Do AdWords Customers Get Special Boost in Organic Search Results – Matt Cutts Video

A new webmaster help video released by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team on Oct 29, 2012.

This is a response to a question asked by a webmaster on Google Moderator Page for Matt’s upcoming webmaster help video series.

Below is the question asked by Christoffel Hiltermann from Dublin:

I am an important Adwords customer and recently I have seen a drop in ranking for my site. Why can’t I get advice on optimizing my site for Google’s search results through my Adwords PoC?

Christoffel Hiltermann, Dublin.

Here is the Matt’s tweet about the new video:

It’s a common belief of newbie and anti-Google readers that Google treats those big spenders of AdWords specially and ranks them higher in organic search results, due to their AdWords point of contact.

Matt’s View: Google is very fair for its publishers. Even though you are a AdWords customer; don’t think you get a special boost or special treatment for ranking high in organic search results.

And for the support for optimizing your site for better search ranking, Google likes you to go through the exact same support channels that anybody else on the web would have.

Checkout the whole video below…

Do you think “He (Google) is transparent?” Add your comments below.

How to Make Your Blog Addictive in 5 Simple Steps

Have you given some thoughts – Why you visit your favorite blogs again and again, everyday without getting bored?

It’s because, they are your favorite. they have the right kind of ingredients in their blog which made you a blog-addict and invite you to visit again and again.

You know, you should be grateful to these bloggers who have made you a blog-addict by tempting you to consume their content day and night. Because these are the blogs who helped to find your route and keep walking in the crowded streets of blogosphere. These are the blogs which enlighten your inner thoughts to become a thought leader, and show you the right path in times of need. These are the blogs where you get the solace when you feel dejected as a tiny blogger.

It’s not so difficult to make your blog addictive to your readers. But, you have to love your blog more than yourself. You have to be passionate about your niche and ever-ready to work hard by putting blood and sweat in to your content.

So, let’s dig a bit deeper in to their secrets and make our blog addictive.
1. Make your blog’s voice unique

The unique voice or flavor of a blog is what makes a reader addictive.

Here, unique voice means – the way you write and serve the content with adequate information to get connected with your blog visitors or readers. Unique voice of a blog is the biggest factor which makes a reader addictive.

Now tell me, “Why do you visit McDonald when you think about burger?” Or, “Why do you prefer Coca Cola over other brands plentily available in the market?”

It’s simple. It’s their flavor or uniqueness.
2. Make your content solve their problem

Do you know, why your regular readers visit your blog everyday?

It’s the content or information which helps them to solve their problem. They visit your blog with an intention to gain something new and learn some tips and tricks to make their life easier.

Blog post which are educative in nature gains maximum popularity in blogosphere. And, never forget to break a piece of news, first, every now and then to make your blog readers stay ahead and loyal.
3. Respect your readers

Treat your blog reader like a “special guest.”

They are the real people who help your blog stand-out in the blogosphere. In fact, you are writing for them only. Your whole blogging career revolves around them. So, why not respect them?

Now, the question is – How to make your readers feel like special, when they visit your blog?

It’s simple. Address each and every queries and comments with an intention to help them out, adding more information which are not in the main blog post, or simply greet them with a smile by adding a short acknowledgement to their comments.

Every good commenter who leaves a meaningful comment in your article, usually re-visits on the same day or the very next day to know your response. Respond them quickly and make them feel special.
4. Publish your articles regularly

No matter you publish your articles once, or twice, or 7 times a week. Schedule your blog posts in a regular fashion.

The organized nature of your blog publishing habit makes you non-spammy and trustworthy. Publishing 4 articles today and the next one after 7 days will not going to work.

Maintain the consistency and make your readers glue to your blog.
5. Don’t dilute your blog’s flavor

Remember the 1st point – “unique voice of your blog.” Now, we have come to a full circle. Keep reading…

Bloggers usually spoil the flavor of their blogs by publishing low quality and tasteless guest posting, which offer very less or no value to their readers.

These are the articles which dilute your blog’s voice or tone. These are the articles which create a distance between you and your readers, and make them stay away from your blog.

