Network cable management and mapping switch ports

 

Keeping a track of computers that are all connected to a network can be a hassle, without desktop management software. Even with it, you can’t necessarily tell exactly which physical computer is connected to a given switch port. Eventually, you will come back to a switch closet, but this doesn’t necessarily help the situation at all; especially when you encounter a stack of Cisco 3750s, spewing yellow ropes of technological vomit off in all kinds of directions. So the best things you (we) can determine are a wall socket (if it is labelled) and maybe a MAC address too, if you log in.

But this is all a heap of work that just shouldn’t have to be done at all and really frustrates, further, any problems that you’re trying to troubleshoot. So, I decided to come up with a plan. This is quite a long post, but it gives background to what motivated me to do this in the first place!

Standard problems:

In lots of situations, you’ll know what the cause of a network problem is. In some cases, we notice connection issues across the board and it is likely that the problem is already known by the IT services department. Specific PCs with issues can often come down to the issues below:

• DHCP scope has been exhausted, so no more IP addresses can be given out
• Port is disconnected (no signal)
• Port is shutdown (electrical connection is present but no traffic goes over the wire)
• VLAN mismatch (subnets of specific PCs will be assigned differently than that designated to the rest of a given room)

(This is just going to go and assume that a PC has been physically checked that it is connected to the right network interface (each interface has a different MAC address which can affect FOG host registration settings and port security settings on a switch) and is connected through the correct wall port that was assigned to that PC (or to a port that we know is – or should be – assigned to a specific network)).

In the case of a DHCP scope issue, the problem can be partly determined by the PXE boot message popups, for example it may display a message that it is receiving proxyDHCP offers but not DHCP offers. If a port is disconnected, this can be determined through a network cable tester. A shutdown can be determined in a similar fashion (electrical signal present but no traffic received) but in all these cases, the only information that can be provided to IT services, that would be of any use, are a patch panel port number and a system MAC address. However, these won’t necessarily help in determining the right location of the switch in a building that has possibly 100 or more switches around.

The case could even be that a PC may work fine and even connect to the internet with no problem – but then if a room of 30 PCs were to receive multicast traffic on a system and, say, two or three are on a different subnet, multicast issues will present themselves and PCs may stop imaging before others have finished. In fact, it is only if someone knows the symptoms and has had experience with the last issue – VLAN mismatches – that you can really identify that as the cause of the issue.

Working with others

Now, in this environment, all PCs are allocated an IP address in specific subnets that corresponds to a respective VLAN, which in turn corresponds to a room (usually). VLAN configuration is implemented by switches. If we want to check some of this information to see what has been – perhaps incorrectly – configured, then we need to be able to access the switch configuration. As these switches are (almost all) operated by the IT services people, our team cannot see this configuration. Even if we were given the configuration, it would eventually become outdated, especially as things can be disconnected and reconnected by other people.

So we could be simply stuck at only being able to provide patch panel numbers (the wall sockets that a PC is connected to), a room number that the PC is in, a MAC address of the PC and an IP address. With the MAC address, IT services could possibly find out where a PC is connected to if a MAC address is provided, but this information is not readily available unless we provide it – and this is assuming it will be accurate and never change. Plus this presents another issue; if the configurations are stored on switches, how can any of the information we provide correlate to what is stored on a switch? The answer is it can’t – unless someone can trace a computer back to a switch port or someone can produce a mapping of this information and stores it elsewhere.

What has been tried

In our networking environment, all computers are connected to switches. Most importantly, this means that, regardless of all cables and panels, there is a direct link between a switch port and a PC. These switch ports are where VLANs are assigned to and where any port security will be set on. Therefore, being able to identify what is connected to all switchports is highly valuable – arguably to both IT services and our own technical team.

When there is an issue with a port or a PC, somebody has to trace that port back. If a port is broken, someone has to go to where the switch is physically located and trace back the cable from the switch-end of a patch panel to the switchport. As mentioned at the beginning, this is a nightmare approach, but it still has to be done.

However, this method is just too labourious for my liking. So the next thing to try is to use something called a fluke tester. These devices, which I think cost way too much money (even second hand they appear to be going for around £1000 – £1500 at the time of writing) for what we would be using them for, can be plugged into a wall socket and tell you all sorts of information about what is on the other side. Crucially for us, they tell us the switchport number and the switch IP address. This is actually brilliant and – whilst this method also requires manual work – is far more accurate. In conjunction with collating a list of wall ports, it can be used to accurately map out switch port to patch panel mapping.

