http://gautham.maediratta.com » Tools & Resources for Bloggers http://gautham.maediratta.com V6.24! Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:57:32 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Distribution 2.0 – Talking without voice! http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/08/04/distribution-20-talking-without-voice/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/08/04/distribution-20-talking-without-voice/#comments Sat, 04 Aug 2007 15:12:57 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/08/04/distribution-20-talking-without-voice/ Call this Distribution 2.0 …. toys that talk to each other: Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Widgetbox & Netvibes.

What do I use and what does it do?
Wordpress: An open source blogging platform that publishes RSS feeds and allows hyper personalization using plugins.
Facebook: A popular social (networking) platform that publishes RSS feeds and allows publishing on its own platform.
Twitter: A simple but brilliant micro-blogging solution.
Pings: Hello World! Automatic updates from my blog to over 70 sites such as Technorati, Icerocket & Pingomatic
Twitterfeed: Updates my latest blog entry automatically into my Twitter Status
Twitter Facebook App: Automatically updates the twitter badge on my facebook profile.
Widgetbox: Updates Blog Widgets with my latest posts (aka blidgets) on a couple of friends blogs and social networking profiles.
Wordbook: Publishes new post notification into Facebook Minifeed.
MyRSS (Facebook app): Updates my feed on the Facebook RSS directory for new users to find.
Share This (Wordpress Plugin by Alex King): User initiated bookmarking, voting (digg it, fave on technorati) and send via email.
Digital Fingerprint – Enables you to easily and quickly search the web for potential cases of plagiarism and content theft. It works by adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts that you select (or all posts if you wish). You can then easily monitor the blogosphere for your digital fingerprint in the hopes of finding potential content thieves and scrapers abusing your content
Netvibes: An RSS aggregator that I spend almost half my life on. In addition to getting updates from all my news sources, i now get my email and facebook feeds as well. Netvibes – very very cool!

Gotta get back to the real world now….happy blogging! :)

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/08/04/distribution-20-talking-without-voice/feed/ 0 Nice tool to check PageRank of all pages on your blog http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/03/24/nice-tool-to-check-pagerank-of-all-pages-on-your-blog/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/03/24/nice-tool-to-check-pagerank-of-all-pages-on-your-blog/#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:50:48 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/03/24/nice-tool-to-check-pagerank-of-all-pages-on-your-blog/ http://www.iwebtool.com/visual/?domain=gauthaM.MAEDIRATTA.COM&nofw=1&ex=1

iwebtool shows PR of all pages/links on your blog

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2007/03/24/nice-tool-to-check-pagerank-of-all-pages-on-your-blog/feed/ 0 How to use Yahoo! Social Media tools effectively http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/11/19/how-to-use-yahoo-social-media-tools-effectively/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/11/19/how-to-use-yahoo-social-media-tools-effectively/#comments Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:13:46 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/11/19/how-to-use-yahoo-social-media-tools-effectively/ Social media consists of Blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS feeds, and social networks; nexgen tools that bring sites, users and communities into a dynamic, ongoing conversation. Syndication and sharing are key to social media since they accelerate the (r)evolution of that specific content/page.

Yahoo!’s dedication to social media and variety of offerings to its users is well known. Many webmasters and bloggers miss the opportunity to drive boats of traffic from the biggest portal on the internet by using these tools effectively enough.

Given below are a list of tools, what they offer and relevant URLs
blo.gs – a pinging service to broadcast updates

del.icio.us – social bookmarking site that allows users to attach tags to saved entries. These tags allow users to attach keywords to their bookmarks. Since no webmaster, blogger can cover every relevant keyword in his description of his page in meta content and reflect them well enough in his keyword density, delicious tags are a useful way of allowing users to generate content on your behalf and thus drive more relevant traffic organically. Especially useful for niche topics. You can include an ‘Add to del.icio.us’ button to the bottom of every post thus turning your users to evangelists.

Save to MyWeb 2.0 – Allows users to save, share and re-visit your sites pages. MyWeb Tools are numerous and consist of everything from buttons to save to myweb which you can include at the bottom of your post to Badges & APIs.

