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Showing posts with label Search Engine Optimization. Show all posts

Top 5 On-page Search Engine Optimization techniques.

On-page optimization is basically the steps taken on the page itself to boost your search engine ranking results. Proper uses of keywords, optimizing titles, URLs and meta tags and internal linking are some of the on-page optimization techniques that may enhance your search engine ranking. Lets discuss them in details.

Include keywords in posts and titles.

Keyword Inclusion

Putting the correct keywords in your site's content is the basic mantra for on-site optimization. The practice of embedding keywords and phrases into your content such that it looks natural to the reader and don't give an impression of over-done (called 'keyword stuffing') is the best way of doing it. However, the content should be written for the readers and not for the Search Engines.The best practice is to write the complete post and then editing it accordingly to include the keywords.

Include your keyword in title and subtitle

Titles and sub-titles plays important role in enhancing your search engine ranking. Include keywords in your title and sub heading tags. Do not include your keyword more than once in your titles since it may look spam. Keep your titles short and up to the point. Don't just make it too long for the shake of fitting your keywords. Title should include your best keywords for which you wanna rank higher.

Include Keyword in the URL

The webpage's URL is one of the best way of optimizing your site. Keeping a short descriptive URL with a few keywords can give you some ranking upgrades. Try to make you URL descriptive so that the readers can guess the content on reading the URL only.

abc.com/125435

abc.com/on-page-optimization-techinque

The second URL clearly is describing the content you will find in that article. Moreover, you can put your best keyword in URLs.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is the best way to promoting your reader to other pages of your blogs. It ensures a better pages/visit and decreases your bounce rate. You try to keep indulging your reader by internal linking your post with other posts that somehow share the same label or are of the same category. The best way is providing a link to other post that is related to the current posts in between two paragraphs and at the end of the article. Internally link your content so that user has the access to the other part of the site related to what he is reading. However, linking should be done only when the contents are relevant.

Meta - tags

The meta-tags are much like summary of the complete posts that are read by the search engines but are not displayed. Usually webmasters put their best keywords in meta tags along with a short description of the complete article. Google shows this meta tag in search engine results for a search and keeping it precise and compact and putting some keywords is the best practice.

Do you know any other method to enhance your on-page content? Let us know in the comments.

Keyword Research Basics for Bloggers.

Unknown 13:50 4 Comments Edit

Searching something on Google? Do you ever go to 10th page of the search result? Nor did I. Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your blog/sites according to these search engines in order to rank higher in the search results. Ranking on 1st page of the Google is the ultimate goal of any blogger and so is mine. SEO is not a "precisely" defined area. Its just that people have discovered some the basic ways of improving search engine ranking.

Keywords plays an important role in building your seo. It is rightly said as backbone of search engine optimization.

Keywords are the the words or phrase that a person searches. It is important for you to know that which keywords are more important and are searched more. Using a keyword research tool such as Google Adword Tool is a better way of finding the best keyword.

Some basic keyword selection practices.

Use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords means that you include some extra words in your keyword in order to make it more specific and targeted.

Your target in terms of competition and length of keyword.

Lets understand this through an example.

If you select "blogging" as your keyword, you are basically trying to compete with thousands of "well organized highly ranked" blogs and sites on internet. Some of them are years old and even have hired seo professionals to manage. Why so? Coz "blogging" is so common word. Instead using "blogging as a career", "making money from blogging" have less competition and your chances of getting on first page is at least there. Moreover, people now no more search a word. They prefer searching for phrases.

Less Competition, More searches

Give preference in selecting phrases which have not very high searches. If its searched millions times a day, most probably half of the blogger world already knows about it, and most likely is working on it.

Try choosing a keyword with less competition and more monthly searches. Sometimes you will have to trade of between these two.

Balancing between these two is necessary. You will never desire to rank on 1st page of Google for a keyword that is searched 5 times a month. Do you?

Use multiple keywords in a blog post

"Make money from blogging"- variations.

Its a good idea to use concentrate on more than one keyword phrase in your article. Do not just stick to one particular keyword. Use a slight variation of the main keyword all along the post.

Keyword Density

Stick to a 2-3% rule. That means you put 2 times your keyword every 100 words. There is no fixed defined rule but this is considered to be ideal. Keyword stuffing can lead to your site going down in search engine results as Google has algorithms for detecting it and they penalize blogs written solely for the search engines.

