There is always a competition to be ahead and be on the top. Other than writing the useful and informative content, there are other things which should be considered for the promotion of blog, and they are listed as follows

10 ways to promote your blog

The first and the foremost thing which comes into play for blog promotion is getting one way links for your website and to do that the following are the best ways

1) Directory Submission (DS)
DS is one of the most trusted and the best way to gather one way links to your weblog. You just have to figure out your niche and submit your blog into. It sometimes takes time for your weblog to be listed in the blog directory, but its ok when it comes to provide result, and in this case it means one way link to your weblog.

You can also consider the list of top blog directories for the blog submission. I won't mind going for some paid blog submission also.

2) Article Syndication (AS)
AS is another good technique for blog promotion, all you need to do is to create an informative and a useful article and promote it via submitting it in the top article directories

The only thing to be kept in mind is to give the URL of the weblog in the resource section of the article, and if the article directory permits giving the option of more than one URL then its better to give some other useful URLs in the resource section along with the main domain.

I would prefer to be a consistent performer and submitting different articles in the top article directories, this gives an edge for syndicating the content, as well as promoting the blog.

3) Distributing RSS Feeds
All the blogs comes with the option of distributing the RSS feeds for the weblog and/or website. And hence it becomes quite necessary to promote the content of the weblog via distributing the RSS feeds.

There are basically two options for utilising the RSS feeds, providing the RSS feeds URL on the weblog itself and prompting the user/visitor to subscribe to the feeds and the other option is to submit the RSS feeds to the top RSS Feeds directories

You can also very frequently update your status, create or join communities and be a part of the social network. You can focus on social bookmarking websites, social news websites, or social media sharing websites.

As we know its difficult to focus on all the social websites, I prefer to focus on the following for blog promotion

4) Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking website. You can create a group or a page for your weblog and ask your friends to read and share their views for the same.

5) Twitter
You can use the hottest microblogging website Twitter by creating a profile for your blog and getting the followers and followees, and start sharing the blog updates in the twitter updates.

If you want to know more about how to create the twitter profile and how to optimize it, then you should definitely read this article - 13 ways to optimize your twitter profile

6) Flickr
Flickr comes in handy if you have a photolog, i.e., a photo blog, then you can use the images in flickr and other social networking websites to promote your blog.

Images can be a source of huge traffic, you can drive tons of traffic from images.

7) Yahoo Answers
Yahoo answers also provide a way to answer the questions and/or to ask for the questions. The thing to be kept in mind is that, you should choose your niche first and then start taking part in the Yahoo answers. The Yahoo answers provide you with the option of a source box where you can provide a link to your weblog.

But always do keep in mind that you are not spamming there by answering everything just for the sake of getting a link back, but you are providing the link to your weblog as a resource and the participant should get some value out of it.

8) Digg
Digg is one of the best technology blog where users vote for the story based on their relevancy and accuracy. Digg provides more or less the latest news and can be a great deal of success for your weblog,

9) Wikipedia Citations
This is a very delicate technique to promote your blog and should be done with utmost care. The citations are the very reference link which you provide as a reference to the article in wikipedia, and as such you should be highly ginuene in providing the reference link.

Always remember that unnecessary and unreliable links are deleted from Wikipedia.

10) Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is one of the key aspects of blog promotion, but off late this is being used by people to often spam the comments and that is the reason why you see the nofollow tag in the comment section of the story.

There are two ways to comment on the blog and get a link back, one way is search for blogs and then comment something with the topic and the other thing is to comment on this post and get a follow link back to your website.

Google Launched Site Hierarchies in Search Results

Last week Google launched a new functionality for the web search result by providing a deeper access to the precise location of the page on the website.

The normal trend for the web search result page was a Title, Description and the display URL (which normally speaks about the destination page). Now Google has provided more detailed access to some of the web search results, where it will also display the navigation hierarchy for the destination web page.

The new display URL (which you can see green in color), now provides more valuable context and new navigation options.

The image below shows the Google web search result for "chicken fry", which shows the host (main website) and hierarchy (which shows the other related navigational sections on the website)

Image 1 Site Hierarchy

Conclusion
The new site hierarchy feature is really a nice option for the users to navigate/search for the particular information in a easy and a fast way.

The display URL is offering not only the host domain, but also with the other navigational URLs which are most relevant to the search query on the page, in this way you can reach the information which you are looking for.

This is what Google is best in doing, providing the relevant information from among the billion results as quickly as possible.

20 Thanksgiving Google Doodles You Have Never Seen

Google Translate Now Comes With Three New Features

Google launched some convenient, simple and extremely useful features to its translation product, Google Translate.

Google Translate will from now on show the following three additional features,

• Translate Instantly
• Read & Write in any language
• Text to speech

Image - 1 Google Translate

All these features enhance the functionality of Google Translate, and makes it convenient and simple for the users to have fun with it. If you haven't tried it yet, then go ahead and check it out now!

Google Image Swirl With Exploratory Interface

Google has added another feather to it's Image search results, by adding a functionality to cluster the similar images into representative groups with exploratory interface.


Example
I did a search on Image Swirl for [statue of liberty], wherein I got 12 image thumbnail as shown below

Image - 1 Google Image Swirl for Statue of Liberty

You can find the group of images you are interested, and then you can click on the thumbnail and and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. The below image shows the same

Image - 2 Cluster of Image Swirl into view

You can go ahead and further get into sub groups and sub-sub groups within any cluster. The sturcture is similar with the Google search - Wonder Wheel. It's still an experimental feature which is currently available in Google Labs. Not satisfied with the result or you were looking for something specific, Google is always ready to accept the feedback.

Go ahead and explore the features.

Now High Definition Videos are Reality on YouTube

YouTube is one of the best video social networking site on the internet. It typically used to show the videos with it's maximum output of 720p. But now YouTube is going ahead to provide the 'High-Definition' videos, i.e., 1080p in full resolution.

This feature will be availabe next week, and the users will have a choice for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p. The high resolution which are already submitted will be recoded by YouTube and displayed accordingly

Google Offers 20GB Online Storage Space for $5 a Year

It's been 5years since the Gmail was launched and it came with the initial offering every user at 1GB of online storage space. Currently, Gmail offers more than 7GB of space to it's users without any charge. Now with the demands of users increasing day by day, Google is now offering a whooping 20GB online space with a little price of $5 for one year. This online storage space not only can be utilized with Gmail but with the Picasa Web Albums also.

To be honest that's enough space for storing more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. In case your need exceeds the storage capacity, you can further go ahead and can purchase up to 16 terabytes! You can visit PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

So don't wait or think about storing the data online, go ahead and save as much as you can.

Useful Link

• More extra storage for less

Google Acquires Gizmo5 An Internet Based Calling Software Company

Google acquired the internet based calling company - Gizmo5.

Gizmo5 used to provide internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. Currently, the new user signup has been suspended and will return when it is re-launch.

GoogleVoice has not launched any new feature to Gizmo5, or at least they have not announced it yet. The existing users will be able to use the service, with an exception of not able to sign up for a call-in number.


Google aims to provide a continued improved performance to it's users. Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience.

Google Shows Colored Balls To Avoid Sex

Google currently launched a special functionality to its search results to avoid the sexually explicit websites and images from your search results. It provides you with the choice to keep the adult content out of the search results.


While the Google SafeSearch option allows not to have adult sites included in search results, but it's not 100% accurate. To overcome this Google has now launched an option which completely removes the explicit content from your search results, and that is 'Locking SafeSearch'




When you lock SafeSearch, there will be two changes,

1. You require to login by entering your password, in order to change the setting, and
2. Google search results page will be visibly different (it will show colored balls) to indicate that SafeSearch is locked.

Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

Useful Links

• Locking Safe Search

Google Will Launch Caffeine After Holidays

In my previous post about Google's New Search Engine Index Caffeine, I did mentioned that Google is working on it's new search engine indexing formula, through which Google would be able to focus on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

And now Google Caffeine is about to show it's real results, and is expected to arrive in next month.

As in the post by Matt Cutts, one of Google's Engineer - Expect Caffeine after the holidays, the Google Caffeine will be made live at one data center, which will allow only a small percentage to users to be benefited by this technology. The full roll out is expected only after the holidays are over. Meanwhile you can provide your valuable feedback to Google