Rockin’ SEO Blog - SEO Tools

SEO as a Search Engine Scamming device, according to Fox News

This week, Fox News which is one of the most well-known news and television broadcasters around, reported that SEO is being used as a tool to scam search engines which resulted to many SEO practitioners vehemently defending themselves against being called scammers. The controversial news article appeared online last August 17 in an article titled “Top Online Marketing Jobs To Leave You Friendless”. A lot of rebuttals to the text were made and the most dominant of all was the fact that the term which was being described in the article is not SEO but typo-domaining.

Viral SEO storms created by one woman

Who could have ever thought that one woman who has a one page website has the ability to create SEO storms on a daily basis? Sounds impossible right? But if you look at the background and context of this story, you will soon get rid of all your second guessing. Brenda Piddy is a spy photographer who stands at the side of Death Valley every single day in hopes of getting shots of new vehicles before anybody else gets them much to the dismay of the auto manufacturers.

SEO + SMO = Perfect marriage

It’s quite obvious that if you’re reading this weekly update that you’re already familiar with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. On the other hand, SMO stands for Social Media Optimization which is a new tool being used to make your site adaptable to be viewed on Social Media sites. The combination of both tools will definitely bring your website to a whole new level because you will be taking advantage of two platforms which are search engines and social media.

The importance of website validation

One of the most overlooked angles to SEO is website validation which is basically an evaluation of your website to make sure that it doesn’t have any errors. Some SEO practitioners are too caught up with the thought of making their website fare better in the rankings that they don’t care whether or not their website is filled with errors. This article argues that website validation is very important. The bulk of website evaluation comes from the website design itself which is a very important component of SEO.

Seven reasons why Twitter would work for any business

The majority of people usually think that Twitter’s only purpose is for socialization purposes only and for keeping up with your network of friends. But Twitter can also be used to help out your business. In this article, seven reasons are given out as to how Twitter can work for your business. These seven reasons include: building and expanding your network so that you will have the ability to build more relationships, top of mind awareness with customers and prospects, to learn more about anything and everything, listening to what people are saying about you, learning more about the competition, transforming your customers into raving fans and developing your customer service to be lightning fast.

Updating your social media profile

Most of us just create our social media profiles at the beginning where we become members of the site and most of us usually forget about it and leave it as it is. But let me tell you that updating your social media profile is very important especially if you want to attract more people to your profile. There are many ways wherein you can add fresh content to your website and one of them is to use Hellotxt to do it for you. Hellotxt is a free tool that you can use to help you in updating your profile in social media sites.

How to build a vibrant online community?

WordCampDallas 2009 was formed to be a venue for SEO and SEM practitioners and hopefully would serve as an aid to make things easier and take advantage of different tools that will make SEO and SEM more effective. The 7 rules for creating a vibrant online community is given out by Cali Lewis and her audio visual presentation can be viewed from the link provided above.

Getting to know the social media platforms

The highlights of this article are building your own social media platform by evaluating the success of the existing platforms, creating a plan in three key steps and understanding the whole picture of social media platforms so that you will have a better grasp of working your way around them. The six steps that you should undertake are: understanding the benefits of social media, incorporating the social media success factors, developing and utilizing a 2MCE process and identifying the different platforms.

Increasing your landing page conversion in 7 easy steps

There might be a million and one reasons why your landing page conversion is not improving but the main one that you should look into is the quality of your landing page itself. Most of us are guilty of incorporating every data and information in our landing pages that it looks way too cluttered which would definitely diver the attention of our potential customers. In this article, seven easy steps are given out in order to increase landing page conversion. These steps are: calling actions to matter, having digestable content, minimizing choices, keeping it simple, avoiding lengthy texts, envoking trust and avoiding too much marketing speak.

