Thanks to XKCD for getting it right in one — this is surely enough reason to make the switch from Facebook to the new Google+ social network at plus.google.com

At Abraham Harrison, online social media PR is what we do all day, every day, and have been doing for years. We’re not an old-media PR shop trying to quickly jump on the new-school bandwagon, hoping we can figure it out (and making all the mistakes on your dime). We are a well-practiced team of 40+ professionals who work exclusively in the social media world. We’re very pleased to put our skills and experience at your service to deliver the extraordinary impact new media operations can have when  practiced by true online experts.

We’re completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who wish to leverage online social media – we know our way around this space like few others. We secure you trust, endorsements, top search results ranking, and ubiquitous presence of message — we can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach, driving your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the  places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand  promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of  the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We do all of this by finding the people you need and mobilizing them to support your aims, be it connecting to decision-makers or activating mass support, we can help you identify, connect with, and mobilize the people you need to be supporting you on the issues that affect you. We can reach out directly  to the people you need to be in contact with or connect with entire demographics in the places they live online.

Abraham Harrison helps you manage your reputation online and protect you online in times of crisis. With the Internet, with its forced transparency and free, instant flow of information, communication and reputation crises can crop up overnight – and with the search engines, even a very old blemish can taint  your or your organization’s image years later and on into the future. We can help you manage crises,  steering communications effectively in the free, open, uncontrollable online medium and we can help you  regain and maintain control of your reputation and image in the search engine results.

Via Abraham Harrison LLC

My CEO and best friend, Mark Harrison, has been working on a short film for months. An animated short that would explain what we at Abraham Harrison do every day for our clients, worldwide.  I got the finished product this AM and finally have a little time to share it with you.  What do you think?  Please let me know in the comments.

Here’s the full script from the Abraham Harrison – What We Do film

In a world with hundreds of TV channels, thousands of publications online and off, and millions of voices and other distractions vying for people’s attention, we know how hard it can be to get heard by the people you want to reach.

Abraham Harrison can change all that for you. Among the world’s 6 billion people, we can find the hundreds and even thousands of online opinion-leaders who are influencing and driving the decisions of your potential customers and constituencies every day. We find those of them who would naturally love to carry your message out to their communities with their endorsement, and make it very, very easy for them to spread the word about you.

We already operate on 5 continents and speak 12 languages natively. We speak to the world’s online influencers in their languages and in their cultures.

And one of the most powerful things about what we do is that even when we stop talking to the influencers for you, they keep talking to their communities about you. And even when they stop actively carrying your message, because what they’ve written about you is now a permanent part of the internet, your message continues to be carried out, more or less forever, to all those people you want to be thinking of you.

And we don’t only drive your message through the people who influence your potential customers online, we also take it to themachines that influence the people you need to reach.

Google and the other search engines know and respect these online influencers, because they are real people, writing real things, with real human audiences. That’s exactly what the search engines like to rate highly in the results. When exactly these respected online influencers write about you, your message appears in their writings all over the search results.

And as a nice added benefit, when these well-regarded influencers are writing about you, they are linking back to your site, lending their credibility in the eyes of the search engine to your site, which powerfully, and naturally strengthens your ranking in the search results.

In our big world, there are certainly thousands, and perhaps millions of people who want exactly what you are offering – at Abraham Harrison, we’ll help you find them, connect with them, and make them your happy customers.

We’re Abraham Harrison. Connecting you to the world’s influencers.

Q: Why has blogging become so popular with some community associations and organizations?

My A: Blogging is popular for several reasons.  Most companies started blogging when they became entangled in an online controversy or had someone bad-mouth them or offer mis- or dis-information online and the company just did not have any way to engage in that controversy and correct that particular attack.

They were the dumb companies but they’re learning.  The smarted companies realized that their web sites were too thin on content and personality and that commenting in message boards and on blogs — or in traditional press releases that nobody reads any more — is neither effective or worthwhile.  What companies and organizations need to do is to get down from the dais and speak more intimately and more textually and more long-form that one can in the well-sculpted and over-edited (controlled).

There is a lot of work that needs to be resourced for a blog.  It should be updated with both “ever green” content that will always be useful as well as some focus on what’s going on, the company’s processes, and more casual and business-related things.

There are another two reasons to blog: reputation promotion and reputation protection; however, sometimes — like any insurance policy — you may never receive double indemnity on the premiums you have been paying into blog-writing by ever having to go through the ordeal of “accidental death” — but you will realize many valuable gains anyway — and the benefits are two-way.

You will surely benefit from search engine benefits on Google, for one.  You will build a two-way relationship with your community and customers even if that back and forth isn’t 50-50 but rather 90-10. You will add to the confidence and reputation of anyone who blogs for the company, helping them with their personal brand.

Your blog will become a go-to place for expertise and your employees and your organization will better be associated with smarts and insight.

And, in terms of reputation, you will fortify your gates and moats and get your villagers AKA your community AKA your consumers AKA your customers safely on your side so that if you are ever truly attacked with great abandon my an online Internet rogue you will be not only kept above water in the search results but you will also be actively and fiercely defended by the people who have had amazing experiences with you in the past.

(Awesome questions from Madelaine Paterson — more to follow)

Our very own Jonathan Trenn was recently interviewed at part of the PBS MediaShift blog article, How PR People Can Tactfully Locate, Pitch Influential Bloggers, which you should go check out. (Via Marketing Conversation)

Jonathan Trenn, a consultant for Abraham Harrison, a digital marketing company in the DC area, said that if he’s starting from scratch with a client he’ll use free tools like blog search engine Technorati to locate the bloggers he wants to contact. Specifically, he searches for the tags that the bloggers use with their posts, because this is an indicator of whether the person writes regularly on a particular subject.

“It’ll give you a list of blogs to look at,” he told me. “You basically start clicking through, and it’s essential that you read the blog and get to know it a bit, maybe start categorizing it or put it in a database. But essentially you want to get to know what they are about, see if they’re updated frequently.”

Technorati and other search tools allow him to then rank the blogs by authority. He said he begins with focusing on the most influential blogs. But he hastened to add that this is only a starting point, and that he can then begin clicking through these blogs’ blogrolls or even approach the bloggers directly to ask them for more recommendations.

“Late last year I was doing some work with a company called ooVoo,” he said. “They’re a competitor to Skype, only they use video. They can have six screens at once…We came up with the idea of having a ‘political day.’ We reached out to prominent political bloggers to essentially hold their own chats for a day, or a series of days. With that I wanted to make it diverse, from political philosophy to demographic, so I reached out to different types of blogs. I asked them who else I should contact. We had 15 to 18 bloggers — left, center, right, African American, Latino, what have you — and they each had their own sessions.”