This actually worked very effectively and, by late 2013, I had finished making a chart of many of our labs and detailed this on our internal wiki site.

The idea was for part of it to be updated and maintained by our IT services and part of it by our department; we would make sure that PCs were in the correct position according to our own records for lab checks and that they were plugged into a corresponding wall socket. But this requires extensive user input and, predictably, will be prone to user errors. It was also pointed out to me at the time, when I borrowed the Fluke tester, that this collation of patch panel/switch port IDs had already been done by some interns and was now almost certainly already outdated. Nevertheless, I finished the mapping and maintained our side of things as changes were made.

And then changes were made that completely invalidated the entire chart.

Over the summer period in 2014, we had a network upgrade that saw the replacement of over 100 switches around the campus. Whilst no word to this effect had been made, it seems as though the switch configurations were probably from over a year ago – before any requested changes to the configuration had ever been made. With absolutely no communication about the upgrade or what might have happened, this presented a huge issue when upgrading our imaging system as it was slowly realised that there were a lot of small – with minimal overall impact – issues with the network configuration.

A new solution

It is clear by now that something more than just checking each PC individually needs to be done. This method is still viable for single sytems that might have the odd issue here or there, but to ensure 100% accuracy across all our systems there needs to be a different approach.

Wireshark provides a really cool piece of functionality that could help. Actually, this was what I have been using for about a year since I realised that it can be used to filter out LLDP and CDP packets after I noticed that the Fluke tester would pick up its information through these two types of packet (LLDP packets are broadcast every 30 seconds and CDP packets every minute across our network). The structure of these packets is very different (CDP uses an Ethernet frame and LLDP uses an Ethernet II frame) but both contain VLAN information, Switch information (for example IP, platform, version) and.. the switchport ID. This is accurate, it can be run on all PCs and we can get more information (VLAN ID, for example) than the Fluke tester would give us (I think it must be able to pull VLAN information out but I didn’t work out how to when I had a go with the one we used for a couple of weeks).

It is progress, but it was still intensive to do it this way, even with 4 or 5 people helping to go around a room. So can this be scripted?

If you strip out the GUI and just look at what Wireshark does, its functionally very similar to the Linux tool tcpdump which has a Windows port, WinDump (Actually, it is built using the same fundamental protocol – WinPCap, which itself is a port of libpcap). So in late 2014, I went about seeing what I could do to script WinDump and found through some quick googling that I could capture an LLDP packet or a CDP packet and then stop the capture after outputting the results of this one packet to a text file. This is great, although the formatting of the file isn’t particularly useful and would require some additional post-processing.

Windump curiously hasn’t implemented a nice formatting for LLDP packets and I would like to be able to utilise either CDP or LLDP outputs in a nice way – or really any network protocol. The only consistent way to output data is in the form of hexadecimal values. Both CDP or LLDP packets should output in the same format if the hex option is specified, but then what? There is still the issue to do with efficiency of data collection and obtaining the meaningful information – you still have to have somebody actually collect these results. The logical thing to do is to perhaps extend such a script to upload the output to a central server, but then I would have to process all of these text files and pick the useful information out.

So why not just do that processing on the PC before sending it? This is possible with a script, which could perhaps dissect an output text file – but with developing complexity, I decided that it could be a good idea to – instead – make a bespoke application that would actually grab all of this of data and upload only the useful parts that I want. Furthermore; rather than uploading a file, it would make sense to upload a record to a database that can store all of these results, foregoing any human interaction and even without needing WinDump at and only capture the relevant data we want in the first place.

So my work on this project, when time permits, has been to write a C (or C++) command-line application that utilises libpcap/winpcap – just as Win/TCPDump or Wireshark does – to capture either a CDP or LLDP packet and upload a string of text from that containing the switchport, vlan, hostname and IP address to a central database. So far it works quite well and hopefully will be releasing it for people to test out before making the source code freely available. I hope people can contribute to and help improve it and make it a genuinely useful tool for sysadmins across multiple platforms.

