Lately, there have been an increased number of usage of hashtags on Tweets. I do not have any number/statistics to support this, but we’ve all seen it, haven’t we ? Tweets with lot of hashtags, sometimes even inappropriate and irrelevant placed just to add more re-tweet value by bots. As more and more bots/apps use content syndication from hashtags, the more hashtags you use, the more the probablity for your tweet to get retweeted/syndicated.

But does this reduce the overall quality of the tweet ? Does it look messy ?

How about someone give you $100,000 to travel around the world, for free and all you got to do is record yourself on a home video and tell them, why you’d like to be the one ? Sounds too good to be true right ? Well it is for real and its happening on social media.

LG – The leading electronics company has come out with a new social media campaign for its new range of TV’s that has a unique new feature of being borderless (okay…). Yeah, that’s the product and they’ve embraced social media. Eat that, all the companies hesitant to make the move yet Live Borderless.

I’m quite impressed with their efforts and not so impressed wither. Impressed because the campaign is fairly simple, well executed, and wraps up quick touching the right notes. "Borderless" keyword will get stuck to you if you ever come across the campaign, and that’s probably all that the brand want. There is no unnecessary noise and the fun zing always remain.

Here are a few lessons from the whole campaign:

1 – Find a mirror phrase for your brand, never throw it on the face

Like all social media campaigns, the final product or the brand always lives in the "subconscious mind" not right in front of you. Here, LG and "Borderless" TV’s are almost invisible but its always lurking behind the core idea of "Living Borderless". Clever.

2 – Knowing which medium doesn’t work for you is as important as knowing which doesn’t

The Liveborderless campaign is based on a simple idea. Get people to talk about the borderless concept, get those travel loving ones to participate, and leave the rest to ogle and onlook the whole buzz. YouTube would have been an obvious choice but because of its complexities and limitations the site built a custom video upload option, which let people upload videos from their machines. Simple, yet effective. They do have a  twitter and facebook account however that supports building the community around the concept.

3 – Get a brand ambassador who’s naturally fun and entertaining.

Another core strength of the whole campaign was this beaver / chipmunk who was assigned to make you laugh. And as a matter of fact, more than the participants, its probably this guy’s video that got shared most and it helped in popularising the concept.

4 – Keep the idea simple. ( Click > Participate > Share )

The idea wasn’t complicated. It didn’t ask you to write an essay,it didn’t ask you to pass the message to hundred friends nor it asked you for your passport. If you’re interested, just click on your webcam, record yourself, post it. That’s it. When the time spent to enter a contest like this is larger than usual then the risk of warding people away too is higher.

5 – Be Genuine, Be Awesome, But don’t try to “utilize” people

This idea was awesome and many people thought it was too good to be true. But it was genuine, and it was for real. It didn’t do anything so as to “make use” of your network or friends or anything. That genuine feel is a feel good factor and prompts people to stick to it, rather than moving away.

Anyhow, the LG Live Borderless social media campaign was quite interesting, and they are nearing the final voting days now, where the user uploaded videos are being voted for the best, and the guy who gets selected is going around the world in 80 days. I wish I could take a vacation at least.

Check out their website here

This post is in light of my experience with moving from dailyseoblog.com to dailybloggr.com, so whatever I’m talking about here is pure experience, practicality and substance, no blah blah (like you’ll find elsewhere).

As you might have already known, DailySEOblog.com is no more, and the site changed its name to dailybloggr.com, with a complete revamp. DailySEOblog used to enjoy a traffic of roughly 50,000 visits & 73,000 page views per month on an average.

Most of the traffic was search engine referrals (~65%), with Google.com topping the most referred channel followed by Stumbleupon.com, RSS feeds and Twitter.

Two weeks ago (Feb 14th, 2010), the domain change was live with a 301 redirect on the old one redirecting all the old URLs to dailybloggr.com. And here are the stats since then.

And the referral traffic stats.