Y!Q: Sounds like IQ :) and allows you to provide related searches and information to your users at the mouseover! Users love sites that provide them the worlds information in the easiest manner. Y!Q allows you to offer your visitors a more wholesome experience. Recommended for advanced bloggers as the install is a more complex.

Add to My Yahoo!: My Yahoo! is amongst the most popular services that keeps Yahoo!s users engaged. The ‘Add to My Yahoo!‘ button allows your RSS feed to be integrated into a users personalised page thus allowing him to find you in his daily dashboard of online updates. Whenever your blog gets updated he is automatically notified on his next login to My Yahoo!

Similarly you can add buttons for users to post your content and on their 360 Pages, and get them to build buzz around your content. Similarly you can upload your podcasts onto the popular Yahoo! Podcasts and display what users think of your podcasts on your own site thus adding to the credibility of your content.

This week Yahoo! also released some easy-to-plug-in (interactive) Social Media Optimisation Tools for anyone who creates content on the internet (publishers, podcasters and bloggers) making it extremely easy for users to share, save, recieve updates and blog about your content. These tools are in multiple formats and can be customized to the look and feel of your site.
Feel free to email me on ‘gautham at maediratta dot com’ if you have any questions.

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/11/19/how-to-use-yahoo-social-media-tools-effectively/feed/ 0 A Little Piece of the Google Algorithm – Revealed http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/10/31/a-little-piece-of-the-google-algorithm-revealed/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/10/31/a-little-piece-of-the-google-algorithm-revealed/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:10:59 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/10/31/a-little-piece-of-the-google-algorithm-revealed/ http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1467
The comments and discussion are a must read for SEOs/Webmasters
GoogScore = (KW Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) – (Automated & Manual Penalties)

KW Usage Factors:

  • KW in title tag
  • KW in header tags
  • KW in document text
  • KW in internal links pointing to the page
  • KW in domain and/or URL

Domain Strength

  • Registration history
  • Domain age
  • Strength of links pointing to the domain
  • Topical neighborhood of domain based on inlinks & outlinks
  • Historical use & links pattern to domain

Inbound Link Score

  • Age of links
  • Quality of domains sending links
  • Quality of pages sending links
  • Anchor text of links
  • Link quantity/weight metric (Pagerank or a variation)
  • Subject matter of linking pages/sites

User Data

  • Historical CTR to page in SERPs
  • Time users spend on page
  • Search requests for URL/domain
  • Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users GG can monitor (toolbar, wifi, analytics, etc.)

Content Quality Score

  • Potentially given by hand for popular queries/pages
  • Provided by Google raters (remember Henk?)
  • Machine-algos for rating text quality/readability/etc

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect summation of the algorithm by any means, but I have a strong suspicion that if we were to see the exact algorithm in perfect form, we’d see that a lot of these factors are strongly reflected in the weighting.Read on…

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/10/31/a-little-piece-of-the-google-algorithm-revealed/feed/ 0 Getting back onto the Hotbot Search Index http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/getting-back-onto-the-hotbot-search-index/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/getting-back-onto-the-hotbot-search-index/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 05:00:32 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/getting-back-onto-the-hotbot-search-index/ Marketleap revealed that HotBot had chosen to drop me from their index. I hopped over to Hotbot’s page and used their help service to find how i could submit my site to lycos search.   So i found my way to http://help.lycos.com/faq.php?do=article&articleid=542 where i discovered that Ask.com has starting powering their results. Hopped over to Ask fom where i found bloglines (also owned by IAC Search & Media), signed up and started the process of claiming my blog.  (Users can do this by selecting My Blog and then clicking on publisher tools.)  I have been asked to place a unique code code   anywhere on my blog  and some other code on my template.  Will check back in a week or so, lets hope this helps!