Abraham Harrison. LLC: True experts in online PR, not just old-media PR doing an add-on
There is a misconception among many old-media PR shops that online PR is pretty much like the old-school stuff, just in a different place. This could not be further from the truth. New media online PR is a very different world, a totally different culture, and an entirely different approach. It’s not easy, and there are lots of potential pitfalls, but it is extremely effective when done correctly and with enough commitment.

Results by True Online Experts
We’re completely confident in our ability to produce results with clients who are willing to commit the resources and focus to online efforts – we know our way around this space like few others. We also know that there is far more to being a surgeon than reading how an operation is done, far more to being an engineer than having the blueprints in your hands, far more to being a chef than being able to read a cookbook. That is why we are willing to give away the shop in this proposal, and willing to provide even more detail to anyone who asks for it – indeed, we publish all this openly on our website.

Securing you Trust, Endorsements, Top Search Results Ranking, and Ubiquitous Presence of Message
We can get your brand out in front of the world, right in front of the eyes of exactly the people you want to reach. We can drive your search engine and general online visibility so that your brand is ubiquitous in the places where your potential clients live online and at the tops of search results – not only having your brand promoted on your own sites, but getting them endorsed and promoted on the sites and under the names of the influencers in the online worlds where your customers are waiting for you to meet them.

We’re happy to help you connect to the online influencers who are speaking to the communities you’d like to reach, and whose posts will further bolster SEO and the presence of your brand in the search results.

Mark Harrison, CEO & Chris Abraham, President and COO, Abraham Harrison, LLC Via Abraham Harrison

How to Defend and Protect Your Brand Reputation Online

Hear Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC and Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates about how to look after your online reputation and why it is important to do so.

As the saying goes, your good name is everything.  Every individual, and brand, needs to know what their online reputation is and how to protect it. When your online reputation is in disrepair, whether because of bad behavior on your, or your brand’s, part, or because of intentional attacks by competitors or someone with a grudge, you sometimes have legal recourse.  But you always have tactics you can undertake online to protect your reputation.

Find out how to determine what your online reputation already is, how to promote and maintain a good reputation, and how to protect and defend it in the future.  We’ll cover issues like:

• What are people saying about me online?  And Why Should I Care?
• Crisis Management
• Proactive Steps to Defend Against Future Attacks
• How to activate Google and other search engines in your favor

and more.

Speakers

Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates
Jay Jaffe is CEO of Jaffe Associates (www.jaffeassociates.com), the leading public relations firm serving law firms in North  America and Europe. Working only in the legal industry, Jaffe offers a broad range of classic PR and PR 2.0 services, crisis communications, strategic marketing consulting, creative branding, and web/technology services. Our goal is to ‘Make It Happen’ for our clients with efficient implementation that goes far beyond goal-setting, strategy and planning.

Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC
Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. Chris is a pioneer in online social networks and an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms.

This webinar took place live on Thursday May 7th at 1 PM EST and 10AM PST. It will include audience participation and a live question and answer session

In support of my series, 99 Cent Articles, I have been exploring the quality and insight of the inexpensive content market, beginning with 99CentArticles.com — I dropped $100 on 20 articles (actually $92, but $100 sounds better) and I have been sharing them, over time, with you.  I would love to get your feedback on what you think about them and what you would use articles of this quality and consistency for.  This post is based on a series of articles I ordered with on the theme of How Businesses Use X where X is a topic:

How Businesses Use YouTube to Promote Their Brand

YouTube is a video sharing website where you can upload, view and share videos. YouTube has become one of the most important aspects of the internet culture. Because of this, businessmen have used it as an alternative medium to promote their goods or services. The visibility of YouTube in the online community is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand.

If you are about to launch your business and is looking for a more cost efficient way of advertising, then you should look into having it promoted on YouTube. Millions of people visit YouTube everyday, and getting some part of that millions of viewers to get to check out your video is enough to generate buzz for your business. To help you get started, here is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand:

• Create your own channel and upload your best videos. Upload only videos that you feel will standout from millions of uploaded videos similar to yours. An interesting video is enough to boost viewership.
• Start a conversation around your videos via YouTube’s Bulletin Board. The more response you get the better it will be for your business. Do not limit yourself to your own bulletin board, though. Being highly visible on this video-sharing community is how businesses use YouTube to promote their brand.
• YouTube is not only a video-sharing site but a social network as well. Add friends and mingle with them. This will generate loyal followers for your business. And if you leave a good impression on them, they will start telling their friends about your channel and your business.
• Search for videos that are related to yours and post one of your videos as a response. Take advantage of the views that other videos get. How businesses use YouTube to promote their brand is like how public relations practitioners would choose the right places to advertise.
• YouTube allows you to fill out a profile. Make your profile as informative as possible. Include a link to your website to generate traffic. In setting up your videos, be sure that all of them are linked to your profile. So when people click on your video, they will automatically go to your profile and from your profile they can click on the link to your website.
• Create playlists of related videos where you can include a lot of popular ones and your own. This will create a greater recall for your brand. Then join groups or start your own, and post both text and video comments. Encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel by asking viewers to subscribe at the end of each video. Reach out to as many audiences as possible.

Knowing how to take advantage of the technology available in YouTube and its popularity will greatly help you in promoting your brand. The possibility of getting your business known to millions of potential new clients is too great a chance to pass up. With a little work and internet savvy, you can save a lot on your advertising expenses.

How Businesses Use Search Engine Optimization to Promote their Brand

The internet has opened a whole new world out there. It is becoming less and less virtual every day. People use the internet to socialize and work. Because of these, search engine marketing has become an aggressive business. Directing quality traffic to their website is how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO helps level the playing field for small businesses. Its affordability and accessibility has made it an excellent marketing strategy for them. SEO considers how search engines would rank your website and what users search for. The idea is to have your website appear on the first page of the search results list to lead more visitors to your site. This idea is how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand.

How businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand is not as easy as it may sound. It may take up to six months before results can be seen and you may need to hire a professional to have successful search engine marketing for your product. Remember that you are competing against increasing numbers of documents from various media, blogs and websites along with more savvy search marketers. Therefore, effective SEO requires creative link building, creation of unique content, integration with other online/offline marketing, social media and optimization refinements.

There are still many ways on how businesses use search engine optimization to promote their brand, if hiring a professional search engine marketer is not in your budget. Register your site with directories like Yahoo and Google, this will have more high quality and high trafficked sites pointing to your site.

