Especially now I have started another blog, www.protwitter.net, this blog of mine has really been neglected. I have been finding it really hard to think of new content ideas, and haven’t got any plans or goals and I think it is just about time that I do something about it and get some.

What is this blog about?

I never intended this blog to be just about search engine optimization and link building. It is true that I was very passionate about these subjects at the time, but the reason I got the domain name www.joeldrapper.com and not something SEO related was because I never wanted this to happen.

However somehow it has come to be a blog about that in my mind, and this, I believe, is what is limiting my creativity. So I have decided to stop and write down a few topics that I would like to cover in my blog in the future ahead.

• Google - News, Tips, Tools, etc.
• Search Engine Optimization and Link Building
• Web Apps - Tools and websites that I find interesting
• Marketing - Much more then just SEO
• Blogging - Yes, although I am struggling especially with this blog, I too have learned a few things that I believe can be of value to my readers.
• Twitter - Most of my twitter tips will be posted to my new blog, www.protwitter.net, however you might see the odd twitter tip now and again over here.
• Social Networking/Media Marketing
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Tech Stuff
• Wordpress Themes
• Stuff

Some things I need to do

1. Be more personal in my writing
2. Write more often
3. Be less limited in what I write and how long each article should be
4. Stop calling my posts articles because that word seems to make me think of 400-500 words +
5. Start linking out more.

Where am I going?

What can you expect from me in the near future?

More twitter tips - I have got great huge lists of articles to write and tools to review for my twitter blog so you should be seeing a lot more updates on protwitter over the next few months. I’m going to be honest and tell you that I started that blog with the intention of flipping (selling) it soon after but I think I have already become too attached to it and my new readers already.

Wordpress Themes - I have been playing around with wordpress themes lately and LOVE it. You should definitely be seeing a lot of wordpress themes here soon. I plan eventually to be designing (and coding) about one theme per week once I get a bit faster at it. I have loads of ideas and scetches and can’t wait to show you them.

Competitions/Contests - Recently I have been seeing loads of contests or whatever you call them all over the blogosphere, but most of them have just been something like this:

If you subscribe to my rss feed by email you will get 1 point. If you leave x number of comments on my posts you will get 2 points. If you blog about this contest…

(Boring, dull, contests that can only be won by chance) Now not all of them are quite like this for example the Blogging Idol 2 is far more practicle, but I have seen them a lot recently and they are just boaring.

Sure it probably helps increase your subscribers, and might also increase the number of comments on your posts, etc. but contests like this are no fun (not to me anyway).

I plan on launching several practicle contests very soon. One of them will be to do with serps and seo, and possibly another todo with twitter and maybe a few more later on, so that will be fun

My Blog Looks Dull

I know. I am going to be making a new theme for it soon, and will also start using pictures in my posts.

Q&A

As I am running low on content ideas how about doing a question and answer session right now?

If you would like to ask me a question, please leave a commet bellow, and I will try to answer it either here, or in a completely new post.

Joel Drapper

The official Google Blog just announced that they are now using advanced optical character recognition, to index PDFs. Google’s search bot can now index PDFs that were produced through scanning in paper documents.

This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found…

…To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter ‘O’, just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

I believe they have already been using similar technology in Google Book search for a while, but bringing this technology to PDFs is certainly a big step toward their goal of making all the world’s information accessible and useful. It has brought countless new documents to searchers that were never available before now.

I wonder just how long it will be before Google start using this and their facial recognition technology for image search.

Read the full post here.

Enjoy a better search experience!

Joel Drapper

Google webmaster central just posted a recap of their live sesssion chat session.

Unfortunate there is no audio.

Last but not least, we are bummed to admit that someone (whose name starts with ‘A’ and ends with ‘M’) uncharacteristically forgot to hit the record button (really!), so there’s unfortunately no audio recording to share :-(.

If I hadn’t had to go to the dentist that day and miss the first part of the session, I would have recorded the audio and the video myself. This would have been great for my blog because 1) I would have published screen captures of the presentations, recordings of the audio, and also the transcript before Google did, and 2) because they would likely link to my post from their blog post if I commented saying that I had the audio myself.

I am so sorry to have let you all down.

But at least you can see the presentations bellow and also the questions and answers here. Next time, I will try harder.

