Holding a contest on your blog can help to build traffic and loyal readership. A well rewarding contest can bring in plenty of backlinks and new visitors.
If you want to start or participate in a blog contest, here are the Top 3+3 Sites that keep their readers informed about all the latest Blog Contests.
1. Contest Blogger- A blog started by Phil Van Treuren with an aim to inform its readers about the latest blog contests as soon as they appear on the web. Contest Blogger deals exclusively with blogs and bloggers. You will not find posts about any contests, sweepstakes or prizes on Contest Blogger if they don’t have to with professional blogging and link building.
2. Blog-Contests- Walt started a $400 contest on his blog, just to learn that there was no way of letting people know about his contest.
Walt got frustrated and decided to start a website especially for blog contests, thats how blog-contests website was born.
Started as a website that gives bloggers a place to announce their contests, Blog-Contests.com now also run some own contests. Like the $50subscribers only monthly contest and $50 draw for bloggers who submit their contests to the website.
3. The Prize Blog: Attractively designed website with focus on Blog Contests. The Prize Blog offers a free updated list of contests, games, prizes available online and also FAQs and Tips and Tricks for those interested in entering online contests.
4. Reviewow Contests: Reviewwow is a blog created mainly to post reviews of gadgets and software but the author recently started cool new contests category where you will find info about all the latest blogging contests.
5. The Link Bait: A website about Link baiting techniques, with special coverage of blog contests.
6. BlogContestSite: Another cool site about Blog Contests. Info on latest contests and their deadlines can be found in the website sidebar.
These sites not only help you to find interesting Blog contests to participate in but also let you announce your contests to the widest possible audience.
Want to subscribe to all of these sites ? This Yahoo Pipeshould help you.
Category: SEO
Have you been penalized in google page rank for selling text link ads? Have your sites page rank decreased because google is not passing page rank for paid links that you have been purchasing? No way to say 100% on either situatation in google’s war with paid link advertising, BUT let’s look at this a little further.
Google’s Quality Guideline’s states “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank… as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” Could purchased links, that are meant to assist in pagerank and popularity of your site, be having a negative effect on your pagerank or search engine rankings. The answer is YES they COULD! Is is this true in every case. Obviously not, but there is no guarantee one way or another.
In general try to “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” and “Make pages for users, not for search engines”, as google states, and work on building a unique site that warrants natural linking from other sites. Unfortunately, normally this takes a long time, sometimes years. What if you have a brand new site? What else can be done to increase Pagerank and google search engine ranking? Check back with us soon for more SEO tips and up-to-date website advice!
Every kid on the block seems to know web designing these days. Actually thinking along those lines it is not difficult at all to learn how to design a web page or for that matter even a site. What with FrontPage, Dreamweaver and the gang making the job even simpler.
But one has to realize there is more to web designing then knowing how to write a few HTML codes or use one of the many commercially available programs. While teaching you how to code or code correctly for that matter is not the objective of this article, I would be giving you some tips that distinguish the real web designer from the rest of the pack.
1. I will strictly ask you to not to use lots of flash contents if you want to be at the top of the search engine. Yes, I know it looks awesome but it does nothing more than hindering your all search engine optimization strategies. You don’t need to provide your visitors an eye candy, dude just provide them some helpful content.
2. Always remember to use navigation menu at the right side of each page of your site, why? because search engines count the first few phrases appearing on the page, this way you would provide the search engines the content first.
3. Make your pages cross browser compatible. Though this is very difficult even for the most experienced among us, TRY!
4. Time your page for its loading speeds. Remember, though a graphic image looks really good on your site, its hateful if your visitors have to wait hours for it to load. You may be using a high speed connection, the whole world doesn’t. Your page has to be quick to load.
5. Too many images have exactly the opposite effect then they are meant to have. So, do everything in proportion… including putting in graphics and animations.
6. Colour combinations matter. Your text has to be readable & as importantly if not more, worth reading.
7. Always work on a good navigation structure… Remember if a client cant find your contact info or order link, you’d miss on a sale.
8. Make your site search engine friendly. Its no use having the best site in the world which no one can find. And for every one’s sake don’t mess around with hidden layers to get a high listing on the engines. It is JUST NOT worth the risk!
9. If you have ad banners, place them with a little thought. Too many of those little pop ups are the most annoying thing on the web and more often then not deter visitors from sticking onto your site rather than earn you some extra cash.
10. Lastly… you never know everything. Over the years and after designing a dozen sites, I still learn something new from ever project that I undertake. Guys you can never be perfect when it comes to coding… And if you are… then there is always room to improve perfection.
Akash Kumar an seo expert and the founder of vistadivine.com -an economical search engine optimization firm
When it comes to search engine optimization , getting other websites to link to your website is the most important factor in achieving top search engine rankings. Here is a list of 10 link building strategies which you should be implementing for top search engine rankings (in no particular order):
1. Write quality articles - write quality articles that other websites will want to post on their websites and link to. The higher the quality of the article, the more one-way links you’ll get. The best articles to write are ‘how-to’ and informational articles. Stay away from self-promotion.
2. Start a WordPress blog – setup a WordPress blog on your website and post articles to it once per week. It’s a great way to build the size of your website, keep your website content fresh and get incoming links. Plus Google loves WordPress!
3. Syndicate your articles online – take the articles that you’ve posted to your blog and syndicate them on article directories such as Ezine Articles and Go Articles , so that other website owners can post them on their websites.
4. Submit your website to online directories – submit your website to free SEO friendly website directories for a quick wayto start building one- way links to your website.
5. Submit your blog to blog directories – use RSS Submit software to submit your blog to blog directories. Use both the automatic and manual submission tools.
6. Exchange links with relevant websites – exchange links with high quality, relevant websites in your field. This can be extremely powerful, as long as you are very selective with whom you exchange links with.
7. Use social bookmarking – submit your blog posts and other high value content to social bookmarking sites such as Digg , Reddit and StumbleUpon . Aside from the one-way link you’ll get and the (short-term) top Google ranking, you can hit the ‘jackpot’ by getting to the first page of digg.com, where you’ll receive thousands of one-way links.
8. Syndicate press releases online – write newsworthy press releases and syndicate them online at press release syndication sites such as PRWeb . If the release is good enough, you can get a lot of one-way links to your site.
9. Post comments on industry blogs – post high value comments on other blogs in your industry to spark discussion. Even if the comments are ‘nofollowed’, you can still get links to your site from other bloggers that refer to your posts.
10. Link between your web pages – use contextual links in your website copy to link to other pages within your websites. Each of your pages should have some PageRank, so why not maximise it?
With search engine algorithms ever changing, it is difficult to know what will be considered valuable by search engines in the future. In saying that, we touch upon a very common discussion regarding link building; is it better to build a large quantity of back links or spend more time to get better quality back links?
If you are involved in any kind of search engine optimisation you should constantly be considering how to spend your time to get the best results and, if you are as busy as most people, you may not be able to use both methods of link building. Now many online marketers may still be advising you that the number of links is what search engines value the most, and they will proceed to build as many links as possible, as quickly as possible, and by any means necessary. But, with the release of Google’s updated Historical Data Patent in March this year, it is clear that this is not the case.
In this document it is stated, among many other things, that the dates on which the back links first appeared for the search engine are taken into account when valuing a website. This means that if too many links are detected at times very near to each other, the algorithm may consider these links are the result of SPAM.
In addition, when building a large number of back links without considering where these links are coming from, there is always the possible issue that these links can be dropped at any time, for any reason. In the patent document, this is suggested as a means of devaluing a website. If back links disappear to quickly, the search engine may consider your website to have become “stale”, or non-valuable to its readers.
Aside from the rate of back link build- up, search engines also consider the content of the site from which a link is received. The more valuable the content on the link source website, the more valuable the link to your site. And the more related the content is to your site, the better.
Similarly, when considering the source of a back link you must take into account the number of outgoing links on that page. A website that has more than 100 outgoing links will almost always be selling links. If you were a search engine, you would ignore links on pages like this, or perhaps even penalize the target sites for being linked to from such a page. Google takes this into account, and so should we.
Search engines are continuously finding ways to find and filter out “invaluable” links. And with the constant updates to search engine algorithms you don’t know what kind of back link will be devalued in the future. Even if the number of links was more valuable previously it certainly is not the case anymore. So how can we overcome this?
I’m glad you asked.
There is one kind of link that will always be considered valuable by search engines – natural quality links. As much as we may try, we cannot imitate natural back links from quality websites, so any links that is given freely from a highly valued site are search engine GOLD.
The best way to build these links is to have quality content on your website. If you are an expert on a topic (which should be the case if you are creating the website) the quality content will simply be your knowledge on that topic. Once you have this content on your site, people will automatically link to it because it will be considered an authority on the topic. And if you are an expert on a topic and have some content to use that is nowhere else on the net or has very little competition, then the traffic to your site will increase massively.
This can take time, however, because it takes time to create great quality content and time for this content to spread. But once you have these links, they will become the most valuable part of your online marketing campaign.
The great thing about these, apart from their value, is that you won’t need to worry about getting too many links too quickly because if they are organic (meaning you haven’t created them using a marketing method), they will automatically be created at a natural pace.
We can definitely help this process by posting your content to quality websites suited specifically for this purpose, such as article websites or journals. However, when doing this you must be careful not to get carried away with the links inside the content. Some article sites already limit the number of self-serving links you can have in an article on their site but for those that don’t you should impose those limitations yourself. Why? Because if the back link is meant to be natural then there wouldn’t be that many self- serving back links on a single page.
Another benefit from a natural back link is that they usually come from websites that have both quality content and content related to your website, which, as I mentioned earlier, are taken into account by search engines valuing your website.
Now, while it is virtually impossible to know what search engines will value in the future, it is fairly safe to assume that a natural back link received from a quality website with content related to your website will always be the most valuable link available on the internet.