To help visitors and search engine spiders navigate your site easily, make sure that it is well-organized, utilize a site map if possible. Familiarize yourself with meta tags, these are hidden HTML directions for web browsers or search engines. Creating a meta tag that accurately describe your site content is essential in directing traffic to your website. Take into consideration likely words or phrases that users might type into search engines to find your site. Include these key words or phrases in the title portions of your site and in its relevant content.

To successfully use SEO to market your brand, you have to determine the ideals and goals that your company wants to pursue. Determine your market by searching volume across major engines for key terms associated with your brand. Find out what markets will return the highest result for your product and focus your optimization efforts towards those markets. Seek out non-reciprocal link relationships that are relevant to your site, make sure that it is high enough in influence to create a positive impact on your site. Most important factor in SEO marketing is your website content. It should contain unique and relevant information to sustain interests of customers.

SEO marketing is a great way to launch brand, product or services of small business owners. Considering the time people spend online and the how people have grown to rely on the internet for information, SEO marketing has changed advertising practices of today.

How Businesses Use Twitter to Promote Their Product

Since Twitter is a social networking site with micro blogging as its primary purpose, businesses can use Twitter to promote their products. Since it is a social networking site, it has the potential to bring in more clients. Here are a few tips on how businesses use Twitter to promote their product.

1. Use keywords when setting up an account. Use keywords in filling up the biography section. Use keywords that are broad enough to describe the product and is popular enough that users will use the keywords in their search.
2. Get into discussions. As an expert in your product you can offer advice and answer questions concerning topics involving what you are promoting. People will then notice you and gain confidence in you and eventually do business with you.
3. Keep track of your tweets. Use search engines to look for tweets that may involve you and may contain feedback on your product and address concerns anyone may have on you or your business.
4. Be diligent in making tweets. Set up a time when you are not busy and dedicate that time for the business. This is for people to get used when they can reach you regularly.
5. Add a personal element in your account and your tweets. This will create a more welcoming effect and not a robot like impression on you by potential clients.
6. Start discussions. Ask some of your concerns and receive feedback and criticism. This way, you can find out what is lacking in your business and what needs improvement or if there is anything that people want that you might be able to give a solution to.
7. Since tweets can only contain 140 characters, it is important that your message be concise and informative. The reader of your tweets should not be scratching their heads after they read your tweets. It is also important that you connect with them by making it a bit more personal.
8. Use retweet every possible time. Retweeting makes other people’s tweets to be posted again on your page. This shows that you’re not only concerned with your business but also with what anyone thinks about it.
9. Make multiple accounts. Since different people like different things, create tweeter accounts that will cater to those kinds of needs. Do not flood your tweeter account with different kinds of products. Group them and divide them so that interest would be concentrated to those products. Just make sure that you can keep up with the demands of having multiple tweeter accounts.
10. There are certain software or services that will allow you to search for specific keywords that will help you in looking for discussions where you can join and promote your product. Or even look for discussions that mentions your account name. This way you can track what people are talking about you.
11. Personalize your tweeter web page. Personalize your background add-ons. Make sure your site will be attractive to visitors and potential buyers.

These ideas on how businesses use Twitter to promote their product can help those who want to start a business or have already started a business and want to extend their network and clientele.

How Businesses Use Facebook to Promote Their Brand

Social networking has increasingly become part of our daily lives. Rarely a day goes by without checking in to see what’s happening to our friends, virtual or not. We now have to the tendency to announce on these social networking sites important things that are happening to us. Facebook is one of the most popular of these sites. And because of its popularity, people are using it to freely advertise their businesses. Creating their own Facebook account is how businesses use Facebook to promote their brand.

How businesses use Facebook to promote their brand is uncomplicated. Once you have created an account and worked on the content of your business profile, you simply click on the “Advertising” link. Then click on the “Pages” link and it will lead you to Facebook Pages page. Clink the button that says “Create a Page”. It will ask you to select the type of business, enter the name, and just follow whatever you’re prompted to do. Be sure to upload all necessary information that will identify your business, like the logo, contact information, other web address that you may have, etc. Lastly to activate your page, just clink on “Publish”. You may also need to post it on the wall of your personal profile for your friends to see or send invites to your friends to become a fan of your new business page. Eventually, a link named “Ads and Pages” will appear and this will allow you to have access on both areas.

Using Facebook or other social networking sites to promote your business is the cheapest way to advertise. All you need is to spare some time each day to update and manage your business page. How businesses use Facebook to promote their brand is a clever and cost efficient way of creating a market to the hundreds of millions of users that lurk on this site every day.

The best feature of your business page is that you can send “Updates” to your fans. If you have a new product to launch, simply compose an interesting write-up that you can send out to your fans. You can also post link that will directly lead them to a particular part of company website. This is how businesses use Facebook to promote their brand. And it costs comparatively lower than any other forms of online advertising.

Using Facebook as your advertising medium entails a different salesman skill on your part. There are millions of users out there who log in everyday to relax and connect with other people. The opportunity of reaching a multitude of audience for your sales pitch should be managed carefully. Make your business page as arresting as possible. It has to catch their attention. Join groups that are related to your business and mingle with its members. There are tools you can use to broadcast upcoming events or syndicate your blog. Utilize these tools to the fullest. Make your presence felt by being a fan of other business pages, write on their walls or send virtual gifts of appreciation.

Facebook is the leader in social networking. Take advantage of its popularity and ease of use to promote your business.

So, what do you think?

Hear Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC and Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates about how to look after your online reputation and why it is important to do so. Be sure to register now!

As the saying goes, your good name is everything.  Every individual, and brand, needs to know what their online reputation is and how to protect it. When your online reputation is in disrepair, whether because of bad behavior on your, or your brand’s, part, or because of intentional attacks by competitors or someone with a grudge, you sometimes have legal recourse.  But you always have tactics you can undertake online to protect your reputation.

Find out how to determine what your online reputation already is, how to promote and maintain a good reputation, and how to protect and defend it in the future.  We’ll cover issues like:

• What are people saying about me online?  And Why Should I Care?
• Crisis Management
• Proactive Steps to Defend Against Future Attacks
• How to activate Google and other search engines in your favor

and more.

Speakers

Jay Jaffe of Jaffe Associates
Jay Jaffe is CEO of Jaffe Associates (www.jaffeassociates.com), the leading public relations firm serving law firms in North  America and Europe. Working only in the legal industry, Jaffe offers a broad range of classic PR and PR 2.0 services, crisis communications, strategic marketing consulting, creative branding, and web/technology services. Our goal is to ‘Make It Happen’ for our clients with efficient implementation that goes far beyond goal-setting, strategy and planning.

Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC
Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. Chris is a pioneer in online social networks and an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and advisor to the industries’ leading firms.

This webinar will take place live on Thursday May 7th at 1 PM EST and 10AM PST. It will include audience participation and a live question and answer session.

Sometimes the community maintenance required for YouTube channel creation is too much for a particular client requirement or campaign and what is needed, instead, is a complete and comprehensive video upload to all of the current video sharing sites.

This Abraham Harrison LLC video distribution service offers a quick and comprehensive upload to over 30 video upload and social network sites, including the usual suspects but also including many other less-popular and less well-known social networks; however, in order to best cover all possible opportunities for brand video sharing, it is always a good idea to make sure the client brand experience and client video assets always exist exactly where and when people are looking for them.

In addition, the primary way people look for video content in today’s market is primarily through word-of-mouth and sharing; however, a more predictable and common way of discovering content online — and the only way of discovering the content if the word of mouth does not include sharing links — which is search.

Doing a comprehensive video upload and distribution is a way of stacking the deck towards the discovery of the content organically by flooding the search engine indices with client content — which can result in the ownership of the content.

Video distribution is an important strategy towards controlling and promoting brand perception online.  The secret sauce of the social web.

Via Abraham Harrison

I have always been amazed how the biggest-and-the-best search engine on planet earth could be so literal. Google only has ever given you what you have asked for, literally. Currently, if you search for ‘online PR‘ you won’t get any returns for ‘digital PR’ unless that page explicitly has the keywords ‘online PR.’  Surprisingly Boolean and limited, honestly requiring an SEO specialist, to be sure, just to make sure you think all of your keywords through.  Well, according to Alana Semuels in her article Google makes changes to search results, this is about to change!

The technology, from Google’s acquisition of search company Orion in 2006, essentially tries to recognize the broader idea of what someone is searching for, rather than the specific words. Someone who types “principles of physics,” for instance, will see a related search bar listing topics such as “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanics.”

I use many of these fine WordPress SEO plugins on Marketing Conversation and Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message. I never got around to collecting the modules list; however, that’s cool because Mashable’s  Sean P. Aune created his own list in the form of 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress:

All in One SEO Pack- One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

If you are interested in an online reputation management, defensive SEO, reputation defense campaign, please call us at +1 202-657-4769 or email us at info@chrisabraham.com, and we’ll be more than happy to help you!

Abraham Harrison Online Reputation Management and Defense Services

When it comes down to it, reputation defense and crisis management demands engagement: resistance is futile. Here’s some excellent advice from Local Advertising Journal about the risks and rewards of Online Reputation Management: Eliminate the Negative:

A negative review of your business or product is detrimental to your online reputation, but if it is managed correctly you can negate some of its worst impacts. When you find a negative review about your business, under no circumstances should you knee-jerk a reply defending your business. This can quickly devolve into a nasty thread of replies that will in perpetuity online, for anyone to read. You would not want have a heated argument in front of your customers in public, and make no mistake, an online post war is public indeed.

This is an excellent addition to what I have written in the past about online reputation defense and management:

Some things to consider when you’re cleaning negative returns on Google and the other search engines: cleaning is easier after the body has been removed. If you are in the middle of a maelstrom of bad press and online vitriolic hatred, then you probably need to weather the storm for a while before the counter messaging and the defensive SEO strategy starts working.

That said, messaging, controlling your brand, your reputation, and your results on Google — promotional SEO — should be started well before you ever get smeared online. Getting your message, your intent, your true self, your words, you interests, your true bio, your positive images, your press packets, and everything you have ever published online well before sladerous things happen is essential.

Otherwise, you will be too vulnerable. The best defense is a fantastic offense, to be sure.

One thing that one really needs to consider before entering into a reputation war is whether or not to engage at all.  One thing that I learned during my short stay at Edelman was that the very best PR consultants know when not to engage.  That’s the magic.

Also, if you have a choice, to not engage the attack unless it is in your own terms. If you enter into an engagement in the other party’s terms, you are doomed to failure. Most often, no matter how tempting it may be, do not try to do crisis management in a blogger’s comments unless you have an attitude of mea maxima culpa and a strong solution — a solution that will seriously win hearts and minds — and that does not include being defensive or fighting back.

What I recommend in cases like this is counter-messaging, using either a platform you control or a neutral platform, such as YouTube, Twitter, Digg or whatnot.  In this way, you will be able to convey your truths and the truths of your company and brand without getting to wrapped up in the tarbaby of the commenters and supporters who will, undoubtedly, flock around you like Piranha.

Otherwise, as I said before, no time like the present to start working up your online brand reputation with some of your own energy, positivity, passion, case studies, bios, experience, sharing, teaching, participating, engaging, and learning well before anything happens in your space, online or otherwise.

When it comes down to it, it all comes down to whether you’re known or unknown. If you are attempting to defend your reputation as an Internet unknown against an Internet Celeb, you’re toast and you probably need to quickly contact me and my firm right away — things are going to get ugly fast.  Even if you’re known but not necessarily adored, you will still be part of the accountability loop. People tend not to attack someone they know. If you can make sure your “captors” know your face and know who you are, you’re more likely to survive any sort of slander and online attack much more than a nameless, faceless, and detached corporate globalist.

I don’t know if you’ve been online much, but the worst thing ever to be online is a detached corporate globalist. Even if you and your brand has a history of tending towards detached corporate globalism, you can at least become an engaged corporate localist with the name Jack or Phil or Mike or Sheila, and that’s better that just being a Trademark, a Copyright, and a pack of hungry lawyers!

Abraham Harrison LLC’s Online Reputation Management Defense Services

You are not helpless in the face of negative search results. A directed, well-executed, diligent campaign will place your desired results high in the list, pushing undesirable results down to irrelevant pages where the majority of Internet users do not bother to look. 90% of searchers never look past the first page — i.e. the first 10 results. 99% of searchers never look beyond the second page. We will work to get the undesirable results as far from those first two pages as possible.

At Abraham Harrison, LLC, our proven and well-refined methods as well as our long-established credibility gives us particular efficacy in influencing top search results. We don’t engage the negative results, as this actually makes them more attractive to the search engines. We employ an assortment of tactics to chaff and flare, to draw the search engines’ attention to positive and neutral results, and away from the problematic negative results .

It is not possible to make information on the Internet disappear unless the people who put the information online in the first place take it back down again — even then, the data is often mirrored elsewhere or cached and re-served by the likes of Google and The Wayback Machine. The method is to make the undesirable results needles in haystacks — it can be there, but only people really intent on finding it will come across it.

