There are two primary factors to getting a page ranked – discovery and relevancy. By and large, search engines are clever creatures, but the very best webmasters will always send out the right signals to gently guide the search engines, and in return receive great rankings for their content.

Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.

Whether you believe in karma or not, making your blog a success often has a lot to do with a series of seemingly disconnected events.  Every post you make, person you contact or comment you leave adds to the sum total of your efforts in the blogosphere. 

Building relationships is important in any industry, but blog karma is the idea that what you do and how you behave will ultimately have an effect on you directly or indirectly.  Blog karma is not often written about, but very often spoken about by bloggers, especially successful ones.  So if you did believe that blog karma does exist, how should you go about increasing yours?  Here are 10 ways you can improve your blog karma:   

Well it never just rains. It has to pour. I made an offer of some free SEO reviews a while back and a nasty confluence of happenings has upset my apple cart.

But I’m going to try and get some advice out to a few more people now. And this is going to be the toughest task I’ve had in a while. You see it never dawned on me that so many folk would be on hosted blogs. Let’s just say that optimising Blogspot is not a straight forward task.

For some of us, there’s nothing better than a good map…well, there are some things better that decent, modest folks won’t mention…which is why we squeal (not me, I don’t squeal) with delight as we watch online mapping services get better over time.

Maybe that’s because maps are reminders that there is much, much more out there than what you’ve seen…

I read more search engine marketing blogs than you would probably ever want to. One thing that continually re-appears, even amongst the industry leaders, are endless lists of easy-sounding advice usually with a DIY (Do it Yourself) slant. They include things like:

Yep, free seo advice.

Last Wednesday Loren Baker announced that Search Engine Journal would be launching a new project called SEO Clinic. Every week SEO Clinic will offer advice to one selected site among those that request a review.

If you take a step back and look at it, the SEO industry is rather odd. SEO experts who are paid thousands of dollars by companies will also freely share tips, tricks, principles, pricing structures, and SEO advice.

Some time back we reported Google’s Advice: Use Meta description Tag. A Search Engine Watch Forums thread intricately expounds the importance of meta description.

Whenever for a site: command you see this

‘In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included’