking for ways to better detect and discount any form of link manipulation. If your goal is to manipulate search ranking with your linking practice don’t blame the search engines later when your linking practices fail.

On the other hand there’s no such thing as a worthless link. Just about all links have some value, though how much can depend on some of your other link building tactics.

Also keep in mind that not all search engines are the same. Google has been clear they don’t like artificial link trades and they’ve been able to detect and discount many of those links. The situation isn’t necessarily the same for the other engines. What matters to Google may not matter to MSN.

Wiep recently gathered some seo and link building professionals and asked their opinion on a number of link value factors. Reciprocity was one of the specific factors discussed. The general consensus mentions reciprocity as having some influence over the value of a link, but here are a few quotes I pulled.

Joost de Valk: “Lots of reciprocals will get you a weird profile, some reciprocals won’t hurt though.??
Hamlet Batista: “Few reciprocal links are fine, but is far better to focus on the one-way ones.??
Maurizio Petrone: “Reciprocal links are not “The Evil”, but you should avoid them as your main link popularity strategy.??

There are more thoughts on the link value factors article, but consider the theme of the three quotes above. If too many of your links are seen as being part of an exchange then they probably aren’t going to do you any good. However, if you have a strong and balanced link profile with lots of non-reciprocal links you can probably see some benefit from adding a few exchanged links into the mix.
When Might You Consider Link Exchanges?

Ultimately that’s up to you. There are certainly pros and cons to exchanging links. The cons will far exceed the pros if you’re talking about mass reciprocal linking with anyone, but you can still find an exchange of links that provides a lot more pros than cons.

If CNN were to email me asking me to link to their home page in exchange for them linking back to mine. I’d be replying with a yes before I finished reading the email. I could care less how a search engine would see the link since the link itself would have the potential to drive a lot of direct traffic.

Search engines are also aware that some link exchanges occur naturally. I might add your blog to my blogroll and you might add mine to yours. In that case we’re going to end up with a lot of reciprocal links between our two blogs. I think search engines are smart enough to realize neither site should be penalized, though I also think they’re smart enough to realize they shouldn’t be giving huge gains to either site based on those links.

The cleaner your linking is in the eyes of a search engine the more you can get away with adding a links the engines might not think are so squeaky clean. Every site is going to end up with some junk links. That is natural. As long as it’s not overdone chances are you won’t lose anything by exchanging links, though your gains might not be much either.

If you can still get in enough quality signals on the links odds are the link exchange won’t hurt.

There’s one obvious time when you can exchange links to your heart’s content. When you don’t care about search engines. We sometimes get locked into the train of thought that all traffic must somehow originate through a search engine results page. Hardly. Search traffic is one form of traffic. A good source, yes, but only one source nonetheless. Links aren’t always about search engines.

Exchange enough links with enough sites and while your site may get put on the permanent search engine spam pile you might still end up with a lot of entry points into your site resulting in traffic. If you’ve chosen link partners well the traffic might even be pretty good.

Back to the question of whether or not you should use a service like LinkEx. Once again I’ll avoid the answer a little and leave it up to you. Will I use their service? Probably not. I think the risks will outweigh the reward for my particular circumstances. Should you use them? Depends on your circumstances. Instead of thinking about it in terms of black and white or good and bad, understand the potential benefits and understand the potential risks and decide if it makes sense for you and your sites. Most of the time the risks will probably not be worth taking, but sometimes they might.

LinkEx isn’t going to be a magic bullet to seo success. I’d guess for most sites it can do more harm than good, but that doesn’t mean it will do harm to all sites or site owners. Understand the risks, understand the rewards and decide if it makes sense for you. LinkEx doesn’t make sense for me, but you’re not me and I’m not you.

I toyed with whether I should talk about this… it’s made me around $1,000 in the past with little to no work and I have not seen it discussed (this exact way) on any other blogs before. However, I have nothing to gain by keeping the idea a secret (I don’t use it anymore - bigger fish to fry) and you guys have plenty to gain by learning about it.

I promised that I’d talk a little bit about making money online for newbies, that is people with not a lot of money to invest. How are you going to start a affiliate website, pay for Adwords and content creation when you only have $50 in your bank account? This is a way that anyone can make money, and best of all it doesn’t cost you a dime.

A few days ago I recommended forum posting as one of the ways to make money for newbies, which didn’t need any investment - once you read this post, and if you carry it out successfully, you’ll never need to post in forums again. In forum posting, you get maybe $0.15/post maximum (using an established company like Forums First) and then you have other requirements - your posts have to be at least x words in length, your posts have to be spread out appropriately throughout the forum, you have to make x threads for x posts… bah. Thinking = work and when you’re getting paid so little, you don’t want to have to work a lot.

