How to Learn SEO - A guide for Starter

Learning SEO is not a rocket science. It has a simple logic-

"Stay focused, Stay active, Keep communicating, Post Content, Keep Spreading"

If you are trying to learn SEO, having passion of Internet, thinking of your career in online world, These tips will surely enhance your expertise in t he domain. For being a SEO expert, the best strategy is to start from basics. Running around for big tools, services, ad hoc methods doesn't help. You need to keep working on your project no matter how much response you are getting or how many clicks or how many visits you got for your blog or post.

Lets start with a list of must-haves to begin with SEO-

1- Laptop (Obviously)
2- Internet Connection (Not Joking)
3- Website/ Blog to work on
4- Minimum 1 hour a day with no excuse+time to create content
5- A lot of patience
6- A Niche ( A small part of overall domain, which you are expert in, Not required If you already have a website)
7- A little bit technical knowledge, especially HTML (Basic but not mandatory, you can learn in due course)
8- Passion for success in blogging/SEO

Once the checklist above is completed, you are good to go with the journey of Blogging and SEO. Pointing out a few well known basic but powerful strategies to be a SEO expert-

1- Finding a Niche-
Now to start with this, take your laptop, connect Internet and start browsing around to find a niche which is not very common but is largely potential. To be more statistically correct and If you are confused, Try getting help from Google. Decide a Niche of your expertise and start working on the same.

2- Deciding Domain Name-
This is a simple but practically hard decision. For this you have to take care of too many visible and hidden things like google search statistics, Negative keywords, short and simple name which has at least one keyword, price of the domain, TLD (Top Level Domain) and many things. Find out a good name go to www.godaddy.com search for availability, register and get ready. Get a good hosting, map the name server with help of customer care and you are ready with your website. I will explain in details in a separate post.

3- Deciding Hosting-
If this is only for learning process, try for free hostings otherwise you can buy a good hosting from www.hostgator.com. In general VPN hosting is more reliable and fast compared to windows hosting. You can use www.1freehosting.com to start with. Though it has some uptime issues but you cant ask for more than that for free. I will explain in details in a separate post.

4- Creating website-

You can try wordpress for beginning or use blogspot initially. For learning matter, Wordpress has more options than Blogspot but similarly, Blogspot is more simple to operate than wordpress. Decide as per your convenience and get your website ready for content posting. Try creating post and saving it. Have a look at final preview before posting. Post on regular time like 10 AM or 6 PM based on your target audience. You can also try posting at different times and analyze the visibility at different times. In general a post at around 4 PM to 6 PM is effective.

5- Create Content-
Draft strong content, with Images and Videos if possible, and start posting on your blog. The content should be original, interesting, useful and nothing has to be copied until you quote the owner. You can decide to post immediately or save for future. Post on a regular interval and not randomly. Use all keywords related to your domain normally with reference. Don't fill keywords for the sake of SEO.

6- Register on Website Indexes-

Register on all Website Indexes mainly Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Once your blog is indexed and you allow Search Engine Bot on your blog, It Will start indexing your blog and show in search results based on the content. You can also try Alexa ranking. There are also a few other small indexing sites where you can register and add you blog in their index list. The more traffic you have on your blog, better indexing you will rank and your blog's rank will increase gradually.

7- Use plugins-
Using plugins for various purposes like images, Social Media, Suggested content, Most Viewed content, Recommendation, Sharing, Discussion, Video, Chatting etc will enhance the website experience and help getting more organic traffic. All these plugins are available for free on internet and with basic knowledge of HTML, you can configure these in your website. You have to make sure that website doesn't look cluttered by the plugins. it should be neat and clean and similarly easy to browse.