Edit: It could be suggested that I find out about connected hosts from the switches themselves or by using SNMP. The thing with various “switchport mappers” out there, however, is that they mostly seem to rely on using SNMP only. If you query a device that runs SNMP, you don’t necessarily get any more information than you would if you were to just look at that device yourself (for example, you can see all of a Cisco switch’s interface details to see host mac addresses; this is all you would receive back if you interrogated it with SNMP anyway).

What this program does, however, is a bit different. Whereas SNMP will give you a network map from the switch-side, this application will generate more detailed host information from the client-side. Switches won’t know a host’s IP address in all likelihood and certainly not hostname or any other information that you might want. Although you can find most of this out with other applications, this program will combine its own information with that given to it by a switch.

Of course, having the SNMP-derived information about a switch actually is not un-useful; this way, you can see every device that is connected to a switch, whereas what I have developed will only show you the information about hosts that you have run this application on (or that you can have remote access to, or have imaged with it already on and scheduled). It is quite possible in an environment such as the one that I work in that you can have other devices that you don’t have access to (AV and Wifi access points for example) and so you can’t make assumptions about free space on switches. So for the future, perhaps some SNMP integration with this application would make it a step beyond what most switchport mappers would normally provide (without being overly complicated). I guess this could help direct what the name should be, a bit more..

Network cable management and mapping switch ports

 

Keeping a track of computers that are all connected to a network can be a hassle, without desktop management software. Even with it, you can’t necessarily tell exactly which physical computer is connected to a given switch port. Eventually, you will come back to a switch closet, but this doesn’t necessarily help the situation at all; especially when you encounter a stack of Cisco 3750s, spewing yellow ropes of technological vomit off in all kinds of directions. So the best things you (we) can determine are a wall socket (if it is labelled) and maybe a MAC address too, if you log in.

But this is all a heap of work that just shouldn’t have to be done at all and really frustrates, further, any problems that you’re trying to troubleshoot. So, I decided to come up with a plan. This is quite a long post, but it gives background to what motivated me to do this in the first place!

Standard problems:

In lots of situations, you’ll know what the cause of a network problem is. In some cases, we notice connection issues across the board and it is likely that the problem is already known by the IT services department. Specific PCs with issues can often come down to the issues below:

• DHCP scope has been exhausted, so no more IP addresses can be given out
• Port is disconnected (no signal)
• Port is shutdown (electrical connection is present but no traffic goes over the wire)
• VLAN mismatch (subnets of specific PCs will be assigned differently than that designated to the rest of a given room)

(This is just going to go and assume that a PC has been physically checked that it is connected to the right network interface (each interface has a different MAC address which can affect FOG host registration settings and port security settings on a switch) and is connected through the correct wall port that was assigned to that PC (or to a port that we know is – or should be – assigned to a specific network)).

In the case of a DHCP scope issue, the problem can be partly determined by the PXE boot message popups, for example it may display a message that it is receiving proxyDHCP offers but not DHCP offers. If a port is disconnected, this can be determined through a network cable tester. A shutdown can be determined in a similar fashion (electrical signal present but no traffic received) but in all these cases, the only information that can be provided to IT services, that would be of any use, are a patch panel port number and a system MAC address. However, these won’t necessarily help in determining the right location of the switch in a building that has possibly 100 or more switches around.

The case could even be that a PC may work fine and even connect to the internet with no problem – but then if a room of 30 PCs were to receive multicast traffic on a system and, say, two or three are on a different subnet, multicast issues will present themselves and PCs may stop imaging before others have finished. In fact, it is only if someone knows the symptoms and has had experience with the last issue – VLAN mismatches – that you can really identify that as the cause of the issue.

Working with others

Now, in this environment, all PCs are allocated an IP address in specific subnets that corresponds to a respective VLAN, which in turn corresponds to a room (usually). VLAN configuration is implemented by switches. If we want to check some of this information to see what has been – perhaps incorrectly – configured, then we need to be able to access the switch configuration. As these switches are (almost all) operated by the IT services people, our team cannot see this configuration. Even if we were given the configuration, it would eventually become outdated, especially as things can be disconnected and reconnected by other people.

