Feminine Perspective

I love anything new that has to do with Squidoo. And recently I came across a great new site while chatting over at the Squidu forum. SquidTop was created by Captain Squid, Loyalis. It’s a custom blogging platform for Squidoo lensmasters to showcase their lenses to the world…or at least other SquidTop members.

If you are familiar with Wordpress blogging, then this will be simple as pie to setup. Just grab yourself a SquidTop blog and start posting, adding widgets and more. This is a great way to gain backlinks and exposure for your lenses.

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Have you ever wanted to know how popular your website is among the top Social sites? Of course you can go around to each and check for yourself. However, that can be time consuming.

Social Scan is an online tool that looks up your social popularity for you. With this service you can search your website URL popularity among the well known social sites in just a few seconds. Just enter the URL and click on submit.

Social popularity is important to your SEO campaign. Use this tool to find out how popular your sites are at delicious, digg, stumbleupon, reddit, technorati and more.

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I just love simple little tools that require little effort. Here is one of them simple little tools that will help you check how poular your site is.

http://www.urlmetrix.com/

If you work hard on your site SEO, then this tool might be helpful to you. This service gives you information after you enter your URL and press submit.

What will it tell you?

Just enter the URL and click on check. The service will check your site for metrics like: Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Indexed, Yahoo Indexed, Google Backlinks, Technorati Blog reactions and lots more.

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Sk-rt has announced today that they are having a huge contest. And it’s a fun contest with fabulous prizes that any woman would love.

Sk*rt is changing it’s name and the site owners need your help! These ladies want something a little more 2008 and beyond. They have a few names picked out and they need you to help pick the best one.

Leave a comment on this sk*rt entry, or on the sk*rt blog telling us which one you like best, or suggesting your own brilliant idea, and you’ll be entered to win some fabulous prizes. Because the site soon to be formerly known as sk*rt is all about the users.

Look what you could win:

Calista Pro Series, No Wires No Hands Phone, worth $279.95: No ordinary home office phone system, this lets you stay connected hands-free wherever you want–at the touch of a button, your Calisto Pro Series headset switches between your landline, VoIP, and even Bluetooth® enabled mobile phone calls. What busy woman doesn’t need a fully hands-free phone?

Magic Bullet

Magic Bullet Platinum Pro Blender/Food Processor, worth $99.99: The Magic Bullet is so handy, so versatile and easy to use that you’ll likely put it to work every single day (probably several times a day). It vows to do almost any job in the kitchen in 10 seconds or less! What you get: 1 High-Torque Power Base with powerful 350 Watt motor, dishwasher-safe, microwave safe, Tall Cup and Short Cup, Cross Blade and Flat Blade, Full-size Blender Lid, 101 Recipes Cookbook, 101 Fabulous 10-Second Recipes, User Manual, 4 Party Mugs with Lip Rings, plus Shaker/Steamer Tops and Stay-Fresh Re-sealable Lids.

A registration to Blogher worth $350 from YouData… a new company that is so freaking smart and fantastic, and you’ll hear much more about them sooner than later. Watch for it. That’s right, this means one lucky winner will be attending the Blogher Conference in San Fran in July for FREE. Thanks, YouData!!!

Remember. Anyone who leaves their favorite New Name choice in the comments on the blog or here on sk*rt will be entered to win! You have until Friday at midnight PST to place your vote.

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So, for the last week or so there has been quite a bit of buzz stirring about google pagerank updating. Some people started noticing changes on the google toolbar while most of us said “yeah right”. Yesterday I noticed PR changes for many of my sites using a pagerank checking tool. There was only one tool that actually worked while all others failed to show the updated pageranks. So, I got a bit of a sneakpeak yesterday which was kind of nice.

Today, April 30, was the actual PR update. All of my sites either stayed the same or got a bump up in pagerank. I had four of my squidoo lenses get a PR4.

Do you think pagerank is important? Some people believe it has great importance while others think it has no use at all. If you are someone that exchanges links or offers advertising, then it’s probably really important to you. However, if you are more focused on search engine rankings, then there is no need to worry about pagerank. Just build your links naturally and you will end up with a nice pagerank in time. As you can see, this blog has no pagerank as it is new, but you will see it with a green bar at the next update.

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I had previously written in a separate post that I prefer manual directory submissions. However, there is a great tool I have found that makes the submission process a lot easier. No more looking for hundreds of free directories to submit to. This little tool will be your new best friend!

It is not automatic, but it is not manual. What you have to do is provide your site info, keywords, email address and so on. Then this tool will find the right categories for you and all you have to do is keep hitting “submit” for each directory. Some of them have a captcha(spam prevention), but many do not. It’s quite fast and saves you a lot of time and effort.

The tool is from resellergo.com and they allow you 150 directory submissions absolutely free. There is an option to upgrade as well and I completely recommend it! You can upgrade your account for a low $4 per site. That allows you to submit to 3000+ directories.

This has helped to boost some of my sites rankings considerably. So, if you want a little help with your seo campaign, then I suggest signing up for an account at resellergo.com.