Determining if your business model is in line with Google

In every SEO campaign, various Google tools undeniably takes on a huge chunk on the project’s implementation and execution. But this does not mean that the tools that Google offers when it comes to SEO is free for all. Contrary to this popular belief, Google actually has a lot of strict rules and regulations that you have to follow in order to use their tools. One wrong move can possibly have you banned from doing business again with the famous search engine. This is the main reason why determining if your own business model is in accordance to what Google sees as acceptable is an important thing to consider. One of the main pet peeves that Google has is towards affiliates, especially those in AdWords.

Reasons why journalists will write about your website

The author of this article is speaking from his own personal experience after his website had been featured in the New York Times which is a great feat for someone who is considered as a small business owner who owns a little known website. He gives out different reasons why journalists will write about your website and the reasons are as follows: the need to create a list, the need for a seasonal story, making a follow up on a big story, writing about a competitor, writing about a particular group, citing an example for a nationwide trend, example to illustrate federal legislation, the need for expert comment and featuring an award winning person.

Tools for Google Caffeine

In this blog post, different tools that you can use for Caffeine are give out. These tools include: Google Caffeine Bookmarklet, Plug Caffeine into Firefox Extension, Ranking Checker, Google vs. Google Caffeine and Google.ie and Google.de vs. Caffeine.

Knowing the basics of SEO before trying out the fancy stuff

Most newbies in SEO will want to try on the fancy stuff at first before learning the basics. This is a kind of thing wherein you leap first before you learn but you always have to keep in mind that sticking to the basics is important especially if you’re just starting out with SEO. This article gives out different tips that you can use in order to master the basics first before you turn it up a notch. The following tips given out are: avoiding JavaScript or Flash navigation, keeping your site’s architecture as flat as possible, staying away from the parameter’s URL, using internal links and treating sitemaps as your friends.

IYP SEO Rankings Report for 2009

The Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) is a common source for SEO rankings and the author tried to lift the top ranking SEO sites for 2009 in this article. His methodology for extracting the results are as follows: searching Google, querying in a specific format, each of the top 10 ranking was in reverse order and the points for each site are added up. The results of this ranking test yielded the following sites in the top 5: Superpages, Citysearch, Yelp, Yahoo Local and InsiderPages.

Are search engines spying on SEOs?

One of the most controversial issues to bombard SEOs is the possibility that search engines are spying on SEOs by lurking in SEO forums. In these SEO forums, the SEO practitioners can initiate link buying or link exchange with other people. Spam is also being monitored in these forums.

Headlining your Social Media campaigns and articles

It all starts with your title or headline. More often than not, if you have a headline which is truly eye catching and easy to read, you will have an easier time attracting and luring people to go into your site. In this article, there is a total of 102 proven ideas that you can use for this purpose.

Link baiting 101

Link baiting is probably the most famous and most used link building technique. Compared to other link building techniques, link baiting is probably the most ethical and accepted way of gathering links for your website. In this article, links to 45 link baiting resources are given out in hopes that people will have an easier time doing this process.

Steps in creating an authority blog

In this article, a total of 10 steps are given out as a guide in building an authority blog. The steps are as follows: creating a winning difference, teaching people, having a pillar content, using headlines and hooks, making friends, putting money in your list, never neglecting SEO, giving Google a helping hand, investing in a high quality blog theme and looking after your followers.

Social Media questions that you need to know the answers to

The author of this blog post being a facilitator for Social Media seminars and presentations have a lot of knowledge when it comes to the most common questions that people have in terms of social media. Some of the most common questions being asked are: if we open up to comments, won’t people criticize us?; what different sites should we participate in?; how many interns do we need to carry out the project?; and what is the exact return of investment in social media?

Backlink research and checking will surely pay off

Backlink research especially if done with your primary competitors will surely yield results that you can use to your own advantage. In this article, three issues are being discussed which are: practical uses for competitive intelligence, research methodology and fun data points for your niche research. In doing competitive research, you are doing the following things: comparing yourself with your competitor in a quantitative way, finding out if the domain that you are in is worth the price that your paying for, finding out which of your competitors have a strong sense of brand management and assessing the relationships of your competitors.

