RIO tunes

8/28/2011

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!

10:59 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

Publicize your site by having your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site included in Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search. I went to the official Yahoo! submission of URL page and clicked the link “Submit Your Site for Free”. You will be prompted to log in using your Yahoo! account. For those of you who do not have a Yahoo! account, simply sign up for one. It is Free.

After you have your Yahoo! account, and are logged in, you will see this screen.

Select “Submit Site Feed” and enter the URL of your Blog's site feed. You can use either:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once the Sitemaps are submitted, click the “Authentication” link shown at the top right hand corner of the page.

You will now have to authenticate your site ownership with Yahoo!, by either uploading a verification file to your site, or adding a META tag to your site. The authentication via a META tag was only introduced by Yahoo! recently, on Jan 30, 2007.

Note: Blogs created under Blogger.com or Blogspot.com cannot upload a verification file in the root directory. The first method is therefore NOT applicable to you.

The only way to authenticate your Blogger.com and Blogspot.com blogs with Yahoo! is to add a META tag. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the META Tag as follows:-

<head> <META Tag> <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Remember to replace the META Tag with the code generated by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Yahoo! Site Explorer, click the button that says “Ready to Authenticate” as shown below.

You will see a message that says “Your site is pending authentication.” Check back later, and you will notice that your site is now indexed and crawled by Yahoo!

According to the Yahoo Site Explorer instructions:-

“If you have added the META tag, please keep the tag in your site's home page. We will revalidate your site ownership by checking this META tag regularly.”

It is alright to leave this meta tag as well as the Google sitemap meta tag in your template.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

10:51 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

Submitting your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site to Google Webmaster will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new Webmaster profile.

Upon logging in using your Gmail account, key in your blog site URL, and click OK. You will then be asked to verify your site. This is to ascertain that you are indeed the owner of the site.

There are two ways to verify your site. You can either add a Meta Tag or Upload an HTML file. If you are using the Meta Tag method, Google will generate a Meta Tag code. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site's home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the Meta Tag as follows:-

<head> <META TAG> <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Replace the META TAG with the code generated by Google Webmaster. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Google Webmaster site, you can click the button that says “Verify”.

Note: The second method of uploading an HTML file is NOT applicable to Bloggers using Blogger.com or Blogspot.com because this requires you to upload a file to the root directory of your Blog, which is not possible. There is therefore only one method for you to verify your site, and that is by inserting the Meta Tag as explained above.

After you have had your site verified, click on the Sitemaps tab as shown below. By adding a Sitemap, you will be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the Sitemaps tab, and index your Blog site at a faster rate.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Click the link that says “Add a Sitemap”. This will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The Sitemap URL for any normal website is usually the index page that is stored in the highest-level directory of that site. In the case of Blogger.com or Blogspot.com, the only way to add a Sitemap is to use either of the following 2 Sitemaps:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog's. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once you have added your Sitemaps, you will receive a confirmation telling you that reports are being generated but “may take several hours to update”. Congratulations! You have successfully added your Sitemaps. When you login to your Google Webmaster days later, you should be able to see the indexed pages and statistics of Google webcrawl of your Blog.

Leave the meta tag in the template if you want to view the statistics of your site. If Google can't find the meta tag, it will show an error message in your webmaster toolbox and you may have to verify your site again.

You may want to read the articles on how to Submit Blogger URL sitemap to Yahoo! and Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com. Also, submit your Blog to Blog Directories and Feed Directories to let more people know about your Blog. As well, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

© www.RIOtunes.blogspot.com

Submit Blog to Search Engines

10:38 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other factors are considered by search engines, such as relevance, unique content, coding and quality of links. The major search engines know that revealing these factors will only encourage manipulation of the ranking system and have thus been secretive about how the ranking algorithms work.

