With the arrival of online tools that make it easy to share information, meet new people and keep in touch more rapidly than ever; online reputation has taken on a dual facet. Individuals and businesses no longer have to be troubled about their reputation in true life but in the virtual planet as well, making it two times as hard to keep up with what’s being said. There are a few ways that you can work to manage your online reputation. The resources listed below offer tips and tools to make it easier to track, control and manage your online reputation so you stay on top and in control of your personal and professional image.

Reputation Management Tips

Here are some general tips when managing your online reputation.

1. Create official online profiles. Don’t let just anyone talk about you online. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the type of information you really want to be available online about you.
2. Check what people are saying about you online. Whether good or bad you can do yourself a kindness by finding out what is being said about you online. Use some of the tools mentioned further down in this article to stay in the loop.
3. Stay on the ball. Don’t get sluggish about monitoring your reputation. If necessary, perform weekly checks to see if there’s any information about you that could possible be harmful.
4. Google yourself. The easiest method to find out where you or your company’s online reputation stands is to Google (search) yourself. See what kind of results pop up first. If they aren’t what they’d like them to be, you’ve got some work to do.
5. Presume everything can get on the web. Equally in your personal and professional life, what you say online and off can come back to bite you. Be safe and assume any emails, conversations or photos out there can eventually end up on the Web.
6. Select your words carefully. If you are blogging, running a website or just have a social media profile, be cautious what you post. Unless you’re looking for controversy what you say may cause you tribulations in the future.
7. Know your weakness. If you know your business has a particular weakness or are just familiar with your tendency for getting untamed on the weekend, keep this in mind and have it as your top priority for checking on your online reputation.
8. Protect yourself from hackers. This may look as if like it goes with no saying, but many people fall short to adequately securing their online information. Make sure yours is as safe and sound as it possibly can be.
9. Keep social networks private. One way to prevent snooping eyes is to keep your social networking profiles confidential to all except those you approve. This will keep informal viewers from seeing your information, good or bad.
10. Consider pseudonyms. If you do want to keep a blog or take on arguments on internet message boards, create a name for yourself to hide behind so you can’t be easily tracked.
11. Be proactive. Instead of waiting until you have a problem with your online reputation, stay ahead of the game. Search for what’s being said about you regularly so you’ll stay up-to-date.
12. Act quickly. If you do find something said or posted about you online that you feel could be particularly damaging to you, take action immediately. Whether it’s your friend posting photos from your bachelor nigh out or someone you don’t know slandering your business, taking care of it more rapidly rather than later is best.
13. Keep your cool. You may be irritated at what someone has said about you online, but don’t let it illustrate. Keep your fury to yourself and off the internet where it can do more damage than good.

Articles

Here are some good quality articles about reputation management that are nice reads….

1. Protect Your Online Reputation: This article from SEO Chat lays out some basics for monitoring and protecting your online reputation.
2. Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation: The CEO of Trakur gives some great advice in this Mashable article on how your company can avoid reputation meltdown.
3. How to Manage Your Online Reputation: This article goes through a number of tools and how to use them to keep your reputation intact.
4. Social Networks Become Powerful Tool in Online Reputation Management: Find out how social networks are playing a bigger role than ever in online reputation from this short article.
5. How to Create Online Reputation Tools for Your Brand: Worried about the online component of your company’s brand? This article gives some advice on creating custom tools to monitor and control your online rep.
6. Online Reputation Handbook: You’ll find just about everything you ever wanted to know about online reputation in this helpful handbook.
7. Manage Your Online Reputation: Lifehacker gives some great tips and pointers, as well as links to tools that can help you get control of your reputation.
8. Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide: If you’ve never done much with online reputation before, or haven’t even considered it, check out this business-geared article.
9. How To Protect, Fix Your Online Reputation: From keeping problems from arising to fixing them when they do, this article is full of helpful advice.
10. Using Social Media to Manage Online Reputation: Find out how social media can be a help, not just a hindrance, to online reputation.
11. Basics of Online Reputation Management: Here you’ll learn the basics of getting your online reputation in order.
12. Managing Your Reputation Online: Technology Review provides this informative article that can help you understand and take action when it comes to your virtual reputation.
13. Online Reputation Management for Individuals: Online reputation isn’t just a concern for businesses, and this article explains how individuals can keep their name in good standing as well.