Guide to creating effective title tags

The title tags are probably regarded as the most overlooked part of your SEO campaign. Every SEO practitioner should know that title tags are also important in SEO and in this article, several ideas and guidelines are given so that title tags can also be effective in implementing SEO. Some of the benefits of title tags are keeping SERP listings in the website, simplifying things for networks and reinforces the branding component. The steps that you should take in creating effective title tags are adding keywords first, using action words and using keyword variations.

Reporting your competitors

In a recent SEO conference, one main question that was raised by someone in the audience was what to do if ever your competitors are buying links and taking an unfair advantage over you. Well, the solution is simple, you can report them to the search engines. The key thing that is being stressed in this article is the fact that search engines are not your friends. Search engines are businesses and they do every act that they can to earn more money. Basically, in the SEO world, nobody would like a rat and karma will be out to get you if you do tell on someone. Like the famous saying goes, to each his own.

Things that you should know about the Bing and Yahoo merger

Just last week, the news that the search engine segment of Yahoo will be powered by Microsoft hit the social media air waves. The main things that are being discussed and are in the process of being finalized include the following: the deal will last for 10 years, Bing (Microsoft’s search engine arm) will be the source of all Yahoo searches both organic and paid and the whole deal is expected to be finalized in a 24-month period. In turn, the biggest changes that are in store for SEO include: focusing on Google, acting on Yahoo services now or switching to another search engine and optimizing for Bing so that you will be ready once the project enters its implementation phase.

The consequences of ignoring social media

This article basically talks about the different things that companies should realize when it comes to social media. It all boils down to the fact that ignoring social media makes you mute. Without social media, companies are better fitted for the long run. Everything that we do on the internet is concerned with social media, if you are one company or website who does not use this tool, you will surely get behind from the rest of the pack.

Site architecture is important too

Everyone who knows something about SEO will surely know that content is considered king in SEO. But a new ideology is now being employed by practitioners and that is the fact that site architecture is also an important component in any campaign. Site architecture is the more technical side of SEO and it surely helps with the overall layout and design of not only SEO but the whole website as well. In improving site architecture, the first step that you can do is to get to know the different problem areas in your site and find ways on how to improve them.

Evaluating link building

The first line of this article says it all, link building is considered as the most important and at the same time most misunderstood part of SEO. Different tips are being given by the author so that link building will be an easier task for SEO people. Some of these ideas include: making sure that the high quality links are a passing variation of valuable key items, using Yahoo’s site explorer to investigate links, using SEOMoz’s linkscape to test links, and never ever chase a page which has more than 50 links.

Clicking and Linking in Twitter

In Twitter, the main trend is to follow different persons around in this social media site, but the main question lies, why should you follow someone on Twitter? Following someone on Twitter is a good tool that you can use especially if you want to increase the traffic in your site. This article offers the best thing that can be done in order to do this and that is to offer something that is value added to your potential followers.

Google’s knowledge of the different websites you own

This article discusses the possibility that Google might know the different websites that you own even if you don’t register all these sites with this specific search engine. With all the different tools and programs that Google has, it certainly has the power to know which owns what in cyberspace but this is one issue that the company is pretty mum about.

Using Press Releases to get quality backlinks

The primary intention of press releases is to disseminate fresh information about your company or website, but now it is also being used as a tool to increase back links in order for your site to gain more popularity and traffic. With press releases, you reach a wider audience than what you typically have. If you don’t have anything new to write about when it comes to your company, focus on writing about new information in the industry that you are in. If you still can’t think of what to write about, you can come up with a good story and then spinoff a press release about it.

Using Online PR to build links

In connection to the first article, in this blog post using online public relations in order to build links for your site is the main topic. This is especially important for small businesses who do not have the right amount of resources to spend for their advertising and promotions. In this blog post, small businesses are being encouraged to use the internet in order to promote their site and business and gain more links which would increase their site’s ranking.

