Springleap is currently having a competition which is awarding the user whose website ranks the highest for the keyword ’springleap’. Basically, get those SEO tools out, on the 1st of April the judges will do a google search for springleap and the top three SERP ranked sites will win cash prizes

The prizes are as follows:

* 1st SERP result - R2500
* 2nd SERP result - R1000
* 3rd SERP result - R500

It’s a clever idea, as most people will be linking back to Springleap inside their posts, therefore securing the keyword for Springleap.com ultimately

I do see that the following domains are open:

* springleap.info ($2.99)
* springleap.net ($9.99)
* springleap.org ($8.99)
* springleap.mobi ($7.99)

The actual Springleap website is rather badly SEO’d, so if you go ahead and register one of these domains and SEO it up correctly, you could easily easily win - Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to do it, otherwise I would! Me thinks..

1. Register domain
2. Install wordpress
3. Write 3 posts
4. Simple metatag usage
5. Inbound link structuring

.. and you could probably win 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize! Someone do it, I want to see someone win doing this!

Many people have emailed me asking me different questions related to search engine optimization, and I do try and write a decent article now and then. I received a question earlier about Technorati and how one could go about increasing ones technorati ranking. Great question and a question that many people over look.

There are a number of different strategies available on the net and some unique ones that I use myself, so I’ve had a think about it and here’s a strategy, which I know works extremely well.

The easiest and most important step is getting Technorati to recognise all the links over the Internet which are associated with your website and which links are available on your website. Technorati often over looks hundreds of potential links and this will naturally damage your ranking. So let’s get started.

First off we need some software, something like Xenu will work. Xenu is a wonderful piece of software, which will crawl your site for links pointing towards it and links available on it. Download the software, enter in your website address and fire away.

Once the program is finished doing its thing, a website will popup - Scroll down to just over half way and look for ‘List of valid URLs you can submit to a search ening’. Once we have that list, we need to copy it to notepad. The next step is to use the technorati pinger, to ping all these URLs, you might want to remove all the external links from the list before you start pinging (http://technorati.com/ping). For sites with lots of links, obviously pinging each link seperately would take forever, so you can try Autopinger (http://autopinger.com/). Another way to submit multiple links is to use (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping)Â with your blog to automatically ping on page loads - let’s take a look at auto pinging with Wordpress:

• Log in to your WordPress weblog.
• Select “Options” from the top menu.
• Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
• The last option on the page is “Update Services.” Add Technorati’s ping server (see address above) as a new line within the Update Services text box.

Applying this method to your website should see a lovely increase in recognised incoming links and therefore a stronger technorati ranking.

Give it a bash, let me know how it goes

Hey peeps,

Everyone knows that one of the first things to do with your blog is index it with Google via Google Webmasters tools and the second thing is to create a sitemap.

Creating your sitemap isn’t a hard task when wonderful sites like xml-sitemaps exists. Simply type in your URL, punch the button and their program will create an .xml file for you. This is the file you submit to Google Sitemaps.

All done? Nope.

So many people run along, submit their sites, grab the .xml file and upload it, but honestly, this isn’t the most ideal way of doing things. Once you have your .xml file, rather open the file up and have a look at all the URLs inside that file. Google has to download this file from your site and then proceed to index the various pages - what happens if you have hundreds of URLs inside the text file? Google will take a while to download the file and on top of that, Google won’t have the time to crawl all the URLs as he is a busy chap.

Open the .xml file in a text editor and remove useless URLs, as well as that, spend some time arranging the most important links towards the top of the file. The smaller the file and the higher the important links, the better your site will get indexed.

I always do this and trust me, it makes a big difference!

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Let’s take a look

Locate the edit-link-form.php stored in your wp-admin folder. Download it and open it in a text editor. Locate the following code: <th scope=”row”> <?php _e(’friendship’) ?> </th>, under this code you will see <td></td> tags, roughly on line 123 or so. See the image below. Where you see the pink rectangle, you will be adding the following code:

<label for=”nofollow”>
<input class=”valinp” type=”radio” name=”friendship” value=”nofollow” id=”nofollow” <?php xfn_check(’friendship’, ‘nofollow’, ‘radio’); ?> /> <?php _e(’nofollow’) ?>
</label>

Once you have added the new lines of code to the edit-link-form.php file, save it and upload it replacing the old file.

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