While “content is king” and always will be, allowing visitors to participate and comment on your blog can make your blog more attractive and more interactive, thus creating a strong relationship with your readers and most of the times making them come back for more.

Here are some great tips to attract comments on your blog:

1.     Ask questions

Whenever you write a new post end it with questions, for example “what do you think about this method?”, “have you ever heard about better tools than this?” and so on.

2.      Ask your friends to start the discussion

Most of the times people do not comment on posts where nobody else commented, therefore it would be a great strategy to ask some of your friends to help you out at the beginning by adding some valuable comments to your blog posts.

3.       Dofollow? YES!

There are multiple plugins that make your blog a dofollow one, however this strategy should be approached carefully while once you turn your blog into a dofollow one you will also notice massive increase of spam comments. Top commenter’s is also a great method to make people contribute to your site and also gaining a link on your homepage.

4.      Create “unfinished” lists

If you are writing top x lists, always make them somehow incomplete. Allow people to add “numbers” to your list by not sharing the whole one. Create from “top 10 list” a “top 5 one”, this will definitely increase your comments’ numbers.

5.    Keep it simple!

Do not request people to register in order to place a comment, leave the comments open to everyone, but in the same time moderated. By asking them to register on your blog you might just tell them “comments are closed” if, of course, you are not SEOMOZ.

Social media is a great way for any online business to establish a virtual relationship with its customers and there are very few companies that do not have a Facebook/Twitter profile to use in their online marketing strategies. However, throwing a bit.ly link on Twitter and waiting for the “goodies” to flow is definitely not a good method to make the most out of your tweets, therefore here are some great tips related to how a good tweet should look.

Create an “answers day” – write down whatever question your potential customers asked you on Twitter and try to give your best answers; make this a “weekly task”.

Share updates – whether you jumped on the first page of Google, hired a new guy to deal with your servers or just launched a new page of your website, share all these news with your followers

Case studies related to your niche – this is a great way to get lots of re-tweets and attention, however you should do some heavy research for something good to come out of your “closet”

Discounts, deals, coupons – people like paying less for a product/service so anytime you are launching a new “lower prices” offer do not forget to tweet about it

Tweet about events you are attending at – whether we are talking about webinars, interviews or even you company’s Christmas party, tweet about it and engage with your customers

Always share news – these do not have to be related to your business or your niche, anything that is hot could bring you some wanted attention so keep an eye on what is popular every day

Solve problems – one of your customers has not got your discount? Solve his problem and reply to him with a tweet; show your followers that you cater for your clients and for your business’ conduit

Twitter has become in almost five years the most important social networking site people and businesses are using, whether we are talking just for fun, networking or developing business. One thing is clear: if you are into blogging or promoting a business, Twitter is something that you should not ignore at all.

And while most bloggers are using WordPress to share their content, here are some great WordPress plugins for Twitter that can definitely make things a lot easier:

• TwitterDash – this plugin easily allow you to add your friends timeline from Twitter on your dashboard

• Elegant Twitter Widget – this is a widget that displays Twitter updates in a XHTML code; highly customisable!

• Twit-Twoo – the Twit Twoo plugin means quick and easy status updates right from your blog sidebar

• Twitter Widget Pro – requires PHP5 to function, this one handles all Twitter feeds with username, display name and so on

• TweetBacks – whenever people are chatting about your posts on Twitter, this plugin will add the Tweets on your blog as comments

• Tweet This – uses Th8.us to automatically shorten URLs and also ads a “tweet post” link on every blog post; as well, it can be customised

There are many other WordPress plugins for Twitter, this is only a small piece that can become handy when you are trying to maximize your online Twitter efforts.

Continuing the “quest” for finding link building opportunities, here is part two, revealing other great queries for your campaign. Yet again, these should be used with the solely purpose of contributing to community, gaining exposure and finally getting the desired link; do not spam these, ever!

5. Video Sharing websites

“powered by VShare”

“powered by Clipshare”

“powered by PHPMotion”

“upload video”

6. Social networking websites

“powered by insoshi”

“powered by ONESite”

inurl:ning.com

inurl:bravenet.com

7.  CMS Platforms

“powered by elgg”

“powered by Drupal”

“powered by b2evolution”

“powered by ModX”

8. How to find different blogs

“web design” “powered by wordpress”

“web design” “top commenter”

“web design” “comments links could be nofollow free”

“this site uses keywordluv”

“powered by blogengine.net”

9. Niche-targeted forums

“web design” forum

“web design” join

“powered by ip.board”

“powered by punbb”

“powered by SMF”

“powered by vbulletin”

“powered by invision power board”

“powered by expressionengine”

Of course, all of these can be used with other queries for laser-targeted websites like inurl: , intitle: and so on. Part 3 coming soon with more places to search for your link building campaign!

Local search has recently become what more and more small/medium businesses are interested in. A high ranking in Google Places can bring crazy amounts of laser-targeted traffic to a certain business and Google guys are aware of this, thus trying to improve their results every month.

Not so long ago, Google improved their photo viewer for Places for an easier and quicker pictures exploration and recently they have announced a new exciting improvement: users can now contribute with personal photos of certain Places and upload them in order to get more ideas about a place.

They have tried to make it easy for anyone trying to upload a photo: just go to the “Photos” section of a place page and search for the “Upload a photo” link; click on it, browse for high-quality photos from your computer and add them to the photos’ group. However, uploaded photos should comply with Google’s review guidelines, let’s hope users will not starting abuse of this new feature.

So, have recently been to a fancy restaurant and took a picture of a popular dish? Why not sharing it with other users on Google Places? Once the photo will be uploaded they will not only be available on Google Places results but also on Google and Google Earth. Could this be a small opportunity for local SEO companies?

Lately, lots of voices are accusing Google that it’s top search results are starting to be more and more spammed, they do not seem to try to do anything in order to stop this. As a response to these rumours, a recent post from Google Blog tries to solve this “mystery”.

According to Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer for  Google’s Search Quality Team, the search quality is way better than it ever was in the last year and not only in terms of relevance. However, spam results are less than half when compared to those five years ago,  it seems that last months came with some negative spam results in the search engines.

For fighting with spam results, Matt Cutts says that many improvements have been released to the  algorithms last month and more are to come. Three major improvements were disclosed in this blog post:

• A new document-level classifier was launched : this to prevent spammy websites ranking higher (a high emphasis seems to be on keyword stuffing)
• Ability to detect hacked websites was “radically improved”
• The third one should sound like a warning for those using so-called auto-blogs: although it is “to be launched”, it seems that websites using auto-generated content from other websites or those with low level of original content will have a short span of life in the search results

In the end, Matt Cutts added that they take strong action against spam website from their index and things are to be improved soon. So more algorithm changes soon to take place, we are looking forward to see these happening.