Websites and Blogs

These sites are dedicated to helping you keep an eye on and manage online reputation, providing the basics, suggestions for security, and much more.

1. Online Reputation: This site has articles on everything from brand reputation management to monitoring your reputation online.
2. The Reputation Blog: Business owners and leaders can take advantage of the advice offered by this blog.
3. Reputation Advisor: Here you’ll find advice and articles that provide essential information on keeping your business’ rep and your own looking good.
4. Reputation Management: From information on slander protection to posts about using search engines to monitor your reputation this blog is full of great info and insight.
5. CopyBrighter: Get some new insights into online reputation management and social media from this blog.
6. StepRepBlog: Find out just what social reputation is or get tips on connecting positively with customers from this site.
7. OnlineReputation.com: This site provides more in-depth explanations on how to use reputation tracking software, advice on building a solid online rep, and much more.

Personal Identity

These tools can help you manage your numerous online profiles, monitor your personal reputation and more.

1. ClaimID: Check out this program that uses OpenID to manage your personal identity over several sites, meaning you only have to remember the password for one, not numerous ones.
2. FindMeOn: Want to connect your identity over several sites? FindMeOn lets you do that while keeping your information private and secure.
3. FreeYourID: Make maintaining your online identity easy, with this tool that bases it directly on your name.
4. Garlik: If you’re worried that your identity may be more than marred and straight out stolen, give this tool a try. You’ll be able to search for mentions of you on the web that might involve identity theft.
5. myOpenID: Don’t worry about having multiple logins with this OpenID site.
6. SpyShakers: Try this tool to get access to any of your profile passwords remotely. It specializes in protecting your information from spyware.
7. TypeKey: TypeKey allows you to integrate your blog into your OpenID, allowing you to manage pretty much everything with one main profile.
8. Realmee: Here you can create a personal profile that will allow you to more easily control what others can see of you online.
9. LookUpPage: Want to control what people find when they search for you? This site helps out, by giving you a central page that comes up at the top when your name is searched for.
10. MonitorThis: Try out this site to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines, giving you clues about who’s talking about you.

Professional Identity

Keep your business’ name out of the mud by protecting it with these helpful tools.

1. Trust-Index: Find out how well your business is trusted with this tool.
2. Google Alerts: With Google Alerts you can get email updates of the latest google results based on your name or other topic of your choosing.
3. BoardTracker: Whether you post on boards yourself or want to see if anyone else is talking about you, this tool makes it easy to filter to threads.
4. Vanno: Get an online reputation the democratic way, with this site that allows others to vote on the stories, videos and blogs about your company.
5. Serph: Use this search tool to look up your company and find out just what kind of buzz is going around the web about your company.
6. Searchles: This social search engine can help you keep up with the news out about your business.
7. Omgili: Search through the numerous forums out there to find out what people are saying about you using this helpful tool.
8. BoardReader: This tool is especially useful, allowing users to search through forums, videos, Twitter conversations, IMDB and more.
9. Joongel: Zoom in on the type of media you’d like to search with this online tool. Choose from videos, photos, shopping sites, and more.
10. Techrigy: This company makes it easier and simpler to monitor your business’ reputation online.
11. Keotag: Match blogs with tags that reflect talk about your business or related topics using this tool.
12. UpdatePatrol: This tool makes it easy to watch websites for updates and changes, which can sometimes be useful when you want to know what a particular site is saying about you.
13. BrandsEye: Hook up with this company to get stats and other information on where your business or blog reputation stands online.

Blog Tools

With the great proliferation of blogs out there, it’s worth your time to keep track of what’s being said about you on them. These tools make it easy and convenient to do just that.

1. Zuula: If you want to get posts just from blogs, try out this search engine. Users can also limit results to photos or videos.
2. SezWho: Follow who’s important in the blogging world and what they may be saying about you with this tool. Also useful to find out where your personal blog may stand.
3. Technorati: Whether you’re blogging personally or professionally, listing your blog with Technorati can be a big help in managing your online reputation. You’ll get updates whenever someone links to your blog so you can keep tabs on what people are saying about you or your business.
4. BackType: BackType is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the Web, allowing you to keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve said on blogs.
5. TweetBeep: TweetBeep will let you keep track of conversations on Twitter than mention you or your business or anything else you’d like to track.
6. co.mments: When you sign up for an account with this site you’ll be able to track comments and conversations that can influence your online reputation.
7. Blogpulse: Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the blogging world, especially in relation to your business using the tools offered on this site.
8. Trendpedia: For businesses, this can be a valuable tool to track when and what your business is getting attention for and how you’re doing compared to your competitors.
9. Twist: Twist allows users to compare mentions of several different topics and view recent tweets about each one, making it easy to track info about businesses.
10. monitter: This tool lets you do much the same as Twist, but you can monitor topics in real-time or by geographic region.
11. Buzzlogic: Track buzz in the blogging world with this site, and find out just who’s word matters when it comes to blogs.