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/getting-back-onto-the-hotbot-search-index/feed/ 0 Blog Basics – Check the number of pages of your blog indexed by Search Engines http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/blog-basics-check-the-number-of-pages-of-your-blog-indexed-by-search-engines/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/blog-basics-check-the-number-of-pages-of-your-blog-indexed-by-search-engines/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 04:54:05 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/blog-basics-check-the-number-of-pages-of-your-blog-indexed-by-search-engines/ To continue from where i signed off last time, it is imperative that major Search Engines know that your site exists and have a majority (if not all) the pages of your site in their index. Industry folks call this Search Engine Saturation.

The logic is simple…the higher the number of pages indexed, the higher the likelihood that a Search Engine throws up your site in their Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

Marketleap.com has some brilliant meta tools, that are FREE & allow you to understand
a) Search Engine Saturation
b) Link Popularity &
c) Keyword Verification (where your site appears for a particular search phrase)
The importance of each one of these parameters cannot be emphasised enough and the relatinship between all three are interwoven. The higher the number of links pointing to your site, the higher the likelihood of a meaty index. The link text forms the base for the terms associated with your site. (So for e.g. if all the links that pointed to my blog were Netreaucrat my site would be associated with the term Netreaucrat and figure higher in SERPs for that particular phrase). Lastly, keyword verification allows you to check where your blog features for pertinent search terms across different engines.
The last time i checked my Search Saturation i was pleasantly suprised to see the statistic at 477. Appears that this has now crawled up to 685 with the MSN index still being the largest.

Maediratta.com Search Engine Saturation

Engine Current Min Max Avg
maediratta.com
Google/ AOL/ HotBot 159 3 159 99
HotBot 0 25 25 25
MSN 400 71 400 171
Yahoo!/ FAST/ AltaVista 126 1 126 57
Total/ Current 685 71 685 289
Click on the links above to view trending for each engine.

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/16/blog-basics-check-the-number-of-pages-of-your-blog-indexed-by-search-engines/feed/ 1 Blog Basics – Robots.txt http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/13/blog-basics-robotstxt/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/13/blog-basics-robotstxt/#comments Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:45:55 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/13/blog-basics-robotstxt/ So you have your blog set up and you’ve started pouring your heart out. It’s natural that you expect your name to be all over search engines, loads of traffic, money, fame, your face on the cover of Forbes…hold it…not yet…nothing begins if a search engine doesn’t know you exist! No traffic, no money, no fame…
The next natural question is….how does a search engine find my site?
Text links from external sites (which lead the SE crawlers/robots to index your site) and manual search engine submissions requesting your site to be crawled. Web Robots are programs that travel across the Web. They’re also known as Web Wanderers, Bots, Crawlers or Spiders. They invariably find their way to sites on the back of embedded text links and check back for updates from time to time.
(The names are misleading and make them sound like independant adventurers moving from site to site and transmitting data home. This is not the case, these bots are couch potatoes, firmly planted home birds that constantly keep pinging new sites…disappointing, huh?)

You need to ensure that your site has a functional Robots.txt that allows all search bots to crawl your site. A Robots.txt is a simple text file that you need to upload into your root directory for e.g. http://maediratta.com/robots.txt. Feel free to copy the lines below and upload after correcting the URL.

# http://www.yoursite.com: robots.txt
#
User-agent: *
Disallow:

What this particular robots.txt has done is allowed all Bots to index the site and hasn’t banned any. If however, you do not want xyz bot on your site simple add them to the disallow list.

If you are keen on reading up, you should check http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html. Advanced users should check RoboGen. RoboGen is a Windows-based program that helps you easily manage robots.txt files for your websites. Instead of the time consuming manual management process, described in the tutorial, you can either edit your robot exclusion files on your local computer or on a remote FTP site.