Dissecting your link intentions

More often that not, people who are building links for their site are lost in the main intention, or worse, do not have any intention why they are doing such. In the SEO game, it is easy to think that the more links you have the better and you will be sucked in to that mentality especially if you want to get ahead of the SEO game for the wrong reasons. This blog post dissects the main intent on why people want to gain more links. Ultimately, the blog digresses saying that the intention would be left to the best interest of the main engineer of the SEO but the search engine who only looks for the algorithm in any website would turn a blind eye on the intention of link building whatever it may be.

Yahoo and Microsoft search deal?

This weekend we saw the possibility of Yahoo scraping off its own search engine technique and possibly leasing off its main rival’s technique. Many people are asking for the main reasons why Yahoo is doing such a thing. Evidently, the people from Yahoo said that using their own technology costs a lot of money and they decided that leasing off from another power search engine will be a more feasible option for their company. The deal has not been closed yet but both companies are looking at early 2010 as the time line for inking the deal.

Vince Update

It’s been almost a month since Google has submitted its Vince update to its UK users. In the Vince update, it is stated that Google will be looking at these four different factors which are: trust, authority, reputation and pagerank when it comes to looking at websites. This actually squashes the belief that Google also looks for the brand popularity that comes with the website and that this factor can greatly affect the ranking that a webpage will have.

Getting technical with SEO

Most SEO practitioners will try to shy away from the technical side of SEO arguing that this job can better fit the computer scientists or engineers who have more knowledge about it than them. In this blog post, different technical tips that you might find useful are given out. These tips include: ensuring that the site has a reliable hosting platform, using geo-targeting, getting familiar with server response codes and redirects and site architecture amongst other things.

Are you an SEO predator?

Predatory SEO is characterized by being cutthroat, deceptive and dishonest. This blog post sheds light on the widespread presence and continuing grasp of predatory SEO in the internet. Basically, the author tells us that the people should be vigilant enough to know whether or not the website is saying factual SEO facts or not.

Using trends can help your website

Every little thing that is connected to the internet is subject to change. Even the SEO techniques that we have are subject to change. This blog post stresses that using trends in your website can help your business stay afloat and even prosper. The main benefit of SEO is that you can pinpoint exactly what specific month or time is the peak season and you can use this information so that it can work for you too. Different avenues where in you can see the current trends that you can use include Google AdWords Keywords Tool and Google Trends.

Top SEO blogs that you can use

There has been many ‘Top SEO Blogs’ articles out there that you probably lost count all in all. But this particular list is different from every other list because the blogs listed in this one is personally handpicked by the author and he swears by them. Different blogs included in his list include: Search Geeks, SEO Peeps, IR Watching, SEO Bad Asses, SEO Collectives and many others.

Designing a better landing page

Again, one of the most often overlooked parts in your SEO site is your landing page. Most SEO practitioners often disregard this part because they think that search engines won’t bother in checking this part of their webpage. But contrary to popular belief, your landing pages are extremely important in increasing your site’s rankings. Basically, there are four basic things that you can look out for in a landing page and these are: research, design, copy and testing and modification. Different tips given out by the author of this blog post in order to improve your own landing page include: knowing your visitors, putting up images, building your visitors’ trust and knowing exactly what your visitors are looking for.

Internet Marketing Tips from Daniel Scocco

Daniel Scocco is the creator and main blogger of Daily Blog Tips, a popular blog in the internet which talks about internet marketing and social media. This article is actually an interview wherein the interviewer asks Daniel about the main idea or inspiration for his blog, major influences that brought about his blogging style, details and statistics about the Daily Blog Tips, his favorite posts in his blog and his personal favorite blogs which include other blogs.

Free SEO tools that actually work

For all SEO and SEM practitioners, finding out which SEO tools are free to use is a gold mine in itself already, but if these tools actually work, it brings about a whole new level of using SEO. This article gives off 100 tools that you can use in SEO which actually are proven to work very effectively. The different tools mentioned in this list are divided in different categories such as keyword tools, online tools, browser plugins, website ranking tools, monitoring tools, website optimization tools, sitemap tools, link tools, trend analysis tools, competitor research tools, resources and SEO services.

Google tools to SEO your iGoogle home page

A lot of people are using iGoogle as their home page, but do you know that you can further enhance this page so that you will be able to use it more effectively. This article gives off different tools that you can use for that same purpose. Different tools that were given are Google tools, competitive analysis tools, PPC, quick links to Google search tools and keyword research tools.

Social Media ABC’s

For people who are not that well-versed with social media, this article gives off a fresh take on the different things that you need to be aware of if you want to wander into the social media world. Literally, things that start with the 26 letters of the alphabet that will help you have a grasp and better understanding of how social media works.

Keywords and probability

We all know that keywords are the backbone of any SEO campaign. In this article, keywords are presented as an abbreviated thought that the SEO practitioner might have so that this thought will grow into the whole campaign but you need to keep in mind that you always need to go back to your central thought all the time and that is your keyword. With keywords, you need to remember that keyword density is always important and measuring the click through ratio of keywords is also a must so that you will know which keywords are profitable and which are not.

Hacking and cyber crime

Believe it or not, even if we are living in a fast-paced technological world, cyber hacking is still very rampant. Just this week, Twitter was hacked. Imagine, one of the world’s most popular and biggest social media sites was hacked, what danger will this pose to other smaller sites who do not have the same protection and security as huge websites? Cyber crime is very visible today but this does not mean that we cannot find out ways on how to fight it.

Business ethics and SEO

When we are talking about ethics and SEO, we usually conjure the ideas of White Hat or Black Hat SEO but what we don’t usually think about is the business ethics that should also be a prominent theme in your websites. In the world of ethics, the basic rule is very simple, do not do unto others what you don’t want to be done to you. What goes around WILL come around. If you decide to play dirty with a competing website, rest assured it will come back to haunt you one way or another so you have to be careful. I am not saying that you can’t have friendly competition with your competitors, competition is always healthy but you have to make sure that it is within the bounds of ethics.

Online advertising and adult advertising?

There is an ongoing idea that adult advertising is one of the leading sources of online advertising. According to Google, people search for the word ‘porn’ now more than ever compared to the previous years. But if you look at the list of the top 100 sites, very few of these adult websites are included there. The reason for this can be possibly pointed at the use of long term keywords in adult advertising.

Getting kicked out of Twitter

There are people who are getting kicked out or suspended in Twitter. What are they doing wrong? This article highlights a specific case wherein a person was suspended in Twitter because of suspicious activity.

Be careful while using StumbleUpon

If you are using Stumbleupon, you will notice that there is a ratings guide that you need to abide so that you will not have problems with posting content in the site. If the rating is titled ’suitable for all’ this means that everyone can view what you posted. On the other hand if the rating is ‘r-rated’ this means that your post contains nudity or violence. Lastly, if it is rated ‘x-rated’, your post possibly contains pornography, excessive nudity or a nude photo.

SEO Boondoggle?

Let’s admit it, there are a lot of SEO articles out there and majority of which are just complete nonsense, hence the term boondoggle which is actually defined as work done of little value just to look or appear busy. This blog article tackles this topic and discusses why some SEO sites are submitting themselves to be victims of such. To avoid being a boondoggle, the client must be extensively involved in the whole SEO process even if the SEO work has been outsourced to another professional company.

The relation between search and social media

Big companies bank on their huge budget to boost their brand awareness and brand name, but small companies cannot afford this kind of luxury. Most companies make the mistake of simply building the brand or company itself but they must realize that all of these are in vain because all these are nonsense without visibility. This blog post suggests two ways that you can do to increase your company’s visibility. The first one is to do your keyword research and get to know what the people are looking for and the second thing that you can do is to use social media sites to increase your site’s visibility.

Content ideas plus link building

This article starts off with stating a statistic that 69% of Americans go online to enable them to get through the recession. You might be asking why? Simple. If you go online there are increased chances of you finding bargains and discounts that will help you get most bang for your buck. With this fact in mind, you can now capitalize on making your website more attractive to this specific market. What you can do is to: encourage linking to your site by reaching out to your immediate network, writing a press release, use Twitter and other social media sites.

Do not be an SEO criminal

If you don’t want to be labeled as a SEO criminal by Google, you will definitely not do any of the following: big mouthing your SEO tactics, your sites are all tied together which makes you an easy target, over optimizing some of the keywords, link profile is unnatural, having a nofollow link attribute to sculpt PageRank, buy and sell obvious paid links and using a spam site to increase your rankings. Doing any of the aforementioned ways will surely put you in the Google hot seat and possibly get banned from the search engine.

China: No to Digg?

One of the more controversial news articles that were released last week highlights this topic. With China having a history of banning popular sites, this came as a no-surprise to many. There are cases where Chinese bloggers or bloggers who are based in China would try to submit their submissions to Digg but the site would hang and be like that for a long time, prompting people to believe that there is a possibility that China is actually in the process of banning the popular social media site.

Common misconceptions about Black Hat SEO

The term Black Hat SEO is also synonymous to unethical SEO. Major search engines sites like Google are particularly adamant on battling this SEO technique which are being used by certain individuals and companies who have the intention of increasing traffic to their site by employing fraudulent practices like link farming and using invisible white text. Here are some misconceptions that are mentioned in the article: Black Hat SEO strategies will yield short-term results, Black Hat SEO are not as effective now because search engines are getting smarter against it and Black Hat SEO will poison your corporate image.

Guide to building links internationally

International link building is one way of expanding your target audience and at the same time, reaching your local areas specifically. In this article which can also be called as a crash course to international link building, you will see that there are several things that you have to know before you can actually do it. These steps include: identifying your international SERPs competitors, prospecting for international link building policies, qualifying international link building opportunities and actually acquiring international links.

Business strategy that you should have for international SEO

In connection with the blog that was discussed previously, this article tackles certain business strategies that you can undertake if you want to break into international SEO. This article also tackles geotargetting wherein you specify which areas your SEO campaign will be visible in. Geotargetting is extremely helpful especially if you have a certain market for your products or services.

Resources for mobile SEO

An emerging trend is now taking the form of mobile SEO and this article gives off resources that you can use in order to help you enhance your mobile SEO campaign. The resources are grouped as follows: mobile internet and search, mobile SEO blogs, mobile SEO best practices and ranking factors, mobile web design, iPhone SEO, mobile analytics and other mobile SEO resources.

Technical review for Geotargetting

As previously mentioned, geotargetting is extremely helpful especially if you have a particular segment of the market that you are catering to. In order to determine if you are ready to use geotargetting, you need to qualify first three different characteristics which are: query, interface and SERP. You also have to use explicit signals and implicit identification while doing these.

Most owners of small businesses don’t even bother thinking about incorporating SEO in their marketing and advertising plan thinking that this technique is better suited for bigger corporations. What they don’t realize is that their type of business is the one more in need of an SEO strategy because they have limited resources but at the same time they need more exposure so that they can be competent enough to stand next to big brands and multi-million dollar corporations. For this week, Rockin SEO will concentrate on SEO techniques, tools and information that small businesses can utilize so that they can join in the SEO bandwagon also and not be left behind.

Mobile SEO and Mobile Analytics

People often interchange these two very different subjects which should not be the case. In this blog article, there are 33 resources that you can use in order to utilize Mobile SEO or Mobile Analytics. The different resources that Small and Medium Businesses can use are categorized under: Mobile Internet and Search, Mobile SEO blogs, Mobile SEO best practices and ranking factors, Mobile Web Design, iPhone SEO, Mobile Analytics and Other Resources.

Google targets small business owners

It is a very known fact that almost 90% of all existing businesses are categorized under small and medium businesses which account a lot when it comes to income generation and profits. Google understands this fact so they are now targeting small business owners to use their tools in order to achieve SEO. For example, Google Maps is capitalizing on giving increased exposure for small businesses with the introduction of the ‘favorite places’ list that enumerates the happening places in a certain locality which in turn promotes the small businesses and establishments in that area.

The right business strategy to achieve international SEO

Aiming for international exposure is an important marketing goal that small businesses should have. Like I said, this is what these kinds of businesses need because they have limited resources that can be allocated with marketing. In this blog post, the basics of SEO localization are discussed which includes language, hosting location, CC ltd, putting an address to every page and local links.

Easy SEO

Small businesses capitalize on easy steps that they can use to make the most out of their limited resources. In this article, easy ways on how to project, forecast, estimate and predict the return of investment for SEO are highlighted. These steps are as follows: picking keywords, determining if keywords have commercial content, determining the search volume, analyzing your competitor’s ranking, estimating ranking costs, estimating the traffic at each position, calculating revenue at each position and dividing estimated revenues by the cost.

Small business and blogging

Since we are on the topic of SEO for small and medium businesses, this topic can easily encompass the need for such businesses to establish and write their own blog. In this article, the many benefits of blogging are highlighted such as offering company news to people who need it, ability to provide customer support and easily receiving customer feedback. Basically, the choice of whether to make your own business blog or not is completely up to the idea that the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages.

Social Media Marketing is an important tool not just in organizing your social life but also in SEO purposes. You can get inside Social Media Marketing sites to promote your site so that you will achieve a wider audience for your campaign. This week, Rockin SEO will reveal top 5 topics regarding Social Media Marketing and Social Media Search.

Sphinn

Sphinn is probably the best site that can be used by any SEO professional or rather someone who is concerned with social marketing. Sphinn is the first social media search engine and can also be used in networking with fellow users. These two main functionality of the site are what makes it work. Sphinn also gives credit to popular articles that are most searched and viewed by its users.

Flickr for marketing

In hindsight, Flickr is primarily a social photo sharing site wherein users can upload their pictures to be shared with their friends and other contacts. Now, Flickr can even be used in social marketing because of its strong following. Probably one of the factors why Flickr is very popular is its tie up with Yahoo. Once people search Yahoo for images, it searched the Flickr database. This enables the users and their photos to reach a wider audience.

Ongoing SEO implementation

Companies who use SEO usually just stop with the monitoring when the project has already been implemented and has reached the final phase. This is a wrong move because the implementation would have to be carried out to the evaluation and assessment whether the campaign was effective or not. Ongoing SEO implementation is important because it will eventually help in the spotting of mistakes and factors which are not benefiting the campaign.

Google’s Firefox extension

In this new Firefox version, the Google extension have the following added functions to it. This include: viewing paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities, viewing paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions, open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison, viewing paid and organic search results from a specific IP address and viewing paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.

Stumbleupon

Like any other Social Media sites, Stumbleupon is a great tool that you can use to bring in traffic to your site. But if you misuse it, you will probably get banned from it and be a liability instead of an advantage. With Stumbleupon you can expand your network and share your site to millions of existing users.

The internet is changing at such a crazy phase that sometimes it’s very hard to keep up with the trends that are introduced every once in a while. Some trends will stay but others are just around to create buzz and then die an unfortunate death in the internet world. In this week’s listing, top 5 SEO trends are discussed.

Paying for links

Links are an important component of any SEO campaign and nothing surely beats paying for links if you want to get the best links out there the right way. A lot of SEO sites will employ link farming or just randomly putting links in their sites without any relevance whatsoever to their site and this will lead them to be banned from search engines because doing this can constitute fraud. While we do not endorse link buying: one way of buying links is to directly ask the owner of the website and ask them to rent a link. Another venue that is popular at is paid directories.

Instant SEO

SEO cannot be done instantly, there are countless hours and days spent on the planning, implementation and evaluation processes that it is almost impossible to have your site SEO-ready in just 60 minutes. But this insightful article promises just that as it gives a detailed step-by-step plan that you can use if you want to get your site SEO-ready in this specified time frame.

SEO Consulting

Some companies who have achieved having their site SEO-ready with the help of legitimate SEO consultants fall into the popular pitfall of stopping with the actual consultation after they have established their site. This article argues that the best thing that you can do is to have ongoing SEO consultation even after the main goal has been completed. Advantages of doing such are as follows: oversight of implementation, acquiring more links, consultancy services of SEO professionals, more people helping out with SEO and search marketing analytics.

Sphinn.com

One of the trends and tools that has been with us for a long time already is Sphinn, an online site launched by Danny Sullivan with the primary aim of acting as a social news and networking sites for search engine marketing. Sphinn is truly one trend that still enjoys loyal viewers and patrons despite the bad reviews and predictions that it encountered before its actual launch.

Women in SEO

Women have been clamoring for equal rights that are regarded to men for a long time. Now, with the popularity of search engine marketing and SEO, this battle also encompasses these two prevalent topics as women are now holding key roles in this industry. This article primarily sends a message to all women in the field of SEO to continue doing their good work as they are not alone.

We at Rockin’SEO believe that SEO tools are important in carrying out and implementing any SEO campaign. In this update, we will discuss the top 5 blog posts about SEO Tools which will be beneficial in helping any SEO campaign.

The ultimate SEO tools list
Who doesn’t love free stuff over the internet? Especially if it comes off as very effective tools on top of being completely free. In this ultimate listing, different SEO tools are included which meet three requirements. One, these are all very helpful in SEO. Two, all these tools are web-based. Lastly, all the tools listed are completely free. How else can you go wrong? The tools listed in this blog post are grouped in different categories. The categories include backlink analyzing online SEO tools, keyword research and brainstorming tools, domain name online tools, on-site analysis online SEO tools, search related online tools and website traffic and demographics report. And ofcourse, if you are looking for a free keyword tracker that works across search engines, you can always check out our very own free keyword tracking tool.

Tools for SEO diagnostics

Most people who are into SEO have complete disregard when it comes to diagnosing their SEO campaign because they don’t know how much benefit this can bring to them. Diagnosing your SEO campaign will give you feedback on how your SEO campaign is doing and what areas need improvement. The different tools listed in this blog post will surely help you with diagnosing your SEO campaign. The tools mentioned are: QuarkBase.com, CubeStat.com, Statbrain.com, Popuri.us and Test Everything. Different rankings and evaluation are also given to these sites. My favorite is definitely ReviewMyWeb - a free website grader, which gives you a good overview of which components of your website you need to concentrate on. I’m a bit biased as I created this tool recently with my friends. It’s got some great reviews though and you should definitely head over and give this one a try as well!

Easy ways to get links

Any SEO expert will attest to the fact that easy link building is one of the most important tools that anyone can use on SEO. But of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should just incorprorate any link out there to your site because that’s called link farming and is deemed illegal in Google. Search engines will look at both the quantity and quality of the links. Some of the steps given in this article suggests that in order to do link building, you should submit to directories, add resources to generated sites, get online bookmarking badges like Delicious and working with other sites or blogs to get your link published on other sites.

Need help with Keyword Brainstorming?

In SEO, content is king. But if you look at content, you will see that majority of what is used in the web content concentrate on the different keywords that you have. The first step towards finding the right set of keywords is challenging but there are a lot of tools that you can use in brainstorming for different keywords that you can use. In this article, different keyword brainstorming tools are discussed and some of these include Google Sets, MSN cluttering tool, Searchradar, Keyword Map and Urban Dictionary.

Using Google Analytics in tracking SEO rankings

Tracking SEO rankings is also an important way of evaluating the over-all effectiveness of your SEO campaign. Google enables SEO practitioners to have an easier time in dealing with this task by introducing Google Analytics. Using this tools will require you to undergo several steps like setting up a filter and viewing the ranking results.

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