Its too early for a comparison but Google still remains the topper in referrals with RSS feeds, Twitter, Tweetmeme and Facebook being the biggest channels.

Alexa too is looking good with a bounce back from the domain change days.

You can clearly see the “transition” around Feb mid when the domain change occurred.

So how did the domain name change and transition happen overnight ?

Well, actually it didn’t happen overnight. Like some of you had noticed (and asked me on Twitter), the 301 redirect had been implemented some 5-7 days prior to the site revamp.

Step 1 – Diverting all the Google traffic via a 301 redirect

I used a htaccess, mod rewrite rule to 301 redirect all the traffic as below.

- All www.dailyseoblog.com } www.dailybloggr.com

- All http://dailyseoblog.com } www.dailybloggr.com

- All http://www.dailyseoblog.com } www.dailybloggr.com

As you might already know, a 301 redirect is the best way to tell search engines that your site has moved permanently. This might not get done immediately, but the idea is to wait and get all the referrals get stuck with a 301 board and once most of this is done, you’re somewhere close to the transition.

( Things to remember while doing a 301 redirect )

- Make sure you pick a static version of the new site (in my case the www version) and create rules so as to move all the other versions of the old domain (wwww, non www and all other versions) to the static version. This is important or things can get worse later on creating one or more versions of the website.

- Make sure you register the new site on Google Webmasters tool and select the static version of the site as your “preferred domain”. Do NOT leave this option unattended.

- Test the 301 from various IPs, if possible from regions. Get some social media help here, if you have friends elsewhere.

Step 2 – Getting the SERPs right, changing all the old listings to the new domain

You won’t have direct control over this, well neither does Google. So all you got to do is do the steps necessary to help the bots do a neat job.

- Submit a new sitemap, via Webmasters central.

- Get some links via good authority web pages, if you can.

- Wait patiently.

It took me around a week to completely get all the old serps to feature the new site name, and even now the transition isn’t complete. You’ll find the dailyseoblog.com stamp on many SERPs listings, but most of this is done, so I assume the rest is under process. Nothing to worry. Also, this is only a minor issue if you care much about the brand. Because anyways if you have the 301s in place, all the search traffic will be properly redirected.

Step 3 – Getting the ball rolling

This is just an additional step you do just to make sure that everything falls in to place. And not all SEOs would be keen on this but I am. What you do is, create some social media friendly content, and “promote” it on the social media channels. Technically it means nothing to an SEO, but this is sort of a “nailing it down” process. I didn’t have much problem here, but sites that have low traffic and lesser google visit frequency might have a problem in speeding up things and getting the major chunk of URLs redirected right. You can leverage on social media here. What you do is get as many traffic as possible from various social media channels, get your content out there, and get as many “human” clicks in. As I’ve mentioned in one of my older posts, search engines these days take into consideration some amount of “social presence” as a factor in deciding the authority of a website. If not everything, they mean something. I mean, if Google doesn’t know about a website but lots of people around the world are flocking around it, wouldn’t Google jump in and get the site indexed ? It should in my opinion. So this step is all about that. You do it, if you can. No obligations.

Step 4 – Getting your settings & tentacles right

By tentacles I mean all the other things you have for your sites presence. RSS feeds, AdSense ads, Bookmarking Options, Custom search result pages, Email subscription options, Email addresses, Twitter feeds etc.

By now, Dailyseoblog has almost all of its SERPs listings moved to the new domain, and the rest of them are on the way. Backlinks to the old domain have been successfully traced back to the new domain. Things are looking good except with some glitches like being unable to change the facebook fan group name, but you got to live with it I guess.

I might have missed mentioning some crucial info here, but feel free to ask if you have anything for me to clear.

This came to me as a shocker, and just like you, I dismissed it saying “yet another claim” initially. But curious, I took another look into the matter and it looks like that there might be some “substance” in the claims. Let’s check some details.