Profile Management

These tools make it easier to keep track of your social networking profiles and your online reputation in turn.

1. Comwat: Use Comwat to organize your social networking profiles into one so that its easier for others to find and easier to control what they see.
2. onXiam: Here you can establish a central online identity, use this identity to link up all your other sites, and even promote this new online location as well.
3. OtherEgo: Show off everything that you’re involved in on the net through this centralized site.
4. Zoolit: Check out this landing page service that makes it super easy to manage all the social networks you’ve been using.
5. Venyo: From lengthy blogs to simple comments, this site allows you to access everything you’ve done online, building up a trustworthy reputation at the same time.
6. ProfileMat: Pull all your existing online profiles together into a “mat” and allow users to comment on this new singular profile instead.
7. SimplifID: This site allows users to organize the online world by creating one central place you can access your blogs, social networking sites and more, allowing you to categorize it by type of viewer.
8. SocialURL: Here you can connect all your online identities by linking your social networking profiles to one URL.
9. ProfileBuilder: Want to create a professional looking profile using material from your existing social networks? This site lets you do just that, keeping or blocking the elements you choose and giving you a super useful home page to visit.

Managing Your Reputation

These tools allow you to hunt down what’s being said about you and find out just what others think of you or your business.

1. Naymz: Give this site a try to get feedback from people you’ve worked with, customers and friends.
2. Rapleaf: Here you can look up your personal or professional reputation, rate other people and businesses and get your own ratings.
3. RepVine: Using a search engine is the easiest way for people who want to know about you to find out more. This site helps you to manage what they find when they do this.
4. Keotag: Manage the blogsphere with this site that allows users to find tagged blog posts over several blog search engines.
5. TrustPl.us: Are you trustworthy? This site works by analyzing your or more like your business’ trust scores and giving you a ranking.
6. ReputationArmor: If you’ve found information about yourself online that’s less than true or extremely damaging to you, try out the services of this company that helps you get things said about you online removed.
7. FriendFeed: Whether you want to keep up with what your friends are looking at or keep up with what’s being said about you personally, this site is a useful tool.
8. Social Media Fire Hose: This accommodating tool tracks your name, brand or product across sites like Digg, FriendFeed and others that specialize in social media.
9. Trackur: If you’re willing to shell out for a little help monitoring your reputation, Trackur is a grand choice with tools that will search through all kinds of sites from social media to video.
10. Radian6: This tool makes it easier to monitor social media, frequently to the benefit of businesses who can use the information to their benefit to build better reputations and products.
11. Cision: For a fee, this tool can help you keep an eye on “100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites.”
12. Web of Trust: Make certain your website is considered trusted by joining up with this site. After all, no one wants to be associated with a dangerous site- it’s just bad for business.

General Tools

If you haven’t already, bookmark these sites which can be a big help in maintaining your reputation optimistically online.

1. Digg: Check out Digg often to see if anyone has submitted stories about your or your business.
2. Reddit: comparable to Digg, this site will allow you to see how much interest there is you on the Web.
3. delicious: This social bookmarking site is a excellent place to see if your webpage or information about you or your business is being passed around by others.
4. Flickr: Think there may be some less-than-impressive photos of you out there? Trying searching this photo site to see if you come up.
5. Facebook: Facebook can be a great place to network, just make certain you keep your profile free from things you wouldn’t want spread about you online.
6. MySpace: With millions of visitors, this popular social networking site can be a great place to get your and your business’ name out there.
7. LinkedIn: Here you can create a professional profile that will allow you to interact with others in your profession in a safe and positive manner.
8. Google: There’s no easier way to find out what your online reputation is than to do a simple Google search.
9. Rollyo: If you want a more customized option for searching, try out this great search engine that you can mold to your online reputation finding needs.
10. Furl: an additional social bookmarking site, here you can track who’s interested in your sites.
11. Twitter: Whether you want to communicate with others or follow the noise about you on the net, Twitter is an essential tool.
12. WordPress: If you’re going to create a blog to be the face of you or your company, this site makes it easy to do so.