So we could be simply stuck at only being able to provide patch panel numbers (the wall sockets that a PC is connected to), a room number that the PC is in, a MAC address of the PC and an IP address. With the MAC address, IT services could possibly find out where a PC is connected to if a MAC address is provided, but this information is not readily available unless we provide it – and this is assuming it will be accurate and never change. Plus this presents another issue; if the configurations are stored on switches, how can any of the information we provide correlate to what is stored on a switch? The answer is it can’t – unless someone can trace a computer back to a switch port or someone can produce a mapping of this information and stores it elsewhere.

What has been tried

In our networking environment, all computers are connected to switches. Most importantly, this means that, regardless of all cables and panels, there is a direct link between a switch port and a PC. These switch ports are where VLANs are assigned to and where any port security will be set on. Therefore, being able to identify what is connected to all switchports is highly valuable – arguably to both IT services and our own technical team.

When there is an issue with a port or a PC, somebody has to trace that port back. If a port is broken, someone has to go to where the switch is physically located and trace back the cable from the switch-end of a patch panel to the switchport. As mentioned at the beginning, this is a nightmare approach, but it still has to be done.

However, this method is just too labourious for my liking. So the next thing to try is to use something called a fluke tester. These devices, which I think cost way too much money (even second hand they appear to be going for around £1000 – £1500 at the time of writing) for what we would be using them for, can be plugged into a wall socket and tell you all sorts of information about what is on the other side. Crucially for us, they tell us the switchport number and the switch IP address. This is actually brilliant and – whilst this method also requires manual work – is far more accurate. In conjunction with collating a list of wall ports, it can be used to accurately map out switch port to patch panel mapping.

This actually worked very effectively and, by late 2013, I had finished making a chart of many of our labs and detailed this on our internal wiki site.

The idea was for part of it to be updated and maintained by our IT services and part of it by our department; we would make sure that PCs were in the correct position according to our own records for lab checks and that they were plugged into a corresponding wall socket. But this requires extensive user input and, predictably, will be prone to user errors. It was also pointed out to me at the time, when I borrowed the Fluke tester, that this collation of patch panel/switch port IDs had already been done by some interns and was now almost certainly already outdated. Nevertheless, I finished the mapping and maintained our side of things as changes were made.

And then changes were made that completely invalidated the entire chart.

Over the summer period in 2014, we had a network upgrade that saw the replacement of over 100 switches around the campus. Whilst no word to this effect had been made, it seems as though the switch configurations were probably from over a year ago – before any requested changes to the configuration had ever been made. With absolutely no communication about the upgrade or what might have happened, this presented a huge issue when upgrading our imaging system as it was slowly realised that there were a lot of small – with minimal overall impact – issues with the network configuration.

A new solution

It is clear by now that something more than just checking each PC individually needs to be done. This method is still viable for single sytems that might have the odd issue here or there, but to ensure 100% accuracy across all our systems there needs to be a different approach.

Wireshark provides a really cool piece of functionality that could help. Actually, this was what I have been using for about a year since I realised that it can be used to filter out LLDP and CDP packets after I noticed that the Fluke tester would pick up its information through these two types of packet (LLDP packets are broadcast every 30 seconds and CDP packets every minute across our network). The structure of these packets is very different (CDP uses an Ethernet frame and LLDP uses an Ethernet II frame) but both contain VLAN information, Switch information (for example IP, platform, version) and.. the switchport ID. This is accurate, it can be run on all PCs and we can get more information (VLAN ID, for example) than the Fluke tester would give us (I think it must be able to pull VLAN information out but I didn’t work out how to when I had a go with the one we used for a couple of weeks).

It is progress, but it was still intensive to do it this way, even with 4 or 5 people helping to go around a room. So can this be scripted?

If you strip out the GUI and just look at what Wireshark does, its functionally very similar to the Linux tool tcpdump which has a Windows port, WinDump (Actually, it is built using the same fundamental protocol – WinPCap, which itself is a port of libpcap). So in late 2014, I went about seeing what I could do to script WinDump and found through some quick googling that I could capture an LLDP packet or a CDP packet and then stop the capture after outputting the results of this one packet to a text file. This is great, although the formatting of the file isn’t particularly useful and would require some additional post-processing.