Google has repeatedly claimed that they don’t interfere with anything manually on the SERPs. They insist that everything is “as generated by the bots”, and there’s nothing you can do to manipulate them.

But there are examples where we’ve found that if you have the right influence, things can be manipulated.

The John Chow Story:
Play dirty – Get banned – Befriend Matt Cutts – Get Back on SERPs !

John Chow, who runs the blog johnchow.com had been banned / penalized from Google regular SERPs for violating the Google TOS. He had been involved in a major scam where he encouraged bloggers to link to his blog with a particular keyword. This resulted in johnchow’s blog appearing on the top results in record time. When spotted, Google penalized the blog and it couldn’t be found via organic searches on Google.

But after about 2 years, Johnchow got back to Google and he posted in his blog that he contacted Google Engineer Matt Cutts through Neil Patel and he got the ban lifted.

Many SEO’s and bloggers believed that if you do something as nasty as what John did, you’re doomed for life. But apparently, if you have the right connections, you can sneak through.

The Henk Van Ess Revelations :
Google employs an army of people to grade websites, instead of algorithms

Henk Van Ess is a dutch journalist who revealed that Google employed a large army of people who rank search results and entries in those results. (Details here) He also reveals that Google secretly (or not) removes links from its search results upon complaints from people manually. This website has the details of links that were removed from Google.

Here’s an example of a latter to Google, requesting removal of an URL.

Sender Information:
Magnolia Pictures
Sent by:
Web Sheriff
London, UK

Recipient Information:
Google, Inc.
Mountain View, CA, USA

Sent via: email
Re: DMCA NOTIFICATION / FILM DISTRIBUTOR REQUEST

1. Rights Owner(s) : *MAGNOLIA PICTURES INC.
2. Rights Agent : *WEB SHERIFF
3. Infringed Rights : *COPYRIGHT, TRADEMARK, PERFORMERS & MORAL RIGHTS
4. Infringed Movie(s) : *DISTRICT 13 – ULTIMATUM / BANLIEUE 13 – ULTIMATUM /
GHETTOGANGZ 2 – ULTIMATUM (PIRATE COPIES)5. Infringing Activity : *COPYRIGHT / TRADEMARK FILE UPLOADING & DOWNLOADING
(MOVIE PIRACY)
6. Infringing Web Site : blogspot.com
7. Infringing File Location(s) :

http://moviehauz.blogspot.com/2010/02/watch-free-district-13-ultimatum-full.html

http://movie-live-shows.blogspot.com/2010/02/watch-free-district-13-ultimatum-full.html

8. DMCA Request : Please remove Infringed Movie(s) from Infringing File
Location(s) ASAP : thank you.
9. Signature :[redacted]
for and on behalf of
WEB SHERIFF
Argentum
London W6 9DX
United Kingdom
Tel 44-[redacted]
Fax 44-[redacted]

Full letter text here

The Michelle Obama Story

This one’s popular. Searching for the first lady’s name on Google images search will surprise you as Google shows a photoshopped image of a chimp.

But if you look at the ad right above, it says something about offensive search results.

The page says -

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results.

Hmm, that’s a tricky one. So why didn’t Google take this stand in John Chow’s case ? Or why don’t they remove this particular search from the SERPs ?

So, what it looks like, Google might occasionally , in particular situations manually “manipulate” the SERPs by removing / adding links from it. Of course, they have their own justifications for each case and mostly they would be legitimate. But I think this raises a question to all of the webmaster SEO community, “Is the most widely used search engine completely trustable ? What if they screwed up ? Would you allow them to ?”

Keyword research is one of the primary things in SEO, and as all of us know, there are a set of keyword research tools that we all have been using for years. I personally feel that the keyword research area is the most important one in terms of laying your foundations for SEO, and unfortunately, this is also one ares where we don’t have much options.

So what does it take to create a better keyword research experience ? We all have the same set of keyword research tools, the same keyword research procedure, so what makes the difference ? Let’s see.