There are plenty of great bloggers who blend their guest posts successfully in their blogs by doing a great editing work and still portraying an unique voice. But, this is not an easy task. Everybody can’t be Darren Rowse (Problogger.net) or Brian Clark (Copyblogger.com).

Finally, publish guest posts after adequate editing to match your blog’s image or flavor.

Web 2.0 Tools To Benefit Your Blog

I wanted to talk about web 2.0 tools that you can use to help benefit your blog. In the world of blogging, it seems like all a new blogger gets done is writing. You talk about everything that you feel is the best fit for your blog in the hopes that someone will get some benefit from it.

This is great. This is exactly what you should be focusing on too. Giving information that people need to know that can help them.

However, there is one problem that a new blogger always has to fight every day. That is the fight of getting traffic to your blog. For an established blogger, this comes as second nature. Being in the blogging industry for over 2 years now, I have set a schedule that I can pretty mush follow in my head, and really don’t think about what I’m doing.

But for someone new, this could be an overwhelming task. Of course the goal is traffic, but since there is no magic traffic button that you can press, you’ve got to learn the in’s and out’s of the blogging schematic in order to get that traffic coming to your site.

Web 2.0 Tools & What They Do

In my experience, I didn’t come across web 2.0 tools until they were already popular and started.  However, what I didn’t know was that when I first started blogging, I was already on a web 2.0 site and didn’t know it.  As most bloggers do, I joined the Blogger platform where I talked, and still talk about social media & traffic tools and web 2.0 tools, which I will explain about a little further in.

First of all I will just clarify what is the web 2.0 tools that you can use for your site. Now I call them tools because this is used primarily as a source of linking back to your site. Some people use these sites as their main blog, and that is ok, however, there is another option, which I will explain here, of how to make them web 2.0 tools to your benefit.

Here are some of my favorite web 2.0 sites:

• Weebly
• Squidoo
• Twitter
• WordPress.com
• Blogger
• Tumblr
• Reddit

It’s a short list, but these are the most popular web 2.0 sites that you can be using for your site right now.  The search engines place each one of these sites in high authority, which is good because I’m going to show you how you can get great backlinks from these platforms.

How To Use Web 2.0 Tools

Ok, like I said, I sort of stumbled onto this type of marketing for my blog. Web 2.0 sites are awesome for building great backlinks to your site.  With the recent rampage of Google, most sites have been de-indexed because their links aren’t relevant to the content that they are writing about, therefore sandboxing most of their material.

This happens when you contract your link building out to third party services.  Build your own links!  Anyway, that said, sites like these can be used, not only for regular blogging, but also for linking back to your main blog post with a high quality link.

First of all, on your main blog, write your content.  If you are using WordPress, then you probably already have either Yoast or SEOPresser, these will help you manage your keyword without over-stuffing your post.

After publishing, I would recommend at least 3 of these 2.0 sites listed above and start writing some more!  This is how web 2.0 tools can help you.  Write original, and yet helpful, content once again…don’t forget about the reader, and while doing so, link back to your main blog post with these three sites.  It helps with faster ranking and indexing of your post.

Now a lot of people get this confused with “link-wheeling”, which is a whole different process.  I don’t think that building a link wheel is classified as “Black Hat” per say, but it’s definitely shadey.  I wouldn’t recommend link wheeling on ever post, but it is allowed.  So figure out your own time frame.  Always keep in mind that you have your 2.0 sites too, and link to them in your future blog posts when you can as well.

Top WordPress Plugins You Should Be Using

One of my top ten favorite blog post to read are those of “top wordpress plugins“. I believe that I have read almost all of the top wordpress plugins posts online! Anyway, it would be no surprise that, if you ever wrote a post like this, I will be there to read it and share.

Top WordPress Plugins

Having a great list compiled of all of your top wordpress plugins that you can share with other people is an important post to have.

Everyone loves other people’s viewpoints and ideas of what works for them in the form of plugins.

You will always find different views on different blogs of what the top wordpress plugins are for that one particular blog. It is not saying that these ideas are set in stone, it’s just that once someone get’s in the groove of marketing their blog, they tend to get comfortable in what their strategy is, so they cease to keep looking for improvements for their blog in the form of plugins.