While no SEO consultant can be absolutely certain about how each search engine views your site, the common agreement is that the more visible your site is on the internet, the higher your ranking will eventually be. Having your site linked to by many other sites and indexed by different search engines increase its exposure and visibility. We have given readers a list of Blog Directories and Feed Directories. In this article, we shall provide a list of search engines where you can submit your website or Blog URLs for Free and have your site or Blog indexed by the search engines.

Website Indexing

Unless you have created a private blog, it is a matter of time that your blog is indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the fastest ways to have your site indexed is to get another site that is already in the search engine listings to link to you. When the search engine crawlers visit that site, they will find your site and index it. We tried this out by linking to our new Blog and it appeared in Google search listings within three hours. Hence, try this method if you do not want to wait for search engines to approve your site submission.

Before we proceed to the list of search engine sites, there are a few points to note:-

1. To check if your site has been indexed by a search engine, enter the full URL into their search query. For some search engines like Microsoft Live Search, enter site: followed by the full URL. If you see your site appearing in the search results, it has been indexed and there is no need to resubmit the site.

2. If your Blog has been linked to by Blog Directories, websites or Blogs, you may see these other sites that mention your Blog appearing first in the search results. More likely than not, they have a higher page rank. Scroll through the remaining search result pages and you will probably find a listing that is solely about your Blog.

3. When submitting your site, you do not need to submit the URL of each individual webpage. Submit only the top-level webpage and for Blogger Blogs, it will be an address like this http://blogname.blogspot.com without the www. before the blogname.

4. You can submit your sitemap to Google and login to Google Webmaster site to know the status of the indexing and view traffic statistics. Also, submit your sitemap to Yahoo! to find out more about the index and links to your site. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.

5. If you add your URL in Yahoo!, it will appear in their other search sites like AlltheWeb and AltaVista as well. Similarly, AOL Search uses the data by Google.

6. Some of the sites send advertisements and newsletters to you in exchange for free submission. If you don't want that, remember to opt out of it. Avoid having your regular email account filled with these mail by creating another free web-based email account just for website submissions.

7. Since search engines have different standards of content, design and technical specifications, submission of your site does not guarantee that it will be included in their database.

List of Search Engines

You may submit your site URL to these search engines for Free. If you lack the time, submit your site to the top few leading search engines.

Website Submission Services

There are many sites on the internet offering free website submission services to search engines. The list of search engines are by and large the same. For a fee, some of them offer to send your URL to more than a hundred search engines. Is it necessary to have your webpage listed in all the smaller search engines? We think that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have cornered such a large share of the market that it is sufficient just to have your website listed there. However, the decision is yours to make. For a start, you may want to use their free services and monitor the traffic.

We shall update this list every now and then and you may want to bookmark this page. Click the Bookmark button below and revisit this page.

© www.RioTunes.blogspot.com

Submit Blog to Blog Directories (III)

10:31 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

This is a continuation from the earlier list of Blog directories to which you can submit your blog for free. For completeness, it is advisable to read the earlier installments Part I and Part II before you read this.

Feel free to share comments on your experiences with these sites but refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites.

Blogflux

Other than a blog directory, the site also provides you with tools and utilities like a pinger form which can submit your feed to several websites.

Blogsearch

Serves its purpose as a blog directory well. You can list your blog in 3 different categories to maximize the exposure to visitors.

Bloghub

A fine blog directory which allows visitor ratings.

Findingblogs

This is not a big directory and hence navigation is easy and fast. [Update: Site is inaccessible and link is therefore removed.]

Bloggernity

This has been around for some time and has a large database of blogs.

Bloggernow

Almost the same layout as Bloggernity but this carries a much smaller collection of blogs.

Weblog-index

Simple and easy to navigate blog directory.

5starblogs

I wonder why some blogs have screenshots while many others don't. Anyway, this is a free directory you can consider listing your blog in.

Getblogs

I like this directory, mainly due to the sleek design and quick search speed.