Here’s how you can make money, and easy money by providing a blog commenting service. Yes, you can do this from the comfort of your home, yes, you don’t need any investment, and yes I’m going to tell you the exact steps to follow.

First off, let me explain why this works. Now me personally - I don’t care about PR; it is only a number, and after I’ve made certain posts on here I am not going to make much money off it. For some webmasters though… they start developing mini-orgasms every time the term is mentioned, and it is them that will make you money.

People pay for links, and sometimes quite a bit too - a standard PR6 link can easily go for $100/month and if you go upwards of that well - you’re in business. What if I told you that you could get such links free, and what if I told you that you could make money off this?

I’m talking about commenting on dofollow blogs. As you know, dofollow blogs do pass PR, and the links are permanent. The problem with dofollow blogs is that it is hard to find them - not many people like displaying that ugly badge in the sidebar (I don’t) and even if you find a dofollow blog whose homepage has PR, commenting on it is useless as the specific page you comment on needs to have PR for it to be passed on to your blog (in this case, the specific post).

Now, how do you get around to finding these blogs, and then how do you get around to finding these posts?

Luckily for us, one of the blogs I read regularly compiled a Do follow list of blogs, and you can find that at Courtney Tuttle’s D-List.

So you have five pages of dofollow blogs. Now the problem is, which blogs should we comment on and which blogs are worthless? You can be dofollow, but if you have a PR0 blog, you’re not passing any link juice on.

What you need to do is use iWebTool’s Visual PR checker, and run it through the D-List. What iWebTool does is show you the PR of links on the page, and whether they are dofollow / nofollow. Use this and run it through all five pages of the D-List, and then copy and paste the URLs that are PR2 or more into a notepad file. I think you are only allowed to run 100 - 200 queries per IP per day so if it shorts out (and stops working) use a proxy or wait a day.

Now you have a list of blogs that do pass link juice and do have a decent Pagerank. However, you need to find the internal pages that have PR, for us that is the blog posts that have PR.

There are two ways to do this:

The first is LivePR’s internal checking tool, which will take a URL that you enter into its box, deliver you a list of pages with their Pagerank and then allow you to sort.

The second is SEO Junkie’s PR Checker program (download here), which you can download. It does the same thing, and provides you a file with pages and their respective pagerank

Both of these tools have limitations - the first only allows you to check once every hour (and has a habit of shorting out every so often) and the second works in the same way that iWebTool does - x amount of searches per IP per day, and then you have to wait. However, if you are patient you can use the combination of these tools to compile a list of blog posts that have PR and pass link juice.

Another thing you can use to find such posts is Comment Kahuna (which unlike its sister Traffic Kahuna, is actually useful & free). This works on the keywords you enter into it - choose “money”, “blogging” etc and it will give you a list of posts that are dofollow. The numbers it returns are less than the other two but it works as long as you want to use it.

So you have a list of blog posts with PR, ranging from PR2 to PR6 (and sometimes more ). If you want to use this for your own gain, leave comments on all of them with a link pointing back to your website - you will see a nice increase in the next update (you can see what amount of links to get to where in this chart). Make sure you leave relevant comments and add value - they don’t have to be long, but it does have to be non-spammy.

How do you make money?

Simple. Provide a “link building” service where you build links for webmasters and make money. I’ve done this in the past and charged $1/PR2 link, $3/PR3 link, $7/PR4 link, $10/PR5 link and $15/Anything above that. As these links are permanent, people will be happy to pay.

Why earn a cent a word forum posting when you can earn a dollar a word building links?

You can provide a link building service at the various larger forums.

If you are a lazy bastard like yours truly, you can hire the same people that do forum posting, pay them $0.2/comment and you keep the rest. Everyone wins

Is this unethical?

To me, it isn’t. Blogs are dofollow because they want comments, and if you add useful comments then there is nothing wrong with that. I have no problem if people spam the hell out of my dofollow pages, as long as they add to them - if you are not adding to the discussion, expect to be IP-blacklisted.

Source of Article

We all need traffic, Don’t we ?