I am one of the worst people to do this. I would rather plank a bed of nails as change anything! However, it’s when I read these “Top Plugins” posts that I realize what I need to change in my site or at least try it out to see how it works out.

Let’s be realistic. Not every plugin works for everyone. As of this moment, I am on the fence about my social sharing plugin. Is it what people like? Is it share friendly? I struggle with this, and, from time to time, I will change the social sharing icons on my site.

Here are the top social/interaction wordpress plugins that work beautifully for me

1. Cash Donator- Probably the best plugin that you can use for advertisements on your site. Cash Donator is a paid plugin, but worth every penny, and you won’t believe how cheap it actually is.  As far as displaying your ads in your posts or sidebar it is excellent.  However, if you are wanting to review a product, Cash Donator works great as well.  Read my post about my review of Cash Donator
2. CommentLuv Premium- Another great plugin!  I am sure that you have already saw, or even have, the regular version of CommentLuv.  It enables you to display your latest post on other people’s blogs when you comment on their site.  However, I want to talk about the premium version of the CommentLuv plugin.  This is a must have for your site!  Why?  Because when your visitors go to comment on your post, it prompts them to share your post to social media.  This is by far not the only thing that it does, but it is probably the most powerful.  It also monitors spam comments at a much higher level and allows your would-be commentor to display their Twitter account when they comment.
3. Comment Redirect- This is a great plugin!  After the user comments for the first time on your site, it redirects them to a separately created page(that you will create on your blog) where you can offer them a free copy of your ebook, or whatever you have in mind! Comment Redirect is another free plugin by Joost De Valk, which I will introduce another plugin by him in the next series.
4. Shareaholic- Also known as “sexy bookmarks”, Shareaholic looks great on your site.  Sleek and easy to use, they are a great addition to any blog.  What I like about Shareaholic is the look and ease of use.  What I don’t like, as I mentioned above, is it goes down more often than not.  It kinda get’s aggravating, but this is what I’m using now, but looking into other options.
5. Aweber Comment Opt-in- If you have started your email list with Aweber, then you will be happy to know that you can add a tick box in the comment section that the reader can click to opt in to your list.  You can find this plugin here.
6. The Slide by Simple Reach- Another great plugin that will engage your reader while they are reading.  If you will notice the little slide out box that pops out in the lower right hand of this screen, you will see that it prompts you to read another post related to this category.  Yet another way The Slide keeps your readers engaged.

The next set of plugins are what I like to use for SEO related purposes.  These are, in my book, some of the top wordpress plugins that I use to help me get noticed quickly and efficiently by the search engines.

Top wordpress plugins for SEO:

1. External Links- This is a plugin for people who don’t want to give away links for free.  You can monitor the External Links plugin easily and effectively from your dashboard to monitor which links get juice and which one’s don’t.  I use this to take away link juice from all of my ads on my site.  A great way to help your site’s page rank.
2. Google XML Sitemaps- One of the best ways to get the search engines to index your site posts faster and more effectively.  No more no less.  You need this plugin.
3. Pingler- You know when you write a blog post, you must ping your post to different feeds so that it can be indexed faster.  No need to do this anymore.  With Pingler, there is no need to waste all of that time doing that.  Set it up, and when you hit “publish” on your post, it automatically pings all of the major feeds.
4. SEO Friendly Images- If you understand SEO at all, then you already know that your images must have ALT tags written on them.  This takes all of that work out. ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your images to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

These are just a few of the plugins that I use to be successful on my blog.  Sure, there is more to it than just having the right plugins, but it is definitely one piece of the puzzle that will fit together to make your blog successful.

If you don’t have some of these I suggest that you get the one’s listed here that you don’t have.  They are definitely the top wordpress plugins for my site and I know that they can help your site too!

There are more top wordpress plugins that you can find, and I recommend that you keep searching. Never let change interfere with your strategy. There is always other bloggers that can teach you lots of cool things!

Best Blog Promotion Ideas for Traffic

There are plenty of blog promotion ideas for bloggers to attract right traffic, leads and revenue.

Instead of deciding on our own, we ran a survey on MoneyCTL since last few months, asking our readers “How do you promote your blog?”