Windump curiously hasn’t implemented a nice formatting for LLDP packets and I would like to be able to utilise either CDP or LLDP outputs in a nice way – or really any network protocol. The only consistent way to output data is in the form of hexadecimal values. Both CDP or LLDP packets should output in the same format if the hex option is specified, but then what? There is still the issue to do with efficiency of data collection and obtaining the meaningful information – you still have to have somebody actually collect these results. The logical thing to do is to perhaps extend such a script to upload the output to a central server, but then I would have to process all of these text files and pick the useful information out.

So why not just do that processing on the PC before sending it? This is possible with a script, which could perhaps dissect an output text file – but with developing complexity, I decided that it could be a good idea to – instead – make a bespoke application that would actually grab all of this of data and upload only the useful parts that I want. Furthermore; rather than uploading a file, it would make sense to upload a record to a database that can store all of these results, foregoing any human interaction and even without needing WinDump at and only capture the relevant data we want in the first place.

So my work on this project, when time permits, has been to write a C (or C++) command-line application that utilises libpcap/winpcap – just as Win/TCPDump or Wireshark does – to capture either a CDP or LLDP packet and upload a string of text from that containing the switchport, vlan, hostname and IP address to a central database. So far it works quite well and hopefully will be releasing it for people to test out before making the source code freely available. I hope people can contribute to and help improve it and make it a genuinely useful tool for sysadmins across multiple platforms.

Edit: It could be suggested that I find out about connected hosts from the switches themselves or by using SNMP. The thing with various “switchport mappers” out there, however, is that they mostly seem to rely on using SNMP only. If you query a device that runs SNMP, you don’t necessarily get any more information than you would if you were to just look at that device yourself (for example, you can see all of a Cisco switch’s interface details to see host mac addresses; this is all you would receive back if you interrogated it with SNMP anyway).

What this program does, however, is a bit different. Whereas SNMP will give you a network map from the switch-side, this application will generate more detailed host information from the client-side. Switches won’t know a host’s IP address in all likelihood and certainly not hostname or any other information that you might want. Although you can find most of this out with other applications, this program will combine its own information with that given to it by a switch.

Of course, having the SNMP-derived information about a switch actually is not un-useful; this way, you can see every device that is connected to a switch, whereas what I have developed will only show you the information about hosts that you have run this application on (or that you can have remote access to, or have imaged with it already on and scheduled). It is quite possible in an environment such as the one that I work in that you can have other devices that you don’t have access to (AV and Wifi access points for example) and so you can’t make assumptions about free space on switches. So for the future, perhaps some SNMP integration with this application would make it a step beyond what most switchport mappers would normally provide (without being overly complicated). I guess this could help direct what the name should be, a bit more..

10+ Great WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO Plugins. WordPress is one the most popular tools for publishing content on the web. Everything from e-commerce websites to blogs can be developed using WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress community has built up a huge offering of free wp themes and plugins to make it easy for newcomers to get content published on the web quickly and easily.
Many SEO Plugins can you use for your site and help your ranking position in search engine offered by wordpress. Some plugins are really effective whereas some are not. To help you find the right plugin for your web site, we have composed some of the best SEO plugins.

10+ Great WordPress SEO Plugins

1. All in One SEO Pack.
   One among the most popular and widely discussed plugins for WordPress. This plugin is easy to use and is compatible with most WordPress plugins. It works as an overall SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizes your titles for search engines and helps you in avoiding duplicate content. This plugin also enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post in your web site.
   
2. HeadSpace2.
   A powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions, thereby improves your page ranking and relevance on search engines. You can also change the theme or load plugins on specific pages and much more. This plugin is available in multiple languages.
   
3. Platinum SEO plugin.
   An all-in-one SEO plugin with a host of features like automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto generation of META tags, avoid duplicate content, SEO optimized post and page titles and a whole lot of other features.
   
4. SEO Post Links.
   This plugin works similar to SEO slugs. It shortens the post slug and retains only the necessary keywords making it Search Engine friendly. It allows you to choose the longest number of characters in your post slug and also remove unnecessary words.
   
5. Automatic SEO links.
   Just choose a word or a phrase for automatic linking and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your weblog. It allows you to set the title, target and rel. for each link. You can also set the anchor text and choose if it should be no-follow or not. If there are repeated words, only the first matched word in the post will be replaced.
   