8- Social Media Optimization (SMO)-
Register on All Social Media sites as below-

www.facebook.com
www.twitter.com
www.youtube.com
www.instagram.com
www.stumbleupon.com
www.pinterest.com
Plus.google.com and many more

Add the links of all these sites profile on your blog. and give options for sharing. This will help in Word of Mouth. You have to post each content of your site with an interactive language on these platforms. Make sure that same content is not posted on all platform simultaneously. You can also try sharing random information without blog link to avoid the boredom of same content. This will make you profile more interesting and attractive to visitors

9- Subscription-
Add a subscription option on your blog, so that people who like your content, can subscribe their email id and the auto mail should got to them every time you post on your blog. You can also plan for a weekly and monthly mailer, which can be a good idea for getting repeated visitors.

10- Online Forums-
Join online forums of related domain and start being an active member. Add you blog link in your signature and keep posting valuable contents there. This helps fetching visitors from other platform. Almost every forum has a separate subgroup to promote your website or content. Which can be utilized.

11- Ping you blog links-
You should ping your blog link daily once to search engines. There are many free pinging sites, which do the job. You can try www.pingomatic.com. Please note that you should not ping more than once in a day or Search engines like Google will start degrading your blog. This is one of the important steps to tell the search engines  that your blog has got updated and there is a new content available for indexing.

12 - Avoid Negative Keywords

You should avoid using keywords which are blocked on search engine. For example "Child P.orn" is a negative keyword and using this may harm your site's grade for search engine bot. Take special care for that.

13 - Have an Eye on statistics-
Once you have enough content posted (Approx 100+) you should start analyzing the trend of your visitors for what content they are liking by checking the comments, visits etc on the a post. This will help you in getting more posts in that regards that can help your visitors connected. Checking the statistics should be your basic routine and you should use the result derived from the statistics. Blogspot has this function prebuilt but in Wordpress, you need to use plugin.

14- Share for Share-
Once your fan following starts increasing, you can use this feature which will get you more visitors. This strategy will work only when you have sufficient number of followers to trade for. In S4S method, you can contact admin of a successful page of social media and ask him to share you content on his page and in return you will share his content on your page. This strategy depends on your personal relationship and number of followers you have.

Start today with the tips and you will see how fast search engines start valuing you blog. After 3 to 4 months of continuous follow up of above tips, your blog will start coming on google searches. Though traffic will increase gradually, you need not stop posting content thinking that you are not getting visitors. To keep continuity in your postings, you can draft and save content or schedule the post directly on blog.

Your comments and experiences are welcome. 

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Kiwi - Most Nutrient Dense of All Fruits

According to my friend Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D., the internationally acclaimed expert in integrative medicine and author of Food as Medicine, the kiwifruit is one of the most underrated healing foods. “Because of their rich array of disease-fighting antioxidants and phytonutrients, they are often prescribed in yoga nutritional therapy to help fight cancer and heart disease,” he says.

Kiwis Have Twice the Vitamin C of Oranges
I’m not surprised. A study conducted at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, evaluated the nutritional value of twenty-seven different fruits to determine, ounce for ounce, which provides the most nutrition. The results? Kiwifruit, with an index of 16, was found to be the most nutrient dense of all fruits. (Second place was papaya at 14, and third place was a tie between mango and orange, which both scored 11.) Kiwi has the highest level of vitamin C, almost twice that of an orange, and is also a decent source of magnesium. Two medium kiwifruits have almost 5 g of fiber. And kiwi—along with papaya and apricot— outranked bananas and oranges as the top low-sodium, high-potassium food!

Another study in the Journal of Medicinal Food examined nine different fruits and fruit juices and reported that eight of them—including kiwi— exhibited significant ability to reduce oxidative stress (damage from free radicals) in human plasma. This ability of kiwi to protect against cellular damage was confirmed in yet another study in Carcinogenesis that was even more promising: In the Carcinogenesis study, not only did the kiwifruit limit the amount of oxidative damage to DNA, but it also stimulated cellular repair of the damage that did occur! Even better, the effect of kiwifruit on DNA damage and repair was seen when it was simply added to a normal diet, and the effects were seen across a whole group of volunteers and in a very short time!

