I know the competition still remains tough, but this tool makes it a lot easy to handle. I’m talking about the Google Insights. A great tool to give you an insight knowledge about who is looking for what; where; how much and when. Its like having your market researchers spread across the world on the click on a button! Well that’s Google!! Simplifying things and making your life easy.

With this tool you can know all about a specific keyword, or a set of keywords by graphing the information based on web, images, news or products. You can also get the data within specified time frame and categories. That’s not all! It gives you the requested information for the related keywords also.

Well that’s a brief about this exciting tool. I’m sure you’ve already started trying your hands on it. But hang on! Allow me to highlight just a few more features of this tool.

• Get the data with region, time range and category filters.
• Analyze search keyword favored across regions, categories, and time frames.
• Get related news headlines.
• Get results in clear graph and map presentation.
• Export and download data in .CSV format.

Rest, I’ll leave them for you to find out!! Just make sure you share the findings with me too..

Click here to know more about this tool and Stay tuned for more..

Are you wondering how promoting your pages on Social Networks can get you more Google Juice? Well, let me explain this with an example:

Search Google for the term Floral V/S Grunge, the first result will points you to one of my earlier posts. Now take a closer look at the other search results.

Did you notice something? Observe a bit carefully and be surprised! You’ll see that the Floral VS Grunge post is listed on almost all major services like Flickr, Digg, BlogCatalog, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and many more. And all of them are indexed in Google and on the very first page!

Wow! How does it all work?

This is no big secret! It’s only a technique to some Google Juice from a various social networking websites. All the services that you saw in the search results are those communities-based social networks that I use to keep in touch with my friends, family and lovely readers. All I did after publishing a post was to share the Post Title and the Permalink with all my contacts on different social networks. This way I get a lot of people to visit my posts on the website and the real magic is Google Juice that comes along.  When you search for relevant terms, many of the listed results will point to your post/page either directly or indirectly. You get the point, right!!

But isn’t this spamming?

No. It is absolutely not. I just shared my post with only my contacts that have chosen to receive updates from me. People follow me on twitter because they want to keep a track of whatever I do. Subscribers want me to update them with new posts and pages. If I set my Facebook, Orkut or IM status to a link pointing to my blog posts, I am not spamming anyone’s social profiles or emails!

I am not sending anyone any emails to buy my services or whatsoever. I just created something and I am sharing it. Sharing is caring, not spamming!

So, how do I go about with this?

Start using social networks. Create an account on MyBlogLog (Yahoo), BlogCatalog, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Plurk, Del.icio.us, etc. There are hundreds of them all around the Internet. Find some time to read reviews and do research on which ones will be the most useful for you and how much time you can spare to spend on these. What I feel is that the few moments you can spare to spend on promoting your posts effectively for a little extra Google Juice. Worth it, man!

And, to make your life easier…

Now, I am going to recommend to you, an awesome service that will save you a lot of time and effort. It’s definitely going to make your life a lot easier! Ping.FM is a service that you can use to share your stuff and thoughts on multiple websites with just one click. It is exactly like the website puts it, “Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”

I know time is precious, and so here you go with Ping.FM, But some more icing on the cake is always nice. So I’d further go on to share this nifty Firefox Add-on – PingFire. PingFire is a Firefox add-on for Ping.FM service. It adds a tiny button in your browser which helps to use this service with great ease and comfort.

To use PingFire, you need to update your username and application key in the add-on options. You will find your application key at http://ping.fm/key/ and you need to be logged in to Ping.fm to access this URI. So go ahead, implement these simple tips and extract some Google Juice out of social networks that you use.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and learned something new! I’ve more in store for you but I’ll keep them for a later posts. Please feel free to share some of your SEO tips. Drop us a comment using the form below. Your comments and feedback are valuable and much appreciated.

Pinging Site Update Services

As this Wordpress Codex page explains,

Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. Wordpress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

There are several site update services up and running which you can add in WP-admin >> Settings >> Writing, in the update services section. Add one service URI per line. Once you update your Wordpress website with a new post or new page, these services will automatically be pinged. Then these pings are processed and associated indices (plural of index) are updated with your update.

You can have a list of active update services from this Wordpress Codex page and copy them into your update services section (WP-admin >> Settings >> Writing). As easy as that!

Tuning your website’s permalink structure

Having title of the post or keywords from the post in the URI of your web page is obviously better than having numbers, question marks and other symbols. Not only humans can identify the subject of the page from its URI but search engines also find it easier to identify and assort web pages in this manner. A link like this: http://www.cssjockey.com/seo/search-engine-optimization-google-juice-hard-to-get-but-tasty-to-drink tells you and Google bots clearly what the page is going to be about. However the WordPress default, which for the same page is http://www.cssjockey.com/blog/?p=469 (click to see that it’s actually the same!), which is not at all intuitive.

You can easily figure it out that if you are Google’ing from a specific keyword then obviously the results will list URI with these keywords in the link higher than the URI containing numbers and/or symbols.

Note that this tip is very effective for static websites as well. Always name and link your website and web pages with the title of the page, or keywords relating to the subject of the page instead of serial numbers.

