Thanks for being a return reader! If you haven't already, you may subscribe to our articles by email alerts or via RSS feed . Also you can follow us on Twitter !

As blog commenting becomes more popular as a form of link building and traffic generation, there is a steady increase of those who are trying to abuse the blog commenting system. But as many comment abusers are starting to learn, with the increase in spam is an increase in systems (such as Akismet) designed to thwart their attempts. So commenting abusers are finding more creative ways to bypass these systems and look more legit.

Commenting Faux Pas

So how do bloggers determine which comments to keep and which ones to trash or mark as spam? Here are some major faux pas and red flags when it comes to commenting.

Ambiguous Comments

“Wow, what a great post. This is my first time to visit here, and I like everything so much that I have subscribed.”

Sounds like a great comment, right? It’s easy, especially for new bloggers or those who are struggling to get comments / subscribers to fall for this type of flattery. But the problem with this comment is that it could go with any post on pretty much any site.

Comments from the Same IP

“Angie | this domain.com | angie@thisdomain.com | 122.44.77.35 | Blah blah blah blah blah…”

“Tera | that domain.com | tera@thatdomain.com | 122.44.77.35 | Blah blah blah blah blah…”

“Tom | other domain.com | tom@otherdomain.com | 122.44.77.35 | Blah blah blah blah blah…”

Many blog systems allow blog owners to view the IP address of their commenters. If several comments come in using different names, different emails, different websites, but the same IP address, this is going to be a huge tipoff that the comments are all spam.

Copied Comments

“Social media is a really nice way to generate traffic. And YouTube is the best (in our opinion) means to do it. Maybe this is because one has to invest some time and efforts in making a video, so one naturally tends to make a video which is REALLY interesting for people. It’s much easier to “tweet” something, so more often than not one “tweets” rather “something about nothing” (at the same time – unfortunatlly!! – spamming the internet).”

“I’m happy to see more and more of my favorite charities on Facebook and even on Twitter sometime. I do whatever I can to help by sharing their FB messages and retweeting their tweets.”

“I have had a facebook for a long time but it was just recently that I began using it again actively. I also created a fan page and as of now is on the building and growing process. I know i have yet more to learn regarding using facebook to its full potential and advantage. It is my first time to hear about facebook insight. Will definitely be giving it a try. Thanks for sharing.”

“Social media is a really nice way to generate traffic. I’m happy to see more and more of my favorite charities on Facebook and even on Twitter sometime. I have had a facebook for a long time but it was just recently that I began using it again actively. Thanks for sharing.”

A new trend in spam commenting is taking bits and pieces of approved comments and sewing them together into a “unique” new comment. If the blog owner is in tune with their reader’s responses, they will get a feeling of deja vu which will tip them off if they have received a copied comment.

(more…)

When I first made the decision to consolidate all of my various and many email accounts over to gmail, I was initially very frustrated with the fact that Google’s gmail only allows you to create a plain text email signature. I was seriously like what the ****?! #GoogleFail!

This was a real issue for me because I have been using a nice flashy html signature for many years.

However this was only an issue until I stumbled upon a post Ann Smarty had written back in 2008 titled SEO Consultant’s Email Signature – What’s Your Tactic? One of the commentators in the post mentioned a cool firefox plugin for easily creating email signatures.

Wisetamp to the rescue! Fortunately Wisestamp is now also available as a Google chrome extension

Once you have the plugin installed, as you can see from the screenshot below, the WYSIWYG editor is very simple, straight forward and easy to use. You can easily switch between visual and html mode, as well as add your blog’s RSS feed, IM ID’s and all of your social networks along with their icons.

Other Key features

• Easily switch between email signature (business & personal)
• Easy to use WYSIWYG editor (switch between visual & html mode)
• Ability to add your blog’s RSS feed
• Automatically insert signature into webmail Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo mail, Hotmail etc
• Easily include instant messaging ID’s & icons
• Ability to link to all of your social profiles (48 different options)
• Easily add an image or logo
• Quick preview

For those of you that haven’t received an email from me yet, here is what my current email signature created with wisestamp looks like.

Wisestamp has a nice gallery of email signatures where you can see some additional examples for inspiration.

Bonus Tip

Add a nice RSS subscribe button to your signature using feedburner

Feedburner has a very neat RSS email signature widget. Here are the simple steps. Login to your feedburner account, click on your feed, click on publicize, click on email signature.

Now you will have several options to customize the look and feel. Once you have it the way you like, select (just give me the code) from the drop down menu and you can just paste this into the html editor for wisestamp.

Do you have any cool email signature tips? Please let us know about them in the comments.

SEO Copywriting is typically not a difficult skill to master. Provided that you have some grasp of how keywords function in your writing and write well without grammatical mistakes, you can usually be sure that the search engine optimization of your writing has already been taken care of for you. However, there are ways that you can take your SEO content to the next level.