Kiwi Works as a Blood Thinner, with None of Aspirin’s Side Effects
In research at the University of Oslo in Norway, kiwi has been shown to promote heart health by working as a blood thinner. This latter ability is really important, considering how many people are told to take an aspirin a day for the same purpose. According to gastroenterologist and author of Optimal Digestion Dr. Trent Nichols, daily aspirin can cause small breaks in the intestinal walls, contributing to all sorts of problems. In the Norway study, lead researcher Dr. Asim Duttaroy noted that it was unlikely that kiwi would create any of the risk factors associated with aspirin such as stomach pain, excessive bruising, or bleeding. Kiwi also doesn’t disrupt the effects of any other medication. Can you imagine how great it would be to find natural food substances and supplements that accomplish the same cardiovascular protections as some medicines do, without any of the side effects?

Kiwifruits look like little brown furry eggs, and are native to China, though they’re now grown in Australia, New Zealand, and California. The little black seeds inside are completely edible, and the kiwi makes a great addition to fresh juice. If you juice them unpeeled, and with the seeds, they are rich in healthy enzymes.

Consumption of fresh fruits rich in vitamin C has been shown to be beneficial in protecting against respiratory symptoms associated with asthma and to help with wheezing symptoms in children. Kiwi has one of the highest vitamin C contents of any fruit.

WORTH KNOWING

The Environmental Working Group, a consumer advocate and protection nonprofit research organization, put kiwifruit on its 2003 list of twelve foods least contaminated with pesticides. Nice to know!

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Blueberries - A Brain Food

Mention blueberries around scientists, and you’re sure to hear the name of Dr. James Joseph. Joseph is lead scientist in the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. His special interest is what we should eat if we want to keep our marbles intact as we grow older. And it’s largely because of Joseph that blueberries now have a firmly established reputation as a memory-protecting food.

Blueberries Are Brain Food
In Joseph’s lab, he’s got something he calls the Rat Olympics. He tests motor function and memory function with mazes and assorted tests for muscle strength and coordination. Around middle age, rats start showing the same kinds of decline in performance that humans do. But what Joseph’s studies show is that when you feed the lab animals extracts of blueberries, wonderful things start happening; or, more accurately, bad things don’t happen.

Bad things meaning mental deterioration. And loss of coordination and balance. Gone. Those rats that chowed down on the blueberries behaved like young studs. In Joseph’s lab, they’d found the Rat Fountain of Youth.

Blueberries contain compounds like anthocyanin that are antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. And inflammation and oxidative stress are involved in virtually every major killer disease: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and heart disease, not to mention “run-of-the-mill” conditions of aging like arthritis. These compounds by themselves would be enough to land blueberries on anyone’s list of superfoods. But the blueberries do even more. They actually help neurons in the brain communicate with one another more effectively.

BLUEBERRIES KEEP YOUR MEMORY SHARP
“Old neurons are kind of like old married couples,” Joseph says. “They don’t talk to each other so much any more.” Memory goes down, and the “processing” necessary for coordination and balance will tend to decline. The technical term for this communication is “signaling,” and special compounds in blueberries called polyphenols actually “turn on” the signals. “Not only can you get one neuron to talk to another more efficiently, but you can actually enable the brain to grow new neurons,” Joseph explained in an interview.

Blueberries are the ultimate memory food. Animal studies have demonstrated that daily consumption of blueberries dramatically slows impairments in motor coordination and memory that are the usual accompaniments of aging. What’s more, they may help lower blood cholesterol and promote urinary health.

Bilberries, a close European cousin of the blueberry, have been shown to promote eye health and protect against glaucoma and cataract progression. In fact, wild blueberries are called “the vision fruit” in Japan, because they have very high concentrations of anthocyanins, natural antioxidants and anti-inflammatories whose benefits include reducing eyestrain and improving night vision. And there are currently plans to study the ability of blueberries to prevent macular degeneration, a disease of the retina and the leading cause of blindness in people over age sixty-five.