We received a total of 221 responses from our visitors for different blog promotion ideas. The 4 different ideas or options we had given to choose (one) were:

1. Social networking

2. Guest blogging

3. Search Engine Optimization

4. Blog commenting

The result was almost inline with expectations, but with a little surprise.

RESULTS: SEO and Social networking got 70 votes each and emerged as the most preferred blog promotion ideas for bloggers. Surprisingly, it’s a tie!

Followed by “Blog commenting” which got 59 votes. And “Guest blogging” is the least preferred method and received only 22 votes from the participants.

The results remind me of a survey conducted in 2012 for B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumers) marketers and SEO became the first choice for lead generation. Marketers have been showing more faith on SEO for sales and brand awareness. Checkout the article here.

INFERENCE: No doubt, social media sites are quite effective for traffic generation (Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest etc). But, SEO has got some edge over social networking, in terms of generating highly targeted traffic and leads. May be this is due to the increased faith of web-searchers on Google due to better user experience day by day.

Guest blogging is more of a tool for authority building, brand awareness and backlinks. Traffic generation is the secondary benefit of guest blogging.

So, what actually is “Blog Promotion” which we are talking about? It means – Promoting your blog for traffic which results in brand awareness and lead generation. Driving highly targeted traffic, who performs the desired task or action on your blog.

Share your most preferred blog promotion ideas for traffic and revenue generation in comments below.

Matt Cutts Answers Questions On How To Use The Link Disavow Tool

The link disavow tool has been out there for nearly two weeks now and while some have just dived in and used the feature others have been asking Google more detailed questions. We’ve even got the answers to some of these questions, they have come directly from Google’s head of web spam team, Matt Cutts.

Question:

“How will people know what links they should remove?”

Answer:

“When we’re taking targeted action on some specific links, the emails that go out now include examples of bad links. We provide example links to guide sites that want to clean up the bad linking. At the same time, we don’t want to help bad actors learn how to spam better, which is why we don’t provide an exhaustive list.”

Question:

“How are you dealing with index files? Do you have to remove all variations, such as like this:

http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com

http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com/

http://badsiteiwanttodisavow.com/index.html”

Answer:

“We tried to cover this in the last two to three questions [of the announcement post]. Technically these are different URLs, so if you want to be ultra-safe, then you would list the URL variants.”

“Practically speaking though, Google normally canonicalizes such URLs to a single URL, so if you’re going off the backlinks that you download from “google.com/webmasters/”, then you should normally only need to list one url.”

Question:

“Just to double-check, reconsideration should only be done if they’ve gotten a message about a manual action, correct?”

Answer:

“That’s correct. If you don’t have a manual webspam action, then doing a reconsideration request won’t have any effect.”

Question:

“Do manual actions specifically say if they are related to bad links?”

Answer:

“The message you receive does indicate what the issue with your site is. If you have enough bad links that our opinion of your entire site is affected, we’ll tell you that. If we’re only distrusting some links to your site, we now tell you that with a different message and we’ll provide at least some example links.”

Question:

“What prevents, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but seemingly inevitable concerns about “negative negative SEO?” In other words, someone decides to disavow links from good sites as perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad? More to the point, are you mining this data to better understand what are bad sites?”

Answer:

“Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests. We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”

“We may do spot checks, but we’re not planning anything more broadly with this data right now. If a webmaster wants to shoot themselves in the foot and disavow high-quality links, that’s sort of like an IQ test and indicates that we wouldn’t want to give that webmaster’s disavowed links much weight anyway. It’s certainly not a scalable way to hurt another site, since you’d have to build a good site, then build up good links, then disavow those good links. Blackhats are normally lazy and don’t even get to the “build a good site” stage.”

Question:

“Any last thoughts, comments or perhaps warnings of mistakes you’ve seen people make?”

Answer:

“I have gotten a couple people asking “If I disavow links, do I still need to do a reconsideration request?” We answered that in the blog post, but the answer is yes.”

“We want to reiterate that if you have a manual action on your site (if you got a message in Webmaster Tools for example), and you decide to disavow links, you do still need to do a reconsideration request.”