An online search results sanitization campaign is a long-term commitment, much like treating a cancer. It begins with a period of intense assault on the problem to beat the negatives down followed by a on-going low-level maintenance regime to keep them down. A campaign is heavily front-loaded with the ongoing maintenance being very low cost — we can also turn those maintenance operations over to you, together with any infrastructure, content, and domain names we may have set up during the campaign.

Unlike many other companies in this field, we have no interest in holding you hostage over the years by keeping control of the mechanisms of the treatment. We are happy to turn that over to you once we get you in the clear, or if you prefer, provide you the service of keeping up the defense, however you prefer.

An online search results sanitization campaign requires subtlety convincing the search engines that what they previously believed — i.e. that the currently highly-ranked negative results are indeed some of the most valuable and relevant results — is no longer true, and that the neutral and positive content that we identify or create is far more valuable and relevant and therefore should rank highly, pushing the negative results down into the obscurity of lower rankings.

This requires a bit of time, 6-8 weeks of concerted effort generally, to get results moving away from where the search engines have long believed them legitimately to stand, toward the new state that we desire, with those negative results far below the neutral and positive ones.

Once we get the results moving and out of stasis, we keep them moving until we are happy with the results, then maintain them in place, so that the negative results (which naturally have their own legitimacy in the eyes of the search engines) do not move back up again. It is a bit like braces on a child’s teeth which are then followed by a retainer that keeps them straight and prevents them from slipping back to their original crooked state.

Even the largest, well-known companies have used defensive SEO tactics in the face of crisis and unfavorable publicity. It works for them, and it will work for you. Negative search results are a controllable problem that can be solved with diligence and know-how. Unlike other common types of crises, negative search results will not disappear without action. However, unfavorable publicity that you may have received years ago that is still affecting perceptions about your brand can be dealt with and have its negative impact neutralized.

We have resolved difficult SEO solutions — probably far worse than yours – in the past and come out on top. With our vast network and effective systems, we are able to provide an viable, permanent solution to most online reputation problems, and we will help with yours as well.

Generally, campaigns run a year, with the bulk of the effort in the first 4 months. After the first five to six months have passed and we have achieved a stable new order with the negative results well-buried, we will be happy to turn the maintenance over to you, if you wish, or we can continue to maintain the defensive systems for you until the end of the year.  After the first year, we’re happy to continue monitoring your online reputation and maintaining your defensive systems for as long as you choose to retain our services.

That said, all of the work, all the domain names, and all the IP we generate for you is yours and we’re happy to turn it over to you if you like, after the year-long contract is completed.

Abraham Harrison, LLC, bills on a retainer basis, i.e. at the beginning of the month before beginning operations. As mentioned, the effort, and the billing is front-loaded to allow an aggressive attack to beat down the negative results soundly, then backing off over time focusing over more on the lower-resource work of stabilizing the results in order to allow you to save money.

I collected all of my personal blog articles to-date on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have been handing them out to folks who still believe that SEO is snake oil and I thought I would share them with you, too, since most of you students of blogging actually want your words, your passion, and your voice to be heard.

Make Your Invisible Graphics-Intensive or Flash Site Highly Visible to Google

Until now. This article helps you turn your invisible corporate website into a high-profile and highly-effective medium for communication.

This article is designed to help you turn your stealth website into a big, loud, impressive, bomber of a website with plenty of payload capacity, the payload being your company, your message, your products, your services, and your story.

Corporate websites that are highly graphics-intensive or are built using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave rich content are pretty much invisible to every search engine because search engines want nothing more than lots and lots of descriptive and rich content. In general, the prettier the site, the more impossible it is to actually find unless you know just where to look.

Websites are delivery vehicles and their payloads are your company message, your products, your services, your brand, your culture, and your story. Is your company website an F-117 stealth fighter, only visible to people who know where to look and only carrying a small payload, or is your company a C-130 Hercules, filling the sky with its size and noise and carrying a massive payload.There are some important things to consider when optimizing a web site for search engines, using Google as the gold standard. SEO requires three things, two of which most web developers and companies do good jobs: rich textual title content, rich textual metadata content (in the form of meta tag keywords and description), and rich body textual content.

Most websites suffers from a strong lack in rich body textual content because they are in general built like brochures: very shallow and very graphical. Sites that rely heavily on either image files or Flash content suffer disproportionately when it comes to search engine ranking. Why?

Because search engines can only index the content that web sites offer them and the only content that the search engines can use is plain text. Although handsome, graphically-rich sites don’t have either the diversity or the sheer volume of keyword phrases that text-rich sites have. In addition to pure volume, search engines also need to find all keyword variations of your service – all variations of the service that your potential clients might use. Search engines also care about what is called “keyword density??? which means that the most readable of copy isn’t necessarily the most findable.

Keep Pronouns to a Strict Minimum

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorithms. Of course, I am exaggerating in order to make a point. I removed all the pronouns and made sure that everything is completely contextualized – not for your visitors, but rather for the search engines.

For my example, I made sure that there was a broad diversity of all the ways people might search for this content. In addition, I made sure that I also mentioned all the buzzwords and key terms that I could imagine. Brainstorming with your sales and communication team or looking at the kind of words and wording your competitors use is always a great idea.

The Controversial Image ALT Tag

Although there is much debate over whether Google pays any attention to ALT tags for images, I always recommend adding ALT tags to all image files, even when the web page is made up of a “sliced image.??? The only ALT tags that exist are usually in the banner of the site. No other parts of a highly graphical or flash-based main page are usually textualized using image ALT tags.

Your company slogan, tagline, phone number, guarantees, products, services, the menu choices (navigation) should be included in the image ALT tags. Even if Google doesn’t care about ALT tags like the rumors say, the site will be way more navigable, especially to the blind and seeing impaired – and don’t they deserve a break? don’t they need your services, too?

Google’s “Eyes” Focus on Where Your Eyes Do

Google give favor and weight to headers and emphasized text. No matter what anyone says, Google cares about formatting. Strong, Bold, Emphasized, Italicized, and Hyperlinked text is favored by Google. Also, Google looks at header tags, too. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Header 4 are important to use. This is especially important because when the same desigers who have you that “sliced” graphics-based site, they might have designer the CSS style sheet without concern for these thing. CSS styles can change the look of regular HTML tags as easily as they can customized DIVs, SPANS, and STYLES.

Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog-readers. Blogs offer built-in useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, a richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with said blogosphere, current, and future customers.Since potential and future clients are clueless as to how the company works, how you have grown the company, why you chose to go into this business, and what your vision is, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owner, as someone who has his finger on the pulse, and also to directly respond to the curious and the unconvinced. It would also allow you to accept and then publish shameless testimonials from real fans like me. It would also allow you to publish any and all positive or neutral mentions (testimonials or otherwise) about the blog or your official corporate website.