Customizing permalinks in Wordpress

You can learn further more about what permalinks are and how to use them on Using Permalinks page of Wordpress Codex. The Wordpress default link structure, also known as Ugly permalinks structure is the least SEO friendly link structure. However changing your permalinks is easy.

On CSS Jockey and my other websites, I am using /%category%/%postname% structure which has remained pretty fruitful for me. You can optimize your own links by following these steps:

1. Login to Wordpress Admin Area
2. Open the Settings Menu and Click Permalinks
3. Click Custom Structure and customize the link structure.

Refer to the Using Permalinks page to see various tags that you can use.

Please note that websites hosted on Windows based hosts (Microsoft IIS Servers) experience issues setting up SEO friendly pretty permalinks. So in case you’re on such a one, stick to the ugly or almost pretty permalinks to avoid issues, or migrate to a Linux based host.

Pinging maximum number of Site Update Services and tuning your link structure play a good deal to get you listed in Google search results or other search engines in less than 30 minutes! Try implementing these magic tricks on your website and let me know how well did they work out for you.

And for the next part in this series, we are going to discuss how to use various social networks to promote our websites and blogs. We’ll talk about what all services you can use and how they are important for you and your website. Till then, see you.

Google Juice - Hard to Get But Tasty To Drink!!

What is Google juice anyway?

If you’ve been blogging for a while I am pretty sure you are not new to this term. For everyone else, I’ll take a few words to explain what it is and how to get it to save you valuable time and several hours of study and research.

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, Google Juice is a term which means the unique visitors coming to your website from search engines (primarily Google, because of its domination in Search Engine market). This is also known as organic traffic which only stops by if your website is optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Importance of Google Juice

The more you get, the better it is for you. As per a research done by forrester.com, 80% of Internet users find websites by searching for keywords on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, Ask etc. and it’s really important that your web pages are listed in the results. If for a particular search term, pages from your website are listed on the first page of the search results then you are going to have loads of visitors stopping by on your website if they are looking for that search term or related stuff.

Pages from your websites stand a chance of getting some visitors even if they are listed on the second or even third page of the search results. Otherwise you shouldn’t (actually, you can’t!) expect significant traffic coming in from Search Engines unless the person who’s looking for something is patient enough to dig a couple of pages of search results for some search term.

How well are you ranked in Search Engines?

Technically speaking what makes your web-presence known is by your search engine ranks. Simply put, how well you are known online is determined by the rank your website enjoys in search engine. Page Rank (PR) by Google is one such important metric assigned to websites listed in Google Search Results which web-masters and advertisers often use to judge the quality of a website. The higher it is (on a scale of 10), the better a website is considered and the higher it is listed in Google Search Engine Results. Obviously, it enjoys more Google Juice than lower ranked websites.

Get listed in Google within 30 minutes

All those SEO and Make Money Online websites next door will try to show you ways to scale the first page of Search Engine results once you’re listed but what they won’t tell you is how to get listed in Google search results within 30 minutes!

We’ll consider scaling the front page of search results in a later post in SEO series but right now concentrate on how to get your web pages listed so soon.

This post is the first part of this series (Get Listed in Google within 30 minutes) and will be focused on websites and blogs built with WordPress as CMS. However, a lot of these tips apply to static websites as well. So, let’s start sharing best practices…

Wordpress Plugins and SEO

With the popularity of WordPress and the contributions by the WP community, managing websites and implementing SEO has become a lot easier. There are various WordPress plug-ins that are available for SEO purposes but the 2 plug-ins I would like to recommend to you are:

1. Google XML Sitemaps
This plug-in will create a Google Sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your site map is updated and all major search engines that support the site map protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Once you activate this plug-in go to plug-in settings and create the sitemap for first time. You can see the output with this URI: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml. Now we have our sitemap ready so let’s tell Google about it. Type http://www.google.com/sitemaps in your browser and login with your Google ID and Password.

On this website you can submit your sitemap to Google and Google will start indexing your website. This process requires site verification where you need to add a Meta tag or upload an HTML file to your web server. It’s very easy to complete and you can get step by step instructions on Google website.

2. All in One SEO Pack
This plug-in optimizes your WordPress website/blog for Search Engines. It automatically optimizes page titles for search engines and generates META tags. This avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs. For Wordpress 2.7 (the latest version) you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want while writing the posts or pages. You can fine-tune almost everything related to search engine optimization. To get most out of it, do a little keyword research for the content and use best keywords while writing the posts and pages.

Tomorrow, I will further dig into SEO stuff relating to getting listed in Google within 30 minutes of updating your blog/website. Next thing I’ll talk about is services that your Wordpress can automatically ping and notify them about updated content. I’ll also tell you how to fine-tune your link structure (permalinks) as they are not very search engine friendly by default. Stay tuned…

UPDATE

This post was indexed within 8 minutes of being published, publish time was 16:02 and Google indexed this post at 16:10.  Check out the screenshot.

I am enjoying the Google Juice!!