Blogtree

Rather interesting to provide a blog genealogy. For some time, the site exceeded its bandwidth and access was cut. The administrator supposedly switched to a new server host and the site seems to be working very fine now. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

eBlogzilla

Such an interesting name for a blog directory. Approval for listing didn't take long.

Search4Blogs

The site is filled with too many advertisements, and the blog directory is a mere secondary aspect of it. Not to my liking, but it is a blog directory nevertheless.

BloggerTalk

This is a forum for bloggers. They have a blog directory as well, although don't bang on it that your blog will be included.

LSblogs

Another directory that is slow in approving your listing.

Be sure to click the Bookmark button below and check back here for a Part IV to this article on free Blog directories to submit your blog to.

For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

© www.RioTunes.blogspot.com

Submit Blog to Blog Directories (II)

10:28 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

This is a continued list of Blog directories to which you can submit your blog for free. If you have not read the first part, please check out Submit Blog to Blog Directories (I).

Again, I seek your understanding that while comments on your experiences with these sites are welcomed, kindly refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. As you will see, where there are voting gateways to the blog directories, visitors can either vote if they like the blog or enter the directory site without voting.

Blogvillage

If you can direct more visitors from your blog to visit this Blog Village site, chances are that your blog will appear in the first couple of pages. There is no search function, and viewers have to browse the pages to pick the blogs they want to view.

[Update: Search feature in place on May 6, 2007. Also, beginning Aug 1, 2007, to continue to be listed in the directory, you must have at least one click every month into their site from the voting link displayed in your Blog. They ask you to vote for yourself if you have to. After that vote is cast, your ranking in their directory is based on the Hits Out, meaning to say the more people visit your Blog through their site, the higher your ranking will be. Take note of this because this is unlike other directories which will rank you highly if you can get more readers to visit their site. We encourage you to check out the new blogs through Blogvillage, but if you have a blog listed there, do yourself a favor by clicking on your own blog too to register a Hit Out.]

Blogelites

The ranking is based on the number of unique votes from your blog visitors. The score is reset everyday. This directory is plagued by a number of inactive blogs though, and presently all you need is one visit a day to appear on the first page of the directory.

Myblogdirectory

This directory has an interesting concept. If you can drive some of your visitors to the site, your blog can be featured as the Blog of the Day.

Blogcatalog

The administrator was rather efficient in approving my blog. It has a huge catalog of blogs. I like the presentation and layout, simple and neat.

Blogarama

Quite a popular blog directory but has a slow access speed most of the time.

Blogion

Another simple and neat blog directory.

Bloggeries

For a change, nice graphics and colors with an icon next to your listing to allow visitors to easily rate your blog. [Update: Submission for listing is no longer free.]

Bloghop

Nice design for a blog directory. It allows you to tagsurf, pixelsurf or ratesurf, and if you'd like, you could rate this blog to see the pretty cool graphics too.

Bloggingfusion

This is currently not a big directory, but has the makings of a good one.

Blog-search

A simple, no-frills blog directory.

Blogpoint

This looks like a new directory to me. The code given to you is supposed to monitor the hits by your visitors to the site.

Blogs-collection

Text-based, simple, and neat blog directory.

Globeofblogs

This was one of the first directories I submitted my blog to, and with their huge backlog, they seemed to be taking a really long time approving the listing. If you are linking to them using a link button, following their HTML code given on their main page will not work because they have not provided the URL of the button in the src tag. What you can do is to pick the button that you like, right-click on it and save the button onto your drive. Next, upload the button onto a free Image Host. Insert the URL into the code where src="URL of button".

Blogoriffic

On the contrary, approval at this blog directory took a much shorter time. It is however difficult to find the relevant blogs using their search box.

This article continues at Submit Blog to Blog Directories (III).

For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

© www.RiOtunes.blogspot.com

Submit Blog to Blog Directories (I)

10:24 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.

Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “tips for new bloggers” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog. You may read my earlier article for a more detailed discussion on traffic exchange programs.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist

A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.

Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea

A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging

Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll

I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews.

This article continues at Submit Blog to Blog Directories (II).

For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

www.RiOtunes.blogspot.com

SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization

9:54 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

What are search engine optimization tools, webmaster tools, Google page rank checker, SEO tools, and how can these internet tools help to bring more quality traffic to your Blog? There are many free online web tools that webmasters can use to find out more information about their sites. The tools can also alert the webmasters to possible problems search engines may have with the site's template codes and design. Here, we shall, for the benefit of our new bloggers, explain how these webmaster tools might help improve your website's PageRank.

Search Engine Optimization

We define Search Engine Optimization as – a method or process of improving and optimizing the ranking of a website in search engine results.

With millions of pages of search results for any given keyword, webmasters would want to have their website appear among the first couple of search result listings. The higher the position or ranking, the greater the likelihood that internet users will visit your site. This Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) concept is no different from a brick-and-mortar shop where location and visibility affect how many customers will pass by the shop and hopefully drop in for a visit. On the internet, your virtual site deserves a good location and visibility, and SEO consultants believe they know how to achieve that.

Blog Directory and Search Engine Listings

After having published a Blog or website, the first thing to do is to make sure that the information relating to the site is available on the internet. Web Directories, Blog Directories and Search Engines are the internet Yellow Pages. Although the major Search Engines will crawl your website even without any action on your part, it will be much faster if you could proactively provide them your site information. We had written articles on how and where to submit the blog information so as to have your site fully indexed and appear in many places on the internet.

Read these guides and follow the steps outlined:-

1. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

2. Submit Blogger Sitemap to Yahoo!

3. Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com

4. Submit Blog to Search Engines

5. Submit Blog to Blog Directories

6. Submit RSS Feeds and Pings

7. Blog Traffic Exchange

Free SEO Tools

After you have submitted your website's data to all the search engines and directories, you should be able to find your site somewhere on the internet. If you do a keyword search on your website's topic, you may find many other listings in the search results ahead of yours. These are the sites which have better page ranks and are optimized for the search engines. You can optimize your blog or website too.

To attract business, many SEO sites have put up some of their SEO tools for free. Commercial sites which are serious in wanting to climb up the search ranking will pay the SEO consultants for more value-added services. If you are like us, blogging out of fun and passion, it might be better to use only the free services for a start.

Enter words like - free SEO tools - into the search box and you can see what some of these sites offer.

Suggested SEO Tools

Many of the SEO webmaster sites have similar free tools and services. You can try any of them, though the one that we like is iWebTool. In fact, they have a link exchange program which you may want to check out. Among the SEO Tools, the ones we find useful in all these sites are:-

a. Backlink Checker – A list of sites that have linked to your blog or website. PageRank is largely determined by the number and quality of links to your site. Monitor this and you can probably guess what your PageRank ought to be.

b. Broken Link Checker – A look at which of the links in your site are pointing to incorrect or non-existent URLs. Having too many outdated and broken links on your web page may irritate not only the readers but the search spiders. Do this housekeeping once in a while to remove the bad links.

c. Google PageRank Checker – The Google PageRank of your site. You can also download Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar to view the Google PageRanks of all the sites that you visit.

d. Google PageRank Prediction – A future Google PageRank prediction. If you are dying to know, these sites can give you a fair estimate of your future PageRank.

e. HTML Optimizer – A clean up of your HTML source code. Be careful when you apply the suggested changes though. Always good to backup the template before making any modification.

f. Index Checker – Number of pages of your website that are indexed by search engines. If pages are missing from the index, try submitting your sitemap again.

g. Keyword Density Checker – The keyword distribution in your webpage. This will by and large influence the sort of Ads that AdSense will place on your site.

h. Keyword Suggestor – Suggested popular keywords for your website. Bear in mind these keywords when writing or editing your posts.

i. Meta-tags Generator – Configuration of website's meta-tags. Tailor a suitable description and set of keywords to be inserted into the template.

j. Reciprocal Link Checker – A check to see if the partners in your blogrolls or link exchange are linking to you.

k. Spider Simulator – The page contents as seen by a search engine spider. Some may give you a breakdown of the commonly used keywords in your site.

l. Traffic Graphs – A comparison of your site's and other competitor sites' traffic history graphs in Alexa.

m. Website Speed Test – Speed of website page load. If you find the pageload time a little long, take some measures to have a Faster Web Page Load Time.