Corporate Blog as SEO Strategy

The Search Engine Optimization of your official corporate website will aid in the site’s “findability??? in Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. There are other things that Google and the other search engines consider in addition to the textual completeness of the entire web property. The most important are the depth of the site (more pages are better), number of links and interlinks to and from the site (can be within the same site), and the frequency with which the site gets updated. A traditional corporate web site is shallow, poorly-linked (especially to external sources) and can oftentimes go for months without being updated. If Google can figure out that your site isn’t changing, it passes it over for constant indexing. It does this because Google has a finite number of resources and will revoke any resources it can in order to preserve them. Since the Internet is vast, Google give priority to web sites and web pages that are constantly-updated such as blogs. Blogs are constantly-updated, deep, many-paged sites that are constantly being updated and constantly being spidered by search engine robots.

Corporate Blog as Community Outreach

No matter how many cool offers there might be online and no matter how much of a your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the entire blogosphere and blog world is in not only letting your service speak for itself but also that people are even more attracted to story, personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of both the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services themselves. If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into really reaching out to the blogosphere and the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by just building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional – people with money, in other words. These types of people, 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading blogs.

Blog Community Outreach

One powerful technique for building community on blogs is to first find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services then search for the blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati. It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.

Technorati as Strategic Tool

Spread the word online: People are already talking about how busy they are, how awful their places look, and so forth — tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself. Here’s how:1) Go to Technorati.com, a blog search engine.

2) Type in one or more of the keyword phrase in your Meta Tag keywords

3) Go to the blogs that are talking about your company, industry, products, and services

4) Where appropriate, leave a short note about your company or your corporate blog

5) Come back the next day (or as often as you can) and do the same thing but be sure to follow-up with the conversation because dropping a message without coming back is considered spam and in the blogosphere, an ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Submit your Blog and Website to Search Engines

I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

The Services You Might Want to Employ

Although I have not used the services, one respectable way of increasing your link popularity and prestige in Google is to use a service like Text Link Ads. What Text Link Adss offers is a link-buying service that does double-duty. The double duty is as follows: in addition to creating clickable links on the popular sites that can choose and afford, it will also allow you to legally create Google bombs that will heighten the probability that your company website or your corporate blog will turn up when people search for your company, your industry, your market, your products, and your services.

Employing “localized” Google AdWords, content-based Google AdWords, and search-based Google AdWords is a no-brainer. There are other advertising solutions available now, including finding the advertising networks that might be placed on some of the blogs you find the most focused or relevant, including BlogAds, etc.

Okay, I hope that helps. I am tired of writing but if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask me questions below in the comment section and I will both answer them and also use your questions, comments, feedback, and suggestions to fuel future articles.

Control Your Google Listing

I control all the aspects of the following return — title and description (and maybe even placement). You should too!

How did I do that? Well, I just wrote some code and pasted it into my blog template, above the opening tag, between the and tags. Simple but mightily effective!

Holler!

If you optimize your blog you can control the way Google shows your site to the world.

Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags.

If you want to see what meta tags I use, they’re listed at the bottom of this article. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

(For you newbies, the meta tags all go within the header tags in your blog template. So you will need to do some template editing.)

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Quick Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips You Can ControlGoogle, Yahoo!, and MSN already love you, blogger, so just write, write, write. If you have more time and an inclination you can continue reading.

Without doing anything to your blog, you have an advantage which is lots and lots of text that is generally topic-centric and frequently updated. You are already ahead of the game. Add to that that Google loves you and cares about keeping up with the blogosphere and you can safely stop reading now and be fine. Just make sure you write something twice a day.

Although the most important part of SEO is getting Very Important People to link to you, there is a lot you can do on your own that I will go into below (I also go over how I think Google works in How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion).

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Third, optimize your blog as though it were a traditional website. Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Six, make sure you use a ping server. If you don’t know a thing, start with filling out Pingomatic as best you can. That should be good enough for now. Blogger and WordPress.com offer a checkbox you can use to send out the ping. You can probably build it into your submission using the WordPress “Update Services” under Options/Writing, then scroll down. On MT it’s in Settings/New Entry Defaults/Publicity/Remote Interfaces. I use a long list that I will post under the Meta Tags below:

Ping Server List for ChrisAbraham.com

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping(I was Inspired by BBC’s More Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks)

What is a Ping Server?

Whenever you post a new entry to your blog I am pretty sure you tell all your friends. It is also important to tell blog search engines and news aggregators so that they too can check out all your new content. Telling them you have fresh content is called pinging them.

According to the definition on Feedster, “A ping server is a bit of software infrastructure, a server program to be specific, which lets a feed tell us ‘I’ve just updated; please index me now.’ What it receives is a small tidbit of information from a blogging or publishing tool which is called a ‘ping’. Hence the name.”

The simple solution is to make sure you visit Ping-o-Matic every time you publish a new blog entry. I have already published a comprehensive list of available ping servers and I will discuss other solutions in future articles.

Depending on which blog service or which blog software you use, there are simple ways to automate the act of pinging all of the ping servers.

I plan to delve much more deeply into this very very soon.

Search Engines Favor RSS Feed Supported Sites

To paraphrase Lee Odden, “RSS feeds get blogroll, inclusion in RSS directories assist with link popularity, Updated RSS feeds are indexed more frequently, RSS output contributes to your freshness, The format of most RSS feeds provides content that’s easier for search engines to understand.”

Basic SEO for Bloggers Comes a Little Short

Thanks to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too basic.

It doesn’t talk much about SEOB (Search Engine Optimization for Blogs) so much as just how to architect your blog. There are so many other tips and tricks.

I am opening up a text page right now to start writing my own Basic SEO for Blogs because if I am going to tell you that this article is severely limited, I had better suggest something better, right?

I Have Power Over Algorithmic Search Engines

“Some time ago, I realized that I have power over google, yahoo and other algorithmic search engines. I can choose words and phrases. And then I can get top ranking for those words in search engine results.” Me too, and I couldn’t say it better myself. PC4Media via ProBlogger.

How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion

Google indexes web pages and then ranks them based on three distinct and equally-weighted aspects.

The first aspect is a trinity which is based on the content of each page: page title, page description and keywords (meta tag data), and page full-text content. A page that has similar content wording (and density) is considered to be legitimate. If a web page has all three components it generally a reliable resource.