6. SEO Smart Links.
   Automatically links keywords and phrases on your blog with corresponding posts, pages, categories or tags on your blog. It allows you to set up your own keywords and a list of matching URLs and also set the no-follow attribute. You can customize it according to your needs through the Administration Settings Panel.
   
7. SEO Title Tag.
   SEO Title Tag makes it easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress powered blog. It allows you to override a page’s title tag with a custom one, mass editing of title tags, title tags for 404 error pages and much more.
   
8. SEO Friendly Images.
   This plugin helps in making your images SEO friendly. It automatically updates all images with a proper ALT and TITLE. ALT acts as a description for your image and TITLE is the tooltip text displayed when the mouse is over the image. These attributes are one of the important part of SEO.
   
9. Robots Meta.
   A very easy solution to add robot tags to your WordPress pages. It allows you to add meta tags to individual posts and pages, prevent indexing of your comments, login and admin pages.
   
10. All Category SEO Updater.
    This much needed plug-in for WordPress adds the ability for the user to further customize category pages as well as additional SEO functionality. This plug-in works in conjunction with the All in One SEO plug-in.
    The All Category SEO plug-in allows for the addition of H1 or primary heading tags on category pages as well as the three basic tags including the page title, meta description and meta keywords tag. Further, an input box allows for a custom, keyword rich description to be added to the category page. This description input box also accepts HTML and CSS code for further customization allowing you to insert images with alternative text or other design features.
11. WordPress SEO by Yoast.
    Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
    
12. SEO Rank Reporter.
    Based on keywords you choose, the SEO Rank Reporter plugin will track your Google rankings every 3 days and report the data in an easy-to-read graph. You will also be able to visualize your traffic flow in response to ranking changes and receive emails notifying you of major rank changes.
    
13. SEO Tag Cloud Widget.
    SEO Tag Cloud Widget displays the tag cloud in a SEO-friendly way, using a search engine optimized html markup. It looks the same as the default WordPress Cloud Tag, but with an optimized html markup. You can put it to your sidemenu.
    
14. SEO Booster Lite.
    SEO Booster Lite detects and analyzes incoming visitors from search engines, and displays the most popular queries in a Widget or via the provided built-in function.
    The list generated is dynamic, and changes according to the popularity of your blog, making it self-optimizing and totally hands free.
    
15. SEO Super Comments.
    For each user comment we will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.

If you have another wordpress SEO Plugins that you absolutely love that wasn’t on the list – please share it with us in the comments, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

5 Premium SEO Plugins for Better SERP

Premium SEO Plugin

SEO Plugins.
SEO plugins will help us to optimize our page. They help to get a better SERP ranking on search engine. Like as you know that SEO or Search Engine Optimization is important thing for webmasters. They’re willing to do anything for make it, like buy a premium SEO friendly wordpress themes or premium SEO plugins.
Willing to buy premium SEO plugins? To help you find the right plugin for your web site,  I have composed some of the best premium SEO plugins.

5 Premium SEO Plugins

1. SEO Smart Links.
   SEO Smart Links can automatically interlink your content to key pages deeper into the site improving both search engine rankings (by using relevant anchor text in the links) and search engine crawling of your site.The plugin figures out what keyword phrases it can use to link to corresponding posts, pages, categories, tags (or any other taxonomy) and all happens automatically according to the options you set.
   If you want more manual control you can also specify a custom keywords and every time select words or phrases appear on your page, SEO Smart Links will automatically convert them into text links to pages you want.
   
2. Clickbump.
   ClickBump SEO! is the first SEO tool for WordPress to offer integrated LSI keyword suggestions right alongside the editor window. You simply click the “Get LSI” button and ClickBump SEO! automatically retrieves and displays the top ranked LSI keywords for your target keyphrase, in milliseconds, right alongside your content editor! You can drag and drop your selected LSI keywords right into the editor.
   
3. Keyword Winner.
   Keyword Winner Comes With Full control of Keyword Research, Check SEO Stats instantly, Competition, Insights & Search Trends Clear as Crystal, Keyword Suggestions for Low Competition Headlines & High Search Trends, Color Highlighted to Target Specific Search Terms.
   
