Whenever you need to post an image on your blog, you will need to upload a photo to blogger directly. That however does not give you much freedom to work with the image and even renaming the image is not quite possible. It is therefore recommended to have a Image Hosting account for use with your blog. The good news is that there are many free image hosting providers that give you good features at absolutely no cost. My personal favourite is Photobucket, but below is a list of other free image hosting providers that you can use to post images on your blog. Many of them are now allowing free video hosting as well. Some of them will not require you to register with them too.

http://photobucket.com ( Images + Videos )


http://www.imagecabin.com/ ( Images + Videos +MP3 & more.. )



http://tinypic.com/ ( Images + Videos )


http://imageshack.us/ ( Images + Videos )



http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/ ( Images )



http://www.freeimagehosting.net/ ( Images )



http://www.theimagehosting.com/ ( Images )



http://www.imagevenue.com/ ( Images )



http://www.piclynk.com/ ( Images )



http://www.filehigh.com/ ( Images + Videos + Cursors )



http://www.theimageplace.net/ ( Images )



http://www.imgplace.com/ ( Images )



http://xs.to/ ( Images )



http://www.myonlineimages.com/ ( Images + Videos + ZIP & more.. )

One of the most important things that you can put on your blog is a "hit counter" or visitor tracking sytem which will give you most valuable information on which pages are being viewed most, what search engines are being used to find your page, what keywords are making your page stand up on search results, what is the geographical location of your visitors etc.

The PageRank Directory contains links to directories that accept submission of individual sites or blogs. Please feel free to browse through. I estimate that this page will become a PR2+ page over time.

Web Directory - Add URL to Search-Group.com
Eastlink Directory

Another free service from http://www.sharethis.com offers a bookmarking widget for your blog(s). This bookmarking widget allows the visitor of your blog to bookmark your blog in any of the popular social bookmarking sites, much like the widget from http://www.addthis.com ( read the post here for details ). you can also customize the widget to match the "look and feel" of your page.

To track your site/blog using analytics you need to have an account with Google Analytics, If you already have a Google Account you can use that username/password here or you can always sign up for a free google account. In either case you need to go to http://www.google.com/analytics [ Opens in a New Page ]

After you login with your username/password, you will be in your dashboard area.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the link to "Add Website Profile".

On the next screen select the option to "Add a profile for a new domain".

Click continue and on the page that follows, type the URL of your blog.

The final screen will generate two tracking codes for your blog. make sure you are on "New Tracking Code(ga.js)" tab

This is the code that you need to copy/paste on your blog. We are now going to install google analyics tracking code to your blogger blog.

Go to http://www.blogger.com [ Opens in a New Page ] and login with your id/password.

Once you are on your blogger dashboard and click the "Manage : Layout" link of your blog. First click the template tab and then the "Page Elements" Sub-Tab, where you can easily add and arrange page elements.

You are now going to add a page element, so click the link "Add a Page Element"

From the popup that appears, click on the "Add To Blog" button under HTML/JavaScript

This will open a final popup where you paste your code(your google analytics code) under the "content" textarea. I prefer not to give it a title because the code is invisible, so leave the title field blank and click the button to "save changes"

In an earlier post, losing significance of paid links, I had talked about paid links losing their credibility and being on the downward spiral. However, buying text links can increase the web presence and in turn generate more traffic for the website in short time also also helpful in building link popularity.

From my point of view, you can go for paid links when your website is new. In case you are opting to buy links, there are few points to be remember, they are:

• Purpose of buying links : The first thing to be kept in mind is to determine the motive or purpose of buying the links. If you are aiming at increased traffic and better results of search engines, choose the text links that are relevant and related to your web page.
• One way links : The next thing is to make sure that the bought links are directed towards your own website only.
• Opt for longer subscription : While buying text links, you should opt for longer subscription. The time-gap projected for search engines' picking up the link is generally very high. Therefore, weekly and monthly subscriptions may not always work.
• Prior knowledge : Get prior information on the text links that you are planning to buy. Many links on the web are bogus ones. The site of the age also plays an important role as Google gives such sites more credibility.
• Variations in anchor text :Buy variations in the anchor text. This will give you an advantage of covering broad categories on your site. It is a sensible strategy, especially when visitors desire different things.
• Well visited site : Buy links from a well known and popular site which boosts of lot of visitors. There is no point of buying links from a site which doesn’t generate much traffic.
  