So here is a great find to get Traffic from Commenting on Digg.com

Read these tips carefully

1. First, your links must post to quality content. The three articles I linked to above are well-written, well-researched articles. Two of the three articles that I linked to have even been featured on Slashdot (1, 2). Quality, of course, is a relative term. Given the typical Digg banter, the threshold for adding quality content can sometimes quite low. The links, however, cannot point to pages that are clearly blogspam or you are sure to face Digg’s wrath.
2. Must be on topic. This is probably more important than the quality of the link. It may seem obvious, but if your comment/link doesn’t relate to the article, especially if it contains a link, then it will be buried.
3. First posts comments are going to receive exponentially more traffic than later posts. They can set the tone for the rest of the discussion and can be almost as important as the actual article being linked to. If the Digg article already has a comment then it is usually better to reply to the first comment than submit a new comment. This is true even if your comment isn’t a direct response to the comment you are replying to. Otherwise, the first comment will eventually get dozens of replies, pushing the second comment way down the page where it will not be seen by most. For example, I replied to the first comment on a post about Google searches. The first post was buried with 16 negative votes which effectively gave me the first post. This comment brought 509 visitors. In my opinion, this is a flaw with the Digg comment system where you can only reply to root comments. It provides an incentive for disjointed discussions. I suspect that Digg will redo their comment system at some point in the near future.
4. If you are looking for traffic from your posts, it does little good to comment on articles that are already on Digg’s front page. There are two reasons for this. First, you no longer have the first post advantage and your comment will be lost among the masses. The second reason is that the highest amount of traffic will come while the post is at the top of main page. Each minute that passes is lost traffic. It’s much better to find future front page stories from the upcoming stories section. This is not hard. Checking the “hot in technology” on the right side of the page will show you which posts are most likely to hit the front page in the next few hours. Of course, you can drill down to other topics besides technology as well. The cloud view and other tools can also be used to predict which stories are most likely to hit the front page.
5. As with all forums and websites, if you focus solely on promoting your website it will eventually come back to haunt you. All your links and submitted stories should not be to your own sites.
6. Digg, as a general rule, has a negative bias towards all things SEO and marketing. If you have a name like SEOmoz (sorry), there are some people that aren’t going to give you a fair shake.
7. Digg does not use the NoFollow tag. However, if you receive a ‘thumbs down’ from four users your comment will be hidden by default. At some point in the future Digg may follow Wikipedia’s lead and move to NoFollow tags. I’d recommend it to prevent link spam but generally the community is quick to bury.
8. Realize that although you may receive many new visitors they may be less likely to stay around than traffic you receive from other sources. As you can see from the statistics below, the bounce rate was between 74-92%. The average time on site was 20 seconds for the Mythbusters article and just over a minute for the fuel and gas articles. I’m sure that there are ways the site can improve its stickiness (any ideas?), but the point remains the same—Digg visitors are less likely to stick around than traffic from other sources.

By way of full disclosure, the site I linked to, OmniNerd, is not my site. I have no financial relationship with the site and don’t know how their GoogleAds performed, but I suspect that very few visitors from Digg clicked on ads. If AdSense earnings are your primary motivation, Digg is probably not your best option.

Although this is not my site, OmniNerd did let me peek into their Google Analytics for this story. Since the stats used above are from Google Analytics and not the server logs, the actual traffic may be higher than I reported. According to something I read on StumbleUpon, “A large portion of…Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls…caus[ing]…Google Analytics…to not work.” If that’s true, then the actual traffic from these comments could be higher than recorded. Currently about 50% of OmniNerd’s recorded visitors use Firefox. How many are not being counted? Does anyone have experience with Google Analytics not counting all their traffic?

Although Digg comments can be a valuable source of traffic, the reaction to spam can be painful. A couple months ago Chandler Kent learned that the hard way when he submitted a comment with a link to his blog under his name, as is common practice in most forums. It quickly received hundreds of “thumbs down” but didn’t stop there. Someone posted his phone number and he began to receive creepy phone calls and comments such as he “deserves to be hunted down and stalked.” Ironically, his recounting of the fallout was widely publicized as “The Most Hated Comment on Digg” and brought him a ton of traffic.

Comments on Digg can bring you some nice traffic if you are willing to risk your life.

Source

StumbleUpon is a hot social discovery site that continues to rapidly increase in popularity. With the increase in popularity comes an increase in the potential traffic that it can drive to your sites. StumbleUpon has always been great at driving traffic and links, but lately I’ve started to notice that it is one of the leading social sites, often times sending more traffic than even Digg.

Most of the basic social media marketing tactics apply to StumbleUpon. It’s important to be an active user in the community who provides value and discovers great sites. It also helps to have a lot of mutual friends and people that will see your stumbles. However, there are some lesser-known tactics that can also help your stumbles become popular.