Put your keyword in your URL In your article's title, in the beginning and ending paragraph, and in between the other paragraphs. Do not OVERDO it.

What do you prefer?

1. Ranking on 1st page for keyword that is searched 100times a day,

2. Ranking on somewhere like 21st page of Google for a keyword that is searched 10,000 a day??

I would go for the first option.

You should set up Google Analytics for your blog and always give a watch to the search terms. These terms can prove to be much helpful in deciding your keywords for your upcoming posts.

Where to put keywords on your blog.

Unknown 07:34 Add Comment Edit

Keyword placement is an important part of On page Search Engine Optimization. In this article, I assume that you have the list of phrases for which you want to rank higher and you are searching the place to put these keywords in your posts.

For a blogger, its difficult to decide where to put keywords on your blog and keyword placement is an important aspect that affects your rankings in search engines.

When you build up a keyword list, the next question is to where to put these keywords on your blog. I am not going into the details in this post, rather only mentioning the places which you can use to put up these phrases.

Once in your article's Titles. Titles are the most important place to put your keywords. Always stick to using your best phrase in your titles and creating an interesting and compelling title.

In your article's URL. Try to build up the URL according to the title you have chosen for your post. Using hyphen in between words is a better idea than using underscores since Google treats hyphen equivalent to a space.

The title, part of the URL which has been searched, and the keyword phrase in the content has been in bold in search engine results - showing the importance.

In meta-description. Although Google do not use meta-description for rankings any more, still its valuable in increasing your click through rate in search results. Include a combination of your keywords in meta descriptions.

In header tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>. You can always include your keyword phrase in header and sub header tags in your post body.

2-3 times per 100 words you write. 2-3% is the ideal keyword density. Including your phrase once for every 50 words is always promoted.

Once in bold, italics and underlined (separately). <strong> and <b> tags are treated equivalent, so you can chose either one. Put your best keyword phrase once in bold, italics, and underlined.

In images alt tags. You can put your keywords in the image alternate texts which is used by the spiders to know about the image and even rank it in Google image results.

In anchor text. Including your article's URL with your keywords as anchor text. However, preacution mmust be taken to not to link the article within the same article. Linking an article "A" in the itself may have negative effect in seo. You still can link your article in another article "B".

Final Words: These are the 8 best places to put your keywords on your blog. Did I miss something? How many of these do you consider while your keyword research and placement?

mb.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog.

Unknown 10:29 2 Comments Edit

The life of any blog is the traffic it receives. Every blog has one thing in common - to reach out to maximum people and trust me, its not easy at all especially if you are a new blogger with only few hundred followers and not much search engine optimization knowledge. And in case you are there for money from your blog, you have to get thousands of visitors per day.

The main reason for quitting blogging for webmasters is that they never really build up their traffic. Driving traffic to your blog is a gradual process that will take your much time.

In this article, I am going to discuss the most important things to drive traffic to your blog.

Social Media Marketing.

An active engagements on social media will drive a great traffic to your blog. All you have to do is be active, join groups and communities, spread your links and hope for the best. You can join different social media like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other bookmarking websites like Digg and Delicious, Pinterest, Reddit or StumbleUpon to drive traffic to your blog.

Read Detail: Increase traffic to your blog through Social Media.

Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your post to rank higher in search results. There are different factors that affects the search engine rankings of any article and these factors can somewhat be improvised upon to get a better ranking.

SEO

Read Here: On-page Search Engine Optimization.

Guest Posting and Commenting.

I have been an active commenter on different blogs and a part of my traffic comes from CommentLuv enabled blogs. You can subscribe to different CommentLuv enabled blogs and whenever there is any new article published, be the first one to comment there.

You can read the complete list to become a good commenter.

Guest Posting gives you a benefit of reaching to wider audience along with link building. It also lets you market yourself as a brand and widen your reach.

These 3 basic pillars of driving traffic to your blog will be very crucial in your blog's success. However, each one of these requires your time.

mb.

PageRank News - Is PageRank Obsolete?

Unknown 08:47 1 Comment Edit

With Google saying it will no more announce any PageRank update this year, most webmasters are feeling that it may be the beginning of the end. PageRank has been an importance metrics for any blog and somewhat affects the search engine optimization process too.

According to WikiPedia,

PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google web search engine to rank websites in their search engine results.