Blueberries Are the Highest-Scoring Fruit of All Time
Then there are all those antioxidants and antiinflammatory compounds, which help fight against cardiovascular disease. Blueberries have been tested to have one of the highest ORAC values of any food in the world. What does that mean? Well, ORAC, which stands for oxygen radical absorbance capacity, is a rating system for antioxidant power. Scientists test how well all the different phytochemicals and antioxidants in a given food perform together, and then give the food a rating based on that performance. It’s easy to understand if you think of a sports team. A really good team is not just about how good the players are individually, just like a superfood is not just about which nutrients it contains. In both cases, it’s about how well the elements work together as a group. And that’s what the ORAC rating tells you: how much protection and value antioxidants and phytochemicals give you as a group in a particular food. The highest- scoring fruit of all time? Blueberries.

Just recently, in the May 4, 2005, issue of the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, it was reported that blueberries contain a beneficial compound called pterostilbene. Pterostilbene’s lipid-lowering ability was superior to both resveratrol (the antiaging compound also found in grapes) and the prescription drug Ciprofibrate. On a cellular level, it works much like resveratrol in regulating fatty acid metabolism and fats in the bloodstream— and it helps prevent the deposition of plaque in the arteries.
Need more reasons to eat blueberries? How about fighting cancer? A University of Illinois study tested different fruits for the presence of a particular flavonoid that inhibits a cancer-promoting enzyme. Of all the fruits tested, wild blueberries showed the greatest anticancer activity.

Fresh or Frozen, You Choose

Best of all, you can get all these amazing health benefits by just adding 1/2 cup a day of wild or frozen blueberries to your diet. No studies have been done to date comparing fresh to frozen to canned berries, but virtually all forms of the fruit have essential anthocyanins and proanthocyanins, making them a genuine health bargain. In fact, all of Joseph’s studies were done using frozen berries, which, last time I looked, were pretty inexpensive and available in any grocery store freezer.
Throw them on a salad, in a blender with a protein powder, or, best of all—my personal favorite—eat them frozen with a dollop of yogurt. The yogurt sort of freezes upon making contact with the ice-cold blueberries, making the resulting blend the most delicious, healthy “dessert” you can imagine.

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GojiBerries - Do they really cure Cancer?

First things first. Goji berries are delicious. They’re also expensive. But partisans claim they are one of the best foods on the planet. A deep-red, dried fruit about the same size as a raisin with an unusual taste—sort of a cross between a cranberry and a cherry— Goji berries have been used in Tibet for at least 1,700 years. They’re used in Chinese medicine, and they’re traditionally regarded by the people of Tibet and elsewhere as a longevity, strength-building, and sexual potency food of the highest order.

Do Goji Berries Really Cure Cancer?
The problem with these exotic berries and the juices made from them (Goji, noni, acai) isn’t that they’re not incredibly healthy foods—they are. Foods that have been used in medical and healing traditions for thousands of years generally don’t keep their reputation if they don’t actually deliver the goods. The problem is that the multilevel marketers discover them, and then you have a war in which everyone claims their product is the only “real” one, fantastic health claims are made that range all over the map and compete for sheer silliness, and before you know it you’re in multilevel marketing hell and don’t know what to believe. I’ve seen Web sites that claim that Goji berries cure cancer, guarantee you an extra twenty years of life, and make you a sexual superman. All of this is nonsense.

The Goji berry is one of about eighty varieties of the Lycium berry (Lycium barbarum) that is indigenous to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions. A lot of published research exists on the Lycium berry, most of it positive, but none of it strong enough to support the ridiculous claim that it cures cancer. But marketing hype aside, this is a great food. Published research that I was able to actually document showed that polysaccharides extracted from the Lycium barbarum have had a positive effect on insulin resistance in rats and have a neuroprotective effect on animal cells. Polysaccharides extracted from the Lycium berry also demonstrate strong antioxidant properties. And at least two studies showed that they have a significant effect on the immune system. In one study, they reduced the weight of tumors, and in at least two others, protected animal cells from DNA damage.

