You made a great site. You filled it up with some great content and informative pages. You spent a lot on the design of the site too – it looks attractive and professional. Everything seems to be fine however you are not satisfied.

The reason of your dissatisfaction is that you are getting few visitors and you are not doing good business. You did some research to find out why the search engines especially Google is not sending traffic to your site. Then someone told you that your site is not ranked well with the search engines and that’s probably because not many websites are linking to your site.

So to increase link popularity you started sending emails to website owners in the hope that if they give a link to your site, you will link to their site in return. It didn’t work out as reciprocal link exchange has lost its importance.

In frustration you have decided to buy links.

Well be warned, Google discourages webmasters to buy links from other sites just to increase link popularity.

NOTE: It does not mean that Google hates paid links. If you are buying paid links to advertise your site in some other site to get traffic, its perfectly ok. However if Google robots come to know that a link is paid link to increase link popularity or page rank of a site, the site may get banned altogether.

Why Google hate paid links?

Google, as you must have known by now, gives a lot of importance to inbound links to a website. If a website has a lot of good websites linking to it, the site will get good ranks in the search results.

However this theory is based on the fact that webmasters link to other websites if they feel that the website offers some good value to their site visitors.

This link is out of interest and offers value to their visitors. But a paid link may not offer any value to the visitor of a site, further may influence the search engine results.

Google can tolerate anything but spam. This way of linking is considered spam by major search engines and therefore should be avoided.

If you are thinking how on earth Google will know if a link is paid or not, then here is some more information for you.

Google has three ways to detect if a link is paid or not.

1. Software: Google software that crawls the web. It has unique and complex algorithm that decides if a link is paid or not.

2. Manual checking: Google has appointed spam check officers that keep checking the web for any paid links (and any other form of spamming the search results.)

3. Third Party Reporting: If someone finds a paid link they can directly report it to Google. Here is an article on how to report paid links.

So be very cautious if you want to buy links to increase link popularity of your site. You may well regret your decision.

However if you want to buy links to advertise your site, there is no problem and you may go ahead. But there are some ethical ways to do it, so that the search engine knows that it’s a paid link to advertise and not to spam the results.

Read my post on how to buy links to make sure the search engines understand they are paid links and therefore should not be considered while raking websites and giving page rank (PR).

NOTE: If you want to get great links to your site (not paid), read my post on how to get great incoming links.

Your views are important to me. Please do leave a comment.

Related Topics:
 
1. Is Reciprocal Link Exchange important
2. How to Find Inbound Links in Google and Yahoo

Before learning how to create a blog I recommend that you please read my article on what is a blog. This will give you an idea of blogs. You can then come back and read this post.

To create a blog you will need a blogging software and a hosting account. A Blog software is a content management software – CMS.

Thankfully there are many online blogging applications where one can open an account for FREE.

Two of them are very popular and free:

WordPress – http://www.WordPress.com/
Blogger – http://www.Blogger.com

It won’t cost you a dime to create a blog with them. Just visit the site, register an account and start blogging – its that simple!

If you open a blog account with WordPress.com and choose a username like abc then your blog URL will be

http://abc.wordpress.com

If you open a blog account with Blogger.com and choose a username like abc then your blog URL will be

http://abc.blogspot.com

Note that Blogger is owned by Google. (But this doesn’t mean that Google promotes/favors blogs created in Blogger. You can create a blog on any platform you like. If your blog is really good, full of quality content, search engine friendly, no spam or illegal promotion techniques, then it should get traffic anyway from the search engines.)

For more information I recommend that you read the features of both WordPress and Blogger before opening an account with them. Here are the links:

http://wordpress.com/features

http://www.blogger.com/features

I have a website and I want to create a blog in my website. Is this possible?

This is a very common question asked by website owners. Yes it is absolutely possible.

Most of the web hosting providers offer a one-step install of blogging software, again for free. You have to login to your website control panel and see if the facility is available.

If you are unable to find you may need to contact your host. But the good news is that most webhosts offer a blogging software for free. The reason is this that these software are open source project. Open source projects are mostly free projects and hundreds of people all over the world work on them just out of interest.