PageRank worked on the backlinks factor. If a site has more number of links pointing to it on web than another site, this algorithm will rank the first page higher than the second one.

Google PageRank- is it the end?

The major problem with PageRank was that it was prone to manipulation. Bloggers all around the world in order to achieve high rank created thousands of back links overnight with free or paid services.

In order to fight this black hat link building technique, Google introduced algorithm where poor links were penalized. However, the process still went on.

▌ Is it the end of PageRank?

PageRank has been a major factor of determining site's popularity. May be, its an end of PageRank. However, Google said it is still a ranking factor along with more than two hundreds other factor.

No one can't really predict whether its an end to PageRank. May be, Google will redesign it and improvise it some way.

There are other metrics that is replacing PageRank. Moz's Domain and Page Authority is one such factor.

What do you think about it? Do share your views and guesses.

mb.

Submit Your Sitemap to Bing Search Engine

Unknown 08:53 2 Comments Edit

Search Engines crawl webpages and index them. Submitting your sitemap to Search Engine will ensure faster indexing of your articles in these search engines and hence will attract more traffic to your blog.

Learn How to submit your sitemap to Google.

Bing is the second largest search engine after Google and can drive huge traffic to your blog if optimized correctly. You need to tell the search engines about your contents and you can do it by submitting your sitemap to them.

Here's an easy way of submitting your blog sitemap to Bing Seach Engine.

Step 1:

Go to the Bing webmaster tool http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/ and sign in with your Microsoft account. If you don't have one, then sign up and create an account.

Add your website in the specified place.

Add your site.

You will see a notification that your website is not verified. Click on verify now.

Step 2:

There are 3 options for verifying your site.

♦ By placing an XML file on your web server

♦ Pasting meta tag in the default page.

♦ Adding CNAME record to DNS.

Of all these 3 ways of submitting sitemap to Bing, pasting meta tags is the easiest one. You will be given a meta tag for each of your website. Copy this meta tag.

Step 3:

Now to go to your Blogger Dashboard > Template > Edit HTML.

Search for <head> tag. You can search for the <head> tag by pressing CTRL+F and typing <head>.
Just below the <head> tag, place the meta tag you have copied from the Bing dashboard.

Now save your template.

Step 4:

Go to Bing and click on "verify". Bing will discover the meta tag you have inserted in your html and your site will be verified. Now you can track impressions, clicks, pages crawled and indexed and many other features. Your sitemap has been submitted to Bing and your articles will be indexed faster.

Bing is easier to use than Google Webmaster tool. You can find search keywords and export them. You can even look up for the inbound links to your blog and strategically plan your link building strategy according to it.

Bing Webmaster tool provides a keyword research tool for blogger. Its still in Beta phase and will be improving in coming days, so it can be a great replacement for the Google keyword tool.

Bing webmaster tool can be used for many other things. Explore it yourself or subscribe to our blog to receive latest news and help about Bing Webmaster tool. I am going to update more on it in coming days.

Enjoy traffic to your blog from Bing search engine.

mb.

Adding Title Text and Alt Text to Images in Blogger.

Unknown 08:49 Add Comment Edit

Alt text provides text alternative to images. It is a way to describe the image to search engines so that the search engine can result the image for any query.

Providing an Alt text for image will bring you some more traffic to your articles through image search and you may find a loyal reader to your blog.

If you have images in your blog and you are not providing alt text, then perhaps you are missing some of your traffic.

▌ Insert Title and Alt text in blogger.

Insert an image in your article in Blogger,

When you left click on the Image inserted, all the attributes are shown to you.

Select Properties and a dialogue box will appear asking for Title text and Alt text for the image. Add the Title text and Alt text to your image.

♦ An image Alt attribute must contains your keywords phrases. It may include some words or phrases. However, stay away from keyword stuffing.

♦ Do not put the same Alt attribute for different images. Try to have some variance with each image.

mb.

How to Become A Good Commenter.

Unknown 09:59 Add Comment Edit

Do you want to spam others comment section with your personalized comments? Do you want your comment to end up in spams? I bet you don't.

Commenting is a great way of building backlinks along with increasing traffic to your blog. If done in right way, it may bring a good amount of traffic to your blog and increase your earnings.

There are some points which you must keep in mind while commenting on other blogs.