1. Think About the Man AND the Machine. Do not make the mistake of assuming that only the crawlers need to like your SEO Copywriting. You can write pages that earn you a very high rank on Google but, if visitors do not enjoy reading it, they will likely not trust the content or link back to it.
2. Get Rid of the Fluff.Whenever you complete a sentence, ask yourself what value it gives to the reader. Of course, introductions will have some expository information. However, the remainder of your SEO Copywriting should be good solid facts and information.
3. Dense Keywords – Not Saturated Keywords. Your main keyword should be situated at the beginning of your article, in the majority of paragraphs in your main body and relatively close to the end. Do not try to overuse keywords in your article. Total keyword saturation should be around 2-3%.
4. Bringing Words Out With Accents. Save your bold, italic and underlined words for keywords. This will bring keywords not only to the attention of your readers, but to the attention of search engines. However, using these techniques too often, especially when the words are not keywords, can have a detrimental effect on your SEO Copywriting.
5. Content is King, Lists are Emperors. Today’s Internet readers love lists. If your article cannot be a list, be sure to include a few within your article. Lists are a great way to squeeze some keywords economically into content and are easy to scan.
6. Frames = Mistakes. It’s very simple. Do not use frames. They will destroy your content and likely prevent it from being recognized properly by search engines. Enough said.
7. Keep HTML Code Simple. HTML code is a simple tool to help you keep your content organized. However, stick to simple HTML codes when creating content. Paragraph, header and list tags as well as a few strong tags on keywords are all that are needed with good SEO Copywriting.

This is a guest post by Corry Cummings, who enjoys internet marketing and content writing. He runs a custom content creation business.

What’s the most important factor that determines whether your press release gets read by an editor or thrown away? It’s the headline. With editors and journalists receiving hundreds of press releases each day, they typically scan over the headlines to determine which ones seem interesting enough to read fully.

With that in mind, your goal is to write a powerful headline that sucks cynical editors and journalists in, making them want to learn more about your story. This gives your press release the best chance of getting picked up, earning your company valuable coverage.

Here are some tips to write better press release headlines.

• Strive for being clear rather than clever—Don’t write your headline to impress other writers by showing how “clever” you are. Editors are only concerned with trying to figure out what your story is about. Your press release headline should clearly reflect what’s covered in the body of your press release. Focus on answering as many of the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions in your headline as possible.

  Here’s a little test you can run to determine if your headline is clear enough or not. Send just the headline to several friends. Ask them to describe what they think the rest of the story is about. If they can’t make a decent guess, it’s probably time to rewrite your headline.

• Make sure the headline is accurate—Don’t try to trick editors into reading your press release by misleading them in your headline. A misleading headline might grab their attention for a moment, but it will lead to them getting upset when they find out you’ve duped them. This will cause you to lose all credibility, and it will burn any potential relationships you have with the media.
• Ditch the hype—Sure, the goal of press release distribution is to build brand awareness and to create a buzz around your brand. However, that doesn’t mean you should treat your press release like an advertisement for your products and services. It’s not. So, your headline shouldn’t sound like Billy Mays (RIP) wrote it. By all means, be interesting, but above all else, be factual and straightforward.
• Lists work—There’s no denying it: List headlines just work. You see them on blogs, magazine covers, and in newspapers. The reasons lists work are because they clearly describe what the story is about, are easy to scan through quickly, and can create controversy and debate.

  So, when you’re thinking of an angle for your press release, try to find a way to structure it in list form. I think you’ll find it gets a lot more attention than most other headline formats.

• Keep it short—If you can’t get the main idea across in about 10 words or less, you don’t have a good enough grasp on what your message really is. Remember, the reporters and editors you’re sending your press release to are in a hurry. They’ll likely only give you a few seconds of their attention, so you need to get your message across quickly. Focus on creating concise headlines that clearly deliver your message. Write several different versions of your headline to find the perfect combination of brevity and clarity.
• Include the targeted keyword—Never forget the importance of optimizing your press release. The search engines tend to favor press releases, giving them high rankings for the targeted keywords. Always try to get your main keyword in the headline, and whenever possible, place it toward the front of the headline.

Do you use press releases to spread the word about your business? How have your press release marketing efforts helped your business? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab your free copy of the Big Press Release Book – Press Releases for Every Occasion and Industry here: press release samples

I’ve entered a Guest Blogging contest over at Famousbloggers.net. Here is a link to the post if you want to check it out How to Put the Kibosh on Content Scrapers & Thieves

If you are interested in participating in the contest here are the details.

