SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Ask.com announces new Blog and Feed Search. Ask.com’s Blog & Feeds Search combines the rich data of Bloglines and Ask’s search technology to offer better search results.

It allows a user to search one of three ways: blog posts, RSS feeds, and from around 7,000 news sources. Search results can be filtered by date, popularity, or relevance.

Ask.com added features that may help drive more traffic to blogs. The “Binoculars” feature in the search results gives users the ability to preview the site’s last 5 posts of a feed without clicking through by mousing over the icon. With the “Subscribe” and “Post To” features, users can sign up for RSS feeds and contribute more links to news aggregation services like Bloglines, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine.

Ask.com Blog & Feeds Search lists search results by relevance and not by most recent posts which is what the other blog search services do. The results do appear to be more relevant and less spammy when compared to G’s Blog Search but results are limited to Bloglines at this time.

Ask has also added some more functionality at Bloglines. It now provides the ability to:

A new list of top Blogs & Feeds queries in the past hour are available to those who want to keep up to date on the blogosphere. This is a great way to keep abreast of the latest news for a specific topic you’re interested in.

Link building is one of the major keys in ranking effectively with the search engines. Many techniques have evolved to capitalize on the hidden gold from attaining top rankings and getting free search engine traffic. Of them all, link baiting has to be one of the best methods to build incoming links.

Link baiting boosts the link popularity of a web site and has quickly become a very effective method of promoting web sites, by increasing their traffic and raising their search engine rankings. Due to the viral aspects of link baiting, inbound links increase very quickly without much additional input after it has been setup. Despite the fact that some consider it to be a black hat technique, link baiting is very popular these days and many top SEOs recommend it highly.

What is link baiting? It is simply a means of creating content that spreads like a virus on the internet. No, this isn’t the kind of virus that infects your computer. Rather, viral content writing involves material that is made freely available online such as tools, useful software, articles, news, gossip, humor, or controversy. The goal of this original content is to attract the interest of other web publishers or peers in the industry, who in return, will add links to their web pages because they like or consider the posted material to be interesting, original, or useful for their site visitors. The materials used in link baiting can provide a valuable information resource to their readers and visitors or it may be just rumor or gossip posted on the web site for the sole purpose of “hooking” as many links as possible.

This technique doesn’t involve requesting any links actively from other webmasters. Webmasters voluntarily link to your website. This is a safer technique when compared to reciprocal linking or purchasing off-topic links which can get a site owner in trouble. It represents the true value and meaning of the Internet.

The first thing everyone needs if they are going to ‘bait’ a link is of course a good ‘hook’. As mentioned before, there are various types of hooks, such as tools, software, news, attacks, humor, rumors, controversy, articles, stories and essays. There are “nice” hooks and “nasty” hooks. SEOs do not recommend the nasty hooks, as they may lead to unexpected consequences (such as litigation).

In order to prepare the bait with the highest probability of success, you have to know the current trends, latest news and any rumors on the web. Find the hottest, most intriguing topics or fill a void of a sufficiently large market that needs to be addressed.

After you decide on a theme and write the material, you must promote it. It’s easy to promote something if you are a well-known author or blogger. In case you aren’t, try to contact a professional and ask for his help. Never ask for a link because most people get annoyed by that. If the material being promoted has good content, it will most likely be noticed, read and linked automatically without having to “beg” anyone to link to your site. Something that “catches the eye” will spread all over the Internet like wildfire and attract lots of quality visitors to your website.

Link baiting has been revived somewhat lately due to the increase in popularity of blogs and RSS which provide people with an easy method of posting their material online.

The main disadvantage of utilizing link-bait methods is that they are usually time consuming and can be quite difficult to develop. In order to write interesting and original material for link baiting, a great deal of investment in time and effort on research and brainstorming are needed.

At first sight link baiting may seem like it’s not worth the effort because of the time and effort involved. Well-orchestrated link baiting, however enables any webmaster to generate a ton of free links from well-known sites and even top industry authority sites that would otherwise be expensive or otherwise impossible to obtain. It can save thousands of dollars in advertising costs to obtain these links and can potentially generate a lot of sales by attracting high quality traffic to your web site especially if your materials have good content. With many top SEOs recommending it, this phenomenon has grown into a more mainstream marketing vehicle for webmasters.

Blogs have become very successful and popular of late. They can be very profitable if they are managed and marketed the right way. Generating profits from a blog doesn’t require selling of anything. You can monetize with ad placements, banners, or contextual advertising. The best blogs draw the attention of a large audience and keep them coming back for more.

There are many types of blogs. The most common types are:

• Professional blogs: These blogs are focused on discussions about professions, job aspects and career building
• Personal blogs: These blogs take the form of an online diary and contains thoughts, poems, experiences, and other personal matters
• Topical blogs: These blogs focus on a certain topic or niche, discussing specific aspects of the chosen subject
• Business blogs: As its name suggests, these are discussions about business and/or stock market
• Other types of blogs include but are not limited to science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs, and photo blogs.

In order to have a successful blog that attracts a lot of visitors and keep them coming back, you need to follow some simple rules.

Here are some tips:

Before you begin blogging, carefully consider what you are going to write about in your blog as there are lots of interesting topics out there, waiting to be discussed. You can find them in every day life, in the media, in the news – anything that attracts attention and a loyal following is good. You can look for blog subjects in many places, the most important being the Internet of course.

Put quality content in your blog. If you have quality content people like to read, they will return to your blog and tell other people about it as well. Posting articles containing useful information on your blog is very beneficial for attracting more traffic. Make sure you add your URL address below your posted article! If other web site owners find your articles useful and decide to include them within the content of their web pages, the added link will contribute to increasing your popularity every time it is hyperlinked.

Update the blog on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, visitors will not return and they will move on to reading another blog that is updated more often. You should try to update your blog daily. Many newcomers have blogging fear, fearing their inability to update it daily. If your blog is interesting enough, offer your readers the ability to keep it updated by posting their own personal thoughts and share stories so you won’t have to do all the updating work yourself.

Listen to what your readers have to say. Always pay attention to the readers’ suggestions and try to find out what people were actually searching for when they found your blog. Try to focus on that theme and even consider developing it by encouraging the visitors to discuss new aspects of that particular theme.

Keep it short and concise. You don’t need material that takes hours to read, people usually like to quickly skim a blog for quick tidbits of useful information and if you post materials that are difficult or take a long time to read, you will most likely drive them away.

You can also include some artistic work or pictures in the blog, to make it more visually appealing. Blog picture managers such as Picasa are freely available on the Internet to accomplish this.

If your blog has interesting, original content, bloggers might decide to add links to it on their web sites and comment on your suggested topic. By gaining back-links to your blog from other web sites, your web site will place higher within search engine queries, thus boosting your link popularity.

Announce the launch of any new blog with press releases. Free publicity through press releases are powerful tools for increasing incoming traffic. Search engines love press releases and it gives them a good reason to spider and to index your site quickly.

Include free downloadable viral reports on your blog to turbo-charge visitor traffic and build a subscriber/viewer base quickly.

In order to simplify the creating and updating process of a blog, take advantage of the many blogging tools and software readily available, a number of them are free. Blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type helps you update a blog easily. There are even free blog generators such as Blogger which allow you to host your content on Google’s servers without having to install any software or obtain a domain and host content.

Offer to inform readers of your blog with free email management services like Feedblitz (if you don’t have an email list management solution) in addition to offering RSS feeds for subscription. Readers and visitors can be kept updated of any new information being added to your blog without having to check the site constantly.

Utilize blog and ping to get sites indexed quickly by the search engines. By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services such as Google Blog Search, you attract search engine spiders to a blog. A blog can automatically be setup to ping certain web sites. An easy method of doing this is by adding the Pingomatic service which pings many popular ping servers at once.

Finally, remember to submit to popular, high quality blog directories such as Feedster, Technorati, Blogstreet, and Best of the Web Blog Directory to boost your web traffic and link popularity!

If you respect these rules you will most likely have a successful blog, and you will be rewarded in the process.

This article was written by Anthony Yap of http://www.anthony-yap.com/. Anthony Yap is a SEO Expert and internet entrepreneur. He works with businesses to maximize their profit potential through cost-effective search engine optimization. All reprints of this article must include a link back to http://www.anthony-yap.com/.