Blogging Maniac

Do your friends and coworkers turn to you for fashion advice? Are you a bonafide guru when it comes to the hottest designers and trends? Or, maybe you're a would-be political pundit-the next Walter Cronkite? You could simply have a riveting way of capturing the world around you. Whatever your talent, rant or position, you can share your inner most thoughts in a place called the "blogosphere"-all you need is an Internet connection.

To the uninitiated, a blog is a personal website that is updated frequently by the author and typically consists of commentary and favorite links, as well as photos, or anything else really.

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Organic SEO And Link Building

Organic SEO or search engine optimization is a slow and steady process. Achieving top rankings takes time and link building is a big part of that effort. If you are to have a successful web site and obtain high search engine rankings you will need quality relevant web sites linking to your web site. The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. More web masters are focusing on quantity and getting several links fast. This is bad because it can be seen as manipulating the search engines. Check the guidelines for the search engine you are trying to optimize for, this will give you a good idea of what and what not to do.

When obtaining links from other sites focus on the quality of the link. Is the page on topic and relevant to your site? What is the position of the link? Is it off to the side with a bunch of other sites? Does it look natural and like it belongs there? What is the anchor text of the link? These are the questions you need to ask yourself when optimizing off site links. Reciprocal links have some value, but with software that automates the process it seems to have gotten out of hand. Plus do you really want a link on these low quality directory pages? How much value do they add by linking to you?

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When Will Google Update The Page Rank Of Older Sites?

There has been another page rank update in the last couple of weeks but it seems as though this has only affected sites which previously had a page rank of zero. The question many people are asking is when will google update the page rank of all of the other sites which already showed a page rank?

This latest update seems to be very similar to the previous page rank update in which the older sites were also not updated. When reading on various websites about other webmasters opinions on this current trend, I have found a number of reasons as to why this may be happening.

Over the last couple of years there have been quite a large number of link exchange programs which have been created. This have proven to be quite popular but are frowned upon by google as the people who enter these programs are in a way cheating to get to the top. Most people are aware of the importance of backward links and these link exchange programs make it very easy to obtain them. In clearly states however in the google guidelines that webmasters should not take part in these link exchange programs. Webmasters who still go ahead are at risk at having their site or sites banned.

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Google PageRank Toolbar Explained

This article will guide you through the importance of the toolbar, and its accuracy at reporting PageRank. I will also discuss the feature about it that most people, including many SEOs are not aware of. If you have an existing site, use this as a reference to ensure that you are using the toolbar properly. I am going to review the key 5 areas.

The toolbar is not accurate, and it has limitations.
If you visit a page that is not in the index, but Google has a very similar page indexed that is very close to yours, then the toolbar will estimate its PageRank. Also, Google represents PageRank through the toolbar, but since the nature of PageRank is linear (a multiplier) and the toolbar is not, there are limitations.
Note: Please read "A few more words on PageRank" in my Google Best SEO.

Practices – Part 4 article to find out more about this subject.

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