The fact of the matter is that sometimes the only way to compete in a cut throat market may be to buy links. I would suggest that you invest in buying links if you are new to the business. After you have established yourself, you can switch to free link sharing and link exchange. I believe that if these 6-things are kept in mind, you can buy links that may turn out to be beneficial in the long run.

In the present day world of online marketing people want fast results and do not find it worth to go for natural optimisation techniques. To stand in the competition, and want quick result to stand their, people think for short method link paid optimization. Whether such a move helps can be debated.

From my point of you, if I am handling a business or website I would rather go for natural optimisation like to come with hundreds of keywords and on the first pages of the search engines. That would be an ideal situation, one we can only try to achieve. To reach to such a level or gain a very good search engine page rank, some website publishers often go crazy and about anything. No sooner did they realize that links were giving better results in terms of ranking, all of them started massive campaigns to get as many links as can be got. Sometimes buying, some times begging, the owners or promoters have just broken all limits.

We would start from a very basic question – Does paid link really help and if so to what extent? In the heydays of online promotions the masters of the web could see the impact of the number of back links on the page rank. Popular search engines including Google, provided more than simple analysis of the sites based on algorithms.

Links were and still are considered as important resources that any website is linked to. But when the habit of buying links became popular the search engines also redefined the priorities. All this has led to a verification of the kind of links a website is using. In case of links that are found as being bought rather than being shared or wishfully granted, the search engines are not much convinced. With the result the importance or significance of paid links has been observing a decline.

The best practice is not the buying of a website link but earning one. For that your own product must be outstanding in quality as well as the practices you are engaged must be genuine. Google knows it, in fact it knows everything.

For more visit Online Marketing information

When it is time to hook some good sites for links, caution is advised. Webmasters are aware of the value that a link has. You are not going to get it that easy and it is more difficult once the potential link-givers know that you want a link. Therefore, if something has to be taken; some bait has to be used.

If the web is the pool or lake where you go link baiting, then networking is your angling rod. It is because of networking that we are connected to a large number of people. One amusing story or a comment that is put across such a network will spread like anything. But does it happen always? The simple answer is: No. It is because the bait itself has to be tempting enough to woo the audience and the website owners. There is no hard and fast rule to what can be used as bait or how it is to be spread. But there are some common practices and patterns observed by professionals everywhere. Here are some steps to help you in your link baiting campaign:

• Make bait that can spread like a virus: Your bait can have such characteristics as being humorous, controversial, informative, novel, patronizing or anything that will grab the attention. The bait has to be made keeping into consideration the audience behavior.
• Find the appropriate channel or community where it can be inserted: Think of various social media and community sites wherein you can put the bait. There are many portals that some people have been utilizing.
• Your bait must be timely: Once you have prepared bait, its deployment must be timely. For instance an event is coming up and more people are supposed to be online or searching for something. Your bait in that case has to have some relevance with the event.
  

Are you getting paid for blogging? or getting penalized by google for posting paid reviews?
It is now official that google is taking action against sites/blogs with paid posts/reviews.

Bloggers and Site Owners who were members of "Paid for Blogging" sites such as PayPerPost.com, Smorty.com, SponsoredReviews etc. must have noticed that their google PageRank has been reduced to 0.

Google's official statement in its webmaster guidelines says:

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

The guidelines add that not all paid links violate their guidelines, since "Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results"

It recommends that the links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag "(The most preferred method in blogs) or Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.

If a blog/site has lost its PageRank and wants to get it back then it has to comply with the google webmaster guidelines by using the above mentioned recommended practices. Once that's done, you can follow Matt Cutt's advice and read the Official Google Webmaster blog which suggests :

"The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google’s Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed"