How to use Google Alerts

How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked?
Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

Google doesn’t give you a warning when they see lots of links to black hat sites - they just stop sending traffic to the pages that contain them. If the hacker has only added the code to a few of your pages the traffic drop can be quite small and it becomes almost impossible to diagnose the problem.

Clearly what we need is some kind of easy to use method for site owners to get a notification as soon as these links are added. Because the hackers often hide the links from everybody apart from Google it’s clear that we need to leverage the Google spider to do the work for us.

Luckily Google Alerts allows us to create advanced search queries so we can set up an alert to monitor our websites for any terms that might appear when a hacker takes control. Of course we can’t monitor every term but it is a very good starting point.

To get started we need to think of a few likely spam terms that people might like to inject in our site and then use them to make up a search query:
it OR freaks OR zone OR anybadword site:itfreakszone.blogspot.com

Next simply go to Google Alerts and enter the query above into the “Create a Google Alert” box and you will get an email whenever Google spots one of your chosen spam words on your site.

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Beginners Guide to Linkbait

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image. Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident.

The first step to thinking of a really cool tool, unique news story or article is to find out what people want to read about.

Another good tip is to search the social bookmarking sites for things related to your site that have been popular in the past. You might find a nice tool that was on Digg 2 years ago and be able to use it to inspire something more modern for your site.

A quick look at some popular tools in different areas is often a good source of inspiration. For example you might see a tool on a car/auto website for valuing used cars and be able to apply it to your real estate site.

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Blogging - a great SEO tool

You can look at a blog from several perspectives. For most people, it is just a simple self-expression method, others see it as a discussion forum. However, if you look at a blog not only as all of the above but also as a SEO tool, your handling of the blog will change. How you write your posts will change. How you think about your blog will change. You'll then be able to derive great business value from your blog.

Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, involves anything that improves your ratings in the popular search engines, like Google, MSN & Yahoo. The higher your ranking, the greater the chance that a new customer will see your site in the first page of search engine outputs. While you can improve the structure and linking of your site by practicing techniques of on-line and off-line optimization, such as adding meta-tags and sitemaps, you need other methods to increase the popularity of your site.

Blogging is one such method. Blogs traditionally have a large number of posts on them that relate to a specific subject. Readers who are interested will come to the blog, reading, and leave feedback and comments. If you promote your blog actively, you will also visit the blogs of your readers, and leave comments on their sites along with a link back to your blog. Can you see how the blog is beginning to behave like a SEO tool?

Two things happen if you handle this well – your blog gets lots of keyword rich content and it gets a lot of links to itself from other sites. Either way, your business gains.

Search engines love keyword rich content and inbound links. While traditional SEO tools do this by making you manage links to other sites and increase or optimize keyword usage, your blog is doing this in the most natural way and gives you a great big, ready-made user base!

Of course, before your blog does become your SEO tool of choice, there is a lot of work to be done. You will not be able to build the niche you are looking for if you do not focus completely on the quality of your blog. This means that your content has to be great and the better than average informed reader still has to find something worth reading on your blog.

While keeping a blog can be a great satisfaction in itself, there are many business related benefits to keeping one. A good blog is a natural SEO tool that attracts traffic to your site in the most natural way.

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To Blend or Not To Blend?

The use of Adsense is often in great debate in most popular SEO forums. The majority of the topics are on how to place the ads on your site to get the most out of a page hit. Some SEO's (Search Engine Optimizers} say that the ads should be towards the top of your page to get a higher CTR (click-thru-rate). Of course other SEO's say the bottom is best for the ads.

One of the next topics discussed are the facts of blending the adsense ad to the rest of your site or not to blend it in with your site. Some SEO's say that you should blend to not disturb the visitor and also it seems more like a part of your site and will make them believe they should click for even more information. This is not always true when the ads are placed on a site that doesn't offer information in the first place. Then on the other hand if you make a ad that sticks out they feel it will draw attention and get more clicks. Other SEO professionals feel that this will only irritate the visitor and may cause them to leave the site.

The major thing that you must learn is to use your blending and placement together in a manner where you can say yes to the following questions:

* Did I place the Adsense ads where they can be seen?
* Did I match the background and border color in a way that would raise the ad off the page, giving it a slight 3-D affect?
* Did I blend the text color of the ad to make it look like its part of my page?
* Did I place them where they aren't obstructing what my visitors are originally there for?
* Did I place the google adsense ad in a place that is in the line of the visitors reading path?
* After looking at my page, was the placement and blend at least where I would read the adsense and possibly click?

If you can answer yes to yourself and be very truthful then your adsense ad is in a good spot for now. Don't forget that you should experiment when you get your traffic up. Find out what works better for you and your pockets.

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The benefits of google sitemap

Google Sitemaps enables Webmasters to Directly Alert Google to Changes and Additions on a Website. Telling search engines about new pages or new websites use to be what the submission process was all about.

Google has for a long time depended on external links from pages they already know about in order to find new websites. For webmasters and blogger Google Sitemaps is the most important development since RSS or Blog and Ping, to hit the Internet. Using RSS and Blog and Ping enabled webmasters to alert the search engines to new additions to their web pages even though that was not the primary purpose of these systems.

If you've ever waited weeks or months to get your web pages found and indexed you'll know how excited webmasters get when someone discovers a new way to get your web pages found quicker. Well that new way has just arrived in Google Sitemaps and it's a whole lot simpler than setting up an RSS feed or Blog and Ping. If you haven't heard of Blog and Ping it's a means by which it's possible to alert the search engines to crawl your new website content within a matter of hours.

If you're a webmaster or website owner Google Sitemaps is something you can't afford to ignore, even if you're also using RSS and/or Blog and Ping. The reason you should start using Google Sitemaps is that it's designed solely to alert and direct Google Search Engine crawlers to your web pages. RSS and Blog and Ping are indirect methods to alert search engines, but it's not their primary purpose. It works now, but like most things it's becoming abused. Search Engines will find ways to combat the abuse as they've done with every other form of abuse that's gone before. Abusing the search engines is a short term not a long term strategy and in some cases certain forms of abuse will get you banned from a search engines index.

You may also be thinking, don't we already have web page Meta tags that tell a search engine when to revisit a page. That's true, but the search engine spider still has to find the new page first, before it can read the Meta tag. Besides that Meta tags are out of favor with many search engines especially Google, because of abuse.

If talk of search engine spiders leaves you confused, they're nothing more than software programs that electronically scour the Internet visiting web sites looking for changes and new pages. How often the search engine spider alias robot, visits your website depends on how often your site content is updated, or you alert them to a change. Otherwise for a search engine like Google they may only visit a website once a month.

As the internet gets bigger every second of every day, the problem for search engines and webmasters is becoming evidently greater. For the search engines it's taking their search spiders longer to crawl the web for new sites or updates to existing ones.

For the webmaster it's taking longer and becoming more difficult to get web pages found and indexed by the search engines If you can't get web pages found and indexed by search engines, your pages will never be found in a search and you'll get no visitors from search engines to those pages.

The answer to this problem at least for Google is Google Sitemaps.

Google Sitemaps Benefits:

1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want
2. Your Website is crawled more Efficiently and Effectively
3. Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want
4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery
5. No Waiting and Guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages
6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines
7. The Google Sitemaps service is Free

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Google Adsense Tips

Every single website and its owner have the opportunity to make some great money by displaying Google Adsense ads on it. The first thing that you need to do is to Place the Google Adsense ads in the right spot of the page. This will determine how much money you will make each day. It is very important that you place the ad at the top of the page on your website in order to get the most clicks. What this really means is that you will want to place the Adsense code that Google gives you high enough on the page so that your visitors do not have to scroll down to see the Google ads. If you choose to have the ads right at the top above everything else then do that.

By placing the Google Adsense ads at the top of your website above the fold, there is a greater chance that people will click on the ad, which will help your site generate a higher click through rate also known as CTR. The reason for this is because the majority of your visitors will not scroll down the page and look at it. A lot of the time, people look over the top part of the page without worrying about scrolling down. The way you blend the ads with the rest of your page can determine if the ad is visually appealing or not.

It is very crucial to make the Google Adsense ads look like your site and not another ad. You can do this by making the font and color of the ad's text similar to the rest of the page. I also recommend that you blend the background of the ad with the background of your page. It should basically have the same color. Google gives you the option to go into your account and customize your ads in different fonts and colors. This will help you blend the ads to your site.

People who visit your website usually try to avoid any banner and picture ads that they see. If you want to increase your click through rate, you will want to add text ads. Google gives you that option so use it.

Here are other small tips to increase your Adsense income:

1. Google has confirmed that using the 336x280 rectangle ad block size does have the highest click through rate. Using this ad size will increase your click through rate and the income that you generate.
2. Using a blue underline for the links can also improve your click through rate. This allows the ads to actually stand out and look clickable.

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Avoid this blog title

Because your goal should be to different from other blogs that exists, you need to think past your initial instincts when it comes to naming your blog. Most people tend to come with similar names, and by avoiding those same traps, you start to set yourself apart from the mob.
The top ten names to avoid:

blog
news
weblog
world
life
thoughts
with
daily
from
journal

This does not mean that the use of these words will necessarily damage your brand, but rather that, if you find yourself back on the same keywords, you’re probably thinking fairly predictable. Break out, go crazy and creative with the name of your blog! Just like this blog :)

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Essential SEO Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more and more complicated area especially with the recent updates and data refresh on the search engines index. However, the basic concept for good ranking does not change. The following illustrates five most important SEO techniques as summarized from the Google Webmaster Guidelines that all webmasters should follow.

It is stated clearly in the Google Webmaster Guidelines that they do not index urls with session ids. In addition, they will not index pages that require user authentication as the bots visit pages like a general user. Search engines also cannot guarantee that they will index all the dynamic url. Therefore, in order to facilitate the search engines in crawling all the pages, static url are always preferred.

The second technique is to create a site that holds unique and fresh content. Search engines like to index fresh content. A frequently updated site will find the bots returning to visit at a shorter interval. Adding unique content regularly will also help other users to find the site more easily as these pages will add on to the respective domain’s search index in the search engine database.

Third technique is equally important as it ensures that search engines can crawl every page in a site successfully. Having a text link navigation system is highly recommended for SEO purposes as it is almost guaranteed that the bots will visit all the pages via the text links. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash navigation system, as the bots will ignore them. Implement a Google Sitemap is also recommended, as this will help the search engines to find any pages that may be missed during the crawl.

After implementing a search engine friendly navigation system, the Webmaster should focus on the keywords allocation and place the targeted keywords in appropriate places. Of the entire HTML markup, the most important tags to take note are the title and the headers. It is advised to have a different title for every page and to adopt a proper hierarchy of headers so that search engines know what the content that the pages are focusing is.

The final step towards a good search engine ranking is to attract organic links. Organic links are natural links from content related pages. Google only takes into account of these natural links when ranking and indexing pages as stated in their guidelines. Although linking from the unrelated pages does not hurt its rankings, they will not help either.

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Tips For Learning SEO

First step: create a practice Web site. This can be a blog, personal home page, or a hobby site. If possible, start with a new site that has never been submitted to search engines or directories. There's some evidence that using a domain name that has your keywords in it can give you a slight boost in rankings, so keep that in mind. To start, you might want to try optimizing just the main page of your site and see how that goes. Alternatively, you could try different techniques on different pages and see which work best. If you choose a subject you know and love, things will be much easier.

Next step:

Choose the proper keyphrases. What you think will be the perfect keywords and phrases might not be what people search for.


Learn to create great meta description tags and meta keyword tags. These two tags are important, but not as important as most people think. It's a good idea to create a good meta description tag that uses your keyphrases and is a good description of your site. This is often the info that appears under your search engine listing. The meta keyword tag isn't quite as important. Contrary to popular belief, what you place in the keyword tag will have little bearing on what keyphrases your site is found under. Use this tag, but don't obsess over it.

Learn to create a killer title tag. This tag is critical because it's given a lot of weight by most search engines. You must put your keyphrases into this tag and not waste space with extraneous words. Don't use the title tag to display your company name or for the phrase "home page." Think of it more as a title/keyphrase tag and create it accordingly.

Learn about the extra goodies that can boost rankings. These include alt tags, header tags, link popularity and keywords in the domain and file names.

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Google Tips and Tricks

Here's the google tips and tricks that many internet users don't know about.

1. Calculator - Use the Google Search engine as a calculator by typing a math problem in the search. For example, typing: 100 + 200 would display results as 300.

2. Track packages - Enter a UPS, FedEx or USPS tracking number to get a direct link to track your packages.

3. Phone number lookup - Enter a full phone number with area code to display the name and address associated with that phone number.

4. Definitions - Pull up the definition of the word by typing define followed by the word you want the definition for. For example, typing: define bravura would display the definition of that word.

5. Track airline flight - Enter the airline and flight number to display the status of an airline flight and it's arrival time. For example, type: delta 123 to display this flight information if available.

6. Find weather - Type weather followed by a zip code or city and state to display current weather conditions and forecasts for upcoming days.

7. Local search - Visit Google Local enter the area you want to search and the keyword of the place you want to find. For example, typing: restaurant at the above link would display local restaurants.

8. Stocks - Quickly get to a stock quote price, chart, and related links by typing the stock symbol in Google. For example, typing: msft will display the stock information for Microsoft.

9. Find PDF results only - Add filetype: to your search to display results that only match a certain file type. For example, if you wanted to display PDF results only type: "ibm" filetype:pdf -- this is a great way to find online manuals.

10. Pages linked to you - See what other web pages are linking to your website or blog by typing link: followed by your URL. For example, typing link:http://itfreakszone.blogspot.com/ displays all pages linking to this blog.

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Find out who's linking to your blog

Do you wonder who's got links that bring people to your blog? Well, See who's linking to your blog or web page by searching for link: followed by your URL. This is just another simple internet tips, but can be usefull if to check your backlink.

For example, when searching for " link:http://itfreakszone.blogspot.com/ "in Google the results will display pages linking to the itfreakszone home page.

You can use this tips for google, altavista, infoseek. Try another search engine and tell me about the result.

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