John’s slides on “Frightening Webmastering Myths”

Jonathan’s slides on “Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools”

Maile’s slides on “Where We’re Coming From”

As time passes, I am sure I will add more, but here is a list of the blogs that I read, and I am sure can be a help to you.

They are currently in no particular order.

• Search Engine Journal
  
• ShoeMoney
• Thou Shall Blog
• Blog About Your Blog
• Blogtrepreneur
• Copy Blogger
• Daily Blog Tips
• Entrepreneur’s Journey
• Hussein’s Blog
• Inline SEO
• Insight Writer
• Justiline
• Link Building Best Practises
• Collin Lahay
• Linkative
• Linkers Blog
• Men With Pens
• Money Bites
• Quitting The Day Job
• Search Engine Guide
• SEOmoz Blog
• The University Kid
• TylerCruz
• Link Buildr
• WIPE
• Winning The Web
• WordPress Max
• Wordpress Modder
• 1st Web Designer
• Blog Design Blog
• Blogging Bits
• Caroline Middlebrook
• Creating Revenue Online
• Digital Labz
• Webmaster Central Blog
• Pixel Head
• Pro Blogger
• Ramblings Of An Unknown
• Sly Visions
• Invesp Blog
• The Net Fool
• Blogsessive
• Online Marketing Blog
• Performancing
• Search Engine Land
• SEO By The Sea
• SEO Smarty
• SEO Design
• Clog Money

Do you have a blog that you would like to recommend me? Please leave a comment or send it via my contact form.

Google webmaster central announced that they are going to have an open chat session today (22 October 2008) at 9am PDT (5pm GTM).

They will be using the new Google moderator tool, which should make it really easy to post questions and vote on your favorites.

The chat will go on for about an hour.

Here’s what it is all about:

INTRO: A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides

PRESO: A 15 minute presentation on “Frightening Myths and Misconceptions” by John Mueller

FAQs: A return of our popular “Three for Three,” in which we’ll have three different Googlers tackling three different issues we’ve seen come up in the Group recently… in under three minutes each!

And lots of Q&A! You’ll have a chance to type questions during the entire session (actually, starting an hour prior!) using our hunky-dory new Google Moderator tool.  Ask, then vote!  With this tool and your insights, we expect the most interesting questions to quickly float to the top.

Sounds great to me! You can find more information on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, or you can register right now here.

Have fun! See you there!

Joel Drapper

Before I start, let me just briefly explain what “On Page SEO” and “Off Page SEO” mean.

On Page SEO

On Page SEO is changes that you can do to your website to help it rank higher for certain keywords. This would include:

• Optimising your page titles
• Optimising your headings
• Using search engine friendly urls
• Using a search engine friendly menu system
• Internal linking
• Renewing your domain name for a few years ahead
• Adding meta descriptions
• Adding meta keywords
• Image alternitave text (alt)
• Keyword Research
• Quality Content
• Etcetera…

Off Page SEO

Off Page SEO is basically getting other pages to link to your site. This can be done in a number of ways. Here is a list of the Top 10 Methods of Building Links to your site.

Now back to the question: Which is more important? Off page, or On Page SEO?

In a way, they are both just as important as each other. Off page seo is almost completely pointless without good on page seo, and on page seo is also almost completely pointless without good off page seo.

However, on page seo can be done to an extent where you have to stop where as off page seo is never ending.

Website Grader is a great tool to help you check your on page seo against your competitors.

Although I said “off page seo will never stop”, you may well get to the point with your website / blog where you have so many readers that are social bookmarking you, blogginb about you, linking to you, etc. that your time is better spent writing good content then doing any kind of off page SEO because when you publish new content, that is all done for you by your readers for free.

Overall, I think probabily on page SEO is the most important once your website is quite well established because, if you publish quality content, others will link to you with out you even having to ask them to.

CNET announced that there is a new blog born every half second. Only a very small amount of these blogs make it big. Here are some tips that I learned in my first month or so of blogging that will help you to jump start the traffic and keep them coming back.

1. Write Five Good Articles

Before you start promoting your blog, you need to have some content on it. I recommend writing five great articles before anything else otherwise those that do come to your blog won’t stay long and might not come again.

2. Find and Subscribe to a few related blogs

Using Google Blog Search or Technorati you can find some brilliant blogs related to yours. I recommend subscribing to these related blogs because 1) you can learn from them, and 2) they already have targeted traffic that you can tap into with comments, trackbacks, guest posts, etc. but that will come later.

3. Burn your feed

I recommend going to feedburner.com and burning your feed. Feed Burner is great because it provides some great analytics, is user friendly, provides email subscriptions, and also you can monetize it with Google adsense if you want to.

4. Get Google Analytics

Before you start getting traffic, you need to have some kind of analytics running so that you can track how much traffic your blog is getting, the top content of your blog, refering sites, and much, much more. I recommend using google analytics which is free.

5. Get Twitter

Twitter is amazing and is one of the top traffic sources for my blog. It is so much more then telling people “What you are doing”. Think of it more like a chat and a way to network with others. Don’t use it completely to promote your blog share useful links, talk to others, be social and add your blog to the “web” section.

6. Don’t forget the RSS button

For about a month my blog didn’t even have an RSS button on it! I know it sounds stupid but I forgot. A lot of themes already come with buttons, but if not then you can find some good ones on Google. Or you could create your own one like I did.

7. Encourage Comments

It is really great when people can see comments on your article. There are some ways that you can encourage this to happen. Here are a few WordPress plugins that I use on my blog to help with this.

Dofollow - If you don’t know what dofollow is then read this article, but a lot of people do, and if you install this dofollow plugin people will comment more on your articles because they get something in return. Also once you set this up, you can submit your own blog to a lot of the search engines and directories mentioned in my post, How to find dofollow blogs.

Comment Luv - Comment luv is a plugin that will check if the commentator’s link is a blog, and if it is will also link to his latest blog post.

Top Commentator - Is a plugin that will show sitewide links to the top x number of commentators. This will keep people coming back.

Keyword Luv - Allows commentators to type Their Name@Their Keywords, and their keywords will become the link. Another great way to encourage comments.

8. Add social bookmarking buttons

If you use WordPress there is a plugin called sociable which will add a few customisable, skinnable, social bookmarking buttons bellow each post. This is really useful if lots of people bookmark your posts. Or you can use an addthis button.

9. Submit your blog to RSS directories

RSS directories are great because they automatically update with links to your latest content. This helps get your new posts indexed by Google fast. Here is a list of RSS directories.

10. Follow Twitter Users

I will write more about finding who to follow on twitter, but for a start I recommend you use this twitter directory to find like minded twitterers and follow them. About one third will follow you back. Also I recommend adding your own twitter account to it.

11. Announce each new post on twitter

Whenever you write a new post to your blog you should announce it on twitter, but make sure this is not the only thing you are doing on twitter. Take some time to join in with others, answer your direct messages, and read your replies.

12. Comment on related blogs

I am not going to go into the details of commenting on blogs here because I already did. Here’s a link to my previous post How to Comment Like a Pro.

13. Consider making a video or even “Video Blogging”

Video marketing is very, very powerful especially if you have a lot of reoccurring videos for a video blog, etc. I recommend using a free service called tubemogul that will submit your videos to loads of video sharing sites like youtube, google video, etc. automatically. Once you have lots of traffic you could even do a live broad cast using a service like ustream.tv.

14. Join some related forums and post regularly

This can be a small, but quality source of traffic, because the people posting to the forums are either wanting help or giving help, related to your blog’s topic, and these two kinds of people are likely to convert to a regular visitor or subscriber.

15. Post once a day to your blog

I know I haven’t been very successful with this, but you should try to post once a day to your blog for the first month.

16. Stumble Your Articles

Before I started using twitter, Stumble upon was the biggest traffic source my website had. It is really important that you do this.

As Desk Coder recommended to me you can use a free website called Social Marker which makes it really easy to bookmark your posts to loads of different social bookmarking websites. Remember with what ever social bookmarking website(s) you use to try and mix your own articles in with others.

I hope these tips have been useful to you. Please share your thoughts in the comments section bellow. Sorry it has been so long since my last article.

Joel Drapper

As mentioned in a previous post, How to find dofollow blogs, commenting on them can be a great source of backlinks, and traffic, but it can also catch the attention of the blogger which is great if they then mention you in one of their articles.

Do Not

Before I talk about how you should comment let me first say how you should not. Don’t ever just say “Great Post” or “I love your blog”. Comments like this are likely to be deleted by the administrator and if not then they won’t help much with traffic. They are pointless, and worthless.