Local Search Engine Marketing Tips

Want your local business website to rank well online? There is loads of information about how to dominate local search terms and rank well, but it’s easy to get confused with all the advice that’s available out there. Here are the top 5 critical tips of local search that will help you rank and dominate in your local market.

1. Add Geographical Information to Your Page Titles

Make sure to use your target keyword terms and location name in your page titles. This helps search engines to decide easily what your site is about and search engine users are more likely to click on your site if it contains related geographical keywords for the area they live in.

2. Get Your Business Listed on Prominent Websites Directories

Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and MSN Live Local are all places where you can have your business listed in order to make it easier for prospective clients to discover you. By claiming ownership of your business listings on these well-known sites, you permit both search engines and potential customers to get accurate information about your business. Sometimes devious competitors may claim your listing on these sites to steal your traffic and business. Make sure you’re the initial one to claim your listings in order to build faith between you, the search engines, and prospective customers. There are also numerous geographical search directories that get noteworthy traffic where you can claim your listings. Citysquares.com is an example of a local search directory with good traffic.

3. Provide a plethora of Information about Your Business in Your Local Listings

When search engine users land on your website by clicking on your business listing, you want to be certain that you give them a lot information about your service. In addition to including the basics such as your address, contact information, and operation hours give prospective clients an abundance of reasons why they should choose you over your competitors. For example, mention precisely which towns and neighborhoods you service, what credit cards you accept, what your guarantees are, any special offers you have (Coupons), and anything else that is applicable.

4. Use Your Target Keyword Phrases as Anchor Text in Your Hyperlinks

Link reputation is a vital element of search engine algorithms. When possible, make sure that the links pointing back to your site use your best target keyword phrase and variations of your location as anchor text. Your internal links also have a say to link reputation so be sure to link to pages within your site using good link text. This link text can be used in your site navigation, HTML sitemap, and links within your content.

5. Monitor Reviews about Your Business Online and Your Online Reputation

Thanks to the internet, consumers can submit online reviews of businesses to customer-controlled review sites like Yelp and share their experiences, whether good or bad. This could be highly beneficial to your business if it gets great reviews but it could also hurt you if you get some bad reviews. Monitor the reviews your business receives on a regular basis so you can find negative reviews when they occur and rebut them if necessary. Sometimes customers don’t always present reasonable or honest reviews so make certain that if you do get bad reviews that are unjustified, the potential customers who see them can get both sides of the story at the very least. Using Google Alerts is a handy way to keep track of what is being said about your business online and is used frequently by reputation management firms. Also make it a habit to “Google” your company name, your name, your phone number, your website name and your product names on a daily basis.

Use these strategies in local search to boost your online presence. There are numerous tactics you can use to boost targeted traffic to your business’ website and develop its ranking but these are some of the most valuable ways to give your business a strong local presence.

Search Ranking & PageRank

Many SEO (search engine optimization) people become obsessed with Google pagerank. It was once considered to be an extremely imperative key in obtaining high Google rankings. I see Google’s PageRank as an indicator of Google’s opinion of a web pages authority within the web. I suggest focusing on overall SEO strategy and PageRank will in nearly all cases rise along with rankings.

PageRank is one of around 200 or more factors the Google algorithm takes into consideration when ranking a web site. It is a numerical rating of pages from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest possible score (Google Is A PageRank 10). PageRank is believed to be endlessly updated by Google, however public rough calculation are able to be viewed in web browsers via the Google toolbar. These values are updated at irregular intervals. I have noticed my websites PageRank being updated every 60-90 days.

Let’s observe some factors that may perk up SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Positions) and PageRank.

1: Content

You’re most likely tired of hearing about the significance of content. Yet it is important today as it ever was. Google clearly examines content when shaping PageRank. Thus, one of the greatest techniques to improve PageRank is to simply make certain your pages have quality textual content. The content should be unique and applicable to the subject of the web site and search terms.

