Wednesday, January 30, 2013

What Is Your Website's (Or Blog's) "Q RATING"?

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Website Quality Factors, or “Q Factors” And The “Q Score”

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the principal objectives are to 1) maximize the number and length of unique and return visits to your website (or blog), and 2) create the greatest possible authority ranking for your site (as measured by such ranking services as Alexa). Putting aside the old-school mechanical tricks of keyword-stuffing, adding re-spun pages to your site to increase its size, obtaining backlinks into your site from high PR-ranked blogs, directories and other e-media, submitting and resubmitting your site’s address to multiple search engines and utilizing aggressive social media campaigning, the ultimate key is to increase your site’s “Q Factors,” thereby increasing its “Q Rating.”

Following are some highly useful guidelines in increasing your site’s Q Rating. It is best to keep these factors in mind during every step you take in designing and adding content and other informational resources to your site. The higher your site’s Q Rating, the better it will generally be rated in all of the other areas that matter.

Here’s a simple checklist of the factors which either positively or negatively influence your site’s Q Rating - the idea is to constantly work on increasing the positives and on decreasing the negatives:

High-quality factors:

  • Unique content that is an excellent resource.
  • Your product or service presented optimally - this means with time and effort spent on description, photos, or whatever else is required.
  • A brand name.
  • A dedicated IP.
  • Long-term domain name ownership.
  • No adverts on the front page.
  • High-quality website code that validates and has a good accessibility score.
  • A dedicated server.
  • A dedicated nameserver.
  • Good traffic - especially via SERPs clickthroughs.
  • Avoidance of all 'obvious SEO' measures on the site or in the content.

Low-quality factors:

  • Duplicate content, scraped content, extensive RSS feed content, content with too many 'possible duplicate' signals, content with too many 'low-quality' signals.
  • A low-cost domain such as .info, as these were sold cheaply by the million.
  • A shared hosting server with 3,000 other sites on the server.
  • Lots of adverts on the front page.
  • Low-quality website code which is full of errors, and a poor accessibility score.
  • No address and contact details on the site.

The task for all website and blog owners is to maximize the Q Rating of their sites, and to avoid relying on either robotic or automated “shortcuts” in establishing the visibility of your sites. When you increase your Q Rating, you increase your longer-term “core” site strength, and minimize the likelihood of getting your site blacklisted by search engines or directories that truly want to give their clients honest results.

A service which issues Q ratings to websites and blogs is SearchSight. You may submit your site to them at no cost, and have them give you their assessment of your Q Rating.

Time to “Q it up!” fellow website owners and bloggers.

Douglas E. Castle

CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator

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Friday, January 25, 2013

Increase Traffic To Your Blog - Rapidly And Easily

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Ladies and Gentlemen - My Blogging Colleagues and Noble Readers of The Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools Blog:

Let's start by restating our qualitative and quantitative tasks as bloggers (whether readily measurable or not). I'll call this the Douglas E. Castle "To Do" List:

  • Post original content, and always give attribution and full credit to sources of information which you might have used; 

  • Be certain to have a catchy BLOG Title;

  • Use a catchy ARTICLE title (the first five words are the most crucial) every time;

  • Minimize any wasted space between your blog header and your most current article -- the more of your original work that shows "above the fold", the better;

  • Embed one or more non-moving, non-flash images (pictures, photographs, themed collages) at the beginning of your blog. This will absolutely lengthen average visiting time on your blog;

  • Embed social media sharing tools in every article, usually at the blog footer, but sometimes elsewhere -- use picture-themed buttons and familiar social media icons wherever possible;

  • Use one or more content-sharing (recycling of your earlier posts) tools such as nRelate, Outbrain, or any other such goodies which show promise;

  • Use one or more related content-sharing (posting of related articles from other sources throughout the web), such as the one provided by Zemanta [in fact, a new Zemanta publication, later in this article, discusses some blogger outreach hints;

  • Comment (including your blog's hyperlinked address) on other people's blogs -- but be certain that these comments are not advertorial -- they should relate to the blog about which your commenting;

  • Add as many links to your blogroll as possible;

  • Use a non-cursive, reader-friendly font (this font is Georgia);

  • Whenever you post an article, send word of it (including a live link) to all of your social media, including Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn, and encourage your readers to share your article with their readers, in turn;

  • Submit your blog site to as many search engines as possible every single month;

  • Maximize the mileage out of the labels which you attach to your post -- use some major categorical grabbers, and some vertical and technical terms, in a mixture;

  • Hyperlink as much anchor text as you can within your articles;

  • Post at least monthly -- in fact, semi-monthly or weekly is better.... the greater your frequency of publication, the more magnetism your blog will develop.

The nifty Zemanta Blogger Outreach Campaign downloadable whitepaper is available immediately below. Read it. It's quite good.



Also, if you'd like to design truly amazing panels of social media sharing tools, I would suggest you visit the site which follows and set up an account:

http://sharethis.com

Other than the few simple and incredibly meditative tasks described above, I promise that I will be returning with more tips, tricks and tools to make you a five-star blogger with an ever-growing list of readers.

Thank you, as always for reading me, sharing my articles on your social media, and for stopping by to visit some of the blogs and websites which I recommend. My recommended blog this week is CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC

Douglas E. Castle
---------------

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Saturday, January 12, 2013

Best Free Search Engine Submission Sites - 01.12.2013

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If you have published a new blog or website (which has already been search engine optimized) and want to start driving traffic to your site, building back links, and increasing your search engine positioning and prominence, you must absolutely register your url with as many search engines and directories as possible. You should then be extra diligent and register all of your sites with these resources no less than once monthly. This is something for you to be doing constantly.

For your convenience, following is a list of some of the best search engine registration sites as of the time of this printing of this article. Free services come and go, so I'll publish and post periodic updates to this file. Additionally, be prepared for "free" services that register you with a limited list of sites (10 to 20 sites), and ofter you a "paid version that promises to submit your url to a much broader list of sites. My feeling about the matter is take what these sites offer for free, and then go on to the next service. Yes there will be some overlap from service to service, but ultimately it won't adversely affect your site ranking and rating one iota.

Here's the list:

FREE WEB SUBMISSION
http://freewebsubmission.com/
Note: You must manually submit to each of the 50 top-rated search engines, but excellent list. Also features an "automatic submission" program, but it only submits to 20 search engines.

SUBMIT EXPRESS
http://www.submitexpress.com/free-submission.html
Note: Quick, easy submission to 50 middle-ranked to better-ranked search engines.

ADD ME
http://www.addme.com/
Note: One-step submission to 20 search engines of varying rank. Be prepared with meta tags and keywords for your submission.

ADD PRO
http://www.addpro.com/submit30.htm
Note: Quick, easy one-step submission to 18 search engines of varying rank.

I NEED HITS
http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/submit-free.aspx
Note: Quick, easy, one-step submission to 20 search engines of middle-ranked to highly-ranked search engines, with a different assortment of engines (including DMOZ) than the redundant packages offered by the other sites.

While there are a number of other services, these cover the field fairly well, and will provide you with some exposure. And more exposure is generally better (but remember to apply sunscreen).


Douglas E. Castle

for The Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools Blog, and... for  

CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC.
















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