That the Goji berry is full of nutrients is not in doubt. But Gojis are not listed in the USDA database, so their exact makeup is hard to verify. The general consensus is that they contain eighteen amino acids and up to twenty-one trace minerals, and are a rich source of carotenoids and vitamin C. They’re also high in fiber (4 g per serving).

You can buy the juice if you don’t mind paying astronomical rates and wading through a bunch of multilevel marketing hype. Personally, I buy the organic berries themselves in a package at the natural foods supermarket. One of my favorite “raw foods” breakfasts is made of raw oats, almond slices, apple slices, flaked coconut, and Goji berries. Moisten with some pomegranate juice and enjoy!

WORTH KNOWING

The Goji is distantly related to the Chinese wolfberry, but partisans are very adamant that they are not the same thing. According to Dr. Jigme Dorje, research director of the Tanaduk Botanical Research Institute, which has been studying fortyone varieties of Lycium barbarum, the Chinese wolfberry is loaded with pesticides. Dorje believes that the best (and authentic) Goji berries come from Tibet and are grown organically.

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Book Review - Business Sutra by Devdutt Patnayak

       In short and brief, the book is basically about the Indian Scenario of business with reference from our ancient documents and write ups. This book is an excellent source for the students pursuing Business Courses or completed them. It will open your mind and change the way you think or you have been taught at your college or institute. This proves a contradiction of the practical and theory of the study materials and actual environment. You get taught the methodologies and thinking process of western countries where organization is first, employee comes next, where personal and professional lives are almost same. But in actual India is a country of diversity. Here people have different taste, look, language, thinking and rituals. USA has 4% of world population and contributes 17% of the GDP while India has 17% of world population but only 4% of the GDP. The methods and solutions which work perfectly there may not be even logical in India. Overall, a must read for all.

          You can download the book from below link and if you like the book you can purchase the same and increase your knowledge.

Download Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/cx1iwmt4k9wk49l/Business_Sutra_by_Devdutt_Pattanaik.pdf

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Quinoa

Quinoa is another of those foods that keeps getting miscategorized— everyone thinks it’s a grain, everyone uses it like a grain, but it’s actually a seed. Anyway, who really cares? You know how the old saying goes … if it looks like a grain and it acts like a grain … Same principle.

The Stuff “War Balls” Are Made Of Quinoa was known by the Incas as the “mother of grains.” They used the seeds of this plant as one of their chief sources of nutrition. In fact, legend has it that the Incan armies frequently marched for days at a time eating a mixture of quinoa and fat known as “war balls,” and at planting time tradition demanded that the Incan leader would plant the first quinoa seed using a gold shovel. Quinoa is a highly nutritious food and is considered a high-protein “grain.” The protein quality and quantity in quinoa seed is often superior to those of more common cereal grains, and the nutritional quality of this crop has been compared to that of dried whole milk by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Quinoa is higher in lysine than wheat (lysine is an amino acid that’s scarce in the vegetable kingdom), and the amino acid content of quinoa seed in general is considered well balanced for human and animal nutrition, and similar to that of casein.


Preparing and Eating Quinoa
You can use quinoa to make flour, soup, or breakfast cereal. Most quinoa has been sold as whole grain that is cooked separately as rice or in combination dishes such as pilaf. Noted natural-foods expert and author Rebecca Wood suggests cooking about 2 cups of stock or water per cup of Quinoa, which should yield about 3 cups of cooked grain and take only about 15 minutes to prepare. She reminds us that it is as versatile as rice (and, in my opinion, a good deal better for us) and can be substituted for rice in any recipe, or used as a side dish. Quinoa has a lower sodium content and is higher in calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, copper, manganese, and zinc than wheat, barley, or corn. It’s particularly high in iron—1/2 cup contains almost 8 mg, way more than any other cereal grain, a hefty 5 g of fiber.