*I still recommend manual directory submissions apart from the directory tool.

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We all know the power of the social media site, Digg. Is the female version of Digg just as popular? Well, they launched in June 07 and they have a PR5 now with hundreds of posts…

“Sk*rt is an online media ranking site created for and by women, featuring topics women dig. Sk*rt was designed to promote sites, blogs, video, products, articles, ideas, art — anything online, really — to women and to the men who want to get in our heads. Sk*rt is basically a filter of cool stuff on the Web. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Digg, it goes like this. Any item (site, product, idea, video, blog, article, etc.) can be submitted by anyone. Readers can vote for the items by clicking the “Love It!” button on the left hand side of each submitted item. The items that get the most votes raise up to the front of the site. It’s actually a great design, because it’s organized so that if you only have a few minutes, you can scan through what’s new, what’s highly ranked or what’s interesting to you; or you can search more specifically by category.”

If you are a woman and you want your site seen by women just like you, then I suggest submitting your site to sk-rt. You could end up with more women reading your posts and subscribing to your rss feeds.

Get started by registering at sk-rt, submitting a web page and updating your profile page. Then start checking out and commenting on submitted stories. If you want to boost some beginners stories, then start with the “Up & Coming Posts” first….then move on to the popular stories.

Visit Sk*rt…

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Backlinks are one of the most important parts of your SEO campaign. Two important search engines (G and Y) place a huge value on one-way-links to determine rankings. Each backlink to your blog is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank. And the quality of links are important too. Google gives more credit to sites that have many quality links pointing to them rather than those sites who have hundreds of low quality links coming in.

The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality. If your link is coming from a page that is irrelevant, then google looks down on that and could penalize your site. For instance if your link title is “seo tips for beginners” and your link is placed on a page about “homeschooling your kids”…well, there is simply no relevance there. Google knows this and it reflects on your sites rankings.

Some other important factors to consider are things such as the text surrounding your links. Google likes to see relevant content surrounding your link. If your link is placed in the middle of an article that is completely relevant…it is better than a link that is just there with no text surounding it. Both count just fine, but a link with relevant text surrounding it is better. Another thing to consider is how much authority the site linking to you has. Backlinks from web sites that have a higher pagerank are better than backlinks coming from sites that have 0 pagerank. Pagerank sites are considered high quality sites and their links to your site are more valuable.

Reciprocal Linking

One has to be careful if they decide to go ahead with reciprocal linking. This is when you exchange links with another site. You link to them and in return they link back to you. Webmasters do link exchanges in order to boost their site rankings. Google does know about this and some believe those sites engaging in this activity to manipulate the search engines will likely be dealt with in the future. You must also be careful who you link to. If you link to a site taking part in Black Hat reciprocal linking, your site could be punished as well. However, exchanging links with sites that are relevant, authoritive and have very little outbound links is ok.

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Dofollow social bookmarking is when you submit to social bookmarks that pass link juice to your blog/site. Many social bookmark sites have started adding “nofollow” to links. However, here is a list of bookmarkers that use “dofollow”…for now, anyways.

Do-follow list:

1. Slashdot - PR9
2. Furl - PR8
3. BibSonomy - PR7
4. BackFlip - PR6
5. Spurl - PR6
6. Searchles - PR6
7. BlogHop - PR6
8. Listible - PR5 - my favorite
9. MyLinkVault - PR5
10. Plime - PR5
11. ClipClip - PR5
12. Faves - PR5
13. JumpTags - PR4
14. A1 Webmarks - PR4
15. Diigo - PR4
16. MyVMarks - PR4
17. OnMyList - PR4
18. Info4It - PR3
19. MyPip - PR3
20. Kapely - PR3
21. Complore - PR3
22. Yattle - PR2
23. ClipMarks - PR6
24. Leenks - PR5
25. Magnolia - PR4
26. LinkedWords - PR4
27. Connotea - PR8
28. BlogMarks - PR4
29. RawSugar - PR6
30. TrailFire - PR3
31. Connectedy - PR5
32. BMAccess - Pr4
33. BuddyMarks - PR5
34. BookmarkTracker - PR4
35. Oyax - PR4
36. Tedigo - PR3
37. Ez4U - PR3
38. Mister-Wong - possibly nofollow now. But still great to submit to…

There is the list. So, submit away! You should submit to the “nofollow” social bookmark sites as well if you are mostly after traffic. Dofollow is more for those looking to bookmark for SEO purposes. I say submit to both!!!

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If you are a Squidoo user, you may want to read this post… and if you are not, then maybe you should join now. Squidoo lenses have sent hundreds of quality, unique visitors to my sites.

Top 100 and Number 1

One of my Squidoo lenses made it into the Top 100 Squidoo lenses list about a month ago. And….it also made it to #1 in my selected category! And it is still #1. I’m not going to reveal the category or lens because that would just create more competition. You know that’s true. However, I will share with you how I did it…

What did I do to rank in the Top 100 and what can you do to achieve this?

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