4. SEO Booster Pro.
   All in all, SEO Booster Pro is a wonderful plugin for beginner and pro bloggers who want to get the most traffic out of the top search engines. It helps you track and analyze your search data, allowing you to come up with a better SEO strategy for your blog. Whether you are a newbie to the world of SEO or an expert search engine professional, you are going to love the convenience of having this plugin retrieve your SEO data for you over time.
   
5. SEOPressor.
   SEOPressor is a premium WordPress Auto SEO plugin tool that is used by bloggers all over the world for their wordpress blog optimization needs. Simply put, this is an SEO plugin that will definitely propel the standard of your blog, in the manner that it helps your blog reach out on the Internet.
   

Do you use another Premium SEO Plugins?

If you use another premium SEO Plugins that you absolutely love that wasn’t on the list – please share it with us in the comments, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

5 Important Starting Points for Successful Blogging

Successful Blogging

When i was launched blog, there is one question in my mind. Can it be become a great blog? Can i get successful blogging? Yes, it’s naturally. Almost people want their blog become a rock. Get a lot of traffic and receive some extra money. But, there are a lot of things to do to make it come true. There are a few pieces of advice that tend to come as standard when you look for help with blogging. “Write compelling content”, “network in your niche”, and “stay consistent” are probably the most common words of wisdom you’ll receive. “Pick the right niche” ranks right up there with them as well. But, it’s not enough. There are a millions blog out there. The competition now become harder.

How to get successful blogging?

Like i said that the competition are become stronger to get successful blogging. We must do the right things from the beginning. Don’t ever thing that it’s not have an effect, even it’s just a small kind. Research and analysis before you make a decisions. “Spend little bit more time, or you will spend a lot of time in the future”. Someone told me to consider a several points when start my new blog, like blog niche, SEO, blog structure and many else. Now, i want to share it now.

5 Important Starting Points for Successful Blogging

1. Choose the right niche.
   In the case of blogging, usually just means that you should pick a topic you’re passionate about, which also happens to have a large audience. It’s advice I’ve given myself throughout the years and I still see it on many blogs today.
2. Choose the right domain name.
   It’s time to thing about domain when you have selected niche. Try to put the niche in the domain. for example, it’s will be a good idea to choose domain for your blogging that have technology within when you selected “technology” as a topic.
3. Install SEO.
   

   Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines (ref.wikipedia)

   Set up the title, keyword, submit sitemap, install SEO Plugin, use wordpress themes or blogger template with SEO friendly and many else. Good SEO mean you will good traffic for your site.
4. Build the blog structure.
   Have you go to some place where it is the first time to go there? Yeah, you will need a directions, street signs and another else. It similar for blog. Visitor or search engine need a directions to explore our blog. Some people installed nice site navigation that will help visitor find what they need. For search engine, they generate sitemap.
5. Make a schedule.
   Set a schedule for writing content – just do it already! Someone speaking there is no exact time to write a post. But it is good to make a schedule for posting and writing articles. The benefit is that your followers can expect a post on the particular time and it helps increase the traffic as your blog gets more lively. Discipline is important to get successful blogging

Do you have another important points to get successful blogging? Please tell me here.

Blogger Mistakes When Starting Blogging

Blogger Mistakes

The goal is become great blogger. We have big passion to get it, but sometime we does unaware about what we have done. Sometime we do some mistakes when starting blogging. We are too drive our mind, energy and life. There is just “Quick, must be success” in our mind. Yes, Motto is important, We must have a goal in our life. But, slow down babe. It need works and time. There are no instant things. You wouldn’t get a success just with say “bim salabim abrakadabra”.
We are bloggers not machines that are overloaded with work, try to be a better blogger as well as a good human being. Try to relax your mind because a relaxed mind is more productive. We should aware about this.