Just remember that the Index of a Search Engine is built on the data gathered by these bots, so the more they crawl, the better your chances of featuring on a search result, getting traffic, money, fame, the cover of forbes and so on… :)

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/13/blog-basics-robotstxt/feed/ 2 Increase Traffic to your blog using Pings http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/11/increase-traffic-to-your-blog-using-pings/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/11/increase-traffic-to-your-blog-using-pings/#comments Mon, 11 Sep 2006 05:15:15 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/11/increase-traffic-to-your-blog-using-pings/ It’s not just about putting content up on the web, the trcik is all about getting people to find this ifnormation. So far the easiest way to get people to your site/blog has been to get on the right side of the Search Engine and cross your fingers and hope for the best. However, today Pinging would stand as the single best way to drastically increase the number of visitors to your blog .

There are several services on the Internet that track Blogs for new information and announce updates in one form or another. These services are monitored in turn by the major search engines, so if you can get your Blog information to appear in these services, you then have your foot in the door for Yahoo!, Google and others. It can take months of hard work if you are not Blogging and Pinging.

Most half-decent Blog softwares offer services to ping the major services after you create a new Blog. To add the list of pings to your WordPress Blog all you have to do is Sign-in and from your dashboard choose Options/Writing and paste the list below into the ‘Update Services’ box.

Happy blogging!
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/ http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/11/increase-traffic-to-your-blog-using-pings/feed/ 2 Resources for Bloggers http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/10/resources-for-bloggers/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/10/resources-for-bloggers/#comments Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:52:03 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/10/resources-for-bloggers/ Decided to give my blog some much needed attention. Had wanted to add a host of tweaks, a resonable amount of syndication, and lastly get listed on all the Blog Directories i could think of. Have added a detailed list to this entry and also created a permanent set of links in the sidebar (phew!…learning HTML was the easy bit…getting all the stuff to work perfectly took some energy)

Blog Directories
http://www.blogcatalog.com
http://www.blogflux.com
http://blogs.botw.org – A highly regarded Blog Directory. Needs editor Approval quite like http://dmoz.org/
http://www.blogtopsites.com
http://www.blogrankings.com

Resources on Blogs & Bloggers
www.blogpulse.com – A service of Nielsen Buzz Metrics is everything from a Search Engine for blogs, to a set of buzz-tracking tools that are applied to blog content daily to track blog activity on key issues, people, news stories, news sources, bloggers and a fun look at real-world Trends as reflected through blogs. There are some interesting ideas like daily blog stats that measure activity in the world of blogging (number of blogs identified, new blogs created, number of blog posts analyzed), trend charts comparing buzz in the blogosphere on up to three specific topics, a Conversation Tracker that follows and captures the discussion, or conversation, that emanates and spreads from individual blogs or individual blog posts, blogger profiles and a showcase of blogs.

http://www.feedburner.com – FeedBurner is the world’s largest feed management provider. Their Web-based services help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web. FeedBurner also offers the largest advertising network for feeds that brings together an unprecedented caliber of content aggregated from the world’s leading media companies, A-list bloggers, blog networks and individual publishers.

http://www.blogexplosion.com – These guys ROCK! I’ve been with them for a while and they have been a source of loads of quality traffic.

http://www.pingomatic.com – A one stop shop to send a ping to every major RSS aggregator in the wild west of the internet. For e.g. if you click here you’d update something…and hey, Thanks! ;)

http://www.ipings.com – Another pinging service that is a must.

http://www.bloggerswap.com – Fundamentally a Banner Exchange where bloggers can swap banners which display their content. Users are allowed to swap banners only within their category of blogs.
http://bloggerads.com – A Marketplace to Buy Sell and Trade Blog Adverts.
http://www.bloggerhub.com – Blogger Discussion board.

Also attached is a list of pings that you should perform. I have integrated them with Wordpress so that this automatically happens when I post my post, if you get what i mean! :)

I quite enjoyed researching and posting the Blogger Special so expect more…and much sooner! Stay smiling! :)

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]]> http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/09/10/resources-for-bloggers/feed/ 0 3 Word Nirvana http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/08/07/3-word-nirvana/ http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/08/07/3-word-nirvana/#comments Mon, 07 Aug 2006 06:29:36 +0000 Gautham Gauruv Maediratta http://gautham.maediratta.com/index.php/2006/08/07/3-word-nirvana/ Om Namah Shivaya!

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