Opinions vary on the ideal amount of text to include on one page. 650-800 words seem a reasonable balance between content and length. I think there would be unimportant benefits in terms of PR from site pages with 2000+ words of content. However, at least 400 words is most likely a good baseline to establish subject matter and healthy page content vs. page coding ratio.

If the content on your site is written well your keywords should naturally appear in the writing style of the page. Be sure to include your keywords in the page title, headings, Alt-Tags, and body. Do not over use a single keyword within your body as it may be red flagged by Google. Also keep in mind that both search engines and humans will be reading your content so fashion your content to be “friendly” for both of them.

2: Inbound links (backlinks)

One of the main factors determining rankings and PageRank are incoming links to your web site and pages. Google assumes that there must be a good reason for a link to exist to your page and counts a link as a “vote of confidence” in the content quality of your website.

Links from high authority sites on your topic (high ranking and high PR pages) bear a far greater weight than links from sites virtually unfamiliar to Google – or from pages/sites that have nothing to do with your site content and niche. So having a football site link to a jewelry site is not as good as a jewelry appraiser linking to your Jewelry sales site. Also, One-way links are better than exchanging links.

3: Get Indexed Fast

A rapid way to have Google index your site is to link to your website from a forum or frequently updated blog. These links are not probable to carry a great amount of weight, but every bit helps and if you select your forums and blogs well, the results do mount up. Try to keep your posts on topic and informative and limit your links to signatures and your profile. If linking from a blog use in-content links. You could even post articles to bookmark sites (Like Pligg Sites) that are DoFollow.

4: Articles

Articles are a very good way of gaining credibility with Google and your target audience. Most article sites do not allow you to place your own links into the body of the article. However you can create convincing author footers with a link to your site. There are plenty of good article sites that can be found with a quick Google search for “articles”.

In closing: Remember organic SEO and SEO in general takes time and with enough effort and hard work you will soon see an increase in your SERP’s and PageRank. There is no such thing as Easy SEO. Check our blog often for new tips and advice.

Comment and let us know your thoughts on this Post!

If you launch a new website and want to get it indexed by Google faster and get a few backlinks as well, here is a method I have used that works. This is a very simple SEO technique that anyone can and should do.

1. Simply copy and paste the links below in to a notepad or text editor and replace the domain name seofriendly.com and www.seofriendly.com with your domain name.

2. Then click or visit each link that you see!

3. That is it! Your Done.

This will get your new website some backlinks and indexed fast.

Here are the sample links. Remember to replace our domain: seofriendly.com with your domain name!

1- http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.seofriendly.com

2- http://www.statbrain.com/www.seofriendly.com

3- http://www.builtwith.com/?seofriendly.com  

4- http://snapshot.compete.com/seofriendly.com

5- http://www.aboutus.org/seofriendly.com

6- http://www.quantcast.com/seofriendly.com

7- http://www.cubestat.com/www.seofriendly.com

8- http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/seofriendly.com

9- http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr…s/seofriendly.com 

10- http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=seofriendly.com

11- http://www.siteadvisor.cn/sites/seofriendly.com/summary/

12- http://whois.domaintools.com/seofriendly.com

13- http://www.aboutdomain.org/backlinks/seofriendly.com/

14- http://www.whoisya.com/seofriendly.com

15- http://www.who.is/whois-com/seofriendly.com

16- http://www.robtex.com/dns/seofriendly.com.html

17- http://www.zimbio.com/search?q=seofriendly.com&btnG=Search

18- http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/seofriendly.com/

19- http://whoisx.co.uk/seofriendly.com  (Failed To Work)

20- wikifox.de  (No Longer Works)

21- http://searchanalytics.compete.com/s…s/seofriendly.com

Do you have any tips on getting indexed fast? Comment and let us all know.

TIPS TO AVOID SEO SERVICE SCAMS

So you are looking for a SEO service to help you reach the top… Beware there are more unethical SEO services online then there are honest.

Hiring an SEO Service is a risky business these days. With so many SEO services to choose from, how do you make the choice? Below are a few tips that might help you make the right decision.

Questions you should ask an SEO company:

    * Can you provide examples of your previous work or share some success stories?
    * Do you use blackhat seo techniques? (If yes be careful)
    * Do you outsource your work or do it all in-house?
    * What kind of results can I expect, and in how long? What do you consider a success?
    * Are you familiar with my industry?
    * Do you understand my geographical area? (For local searches)
    * What’s your experience developing international sites?
    * What SEO techniques do you consider the best to use?
    * How long have you been in business?
    * How will I communicate with you? Do you have a direct phone number?
    * Do you accept credit cards? How do you take payment?