Pick the right topic. When you discover a site and submit it to StumbleUpon it asks you to pick a topic that you’d like to submit it under. It’s important that you pick the right topic for submission as this can literally make or break your stumble. If you submit to the wrong topic then people who stumble across that page will be less likely to give the page a thumbs up, as it might not fit the kind of content they’re looking for. By submitting to the right topics you will increase the number of relevant eyeballs that see the page and this increases the likelihood that they will give it a thumbs up. For example, if you’re submitting a site about surfing then submit to the surfing topic and not the general sports topic.

Use relevant tags. Just as picking the right topic for submission is important it’s also important that you assign the proper tags to your stumbles. Not only does this increase relevant stumbles but users can also search either on StumbleUpon’s site or using its StumbleUpon toolbar. It’s more likely they’ll discover your site if you use proper tags that accurately describe the page.

Get a little help from your friends. StumbleUpon offers a feature where you can send your stumbles directly to your friends. They will see a little red number next to the “stumble” button on their toolbar. This lets them know that someone has sent them a stumble and the next time they hit the button they will see that page. You can even send them a little message and they can reply back. This is a feature that you have to be careful not to abuse, and it’s very tempting to do so. Only send recommended pages to friends when you’re reasonably sure they’ll like the page. If you send too many it will annoy your friends and you’ll so no longer be friends. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a few people abuse this feature with me and after awhile I just deleted them as a friend.

Leverage groups and forums. StumbleUpon has groups for just about every topic you can think of and you can join up to 63 groups. Within some of these groups you have the ability to post relevant links for others in the group to see and discover. This feature is not available for all groups and can depend on the settings that the moderator sets for that specific group. The forums within the groups usually allow anyone to post links. Don’t spam them, though, or you can be deleted from the group by the group owner or moderator.

Create your own StumbleUpon blog. Did you know that can post HTML and images on your StumbleUpon blog? You can, and these help make your stumbles stand out to people that are browsing or stumble upon your profile. Not only can this increase your stumbles on certain pages but it can also help increase your friend count as others often friend people based on favorable impression from blogs.

Sometimes the little things can make all the difference for whether or not the pages you submit go popular. By taking a couple extra minutes to make sure you submit pages properly it will give you that extra edge and help you get more traffic and links to your site. Just remember, the content still has to be good and interesting to the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon is a new free service where internet surfers can discovers new website according to their interest. StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for. For webmaster, Stumbleupon is another great way to get traffic to their site which might bring more subscribers and sells.

Bringing a huge traffic to your site from StumbleUpon is achieavable if you follow these 10 steps. Stumblers are often tend to got a Digg and other social-bookmarking sites so never not underestimate the traffic that you got from them. Just make sure that you sign up and submit your website there first. Now here are the tips.

1) Tag your site to the related category so that the visitor can expect what they will find in your website. Build a good, unique, and informative content.

2) Use an eye-catching headline like “secret” or “shock”. The visitor will curious to know what is inside your website.

3) Put the StumbleUpon integration code to every page in your site but do not stumble all your pages by yourself.

4) Be a part of the stumble community so that you will know what they are mostly interested with.

5) Prepare your site with “viral marketing technique” so that the number of traffic will double from the Stumblers. (free e-book or flash game giveaway)

6) Ask your friend to “thumbs up” your site and you did the same to his/her website.

7) Suggest your reader to try StumbleUpon and install the toolbar to increase the number of your pages got “thumbs up”.

Add as many “StumbleUpon” friends as possible (the result is same as above).

9) If you got many websites, link them together. If one of your website got stumbled well, the other site might receive the effect too.

10) Optimize your website loading time. If can, avoid flash since not all browser can support the latest flash version.

Original Post

PageRank isn’t everything

PageRank is nice, it’s a good guide to how important Google thinks your blog is, but it’s not everything. Your goal should be to make the first page for terms that people are likely to use when searching for the topic your blog covers. Easier said than done. John Chow is actually doing an interesting experiment with the term “make money online” right now.

Make sure your <title> tags make sense

If every single page on your site has the same title then you’re making a huge mistake. Seriously. Huge. Chris Pearson wrote a great article that explains how to use WordPress code to make your titles change dynamically depending on which page your on. This will help tremendously with indexing and also getting people to actually click through to your site when it shows up in the search results.

The only thing you have to do next is learn to write great headlines.

Make sense of your permalinks

This is another really, really easy tip to follow through on. When you first install WordPress your URLs will probably look something like “http://www.domain.com/page/?id=6? or something along those lines. It’s useless. What does a page ID of 6 mean to you, your visitor, or a search engine? It means it’s the 6th post or page you added to the site. Great.