1. Use more than one tool, mix it up and get the best of it

Of course we all have out favorite tool, but does sticking to just one tool narrow down your possibility of finding out better keywords ? It does. In my opinion, one should always try it out with as many tools as possible and then get the best of everything. For instance the Google Adwords Tool has the advantage of popping up “realistic” keywords, but the search number and the competition is probably not accurate. You could use the SK Tool instead.

2. Do not pick the obvious keywords

Remember, in SEO its more about doing things better than doing things right. So if you pick the obvious keywords with the best search volume, you are forgetting the fact that other SEOs in your niche probably doing the same thing, and even better than you. So the wise thing to do is to track your competition and over-doing them, even if that means you have to deviate form the regular procedures.

3 – Match search volume in context with your site content

A mistake SEOs often repeat is getting carried away by the search volume and picking the most competitive keywords which they may not stand a chance to rank for. The problem here is that there is no focus on the content. Only if your content matches in context with the keyword selection would it be possible for you to go ahead with the rest of SEO factors and possibly get some traction. If you make the wrong selection, then you got things all messed up right from the beginning.

4 –   Pick up the low lying fruits first rather than jumping for the big ones

Why ? Its easier to get the momentum. When you try and pick up competitive keywords first, you have to spend a lot of time on it until you get anything for result. Instead try picking up the low lying fruits first (long tail, lesser competitive keywords) and then once you have some momentum gained, leverage on it for the bigger ones. Makes sense ? Saves a lot of time too.

5 – Start from bottom up of your site

Another grave mistake SEOs do, especially with new websites is to start with their homepage. Nothing wrong technically, but you’re losing out on the opportunity that a lot of your content that lies in the inner pages of your website are still not optimized or catered properly to the search engines. There are several options available with them, so why not fix them first and move up gradually to the homepage ?

So there you have it. Five overlooked facts in keyword research, that could really make some difference to your overall SEO strategy. Did it help ?

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

This week, Google Engineer Matt Cutts gives us tips on what could be the best screen resolution for a website to be in. Not exactly an SEO or Google related topic this one, but Matt Cutts think that the best way to go about it is to dig your previous user data on Google Analytics, and find out what’s the popular resolution among your users. It could differ for each website as the audience is differ for each. So it would be difficult to come up with a standard. However, I’ve seen that there are two trends to watch out for based on recent user statistics.

Trend No. 1 – Increasing number of mobile users.

Mobile browsers are on the increase these days, and unfortunately, not all analytics software puts them into the right category, but their number sure is increasing. It might be a wise decision to consider them while designing your new website.

Trend No. 2 – Increase in the number of smaller devices like Netbooks.

Smaller resolution devices did not go away in the 90’s. They still exist with the use of netbooks and other hand held devices (iPad ?).

Take a look at what Matt’s got to say about the best screen resolution for website ?

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that a major chunk of the blogging community prefers shared hosting to dedicated hosting, mainly because shared hosting is cost effective, cheap and easy to hop on to, while dedicated hosting comes with it a thread of problems. In fact, shared hosting works for anyone who’s started blogging and works fine until he reaches the traffic avalanche period. Shared hosting packages are easier to find, cheaper and easy to set up, all you need is to pay, click and install. I preferred shared hosting when I started blogging, grabbing one from hostgator wasn’t that hard a decision. But when the traffic started to roll in, the servers went to a standstill more than once, several to be honest. And this had created some issues with the site, and wasn’t really a smooth ride mostly. The reason why I hadn’t moved to dedicated hosting is that I didn’t care much about it until the traffic bumps came up, to be precise carelessness. Also, I had been taught that dedicated hosting was very expensive only a few could afford. But to my surprise this was wrong – until I met the guys from Knownhost. (More about that later)

Dedicated hosting v/s Shared Hosting – Major Issues Comparison

1. Shared Hosting cannot take social media traffic
Even if you use plugins and caches, shared hosting can make your blog burn up resources when in times of huge traffic especially from social media where you can expect anything to happen anytime.