Few Blogger Mistakes When Starting Blogging

1. Lot’s of people try to earn money from blogging, but very rare gets success.The reason behind their success is not that they are better blogger than you but, the reason is that they are blogging not only for money but for their interest and passion what makes it all. So, don’t blog only for money. Try to develop your interest. I think it’s the important in blogging. Why? They can’t stay for a long time. Like i said before, make money from blogging is not an instant. Need a long time.
2. Lot’s of people have a lot of blogs, but doesn’t have a good updating schedule. Many of them thinking that with a lot of blogs, they can earn money. In this case, blogging is not same with mathematics. Try to develop one blog, and make sure that it have good quality.
3. Spend out a lot of money for advertising. Want to get famous? Try anything to make it come true? It’s wrong babe. It’s need time, and of course yours patience. You can use advertising program to promote and get traffic for yours blog, but not to much.  Try to get natural traffic. It’s better than advertising.
4. Wasting time. Oh, i often do this. Sometime we doesn’t have something to say, to write or to do. Blogwalking is the right solution. Find a good source, reading and finally have a good idea. But, sometime we just opening new tab each time and another and so on, and writing nothing. Or just make a plan, “I will write it tomorrow”. Like i said before, it’s happens to me many times.  “Do what you can do now, don’t wait until tomorrow.”
5. Doesn’t have a resume sheet. It’s all about PDCA (Plans, Do, Check, and Actions).  Many people doesn’t have it. They just blogging without do some analysis. Planning all of your works ( like posting schedule, marketing plans, etc. ). Do what you have been planning before. Do it with 100% right. Check for the result, and try to compare with your competitors. Analysis the gap between yours and competitors. And make some actions to achieve yours goal. It’s a circle. So, it’s never end. Remember,  improve your blogging with PDCA.
I think after reading this post you might be laughing in your mind that you  also have done the same things whether knowingly or unknowingly, but it’s always Better Late Than Never.
Do you have another mistakes in blogging? Please tell me.

How to Get Blog Posts More Shared

How to Get Blog Posts More Shared. Social networking can be seriously traffic resource, and i think that you all already know. Why? and how it’s works?

Social networking is a way to connect and raise people, based on interest, jobs, hobbies, etc. People who you may not know them can find you and your business, because they was connected with someone who you both know. I means people can visited your blogs even they know you, because they have see your blog on their connections. It’s the magic and of course we need the mantra to make it works, sharing. Your stuff will appear on people social networking circle when they sharing it.
Another question is how to get vote? Of course you need make interesting and useful contents. It’s a must. But, that is not enough. We must do several thing to get it. I want to share about “How to Get Blog Posts More Shared” now. Even, i still got a little bit shared. But, it better than with my old blog.

4 Things to Get Blog Posts More Shared

1. Use Email Campaigns.Email campaigns is one of the best new ways to promote your links. It’s can reach a lot of people. But of course you must have  email address list. 
   Now, i usually sent my link via mail after i published my new posts. And guess what, now my blog post shared increase.
   One thing to remember that not all of  people who receipt your message will happy with your mail. Some people asking to me to remove their email address from the list. So, you must remove them in the future. Also i have add my apologize in the end of campaigns.
   

   Sorry for my mail, and if you do not wish to receive these mails from us…. Please kindly send us an email with subject “remove” and your ID in it.
   Thanks for your support… Cheers.

2. Use Contest Campaigns.
   It’s not free way to promote, but it’s can be effective way to get blog posts more shared. Take a look for while, many popular sites using this campaign method. They offer nice and interesting stuff as a present, like premium membership, premium WordPress themes, premium WP plugins, and another else. I haven’t try it yet, i still take up some money.
   But if you want to make a contest for your blog soon, please make it as simple as can. Don’t making the contest overly complex, or don’t put the present with something people don’t want. If you making that, you will loose the audience contest.
   Try to read this article before you start the contest.
3. Join Groups. It’s another free way to get blog posts more shared, join several groups. Of course you must selective to find them. Choose the group that has the purpose to share a contents or blog posts. Find it into Facebook, Twitter, or another social media groups.
   I have several list groups that can be your choice to follow or join.
   

   a. ShoutMeLoud Retweet
   b. Retweet Group
   c. ReTweet My Posts
   d. Digg Ninjas on Facebook
   e. Digg.com=Greatest Website Ever Group
   f. DaggDiggDugg

4. Using Social Bookmarking Plugin. I have use Digg Digg share plugin. What is the purpose? It have to make visitors have easy access to share blog posts. Put it in the bottom of your post, and try to make it clearly visible. When visitors enjoy with your content, they can share it with one click.
   You can choose another social bookmarking plugin that you like. Go to Free WP plugins directory, and pick one for your blog.

Do you have another ways to get blog posts more shared?

if you’ve another one, please add it to the comments below. please share it with us in the comments, we’d love to hear your thoughts!