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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