Beware: There are always SEO Scams lurking around the corner:

Avoid SEO companies that send you a SPAM email to win your business. An email that states something like: “Dear Webmaster, I went to your website and see you do not rank in the Top Results of Google…”. These emails will normally, in most cases lead you to getting ripped off.

Remember that NO ONE can truly guarantee a #1 position on Google’s organic search results. Companies that guarantee you a #1 position are telling you a lie right to your face. Avoid anyone that guarantees to much. If it sounds to good to be true… You know the rest.

If an SEO service offers a guarantee that you will rank for useless keywords that are long phrases like “Beverly Hills Plumbers With A License”, avoid them. You will most likely lank for this keyword easily on your own if you wanted to. Just make a page geared toward that keyword phrase.

My favorite tip is if an SEO company have no websites they own or operate that rank good on Google, how are they going to get you to the top? If they can’t get their own website to the top, that is a big caution flag! I don’t expect an SEO company to rank high for terms like “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”, I realize these are very tough keywords to rank for. I would however like to see a website they own ranking good for something impressive.

Remember you get what you pay for in the SEO world. If a search engine marketing company offers to submit your website to thousands of free directories and free-for-all link pages for $29.95, it is not worth it! These type of services are a waste of time that might even hurt your search ranking. True SEO is not cheap, you can expect to pay anywhere from $500.00-$150,000.00 per year on SEO depending on what keywords you’re trying to rank well for. There will always be a competitor that wants to rank high for the same keywords you do, this will drive prices up and require you to regularly spend money to stay on top.

Article Marketing Tips For 2009

Article Marketing can be a very handy SEO tool if utilized properly. A well written, well organized article will get your website traffic and popularity. Some of the benefits of having a wining article published include generating a quality back link from the resource box or “author box”, some article directories allow in-content links (link within the content). Content links are good because you can use whatever anchor text you want. Anchor text means linking your website to a specific keyword or phrase within your article.

A good article should have a great keyword rich title that is relevant to your content. When making a title try using a phrase that makes sense, grabs attention, and contains keyword. Just be creative and you will come up with something within a few minutes.

Also, your description should be creative and contain keywords as well. A title should not be too long or too short. Just about 20-25 words or so will do (basically 1-2 sentences).

Your article itself should be written well. Have a friend or family member proof read it and make sure everything makes sense. If you don’t have a proof reader, give yourself a 20-30 minute break after writing the article then proof read it yourself.

Your article should not be too long. Short and sweet will attract more readers. A 500 word article that is packed with valuable information is better than a 1500 word article filled with useless info.

Promote your article: This is one of the biggest challenges that everyone will face. Promote your article everywhere you possibly can. Use forums, link from your social networks, blog about your article, link to your article from your forum signatures, try to get others to link to your article, add a link to it from your websites, use social bookmarking sites like Digg, and submit your article to multiple article directories.

Tip: Do not forget to use the resource box. This is where you will add a link to your website and tell everyone about you or your company.

Below is a list of article directories and their PageRank. You can submit articles to these directories for SEO purposes.

Tip: Some offer paid upgraded accounts. Paying extra may get you more exposure and faster approvals.
EzineArticles.com  PR 6
GoArticles.com  PR 4
ArticleDashboard.com  PR 6
SearchWarp.com  PR 5
ArticlesBase.com  PR 4
iSnare.com  PR 6
SelfGrowth.com  PR 6
Buzzle.com  PR 6
ArticleCity.com  PR 6
IdeaMarketers.com  PR 5
ArticleAlley.com  PR 5
Web-Source.net  PR 5
SelfSEO.com  PR 5
Amazines.com  PR 5
ArticleTrader.com  PR 5
SearchGuild.com  PR 6
WebWorldIndex.com  PR 5
ArticleSphere.com  PR 4
BusinessKnowHow.com  PR 6
PromotionWorld.com  PR 6
ArticlesFactory.com  PR 7
ExcellentGuide.com/article  PR 6
ContentDesk.com  PR 4
ArticleCube.com  PR 5
AfroArticles.com  PR 4
ArticleBiz.com  PR 6

Do you have an article directory to share? Comment and let us know.