Since it does not cost anything to the web hosting companies, they offer the software for free to their customers.

However please check with your web hosting company if they offer a blogging software for free.

If they don’t offer, you can host your blog with Blogger.com in Your domain/website. For more information please visit this page:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=55373

Note: If you are serious about blogging and want to use it to market your product/service or do business – I would recommend that you register a domain and host your blog in your domain.

A simple reason is that you will have complete control over your blog and the URL of your blog will look like a professional one. Everyone knows that WordPress or Blogger blogs are free and might not take your business seriously.

I would love to hear your experiences of creating a blog. This will help me to improve this article. Please leave a comment.

Early 2006 gave an amazing method of online marketing – Blogs! I will discuss why blogs have become a very popular method of web marketing today. But before moving further, the big question:

What is Blog?

A blog helps to instantly publish content online. Unlike websites, uploading content to a blog DOES NOT require a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or any other software to upload the files to a server.

If you have access to internet, you can publish content from anywhere – home, office or anywhere else.

This is how it happens – Blog software asks you to login using a username and password (just like you login to your web-based email like Gmail etc) and post content. Once you click on the “publish” or “save” button, your content gets published instantly.

Once the content gets published a unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is created. It is something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/blog/the-latest-post

 
You can then view the newly posted content online using a browser. Anyone in the world can also view it.

This is the primary reason why blogs became so popular. No technical knowledge required, no software hassles, just login and post content and view it online.

A great feature of blogs is that the visitors can leave a comment/feedback. This way it becomes interactive. Compare it to websites that are more-or-less online brochures of a company. You read the content and forget.

Here is some more interesting stuff. Some bloggers got such good response that they left their jobs and became full time bloggers. If you are thinking what happened to their income, then you will be surprised to know that their blogs gave them much more than what they earned from a full time job.

This was possible because their blogs got a huge amount of traffic (because of the quality and fresh content and some SEO techniques). The owner of the blogs then got some advertisers to advertise their websites on their blog. This way they generated some income. There are many other ways to generate income from a blog, but it requires a different post.

Another benefit of blog is that if someone really likes a blog, they can subscribe to the blog using a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. They can then read the newly posted content using a RSS feed reader like Google Reader.

These are some of the reasons why blogs have become very popular today. Everyone wants to own a blog.

Today many people have their own blogs. This site is my blog. And I post articles related to search engine marketing because this is something I love. You can scroll down to the end of the post to leave a comment.

Many companies have their own blogs. This helps them to get user feedback on their product and/or services.

Most online news websites have their own blogs too. Readers can leave comments after reading a news item. For example: http://chronicle.com/news/.

A blog can be created in many languages. WordPress offers over 50 languages to choose from.

Here are some great blogs I have come across:

http://www.problogger.net/blog/ – One of the world’s most popular blog for bloggers. Owned by Darren Rowse of Australia. Offers tips on how to market a blog. He also owns http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/ which offers digital camera reviews and rating.

http://www.shoemoney.com/ – Owned by Jeremy Schoemaker. Offers all sorts of interesting information to bloggers. Gets over 10,000 unique visitors a day.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/ – Amit Aggarwal’s blog – an Indian who left his top paying full time job as a computer science engineer to become a professional blogger. He also owns http://www.labnol.org/ a.k.a. Digital Inspiration.

Amit has appeared on TV and radio channels including BBC, CNN IBN, CNBC, NDTV, Star TV, ETV and Blog TV Singapore. He was featured on the cover page of The Week magazine. Microsoft awarded him the “Most Valuable Professional” status for 2007 and 2008. Hindustan Times (a leading daily news paper in India) mentioned him as “founder of the Indian blogging revolution.”

Amit writes about computer software, consumer gadgets, web applications and personal productivity.

It is very easy to create a blog. Infact you can create a blog for free. Read my post on how to create a blog.

Your ideas/suggestions will help me to improve this blog. Please do leave a comment.

The first thing people do after creating a website is to open Google and search for search engine submission software or service. Interestingly they look for a free search engine submission service, but alas end up paying for actually a no service.

What is search engine submission? (A layman’s perspective)

A process of submitting a website to search engines so that they “know” the website exists and should be considered while displaying search results.

And a misconception they have is that if they submit their site to search engines the website will be ranked well and therefore will start getting good traffic.

Reason why people search for search engine submission software is that they feel a software will automate the process and save time.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Search engine submission is just that – search engine submission. Its NOT search engine optimization.

People don’t seem to understand the difference. Search engine submission is submitting the websites to the search engines and search engine optimization is the process (a long process) to optimize the website in a way that they get top rankings in the search engines for some good business related keywords.

Search engine submission will take you a minute, while search engine optimization may take months or even years.

Coming back to the topic of the post – is search engine submission required? The short answer is Yes and NO. Whatever the case may be, one thing is for sure – search engine submission software is NOT required.

Before answering the question in detail let me tell you in very very brief how search engines work.

Search engines keep a copy (or backup) of most websites in their databases. Once someone submits a query, they look in their database and return links to relevant webpages in their search results. The most relevant page will get the first rank, the next relevant the second …. so on and so forth.

Huh, that was too brief really!

Read this carefully – if a website is “in” the database of a search engine, there is absolutely no need to submit it to that search engine. But if it isn’t, search engine submission is required.

How to know if a website is in the database of the search engine?

Open your favorite browser.

Visit the search engine.

Type the URL of your website in the search box.

Hit enter.

If the site is in its database, the search engine will show the URL of the website in the search result. In most cases the site will be in the first position.

If the site is not its database, it may show some other websites’ URL or show that the search did not match any documents / site may not exist / did not find any results for ***.

For example cnn.com is in the database of all three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Live (MSN).

Click on the following links to see the result for cnn.com:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=cnn.com
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cnn.com
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cnn.com

Now let’s check if website cnn0123456789.com exists in the database of these search engines. I am sure such a website does not exist, so it won’t be there in their databases.

Click on the following links to see the result for cnn0123456789.com:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=cnn0123456789.com
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cnn0123456789.com
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cnn0123456789.com

So if you are the owner of “cnn0123456789.com”, you may need to submit the website to the search engines once the website is live.

Here is something interesting. Search engines are themselves eager to find new sites. The reason is simple – they will have more scope to improve their search results. Bigger their database means more information for the users.

More than you, the search engines want to find about your website and take a copy in their database.

How do they do this?

To know about new websites, the search engines follow the links present in the websites. Say for example A.com is in the database of a search engine and it has a link to B.com, the search engines will know about the site B.com and keep a copy of B.com in their database. Similarly if B.com has a link to C.com – this site also will be known by the search engines.

There is a way to tell the search engines not to follow a link, however this is beyond the scope of the article.

Until unless specified, the search engines do follow the links.

Read this carefully. If your site is linked from any site that is present in the database of the search engine, they will follow the link and know about your site. In that case there is NO need to submit the site to that particular search engine.

However if no site is linking to your site and you don’t see it in their search results, you may need to submit the site to search engine.

Note that for some strange reason sometimes the search engines know about a site even if it isn’t linked from any other site. (I presume that the domain registrars inform them. But this is just an assumption. There may be some other reason.)

If you need to submit a site to the search engines you can search the engine themselves, or look for a submission link.

If you want to submit a site to Google, Yahoo! and Live (MSN), here are the links:

1. Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/

2. Submit to Yahoo! – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

3. Submit to Live (MSN)! – http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

NOTE: Please read the search engine’s guidelines carefully before submitting your site. You may need to submit the home page ONLY. Rest of the pages will be crawled by the search engines themselves. Please don’t use any search engine submission software. The search engines do not like it. They prefer manual website submission. There is no need of any search engine submission service provider either, as submission to these search engines is easy and free.

I hope this article will help you to understand search engine submission better and help you to avoid costly mistakes.

You views are important for growth of this blog. Please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to read in this blog.

Related Topics:
 
1. Search Engine Optimization in a Nutshell
2. How to Find Inbound Links in Google and Yahoo!
3. How to Get Great Incoming Links