Basic Tools

Should you want to have a quick look at what some of the SEO tools are about, we have created a few basic search tools over here at our Tips for New Bloggers site.

Yahoo!

To know how Yahoo! sees your site, enter into the search box below your website's URL in full, beginning with http:// For Blogger blogs, you do not have to add a “www.” into the blog URL.

1. Yahoo! Indexed Pages

The results will show you the number and details of the web Pages that are indexed by Yahoo!

2. Yahoo! Backlinks

Enter your site's URL to see the Inlinks or backlinks of your site.

Google

The data in the various search engines are not the same. You can have a look at how your blog is performing in Google search by entering your site URL below.

1. Google Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in Google.

2. Google Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: for details of the backlinks to your site.

Microsoft Live Search

Compared to Google and Yahoo!, MSN spiders may not index as many pages. Nevertheless, if you are curious to know, enter your blog URL into the search boxes below.

1. MSN Indexed Pages

Enter URL after the word site: to view the indexed pages in MSN.

2. MSN Backlinks

Enter URL after the word link: to view the backlinks.

Page Rank Checker

This search tool is provided by Prchecker. Enter a URL into the form to view the Google PageRank.

Alexa Rankings

Alexa monitors the web traffic of many top sites. You can compare and view the Alexa traffic graph of your site by entering your site URL into the search box below.

Blog Traffic Exchange and AdSense

9:16 AM MD. RAKIBUL ISLAM OLY(R.I.O) No comments

After doing up nice websites with interesting contents, the webmasters' dilemma is usually one of attracting visitors to their sites. Having more visitors is gratifying; it is a reward that website owners deserve for putting time and effort into their sites.

Traffic exchange networks were designed to promote visitor traffic to websites or blogs. The idea is simple – members of the network surf each other's sites. Upon setting up an account with a traffic exchange program, you will be entitled to earn 'credits' by manually surfing other members' sites. Depending on the program, you may have anything between 0.5 to 1.0 credit for every site you visit. There is a timer at the top or bottom frame of the page to compel you to remain at the site for a period of time. This can range between 10 to 30 seconds. You are then required to click one of the images to correspond with the given image in order to proceed to the next random site. This is to prevent autosurfing hacks that may cheat the system.

With the 'credits' you earn, you can assign them to your blogs. For every visitor you get to your blog, 1 credit will be deducted until all your 'credits' are spent. In a nutshell, the more blogs you visit, the more visitors you get to your blogs.

Alas, no program is perfect. While the concept of traffic exchange sounds good, there are the negative aspects that you should consider as well. I'll summarize the good and bad points of traffic exchange.

Pros of traffic exchange

1. The programs are free, that is if you are not buying the 'credits' but earning them.

2. For some programs, you can specify the category of blogs you would like to view or the sort of visitors you would like to have. The traffic is therefore targeted.

3. While viewing other member blogs, you may come across a couple of interesting ones that you can re-visit or learn from.

4. Since the programs work well only if they have a wide network of members, the administrators often conduct mini contests and games to interest the members. You may find some fun in these communities.

Cons of traffic exchange

1. The biggest negative point is that such traffic exchanges run counter to many advertising programs, especially those that pay you based on impressions you get to your site. A notable one is Google AdSense. If your site's traffic is mainly through traffic exchanges, be prepared to receive reminders like this from the Google administrator:-

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.”