Link building is a vital ingredient when it comes to SEO and search engine ranking. Link building can be a difficult overwhelming task; however it is a necessary one if you plan on ranking well on search engines. Every SEO will tell you that Link Building and obtaining quality backlinks is a very important facet of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Link building is basically the process of getting other websites to link to your website.

If you’re seeking fresh ways to build quality links, here is a list of link building strategies to mull over:

• Build and host useful tools (Others May Link To This)
• Offer testimonials on complimentary services
• Widgets (and submit them to directories)
• Awards (badge) Like a “Verified SEO Guru Badge”
• Contest (badge)
• Cross link web sites that you own (Try one way links.)
• Write reviews (Make them interesting and sometimes negative reviews)
• Promote content on social news sites
• Article Distribution (Try EzineArticles.com)
• Submit Blog & RSS Feed to Directories (Google Blog Directories)
• Directory Submissions (Choose High PageRank Directories)
• Ads on search friendly sites (Text Link Ads)
• Sponsor newsletters archived to the web
• Job listings
• Forum Signatures (See DoFollow Forum List)
• Classified Ads (American-classifieds.com)
• Publish comprehensive resource lists (Like This One)
• Post an ebook or substantial whitepaper
• Exchange links with marketing and business partners, clients
• Post surveys
• Write guest posts on others blogs
• Contribute articles to online publications
• Optimize press releases (PRWeb.com)
• Comment on industry blogs (SeoFriendly.com)
• Sponsor events
• Social bookmark your worthy content (Digg)
• Speak at events and offer your PPT deck with links embedded
• Donate where a link of donors is published
• Interview industry pundits (don’t be scared to ask pros for interviews)
• Transcribe video interviews to text as separate posts (Great idea!)
• Apply for industry awards, web site & blog awards
• Ensure industry groups you’re involved with link to you
• Create a wiki and ask others to contribute
• Create micro sites for causes, events, specific purposes
• Leverage your affiliate program
• Be a resource on Q/A web sites like Yahoo Answers (indirect)
• Solicit links directly
• Always Provide “link to us” content on blog and/or web site
• Leverage publicity and media for links
• Digital submissions: images, audio, video (youtube?)
• Social profile optimization (Linkedin.com)

Now go out and build some links, your website will than you. Do you have any link building tips for our readers? Post a comment and let them know.

SEO Plugins For WordPress

WordPress has some powerful SEO functions built in to help you with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), however there are a few very importan

t and must have plugins to help you along the way.  Here is our most favorite SEO related WordPress plugins. These SEO WP Plugins will make a huge positive impact to your blogs SEO.

All in One SEO Pack – Allows you to optimize your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). You can set a specific META Tags for your WP Blog’s main page. You can also specify Title, Description, and Keywords for each post you create. This is by far on of my personal favorite seo plugins for wordpress.

Redirection – Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge.

Search Everything – Increases WordPress’ default search functionality through an options panel.

• Search Every Page
• Search Every Tag
• Search Every Category
• Search non-password protected pages only
• Search Every Comment
• Search only approved comments
• Search Every Draft
• Search Every Excerpt
• Search Every Attachment
• Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
• Exclude Posts from search
• Exclude Categories from search

HeadSpace2 – Controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging, Analytics, and dozens of plugins. A great WP SEO Tool.

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.

You can configure meta-data for:

• Posts
• Pages
• Categories
• Home page
• Author pages
• Search pages
• 404 page

You can define:

• Tags/keywords, with suggested keywords
• Descriptions
• Page titles
• Custom ‘more text’
• Site name and site description
• Custom themes – change your theme on each page!
• Custom plugins – load a plugin only on specific pages
• Additional CSS and JavaScript files
• Noindex and nofollow meta tags
• Follow/follow on archive, category, page, tag, and comment links

Robots Meta – This plugin makes it easy to add the appropriate meta robots tags to your pages, disable unused archives, nofollow unnecessary links and more.

Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

SEO Title Tag – Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Mass edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages – indeed, any URL!

Optimal Title – Optimal Title mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before.

SEO Friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes the tags w3c/xHTML.

Do you have a plug-in that you think should be on this list of Top WP SEO Plugins? Add it VIA commenting!