Why not edit your permalink structure so that it looks like “http://www.domain.com/03/2007/the-title”? This means a lot more. It means the post was written in March of 2007 and even tells me what the title is. This is - quite literally - a piece of cake. Login to WordPress, go to Options, and select the Permalinks tab. If you don’t feel comfortable customizing it, WordPress has a few great options and all you have to do is click the box you like.

Narrow down your topic

This is important for a number of reasons, but it also makes sense in relation to SEO. If you’re hoping to rank high for a term in Google, MSN, Yahoo, or any other search engine (are there any others?) it makes sense to have more than one page about that topic. What better way to create hundreds, even thousands of pages about a topic than to write a blog about it?

Each article in WordPress is considered another page by Google. Simply write about your topic and eventually Google will have all your posts indexed. When someone is searching for anything related to your topic, your blog has a better chance at coming to the top because of the number of posts you have about the topic.

Read the original article.

Link building is an extremely important part of any online marketing campaign. Since page rankings with the major search engines are influenced by the number, as well as the quality of links that direct traffic to your website, knowing how to formulate and execute a link building campaign is imperative.

The first step in any link building campaign should be to make sure that links exist on sites that you already do business with. It is usually simple to get links in such places, and they will more than likely remain there for quite an extensive amount of time. When starting out, make sure to have links in the following places:

• Vendors and suppliers websites.
• Trade associations.
• The Chamber of Commerce.
• Friends’ websites.
• Customers’ websites.
• Trade groups and associations websites.

Once your links have been placed with the aforementioned sites, there are numerous other steps that can be taken to efficiently build links.

Directories and Verticals

If you are serious about your website, you will definitely want to have it listed in all of the major directories, and if your website is industry specific, being listed with an appropriate vertical that services your industry will be extremely valuable. Major directories to be listed in include:

• Yahoo
• GoGuides
• Joeant
• DMOZ
• Business

Some of these major directories charge a fee, while some are free of charge, but do take longer to list your link. If you need to find out if your industry is serviced by a vertical, a quick search on the Internet will provide you with the answer.

How to Obtain Links

There are a variety of places, as well as ways in which to obtain links. There always seems to be a difference of opinion among webmasters as to what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to link building. You will need to examine your specific needs, as well as what kind success you hope to have with your website in order to determine what will work for you. Some of the ways to obtain links are as follows:

• Unique Content-Having unique content on your site may draw webmasters who place a link to your site on theirs. This is often referred to as a “natural link.”
• Reciprocal Links-This is simple, you trade links with another website. This is usually only beneficial if both websites are targeting the same market, but are not in competition with one another. This is commonly referred to as “link trading.”
• Writing Articles-Getting articles published online that you write is a great way to build links, as it affords you the opportunity to place a link to your site within the text of the article. Hence, the more articles you write and get published, the more links you will be gaining.
• Message Boards and Blogs- Adding a link within the signature line of posts that you make to message boards and blogs is a good way to get free advertising and build links. However, be sure to only post on high quality sites, and only on those sites that pertain to the essence of your own websites’ content.

Another way to find places for your links is to simply search for them! There are virtually thousands of sites that will allow you to place a link for free, or for a very nominal charge. To find these sites, use any major search engine and type in any of the following search phrases:

• “submit a site”
• “submit your site”
• “submit a URL”
• “submit your URL”
• “list a site”
• “add a site”
• “add your site”
• “add a link”
• “add your link”

You will discover many different sites where you can add your link. Do a bit of research, and make sure that you are placing links on quality websites that are offer relevant, authoritative information.

Since there are so many different ways to build links, you are sure to find a way that works great for you, and that will raise the ranking of your website. Remember that it is the quality of links, and not necessarily the quantity of links that is important.

Original Article Source

People on the internet have started blogging and have used a free way to do it by using Blogger.com owned by Google.  Everyone has analyzed and optimized Wordpress to boost their rankings in every aspect, but left blogger/blogspot users looking for tips.

Welcome to Blogger Seo Tips Part 1. I will be covering what blogger settings you should choose before we start to optimize your blog.

Blogger Settings:

1. Title: Title of your blog, make it short and simple
2. Description: The description should include your keywords that you are aiming and should be a complete sentence.
3. Add your Blog to our listings?: YES
4. Show Email Post links?: NO; nobody uses them, they just lower your keyword density.
5. Send Pings: YES
6. Date Header Format: Choose the one with the less text, ex: “8.9.07?
7. Comments: Show, but delete the unrelated/short comments
8. Backlinks: Hide, no need to share your PageRank value, is there?
9. Enable Post Pages?: YES, so that each of your posts can attract different visitors
10. Archive Frequency: Weekly. Its better to have the least number of posts on a single page.