2. A number of the sites that register with traffic exchanges are new sites and are not worth the time reading. Many of the established ones that have a good following of readers do not need such traffic exchange programs to boost their traffic.

3. After surfing for a while, you would also find yourself looking at the same sites over and over again, simply because only a fraction of the members are active users. It may be boring in that sense.

4. While I make it a point to read some sites, I believe that many people don't. They may be doing their homework or watching television, and mindlessly clicking the image after every 30 seconds or so. You may be getting more visitors but these are not the people who appreciate your blog contents.

Blog Traffic Exchange sites

If you want to have a go at it, here are the ones I think you can consider.

Blogmad

This has a 1:1 ratio, which means that for every site you visit, someone will visit yours. The surf timer is 25 seconds and the site layout, ideas, and image icons (with the two big eyes) are pretty nice.

Blog Explosion

The surf ratio is 2:1, i.e. for every two blogs you visit, one person will visit yours. The saving grace is that they have about close to 50,000 blogs registered, although I have an inkling that only a small percentage of these are active. They do run contests like Battle of the Blogs which add to the fun of using their service.

Blog Soldiers

Another 2:1 ratio traffic exchange. Nothing fanciful about the site, and the administrators should do more work to build up their membership base.

Blog Advance

Their surf ratio of 1:1 sounds attractive, and like a few other programs, they throw in free bonus points when you log in or surf. What I didn't like was their lack of response. I raised a technical problem concerning adding a site and despite 2 messages, they have not replied. Such a contradiction to their statement that “at Blog Advance your voice doesn't fall on deaf ears.” Also, I received error messages on a few occasions despite having clicked the correct surfbar images and was unable to proceed to subsequent blogs. I guess there are unresolved bugs in the coding of their program. (Update: This service is no longer available and link is therefore removed.)

EasyHits4U

This is another 1:1 traffic exchange site that seems to have more commercial sites registered with them than blogs. It has a 30-second timer giving viewers a lot of time to view the blogs. The thing that stands out is that they pay you cash for active surfing ($0.50 for 1000 sites viewed)

TrafficG

This is not blog specific, and you will see a number of non-blog websites. The ratio of 1:1 is good, and the longer surf time of 30 seconds means that you might get more quality traffic, people who browse your blog contents.

Blogazoo

They have a 4:3 ratio, and credit incentives to read blogs and find the 'gazoos'. (Update: This service is temporarily not available and link is removed.)

Linkreferral

I happened to come across this site last week. Essentially, when you register your blog with them, other members can review your site, give a rating and post comments. The more sites you visit or review, the higher your blog rank will be, and the more likely that your blog will be seen by others. Unlike the other programs, you will expect visitors to go through what you write in order to review your blog.

Conclusion

If your blog is new, traffic exchange may do wonders in sending visitors to your site. Surfing other members' sites is also a good way to learn useful tips to improve on your blog. For a wider exposure, you would want to have your blog listed in Blog Directories, Feed Directories, and search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines. Nothing beats content though, and if you have good quality writing, you can be sure that your blog will be read.

I have tried out the traffic exchange sites for the purpose of this writing. With the credits, I have bought banner and text link ads since advertising a blog is not against Google's TOS. These ads appear at the traffic exchange sites when members are surfing, and make your site more visible.

Feel free to share your experience on the above sites, but please refrain from posting suggestions of new traffic exchange sites. There are hundreds of them and if you'd like, do a keyword search and try them out. New traffic exchange sites are created practically everyday. Run an eBay search and you will see a number of them being sold too. It is alright to register with a few of them, but unless you intend to spend all your time surfing member sites, there is little reason to be registered in a hundred traffic exchange sites.

If you are ready to submit your blog to blog directories for better search engine optimization and publicity, read the articles on “Submit Blog to Blog Directories” Part (I), Part (II), and Part (III).

While you are looking at traffic exchange sites, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.