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Cholesterol: What’s the Story?

Cholesterol just might be the most misunderstood molecule in the whole world. Dr. John Abramson, professor of medicine at Harvard University, says this: “It is important to keep in mind that cholesterol is not a health risk in and of itself. In fact, cholesterol is vital to many of the body’s essential functions.” Cholesterol is the “parent” molecule of some of the body’s most important compounds, including the sex hormones and vitamin D. It’s also an integral part of the cell membrane.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that the vast majority of cholesterol is made in your body, by the liver. If you take in more from the diet, the liver makes less. If you take in less, the liver makes more. You need cholesterol. Without it, you’d die. 

Doing justice to the whole cholesterol question in an introduction as short as this is a real challenge, but I’d like you to have a few basic take home points. The first is that dietary cholesterol— like the kind you find in egg yolks—has minimal impact on serum cholesterol (the kind your doctor measures). Minimal. Not only that, but the effect of eggs on heart disease can’t be predicted by looking only at their cholesterol content. Eggs contain many other nutrients that are good for you—protein, some polyunsaturated fats, folic acid, and other B vitamins. As Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has said, “No research has ever shown that people who eat more eggs have more heart attacks than people who eat few eggs.”

The second point has to do with the demo nization of saturated fat in general. Yes, saturated fat raises cholesterol, but it raises both the good and the bad cholesterol. And though there may be a relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol, the relationship between saturated fat in the diet and heart disease or mortality is far less clear. In fact, an entire nexus of researchers, doctors, and statisticians led by the brilliant Swedish scientist Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., has been questioning some of the “conventional wisdom” on saturated fat and cholesterol for years. They have an organization called The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (http://www.thincs.org/). If the science doesn’t scare you off, it’s worth a visit to get a “second opinion.” (Also worth checking out: Ravnskov’s “The Cholesterol Myths,” available both as a book and online at http://www.ravnskov.nu/myth1.htm). 

Lowering cholesterol is big business. In 2005, the two top-selling drugs on Forbes magazine’s list of pharmaceutical juggernauts were Lipitor and Zocor, both cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. Together, they did a combined business of more than $13 billion. It’s worth noting that many researchers believe that the good that statin drugs accomplish has much less to do with their ability to lower cholesterol than their ability to lower inflammation, which is indeed a definite risk for heart disease, as well as a component of Alzheimer’s, obesity, and diabetes. The foods in this book are filled with natural anti-inflammatories like the flavonoid quercetin, for example. Spices like turmeric are so incredibly healthy largely because they are anti-inflammatory. Maybe we wouldn’t need $13 billion a year’s worth of drugs if we were eating more of the foods that accomplish the same thing. 

Finally, in my opinion, we’ve been way too focused on lowering cholesterol and not focused enough on lowering heart disease and mortality. They are not the same thing. In the Lyon Diet Heart Study, people who had had a heart attack were either counseled to eat a Mediterranean-type diet (fish, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, nuts) or given routine post–heart attack advice (watch your cholesterol, eat less saturated fat). The people on the Mediterranean diet experienced 70 percent less heart disease than the group getting the “standard” advice, about three times the reduction in the risk of further heart disease achieved with statin drugs! Their overall risk of death was 45 percent lower than that of the group getting the conventional advice. And—get this— their cholesterol levels didn’t change much. Though they had significantly less heart disease and less risk of dying, their cholesterol levels pretty much didn’t budge.

Though some studies have shown a reduction in heart disease with cholesterol-lowering medications, the amount of reduction pales when compared to what’s achievable with lifestyle changes. High-risk men in the WOSCOP study (a statin drug study) achieved about a 30 percent reduction in heart disease by going on drugs, but the women in the Nurses’ Health Study showed 31 percent reduction in heart disease just by eating fish once a week. As Harvard’s Dr. Abramson puts it, “Most of our health is determined by how we live our lives.”

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