You wouldn’t jump into the middle of a conversation between a group of people, say “You people rock!“, give them your url and walk away. The same applies to comments.

You are the expert

You need to be seen as an expert in the subject. (This is why it is important to comment on blogs that are related to your own.)

When you come to a post first read it through and then think to yourself, “If I was writing this article, what more would I add to it?” then comment accordingly.

If you say something new, or perhaps even correct the blogger on a mistake he made, you will attract the blogger and his reader’s attention.

Add to the conversation

Be sure to read through the comments that are already present. Look for questions that you can answer, try to add to the conversation.

More Do Nots

Don’t leave your link in the comment. When people are looking through comments and they come across a link, they will often think SPAM and pass right over it. Almost every blogging software out there has a “url” field. Use it!

Don’t get the idea that your comment has to be several paragraphs long either. This is another way to get people to pass over it.

Wordpress

If you are commenting on a wordpress blog, you might want to first look around for these plugins.

Top Commentator - This plugin will display a site wide link to the top (usually 5 or 10) commentators. You can find it by looking through the sidebars. If this plugin is present then you might want to consider subscribing to the blog’s rss feed.

Comment Luv - Comment luv will update with a link to your latest blog post right bellow your comment using the blog post’s title as the anchor text. If you comment on enough blogs that use this plugin, your new posts will gain a lot of backlinks very fast which will get them indexed quicker. Sometimes you have to tick a box to enable it.

Keyword Luv - If you see the words “This site uses KeywordLuv. Enter YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field to take advantage.” then do just that.

I am sure you won’t but I must say this Please do NOT comment SPAM! About twice a day I have to delete comments that contain just a url. That is it! I hate spam and I am sure you do too so don’t be a part of it.

I hope you find these tips useful. You are welcome to practice in the comments section bellow!

Joel Drapper

Commenting on dofollow blogs can be a great way to gain traffic, and great backlinks. Here are a few ways to find such blogs.

Dofollow Blog Directories

• “Do Follow” Blog Directory
• Follow List
• Bigfoot Web Marketing’s Dofollow Blog Directory
• Dofollow Directory

Dofollow Blog Search Engines

• Dofollow Diver
• DoFollow Blog Search Engine
• Dofollow Search
• My Blog Follows
• Dofollow Blog Search Engine Beta
• W3EC’s Dofollow Blog Search Engine

Once you find a few related blogs, I recommend first of all subscribing to their rss feed. This way you can try to comment on as many posts as possible as they are published.

I also recommend using this tool to check their internal pages page ranks.

Warning: It can be very tempting to go ahead and comment on each high page rank post on a blog as fast as possible, but this will look unnatural to the blogger. So save a list of the posts with high page rank to read through and comment on later. Try to only comment on two posts a day per blog.

Remember that links coming from non related sites are almost worthless so it is important to find blogs on the same topic.

Look forward to another article tomorrow explaining how to comment properly on blogs to catch the attention of the blogger and get more traffic.

Oh, I almost forgot! My blog is dofollow and has some great plugins like Top Commentator, Comment Luv, and Keyword Luv so if you want some SEO related backlinks, here is the place!

Some of you may know that I tried to host a competition earlier on and it didn’t go very well. Other then seo google tips, only one other person entered. I think next time I should offer a prize like $100 or something and hopefully get more entries.

However, the time has come to announce the winners of the only two entries.

It appears that the tool that I had said that I would be using (Google Position Tool) has been baned by google or something and is no longer working, so I will have to use another one called Search Engine Position.

The winners

The first runner up is Free Flash Portals - Using one of his parked domain’s he did a pretty good job for the first week of link building. He set up a wordpress blog completely focused on “seo serps” and posted several articles to it. His internal linking was good, but possibly too much for readers. He managed to get his site indexed by google but that is about all. As far as ranking for the term “seo serps” the tool didn’t even find his position. But overall a very good attempt. Congratulations

and our winner is…

SEO Google Tips!

Using his already active blog, SEO Google Tips, he posted an article entitled “SEO SERPs” explaining what “SERPs” means, etc. Very little internal linking compared to Free Flash Portals, but the authority his site already had really helped him rank. His position today for the term “SEO SERPs” is #6.

Congratulations to our winner!

I hope to make a better competition latter on with a descent prize. Look forward to meeting you there.

Joel Drapper