The second aspect is that Google favors web sites that are continually-updated; therefore, a blog is always indexed more often and considered more timely than a static “brochure” web site.

The final and most-important aspect Google uses to favor (and thus rank higher) web pages is each page’s (and site’s) link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many other sites link back to a site; in addition, Google goes one step further and considers a number of things to insure that the link popularity isn’t abused: prestige.

If an old, high-prestige, high link-popularity web site (or sites) links to a site, it is more beneficial to the site’s link popularity than if a host of insignificant sites link to a site. Old, popular, and well-trafficked sites always lend their prestige to the site to which they link.

The three taken together result in the ranking of the site based on a typical Google keyword search.

You need the content (flash-based and highly graphical pages without well thought out meta tags are virtually invisible to Google), you need the link popularity, and when it comes to it, you need to have new content to show up in the top-ten on Google.

A popular upstart blog or message board can oftentimes achieve better ranking than a big corporate website, especially if that website is new or has changed the architecture of its website recently (Google considers the sudden and complete change of the architecture and file-structure of a web site really fishy).

Never Use Pronouns When You Blog

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms.

To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Invest in Google Sitemap as a Tool for SEO Analysis

Investing in Google Sitemap is worthwhile. For example, the top search query for chrisabraham.com is ladder theory and the top search query click is nicole richie diet.

Brand Protection on Blogs

Andy Sernovitz is spot on when it comes to how to control and manage brand online, especially when it comes to online brand protection.

It boils down to this:

Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse only really care about the last word. If you can reply to a negative, hurtful, brand hit, then you can dominate the conversation and win the debate, in most cases.

Google cares about everything but the latest word isn’t always indexed yet, so therefore, in the world of Google, the better indexed site always wins. Learn about SEO and Google Sitemaps if you want to compete here.

You can’t control online conversation unless you participate. The only way to get indexed by Google or to show up on Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse is to be an online opinion leader who has a site that has made it out of Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google’s sandbox, and has an SEO and a Blog Search Engine strategy.

You have to initiate membership, become part of the conversation, build street cred, have an SEO and blog strategy, and become a respect online opinion leader before something goes awry.

To quote Mr. Sernovitz, , “you’ll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don’t even try. You’ll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don’t even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.“

This is my response to a very brilliant and spot-on article. I have nothing to say in contest to it, so stop reading me and go read WOM Tactics: Blogs are Upside Down.

Chances are that your corporate website is beautiful and expensive. Beautiful websites tend to be rich in graphics, images, photos, and Flash content. They also tend to be shallow with few pages and very little copy. Sites like this are almost impossible for Google to find. If Google can’t find you then neither can your customer. Until now. This article helps you turn your invisible corporate website into a high-profile and highly-effective medium for communication.

This article is designed to help you turn your stealth website into a big, loud, impressive, bomber of a website with plenty of payload capacity, the payload being your company, your message, your products, your services, and your story.

Corporate websites that are highly graphics-intensive or are built using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave rich content are pretty much invisible to every search engine because search engines want nothing more than lots and lots of descriptive and rich content. In general, the prettier the site, the more impossible it is to actually find unless you know just where to look.

Websites are delivery vehicles and their payloads are your company message, your products, your services, your brand, your culture, and your story. Is your company website an F-117 stealth fighter, only visible to people who know where to look and only carrying a small payload, or is your company a C-130 Hercules, filling the sky with its size and noise and carrying a massive payload.

There are some important things to consider when optimizing a web site for search engines, using Google as the gold standard. SEO requires three things, two of which most web developers and companies do good jobs: rich textual title content, rich textual metadata content (in the form of meta tag keywords and description), and rich body textual content.

Most websites suffers from a strong lack in rich body textual content because they are in general built like brochures: very shallow and very graphical. Sites that rely heavily on either image files or Flash content suffer disproportionately when it comes to search engine ranking. Why?

Because search engines can only index the content that web sites offer them and the only content that the search engines can use is plain text. Although handsome, graphically-rich sites don’t have either the diversity or the sheer volume of keyword phrases that text-rich sites have. In addition to pure volume, search engines also need to find all keyword variations of your service – all variations of the service that your potential clients might use. Search engines also care about what is called “keyword density??? which means that the most readable of copy isn’t necessarily the most findable.

Keep Pronouns to a Strict Minimum
First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorithms. Of course, I am exaggerating in order to make a point. I removed all the pronouns and made sure that everything is completely contextualized – not for your visitors, but rather for the search engines.

For my example, I made sure that there was a broad diversity of all the ways people might search for this content. In addition, I made sure that I also mentioned all the buzzwords and key terms that I could imagine. Brainstorming with your sales and communication team or looking at the kind of words and wording your competitors use is always a great idea.

The Controversial Image ALT Tag
Although there is much debate over whether Google pays any attention to ALT tags for images, I always recommend adding ALT tags to all image files, even when the web page is made up of a “sliced image.??? The only ALT tags that exist are usually in the banner of the site. No other parts of a highly graphical or flash-based main page are usually textualized using image ALT tags.

Your company slogan, tagline, phone number, guarantees, products, services, the menu choices (navigation) should be included in the image ALT tags. Even if Google doesn’t care about ALT tags like the rumors say, the site will be way more navigable, especially to the blind and seeing impaired – and don’t they deserve a break? don’t they need your services, too?

Google’s “Eyes” Focus on Where Your Eyes Do
Google give favor and weight to headers and emphasized text. No matter what anyone says, Google cares about formatting. Strong, Bold, Emphasized, Italicized, and Hyperlinked text is favored by Google. Also, Google looks at header tags, too. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Header 4 are important to use. This is especially important because when the same desigers who have you that “sliced” graphics-based site, they might have designer the CSS style sheet without concern for these thing. CSS styles can change the look of regular HTML tags as easily as they can customized DIVs, SPANS, and STYLES.

Corporate Blogs
Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog-readers. Blogs offer built-in useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, a richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with said blogosphere, current, and future customers.

Since potential and future clients are clueless as to how the company works, how you have grown the company, why you chose to go into this business, and what your vision is, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owner, as someone who has his finger on the pulse, and also to directly respond to the curious and the unconvinced. It would also allow you to accept and then publish shameless testimonials from real fans like me. It would also allow you to publish any and all positive or neutral mentions (testimonials or otherwise) about the blog or your official corporate website.