2. If you share, your hosting guys will consider other sites and won’t prefer you over them
Since a lot of websites will be hosted in your shared host, your hosting guys will have to consider everyone equally, and in trouble times they would simply pull the plug to your site rather than waiting to solve it. This might make you put your head down.

3. Shared hosting is really for starters, not for the professional
Seriously, shared hosting is not really optimized for professional serious guys with blogs. If you want whole lot of traffic, then you better scale up and offer a dedicated hosting.

But, migrating to dedicated hosting is not easy. And you got to select your partner carefully. Here are a few things I found that could confuse you.

1. Don’t go for offers
There are quite a bunch of guys who really offer some good discounts and deals but they have the catches. Like one web host I found that was offering really cheap prices, did not offer support to migrate from shared to dedicated, they said they’d expect the users to do it themselves. Of course, they would help, but it would come at a price.

2. See whom you can trust in the long run
Remember, you are making a decision to which you have to stick to for a long time. You cannot afford to move around hosts, every time there’s a problem. Find out who are the trustworthy guys out there and contact them for a better price than the published rates. Most of them are willing to discuss.

3. Find a team who’ll guide and support you through trouble times
Moving to a dedicated host doesn’t mean the end of all problems. You can expect minor glitches here and there like adding domains, database management, FTP etc which are not easy like plug and play in shared hosting. In such cases only a good support team can help you, so make sure you have one.

4. Published rates are not for all, you can get a better price if you ask
Not sure if this will work for all, but at least for some, it should. If you have a decent traffic and some traction there, may be the hosting company can benefit from you. You can leverage on this and ask them for a better rate than the published rates, most of them agree to discuss further. Try it, only a crying baby gets the milk.

In my personal experience, I’ve come over several dedicated and VPS hosting companies. I’ve tried out a couple of them, bought their services to try out, but there’s only one guy whom I liked in all ways – Knownhost.

They are relatively less popular, but that doesn’t mean at all that they are small. They’re in fact better than many of the big players out there. And what I found striking is their willingness to support and help. You know, I believe in imperfection, when ever you deal with imperfect people, you can find that they have a passion to excel, a willingness to learn and help others. I found this with these guys, and I can quite boldly state that you won’t find that enthusiasm in many of the established and popular hosts out there.

After I made the decision to move to knownhost, all I had to do was make the payment and ask them to “go”. They migrated the entire site from the old one to the new server, smoothly with proper guidance and help. So much that I didn’t do anything at all but to change the nameserver info from my domain registrar ! That’s so impressive.

I don’t want to sound like they’ve bought DSB, but do check out their options and you’ll know what I mean. And also, they come cheap starting at $25 per month.

So if you’re looking for a dedicated host, VPS host, I can blindly introduce you to Knownhost. They’re one of the best I know.

Do let me know if you’ve been running on them, or are planning to anytime soon.

Ask anyone what’s the one reason why they hate SEOs, and you’ll most probably get something like “because they lie on the face” for a reply. And I quite agree with it.

The reason is that not all SEO’s are brave enough to admit what they can’t achieve and not all clients are aware that SEOs aren’t Gods. Since we agree on that, let’s move ahead to the fun part. Some common lies SEO’s make and 10 ways you can easily find them out.

1. SEOs offering Guaranteed Google Ranks

Google has repeatedly mentioned it at many places that no one can guarantee any ranks on Google SERPs. Simply because the system cannot be gamed. The Google algorithm is smart enough to separate wheat from chaff and though often speculative, does a better job than the rest. No SEO can guarantee google ranks, and if they do, they’re probably looking at short term results that are achieved through black hat SEO methods, which will harm your site than good.

2. SEOs promising a Google PageRank

Well, technically there is nothing wrong in promising a future higher Google PageRank but only very few people in the industry can possibly predict or game it. I cannot imagine that every SEO in the industry can promise a Google PageRank accurately, of course we could use successful link building strategies, but the outcome can only be guessed, never predicted. I would not call anyone who promises a Google Page Rank bogus, but that is something too good to be true.

3. SEOs offering directory submissions as link building methods

We’ve seen many directory submission services from SEOs, and if you dig into each one of it, you’ll see that the value that comes out of it is very nominal, for most of them to be called a service. Mostly, these services get away with automated submissions which do nothing good but harm. I’d say its a good idea to think of anyone who emphasizes directory submissions, as their primary link building activity to be bogus.

4. SEOs offering blog commenting as link building methods

Blog commenting was once upon a time a good trick to source backlinks, but like any gaming strategy, Google detected it and cut it off. So these days blog commenting is nothing less than spamming, and anyone who offers it as a service…yeah you got it !

5. SEOs claiming to have experience of more than 15 years

Danny Sullivan who’s probably one of the early guys to research and study on SEO has an experience of 14-16 years. So that makes me wonder where does the guys claiming to have 15-20+ years of SEO experience come from.

Not trying to sound sore, but these are the industry facts and no matter what, unless you are brave enough to discuss these stuff,you’ll never get the clear picture. Hope it all made sense. Looking forward to your comments.

There’s no stopping Google docs. Google has recently announced that it will be rolling out a new change where users can upload any file type to Google docs up to 250 MB. That is huge. So now you don’t need to email it to yourself, but just upload and play with it !

The new feature may takes a few weeks before you can use it completely as its being rolled out slowly. People requiring larger storage requirements can buy additional storage for a nominal price of $0.25 per GB per year.
The uploaded files will be available for sharing via the Google Docs sharing feature, so now you can collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

I’m a huge fan of Google Docs, and here’s three cheers to the Google Docs team.

One of the most popular problems among webmasters is not being able to get indexed by Google despite search engine submissions and long waiting. Google takes time to index some new sites and this can be frustrating. But most of the times, the reasons for Google not indexing your site is from your side, although not many people realize it, and hence to frequent complaint. So if you have a new website and is awaiting indexing by Google, here are a few things that you might want to consider in the first place.

Checklist for search engine indexing.

1. Check if your CMS has an opt in option where, it blocks search engines.

Well technically they shouldn’t but some CMS’s like WordPress has a default option which will be checked already where it will block all search engines from crawling the website. This is to make sure that your website is not indexed while you are only setting up the site. But when you forget to uncheck this option, the CMS adds a Nofollow meta tag to the pages whereby search engines will not crawl the site.

2. Check if you have set the correct Robots.txt

Robots.txt files are used to control (not fully though) search engines crawling the website. Make sure you have not blocked bots from crawling parts of your website.

3. Check if your servers are returning OK status

Use tools like header checker tools to ensure that your server is returning a healthy 200 OK status. Anything else should be dealt with immediately.

4. Set up a sitemap

Sitemaps does not guarantee that your site will be up on the SERPs soon, but they are a necessity. They ensure that we have a route map for the bots to follow. So set up a sitemap before even trying to get indexed.

5. If you run plugins check if they are set properly

Setting plugins like SEO plugins are good. But make sure they are set properly. Some plugins have an option to set nofollow meta tags on pages by default to avoid duplicate content issues, if you do not turn this off, it might screw up the indexing process.

I assume that you have done all the basic steps to invite search engines to your site already. Which are -

1 – To submit the website URL to Google via the submission tool.

2 – If possible, get a relevant contextual link from a good website (which has already been indexed and has good reputation).

Summary

Generally Google takes its own time to index new websites, and the best way to make sure Google indexes your site is to get a very relevant text link from a reputed site, but it isn’t easy always. But however, remember to have the basics health check done, so that when the bots are here, you have everything in place.