“We recommend waiting a day or so after disavowing links before doing the reconsideration request to give our reconsideration request system time to pick up the disavowed links, and we also recommend mentioning that you disavowed links in the reconsideration request itself.”

Using Contextual Link Building for a Higher Ranking with the Search Engines

Using contextual link building for a higher ranking with the search engines is by far one of the best search engine optimization strategies. When the context of the web pages you have are a close match to the context on other web pages linking the two together can make the search engines give you extra ranking points for being popular and having a common bond with another page.

If you just randomly try to insert links to your pages rather than doing contextual link building for a higher ranking with the search engines you could do more damage to your ranking than you do good. The content of two web sites that are linked together must have relevance to each other. If the content does not have a relationship to the content from the previous page then the search engines will not see the link as favorable. You have to be careful with your search engine optimization techniques to make certain that you do not disregard any of the regulations that have been established to make the systems work well together and be fair to all web sites.

With Contextual Link such as guest posting service you not only get the opportunity to increase the ranking you have with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines, you have the chance to send people who are already interested in the context of your pages to them. With these links the person is viewing a page or a web site that has some of the same general information that you have so they are interested in this information. They see the link to your web site where they are supposed to be able to either get more information on the subject or where they are supposed to be able to make a purchase of something they have been researching. That is a winning combination because all you need is relevant material, the person browsing is already hooked.

Contextual link building will work from other sites and it will work from things like discussion forums that are covering the topics you cover on your pages. It will work from directory list, more especially for the ones of you that have web sites with things to sell on them. It will work from blog sites that are discussing what you are selling or the service you provide. Some sites have a higher PR value than others but all of these sites will help you to increase your visibility and your search engine ranking.

Be sure that you visit the sites that you are linked to on occasion and check your link to make certain that it is working still. Repairing broken links will keep the traffic flowing smoothly.

7 Steps to Setting Up Your Google Account for SEO

If you own a website, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization and marketing by now. If not, it is the practice of optimizing the content on your website and improving your search result ranking. This can greatly improve the amount of visitors to your website. Follow these steps to help you get started generating more traffic:

1. Account – Setting up your primary account with Google is free. Your primary account is what all of your tools and settings will be linked to. This makes it easy to quickly switch from one tool to another without logging in to every tool one-by-one.

2. Webmaster Tools – This is where it all begins. Signing in to Webmasters Tools allows you to add your website to be crawled by Google. Once your website is verified through various methods, it will begin to be crawled regularly. Verification can be through a variety of means including HTML file upload to your website server.

3. Sitemap Submission – In the Webmasters Tools, you can submit your sitemap for more efficient indexing of your website. If you don’t have a sitemap yet, there are plenty of websites on the Internet that can help you such as XML-sitemaps.com, although you will have to make a new one periodically to keep the information current for Google.

4. Analytics - Google Analytics will provide you with a vast array of information about who visits your site, when it was visited, what page they visited, and demographics about the visitors machine and location. This can go a long way to determining optimized content related to what is popular. Analytics includes referral information as well including where the visitor came from to access your website: ie. YouTube, Google, eBay, and others.

5. Adsense – As you develop your website, might as well monetize it. With Google Adsense, you are able to show advertisements on your website related to your content. Each time a visitor clicks on one of those links, you get paid a varying amount depending on the ad’s worth determined by the advertiser.

6. Adwords – Ready to start advertising your website? Google Adwords is a Pay-Per-Click advertising platform that allows you to place ads on search results and websites. Those ads that you just added to your website with Adsense came from here. Keyword and phrasing are very important in developing Adwords ads and you may want to research on the best methods before putting money into it.

7. Apps for Business – For continued success, Google Apps for Business is a great set of professional tools that can keep yourself or your organization connected. Everything you could need to promote and market your website is within the Apps for Business.

Google is loaded with reports and tools covering a wide range of aspects for your website. By learning these tools and reports, you can begin to develop a website that generates optimum traffic for the content provided. As most of these tools are free, you have very little to lose, and so much to gain.

About Contributor: Ken Myers is the founder & contributor for http://www.longhornleads.com/. He frequently researches and writes about a variety of topics like education, Technology, Health and many more.   He welcomes your comments.