Corporate Blog as SEO Strategy
The Search Engine Optimization of your official corporate website will aid in the site’s “findability??? in Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. There are other things that Google and the other search engines consider in addition to the textual completeness of the entire web property. The most important are the depth of the site (more pages are better), number of links and interlinks to and from the site (can be within the same site), and the frequency with which the site gets updated. A traditional corporate web site is shallow, poorly-linked (especially to external sources) and can oftentimes go for months without being updated. If Google can figure out that your site isn’t changing, it passes it over for constant indexing. It does this because Google has a finite number of resources and will revoke any resources it can in order to preserve them. Since the Internet is vast, Google give priority to web sites and web pages that are constantly-updated such as blogs. Blogs are constantly-updated, deep, many-paged sites that are constantly being updated and constantly being spidered by search engine robots.

Corporate Blog as Community Outreach
No matter how many cool offers there might be online and no matter how much of a your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the entire blogosphere and blog world is in not only letting your service speak for itself but also that people are even more attracted to story, personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of both the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services themselves. If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into really reaching out to the blogosphere and the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by just building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional – people with money, in other words. These types of people, 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading blogs.

Blog Community Outreach
One powerful technique for building community on blogs is to first find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services then search for the blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati. It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.

Technorati as Strategic Tool
Spread the word online: People are already talking about how busy they are, how awful their places look, and so forth — tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself. Here’s how:

1) Go to Technorati.com, a blog search engine.

2) Type in one or more of the keyword phrase in your Meta Tag keywords

3) Go to the blogs that are talking about your company, industry, products, and services

4) Where appropriate, leave a short note about your company or your corporate blog

5) Come back the next day (or as often as you can) and do the same thing but be sure to follow-up with the conversation because dropping a message without coming back is considered spam and in the blogosphere, an ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Submit your Blog and Website to Search Engines
I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

The Services You Might Want to Employ
Although I have not used the services, one respectable way of increasing your link popularity and prestige in Google is to use a service like Text Link Ads. What Text Link Adss offers is a link-buying service that does double-duty. The double duty is as follows: in addition to creating clickable links on the popular sites that can choose and afford, it will also allow you to legally create Google bombs that will heighten the probability that your company website or your corporate blog will turn up when people search for your company, your industry, your market, your products, and your services.

Employing “localized” Google AdWords, content-based Google AdWords, and search-based Google AdWords is a no-brainer. There are other advertising solutions available now, including finding the advertising networks that might be placed on some of the blogs you find the most focused or relevant, including BlogAds, etc.

Okay, I hope that helps. I am tired of writing but if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask me questions below in the comment section and I will both answer them and also use your questions, comments, feedback, and suggestions to fuel future articles.

I control all the aspects of the following return — title and description (and maybe even placement). You should too!

How did I do that? Well, I just wrote some code and pasted it into my blog template, above the opening <body> tag, between the <head> and </head> tags. Simple but mightily effective!

<meta name=”title” content=”Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing.” />

Holler!

<meta name=”title” content=”Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing.” />

If you optimize your blog you can control the way Google shows your site to the world.

Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags.

If you want to see what meta tags I use, they’re listed at the bottom of this article. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

(For you newbies, the meta tags all go within the header tags in your blog template. So you will need to do some template editing.)

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day.

They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog.

And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Meta Tags from ChrisAbraham.com

<link rel=”DCTERMS.isreplacedby” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com” />
<link rel=”meta” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”FOAF” href=”foaf.rdf” />
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” />
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”38.8886,-76.9855″>
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”38.8886,-76.9855″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Chris Abraham, Christopher James Abraham, Christopher J. Abraham, Chris J Abraham, Christopher Abraham, media strategist, online brand promotion, online brand protection, brand promotion, brand protection, new media strategies, nms, vbma, viral + buzz marketing association, search engine optimization, seo expert, defensive SEO, SEO promotion, Washington, DC” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing.” />
<meta name=”DC.Description” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog” />
<meta name=”title” content=”Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message” />
<meta name=”language” content=”en” />
<meta name=”author” content=”Chris Abraham” />
<meta name=”abstract” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog” />
<meta name=”publisher” content=”Chris Abraham ” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Chris Abraham”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”after 1 day”>
<meta name=”page-topic” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog”>
<meta name=”page-type” content=”Personal Home Page”>
<meta name=”audience” content=”all”>
<meta name=”generator” content=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/”>
<title>Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/styles-site.css” type=”text/css” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/atom.xml” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 1.0″ href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.rdf” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.xml” />
<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/rsd.xml” />

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN already love you, blogger, so just write, write, write. If you have more time and an inclination you can continue reading.

Without doing anything to your blog, you have an advantage which is lots and lots of text that is generally topic-centric and frequently updated. You are already ahead of the game. Add to that that Google loves you and cares about keeping up with the blogosphere and you can safely stop reading now and be fine. Just make sure you write something twice a day.

Although the most important part of SEO is getting Very Important People to link to you, there is a lot you can do on your own that I will go into below (I also go over how I think Google works in How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion).

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Third, optimize your blog as though it were a traditional website. Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Six, make sure you use a ping server. If you don’t know a thing, start with filling out Pingomatic as best you can. That should be good enough for now. Blogger and WordPress.com offer a checkbox you can use to send out the ping. You can probably build it into your submission using the WordPress “Update Services” under Options/Writing, then scroll down. On MT it’s in Settings/New Entry Defaults/Publicity/Remote Interfaces. I use a long list that I will post under the Meta Tags below:

Meta Tags from ChrisAbraham.com

<link rel=”DCTERMS.isreplacedby” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com” />
<link rel=”meta” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”FOAF” href=”foaf.rdf” />
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” />
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”38.8886,-76.9855″>
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”38.8886,-76.9855″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Chris Abraham, Christopher James Abraham, Christopher J. Abraham, Chris J Abraham, Christopher Abraham, media strategist, online brand promotion, online brand protection, brand promotion, brand protection, new media strategies, nms, vbma, viral + buzz marketing association, search engine optimization, seo expert, defensive SEO, SEO promotion, Washington, DC” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing.” />
<meta name=”DC.Description” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog” />
<meta name=”title” content=”Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message” />
<meta name=”language” content=”en” />
<meta name=”author” content=”Chris Abraham” />
<meta name=”abstract” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog” />
<meta name=”publisher” content=”Chris Abraham ” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Chris Abraham”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”after 1 day”>
<meta name=”page-topic” content=”Chris Abraham Official Blog”>
<meta name=”page-type” content=”Personal Home Page”>
<meta name=”audience” content=”all”>
<meta name=”generator” content=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/”>
<title>Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/styles-site.css” type=”text/css” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/atom.xml” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 1.0″ href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.rdf” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.xml” />
<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://www.chrisabraham.com/rsd.xml” />

Ping Server List for ChrisAbraham.com

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

(I was Inspired by BBC’s More Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks)