Common mistake #1: You can be rich, but not filthy rich… in anchor text
The best way to boost your rankings is to build rich anchor text links. For example, if my startup KISSmetrics wants to rank well for the term “web analytics” I need to get other websites to link to KISSmetrics.
When convincing these sites to link to me, I ideally want them to link with the phrase web analytics as the link text instead of my company name, KISSmetrics.
If more people link to you with the keyword you want to rank for as the anchor text of the link, your rankings will start sky rocketing for that keyword.
But what you may not know is that if you get too many links that are rich in anchor text your rankings will drastically drop after a while. So you have to rotate the anchor text up and ideally make it natural.
In essence having rich anchor text is good, but it can’t be too rich. I usually try to keep my anchor text rich for less than 10% of my links.
Common mistake #2: Don’t ignore internal pages
When you are optimizing your website for search engines, although it’s common for you to optimize the code on all pages of your website, for some reason you tend to forget about building links to your internal pages.
Your homepage is important, but having 100% of your links to your homepage is really unnatural.
I personally try to make sure that 80% of my links, if not more, are going to internal pages. And the best way to do this is to make sure your internal pages have really good content.
What you’ll notice when your internal pages start to get more links, the ranking of your homepage will also start going up. It’s because search engines don’t just try to evaluate where you should rank on a page-by-page basis, but they also look at your website as a whole. This is why sites like About.com and Wikipedia rank for millions of terms.
Common mistake #3: Slow and steady really does win the race
You have heard that phrase millions of times, but do you follow it? I know I always don’t.
Let’s go back to my previous example on the anchor text “web analytics”. Before I start building links, not only do I have to look at how many backward links I already have, but I also need to look at how many links my competitors have.
For example, if my competition on average has over 100,000 links when I only have 1000, my first instinct maybe to build links really fast and catch up. In an ideally world, that would work, but it isn’t the case with Google.
- Don’t try to grow your link count by double or triple each month. Try to stick with a smaller percentage like 5% or 10%.
- Don’t aim to build a ton of links, but instead building relevant links, as they will move your rankings a lot faster.
- Stay away from all page links. Although they can easily be bought, it’s unnatural that someone would link to your website from every page unless you have a blog (blogrolls).
I know doing the things I mentioned above won’t get you to the same link count as your competition, but you will start increasing your rankings drastically.
Don’t fall into the trap of building links quickly. Although your rankings will go up in the short run, it’s hard to maintain your rankings once you get to the top. You’ll start noticing way too many fluctuations compared to if you built relevant links slowly.
Common mistake #4: Content isn’t always king
Have you heard the saying that content is king? It usually is, but if you don’t have enough links coming into your website you won’t get that much traffic.
It’s not about going to oDesk and paying for a million pieces of content and trying to compete with Demand Media. It’s about having a good content to link ratio.
What I mean by this is that search engines analyze how many links you have coming into your website compared to how many links you have. So if you only have 100 links while having a million pieces of content, a lot of those pages won’t get indexed in Google unless you get more sites to link to yours.
Sadly I don’t know the exact ratio of content versus links that you should have, but I just recommend building up your content and links at the same time. If you don’t, your search engine traffic may stall.
Common mistake #5: Title tags and meta descriptions do matter
Out of all the years I have been doing SEO, it seems that you tend to make one mistake over and over. You take title tags and meta description tags for granted.
Now before I got into the simple title tag and meta description optimization techniques I use, I just want to ask you for one favor, don’t take them for granted. I used these simple tactics on sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, and around 30 of the top 100 blogs on the Internet and their traffic went up drastically.
- Your title tags have to be unique on every page and around 60 characters.
- Do not include your website name in all of your title tags, as this makes them seem more duplicate. Just include your website name in the title tags for your homepage, about page, contact page, and other generic pages.
- Your met description tag needs to be unique, represent the content on the page (don’t just stuff it with keywords), and contain around 25 or so words.
Try making those changes to your title tags and meta descriptions. If you already have a good amount of links coming into your website and you have a decent amount of pages, you’ll notice that those changes can double your traffic. But if you don’t have that much traffic or links coming in, you won’t notice a big impact in your search engine traffic.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of SEO tactics that you can use to increase your rankings, but before you pick them, be careful. Although you’ll notice your rankings going up in the short run, in the long run they can start going down. And before you figure it out, it’ll be too late.
Do you know of any other tactics that can crush your rankings?
Courtesy : www.quicksprout.com
Linux Desktop Environments: GNOME, KDE, and XFCE Explained
You can customize nearly every last inch of your Linux installation to fit your liking, and it starts with choosing the right desktop environment. Whether you're a Linux beginner or you're just looking for a new interface, here's an overview of how desktop environments work and how to pick the right one for you.
Windows and Mac OS X come with pretty specific graphical interfaces (you know, the windows, the skin, the system toolbars, etc.) that aren't really built for customization. With Linux, you can fully customize not only how your desktop looks, but even its functionality, and the settings available in its preferences. If you're a beginning Linux user, you may have heard of popular desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, or others—but what do they all mean? Here, we'll discuss what desktop environments are, and how to try new ones out on your existing Linux installation.
What Are Window Managers and Desktop Environments?
While Windows and Mac OS X were designed around a GUI and, for the most part, are fixed to that specific GUI, Linux's GUI is completely separate from the operating system itself. It's split up into a few different parts: atop the command-line operating system is the X window system, which is what draws the GUI onto your screen. On top of that is what's called your window manager, which allows you to (surprise, surprise) manage the windows on your screen: move them around, drag and drop files, scroll up and down, and so on.
You can get a usable GUI with just a window manager, though it's fairly minimal. You usually won't have any panels, taskbars, or a ton of menus to work with, so there's a bit of a learning curve. It may work for low-powered machines, but more often, people use a window manager coupled with a desktop environment, which lets you choose between different taskbars or docks, customize the appearance of your system, and tweak settings through the GUI. Popular examples of desktop environments are GNOME (which comes bundled with a window manager called Metacity, though many others are available) and KDE (which comes with its own, KDE-specific KWin window manager).
Seem overwhelming? It's definitely a different experience than Windows and Mac OS X provide, where you just install the OS and go. What's really cool, though, is that because there are so many different desktop environments, you can fully customize your experience by finding the right one for you. That is, if you have, say, an older machine, you can run a window manager by itself, or find a less less resource-intensive desktop environment. On the other hand, if you want a window manager that gives you lots of eye candy or configurable options, you can do that too.
Note: While window managers and desktop environments are separate things, the purpose of this article is to show you the versatility you have in choosing your Linux desktop, which includes using both desktop environments and window managers on their own. To make this explainer easy to understand though, I'll be using the term "desktop environment" to mean desktop environment coupled with a window manager, or a window manager on its own.
Installing and Running a Desktop Environment
Desktop environments are separate from the operating system itself, so you have a lot of choices beyond what comes with your Linux distro. Here's what you need to know about experimenting with desktop environments.
Running Desktop Environments
The cool thing about desktop environments is that you can install more than one on the same machine, and pick which one you want to use each time you log in. Many of your settings will stick between different window managers (specifically, the ones built in to applications and the ones you've set at the command-line or config file level), while others will be reset (namely the ones related to managing your desktop, like window appearance or keyboard shortcuts).
Each desktop environment comes with a few essential programs of its own, too, so if you install more than one on the same machine, you'll notice that you have a few extras in your menu. GNOME, for example, uses Nautilus as its default file browser, while KDE uses Dolphin—so if you have both GNOME and KDE on your system, you'll see both file browsers in your menu, no matter which environment you're currently running. Furthermore, each desktop environment has its own apps that you can download from your distro's package manager: things like IM clients, mail clients, Bit Torrent applications, and other things.
While you can generally use an app in any environment, most people choose to use apps specifically tailored to the environment they're using, because they'll have tighter integration with the desktop. For example, GNOME users prefer to use Pidgin as their IM client, while KDE users tend to use Kopete. That said, certain apps—Firefox, Chrome, and the GIMP come to mind—are designed with the GTK toolkit (upon which GNOME and XFCE are based), but are often used across other desktop environments, simply because they're the best at what they do. In the end, it's up to you—again; the biggest advantage of the way desktop environments work is that you can completely customize how you use your system.
Installing Desktop Environments
Certain Linux distributions come with default desktop environments. OpenSUSE, for example, uses KDE as its default desktop environment. Others let you pick which desktop environment you want to use when you install it. Ubuntu's a bit special: while the default version is based on GNOME, it also has branded versions for other desktop environments, like Kubuntu (which uses KDE) and Xubuntu (which uses XFCE).
If you're running a distribution other than Ubuntu, you can just install another desktop environment using your package manager (e.g. by running
pacman -S KDE in Arch). The next time you log out, you'll be able to log into another desktop menu from a dropdown menu on the login window.
If you're running something like Ubuntu, which has a few different "branded" desktop environments available, there are a few different ways to try one out. Say you're running the default, GNOME-based version of Ubuntu, and you want to try out KDE. You can either install Kubuntu and get the Ubuntu-branded version of KDE (with a bunch of extra apps installed, like an IM client and a mail client), or you can just install KDE. Generally, I'd recommend installing the Ubuntu-branded versions in these cases, since they come with a bunch of apps designed specifically for that desktop environment and, like I said, you generally want to use apps that integrate well with your desktop.
What Desktop Environments Are Out There?
GNOME
GNOME is the most popular Linux desktop environment, and the one that most Ubuntu users are probably familiar with. It's fairly low on system resources and very simple to use, so it's great for new users of Linux—especially those that aren't super tech-savvy. Of course, that doesn't mean advanced users won't love GNOME. It has quite a few advanced settings that let you configure the environment to your liking. While I'm reluctant to compare its interface to other operating systems, since it's fairly unique, I'd have to say its combination of a menu bar at the top and the taskbar at the bottom make the interface slightly more Mac-like than Windows-like (especially if you're using Ubuntu's new Unity interface). Coupled with the popular Compiz window manager, you can add some pretty nice eye candy as well.
KDE
KDE is a bit more resource-heavy than GNOME, as well as a bit more complex. Instead of aiming to create an easy-to-use interface, it's more about always evolving and adding lots of functionality, whether it be for beginners or more hardcore geeks. It's probably the best looking environment around, and it has a very cool widget-based desktop built in to the environment. Its menus are set up very much like Windows, with one main menu located in the bottom left corner of the taskbar from which you launch apps and view settings. KDE actually has a ton of different configuration options available from this menu, but it's pretty hard to navigate, even if you're comfortable with computers and Linux in general (especially when the settings are part of the desktop widgets, which also manage everything you see in the taskbar). There are just so many different preference panes and settings that it can take awhile to figure out where the settings you want to tweak are located. It also has a few characteristics that will confuse new users—like the fact that dragging and dropping files always results in it asking you whether you'd like to move a file or copy a file—that you can't seem to change. If you're an advanced user looking for a lot of configuration options, KDE is a great choice—just know that there will be a learning curve, even if you're fairly tech-savvy.
XFCE
XFCE is designed to be very lightweight, without sacrificing usability. It's actually very similar to GNOME, so new users probably won't have too much trouble getting around. It isn't the prettiest, but if you have an old computer (or a low-powered machine like a Netbook), this will make it run faster than any other operating system will (or than GNOME or KDE will, for that matter).
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