Contest sponsors:

• FamousBloggers.net – contest organizer

• MyBlogGuest.com our contest media partner

• MMO social network – making money online tips

• DesignGizer.com a new design bookmark site

• Better Blogging for Bloggers blog

• IBlogZone.com a making money online blog

• CrazyEgg.com heat mapping tools

• SimplyFreshThemes.com Fresh Journal WP theme

Contest Prizes started at $248 and reached $447.75

• $50 Cash via PayPal from MMO social network

• $50 cash via PayPal from DesignGizer.com design bookmark site

• $15 cash via PayPal from making money online IBlogZone.com

• $199.75 worth 5 copies of Fresh Journal theme from SimplyFreshThemes.com ($39.95 for each theme)

• $95 worth 5 copies of 70 Posting Ideas from BetterBloggingforBloggers.com ($18.95 for each copy)

• $38 worth of 2 free one month memberships (see where people click on your site) from CrazyEgg

Contest winners:

The contest is going to have 5 winners, which means a very big chance for you to win one of our prizes, and if you think about the great benefits of guest blogging you will find your self a winner in all cases.

Who can participate?

The contest is open for everyone who writes any related topic to our blog categories, and this means anyone can be part or it as long as you write unique and fresh post specially for the contest. PLZ make sure you have a valid PayPal account, we are not able to use any other service to deliver prizes.

They will accept only high quality articles related to these niches:

Making Money Online, Marketing, Blogging Tips, SEO, Promotion, Branding, Social Networking, Web Design and Development.

Contest Guidelines:

• Take a look at FamouBloggers.net submit your article page before start writing your post.

• Create your account on FamousBloggers.net

• Write your post and submit it to your Famous Bloggers account.

• Write a very simple post on your blog with links to our sponsors above & prizes

• Promote it the way you like! (send it to all your social media friends)

How to win?

First of all (remember) this is a writing/popularity contest, means the useful good content force readers to like it, so be sure to make your post from that type! Then start promoting it using social media, bookmark sites, and even on your blog, this will grantee the maximum exposure for your post and your blog, and don't worry.. we will help you on promoting your post and share it with our community readers.

Contestants will collect points depending on:

• Quality of your post

• How many valuable comments

• How many Tweets

Contest Start/End

The contest is already running and will end at 31 of March 2010.

This is a guest post by Eric Gesinski who does SEO in Tulsa and Tulsa website design.

Searching on Google is one of the core elements of good SEO research. Find your competition, see who’s listed for certain keywords, and more. But if you know some of the tricks to the Google search query parameters, you can learn a lot more.

photo credit:dullhunk

Here are 6 Google search query tips to help SEO:

1) “intitle:”/”allintitle:” Using this followed by your keywords will show you who’s strongly targeting these keywords by putting them into their title tag. Using just “intitle:” will show any of the keywords you’ve queried in any order, but not necessarily all the keywords. Using “allintitle:” will show all results with every keyword you’ve listed in their title tag, in any order. Putting your keywords in quotes after “intitle:” or “allintitle:” will show only listings who have all the keywords in that order in the title tag. By doing this, you can see who’s got at least the basic SEO down to compete for this keyword.

2) “inanchor:”/”allinanchor:” This query will show you who Google has found that has the highest number of links with these keywords as the anchor text pointing to these pages. The top listing has the most links pointing to this page with that anchor text, and it goes from there. Again, using quotes will show who’s using the exact phrase for their anchor text. By dusing this query you can see who you have to beat in anchor texted links (according to Google) to rank higher for that keyword.

3) “intext:”/”allintext:” This query isn’t as important as it used to be, since good SEO doesn’t weigh so heavily on keywords in on-page content (more on title tags and anchor text), but it can still be useful. This shows which pages are using the keywords most in their content. PageRank does affect the order of the listings for this query, so a site with a higher PR value will show up higher than another page even with the same keywords used a similar quantity on their page.

4) “link:” This fits well with the “inanchor” query for backlink research. If you put a domain or a page address after this, you’ll find out what other pages are linking back to this page. There are other tools that some people prefer to do this job, but it’s a quick way to find out what backlinks somebody is using.

5) “site:” If you don’t know this trick, this is one you really need to have in your arsenal. Using this followed by a domain name will show all pages in that domain that Google has crawled. If you add keywords after this, it will show only the pages in that domain that match the query. This can be used to find out how many pages from a site Google has in their server cache, as well as looking for specific information within a domain. This trick can even be used to find all sites of a particular class about a certain keyword phrase by typing in something like “site:.edu” with your keyword.

6) “info:” Another trick that is often missed. This will basically give you shortcuts to find out more about a domain or a specific page that you put after this tag. From the results page on this, you can find the cache (which will display the last time the page was crawled) as well as a few of the above options (“link”, “site”) plus pages that are similar to the indicated page (the “related:” tag) or even just a pure query on who has that specific term listed on their site. It’s a mix of the Google query tricks in one place, but if you know each of them uniquely you can do each separately on your own.

Learning how to use each of these can make for very powerful tools to use for your SEO research and goal-setting. It can help find out who your competition is and how effective they are at different SEO elements.