Announcing MyBlogGuest: Community of Guest Bloggers

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It’s no secret I believe in guest blogging as on of the most effective ways to build your brand, broaden your scope and find new audience. In fact, guest blogging is one of my most-often used link building tactic that has helped me get my most valuable links.

My constant quest for new blogs to guest blog for has brought me to one important question: is it possible to unite all bloggers interested in publishing posts by other bloggers and those guest bloggers under one roof? The idea seemed tempting enough: plenty of people are interested in guest blogging to build their network of contacts and promote their sites.

So I decided to go ahead and give it a try; and here it is: MyBlogGuest - currently not really feature-rich (implemented as a simplified forum) but with the concept behind it: join if you want to guest blog!

Want to be my friend?

Then help me by becoming my beta tester: Read on: Announcing MyBlogGuest: Community of Guest Bloggers

SEO Ethics | 3 Comments » | 2009-11-25

How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot

Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In this post I am sharing a tip on how to create a useful Twitter RT bot that can be used to collect various Tweets around a keyword or a hashtag and retweet them. And before you start throwing stones at me calling me a Twitter spammer, let me give just a few examples of how this bot can be used to create real value:

• Think of a Twitter RT bot that will be used to collect Tweets around some SEO conference. Thus all people who want to follow live updates from many members won’t need to keep track of hashtags and keywords associated with the event - all they need is to follow your bot.
• Or, say, you want to introduce your own cool hashtag and get other people to use it (#FirefoxFriday for example) but you want to filter out all retweets and give people the way to only follow real first-hand Tweets - a Twitter bot is the best option to go!

So, I guess I made it clear why you might find this tutorial handy. Now let’s see how to create one: Read on: How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot

Social Media Marketing | 20 Comments » | 2009-11-12

Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration

One of those tactics that keep working for me is creating viral pieces (like long lists full of cool images) that attracts thousands of visitors and dozens of links. People seem to never grow tired of “20+ Weird Something” (I myself am guilty of regularly sharing these types of content with friends via IM and social media). So why not try them if they work and entertain people (looks like a win-win to me)?

As I’ve been playing with them for a while, I decided to go ahead and share my sources of inspiration (in a hope you’ll share yours in return).

1. Google Search

Good old Google search is quite understandably my first source of inspiration. Here’s one trick I’d like to share that always works: Google wildcard search. Just insert * anywhere in-between your topical search phrase and you’ll get plenty of suggested term variations right within SERPs:

• [amazing * swimming pools] for more ideas on swimming pool designs;
• ["what kind * are you"] for more viral quiz ideas;
• [weird *] just for something bizarre.

Read on: Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration

Viral Marketing | 69 Comments » | 2009-09-25

How to Ghost-Google: Searching Google without Google to Know about You

There can be several reasons why a search marketing professional would want to be “ghost-googling” (i.e. searching Google without Google to know you are searching it):

• He/She may want to see absolutely “fair” results (not influenced by his/her recorded browsing preferences, territory, etc);
• He/She may want to be served “non-targeted” Google ads;
• He/She may want the competitors to be unaware they are being watched (have you ever noticed any [site:yoursite.com] type of Google referrals? This is quite enough to suspect someone is after you).

So here are a few steps to take to ensure some preferred level of Google privacy:

[Btw, I do see the irony behind trying to make our sites visible to Google while getting invisible ourselves :)] Read on: How to Ghost-Google: Searching Google without Google to Know about You

SEO Ethics, Search Engines | 20 Comments » | 2009-09-04

How to Optimize Your Site for Phone Calls

A lot of time passed since my post on calls-to-action but I am still getting comments and requests from people who are willing to get their site visitors to act. One of the recent comments was about optimizing your site for phone calls: how to place your company number to start getting calls.

I don’t know any extraordinary hacks (if you do, please share) but here’s what I know about why and how to make your telephone number visible: Read on: How to Optimize Your Site for Phone Calls

Usability | 20 Comments » | 2009-08-11

Impossible CAPTCHA : It Doesn’t Really Matter if You are Human or Not

CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart”. In a broader sense, CAPTCHA is defined as:

Type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade…

["simple" is the key word here]

CAPTCHAs present a very controversial topic: you can’t do without them as a webmaster and you can’t stand them as a user.

Some CAPTCHAs are just impossible to figure - no matter who you are (a robot or a human), you won’t pass the test. Here’s my gallery of impossible CAPTCHAs:

Read fast:

Read on: Impossible CAPTCHA : It Doesn’t Really Matter if You are Human or Not

Usability | 45 Comments » | 2009-05-18

How (and Why) to Maintain Several Online Identities

Ok, before you start calling me a spammer or anything like that, I’ll say there may be totally legit reasons why you would want to keep several online identities, for example:

• You may want to separate business life from your personal life (really having your husband/wife and your clients on same Facebook account may be tedious);
• You don’t want your partners and clients to know about your other projects (why would I want the SEO world to know that I own a creepy celebrity blog on blogspot and promote it on Myspace… and no, you don’t want to see that Myspace page!).

You know me as Ann Smarty, that’s my SEO pseudonym, and if you search this name on Google you will see only my professional profiles, professional comments and professional articles. But my SEO business is only part of my Internet life and I don’t want you to know (trust me, you don’t want to know that either:)) what stuff I stumble from my “private” StumbleUpon account and what comments I leave (or used to leave) on fellow Myspace profiles.

OK, I guess now you are intrigued to know that but that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to live several online lives, that’s totally OK and here are some tools for that (yes, there are tools for that either!) Read on: How (and Why) to Maintain Several Online Identities

Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing | 35 Comments » | 2009-05-07