Our journey begins by defining some of the key contributing factors that Google uses to determine a website’s and webpage’s ranking within its results. These factors range from keyword use to manipulating internal and external links and the list goes on. To get you started, they have listed the top twenty factors that you should focus on in order to help get your website that little bit closer to the top of the search engine results listings.

For example it shows you your score, gives an explanation for where on the strength scale your URL falls, and provides links to the other sections of the report.

Your score is a measure of your blog’s importance and popularity. It predicts the blog’s ability to rank well in search engines, the reach of your brand awareness and how well you currently draw in traffic.

Then it retrieves data from multiple web services including Google, Yahoo!, Technorati, Bloglines & more and sends them through our custom formula to produce your blog strength score.

It’s a question every blogger asks themselves. Skellie wants to answer it by outlining 7 content methods that seem to work wonders on social media while also generating a lot of grassroots in-bound links.

• A #5 ranking sent him 6,000 unique visitors per month.
• A #1 spot, using the leaked AOL search data (referenced later in this document), is worth 8.5 times what #5 is. 6,000 * 8.5 = ~50,000 uniques per month
• His site currently makes $40 for every 1,000 pageviews.
• His estimated income from ranking #1 for [bingo cards]: $2,000 a month.

You could do this type of calculation for any keyword you rank for that has significant search volume. You can use some of the other data points listed in the knowte to create similar calculations - even if you do not rank yet.

This knowte is also available in german!

LinkMyPics is an easy to use widget, packaged in an external Javascript file, that helps convert otherwise frustrating image and bandwidth theft into useful backlinks to your website.

Visitors who right-click on the protected images are presented with either HTML (for web pages) or BBCODE (for forums) that they can copy/paste so they can display the image on their sites. The benefit to you? The code they use includes a built in link back to the page the image is located on. This can not only bring traffic to your site, but can also help boost your search engine rankings.

What’s a sitemap?

Lets take a short view at the basics. If you know what sitemaps are, you can jump to the next part. By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Let’s do it!

So how do you create a sitemap? The best way is to use plugins for your blog or cms, which will get updated everytime you update you files and will inform google automatically. If you dont have a blog or cms you can do it by hand or you use this nice free sitemap builder.

Create a google sitemap

1. Go to the XML Sitemap builder
2. Enter the homepage path of your website (e.g. www.mydomain.com)
3. Enter the change frequency of your website (be honest
4. Leave the rest as it is and click on start to let the tool make your sitemap
5. When it is done download the compressed XML Sitemap version (.gz) and copy it to your root folder
   
6. You can open the file with an text-editor of your choise and change the priority of documents you think. You can use and value between 0.1 and 0.9, but be aware to only give really important sites the higher value.
7. The following is very important, so that all search engine bots will know you have a sitemap. Create a new file called

   robots.txt

   and add the following code to it:

   User-agent: *
   # Enter the path to your sitemap here
   Sitemap: http://www.knowtebook.com/sitemap.xml.gz

   Copy it in your root folder and upload it to your server with your new sitemap.

8. You are almost there! Go to Google Sitemap / Webmaster Tools and add your sitemap. If you do not have a webmaster account, just register and add your website. Now Google will scan your file and visit pretty soon all the pages you had in your index.
9. Finished! You might consider creating a new sitemap in a few weeks if your content has changed much. The result should somehow look like knowtebooks sitemap.

More great sitemap generator tools:

• GSite Crawler for yahoo and google sitemaps
• German sitemap creator where you can choose between the files you want in your sitemap
• Generator by ScriptSocket
• Generator which will ping google automatically if your changed a website (registration required)

SEO is a very sensible business and there are many ways which swear success, but most of them are pain for search engines. In this tutorial we will use headlines for reaching better results in search engines by using the CSS text indent technology. There is also an german article about image replacement by using CSS.

First, take a look into the source code of Knowtebook and you will find in the beginning lines beneath the body tag following code:

<div id="header">

<h1> <a href=http://www.knowtebook.com/">
Knowtebook - Knowtebook is a social open source community
dedicated to web-developers and designers.</a
</h1>

</div>

The lines of code contains an H1 header-element with the title and the description of Knowtebook. The header is put into a div tag. So what’s so special about it? Well, try to find it on the front page!

Most techniques describe image-replacment tricks which are complicated or are very known by search engines and can lead to be kicked out of their index, because of cheating with content. Knowtebook uses the “text-intend” CSS technology shown below:

#header h1{
margin-top:10px;
margin-left: 0px;
background: url(i/logo-web-300px.gif) no-repeat;
float: left;
text-indent: -9999px
}

The CSS code will take your headline and will place it outside of the screen, but will show a logo instead. This way you can use your H1 elements for your search engine optimation and your nice logo. We have had nice experiences with this technology - what are yours? Please give us your feedback below.

<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Of course, it makes sense that they would - it’s beneficial to them that you send visitors through to their site, and beneficial to you that those visitors end up digging your article. But what if you want to go one step further and display a digg count for a whole range of articles?