▌ How to become a good commenter.

♦ Read the article first. To become a good commenter, you must read the article. Reading will ensure that you will put up a comment relevant to the article. A good commenter always ensures that what he writes is in accordance to the post.

♦ Do not do it for link building. If you think commenting as a link building, you will end up writing Hi!! Hello!! comments on other blogs. Instead, treat it as a way of building relationship with the author of that blog. Do not write one liners comments like "Nice post, keep up the good work!!". The chances are that the author will not even notice your comment.

I personally delete all those one liners comment that says "nice post buddy". I know the article is nice for me otherwise, I would have not published it.

♦ Are you CommentLuv enabled blog lover? Perhaps you search for ComemntLuv enabled blogs for building backlinks. However, most of the blogs are no-follow, that means they do not pass any juice to your link. Hence, its not a good strategy to search only for CommentLuv enabled blogs. Instead, you can comment on any blog with WordPress, ComLuv, Disqus commenting system where they allow links to your blog.

♦ Stay focused to your niche. You run a blog on body building and end up writing a comment for backlinks on a technology niche, then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Google asks for relevance of links to your blog, and how is that technology niche link is relevant to your body building blog? So, commenting on blogs having that same niche as yours is a must.

♦ Do not put links in your comments. (unless its Wikipedia). There is no need of putting one or more links in the comments unless you have reference of some highly reputed blog. Moreover, you might end up in spam. I have noticed that the default Blogger commenting system puts up a comment in spam folder if there is a link in it. Almost all other commenting system does the same. So, be careful. You may select blogs that generates a backlink automatically from your blog feed to not to waste your time.

♦ End up asking for suggestions. Its a great idea to end up your comments with queries or suggestions. This improves your credibility as a blogger and will compel the author to reply to your comments.

♦ Be the first. The first comment will always stay on the top. If there's 100 comments on a post, I am gonna read the first one and the last one. The last one will keep on changing, so you have to be the first. You can do so by subscribing to the feed of various blogs of your niche and then when there's a new articles published, be the first one to comment on it.

♦ Do not criticize. Constructive criticism is always welcomed by all bloggers. If the author missed some points, you can add them in comments. If you want to suggest something you can. However, you should not criticize the author directly. No one keep a comment of his criticism. It will be deleted or not approved. Trust me.

Commenting is a great way link building and building reputation in the blogging world. Writing up a good comment will ensure traffic to your blog and stay away from the myth of commenting on CommentLuv enabled blogs only. These points are the basics of commenting. If you want to add some more points to "how to become a good commenter", please use the comment section below.

mb.

On-page SEO - Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog

Unknown 11:44 5 Comments Edit

Search Engine Optimization is a process of practicing steps that results in higher rankings. If you are a blogger, you perhaps know the difference between ranking on first page of Google and on the 10th page. First page ranking will bring a hell lot of traffic. There are two parts of Search Engine Optimization - On-page and off-page.

On page optimization for your blog includes keyword density, title and heading tags, meta descriptions, keyword placement, internal linking and URL of your page. Lets discuss On-page optimization in details.

On page SEO is a process of optimization of factors on a page that affects your search engine rankings. On page optimization is whatever you can do on a page to get a higher search engine traffic. There are various factors that affects search engine ranking of your blog and optimizing these factors will eventually result in a higher traffic to your blog.

On-page Optimization Technique

On-page optimization can directly be controlled by the blog owners by proper placements of keywords, ensuring a better quality URL structure, title and heading tags and much more.

▌ On page optimization for your blog

♦ Content of your blog.

Content of your blog is what will dominate in your search engine optimization practice. Google wants to deliver high quality contents to the the searchers and by practicing some of these points you can ensure a higher listing in Google Search results.

Be original. Google has algorithms that will detect copied contents and will eventually show you the door in rankings.

Keep your keyword density to 2-3%. Keyword density can be broadly defined as the number of times you use your keywords in your articles. Placing your keywords 2-3 times every 100 words you write is the best practice.

Put your keywords at the best place in your blog, in your title, in heading tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, in bold and italics and in hyperlinks.

♦ URL of your blog.

URL plays an important role in your on page optimization practice. Here's an example of my blog's listing in Google search results for the keyword "Increase traffic to Your Blog",

You can see that the keyword phrase of the search in bold letters in both title and URL and in post too. You have to put the your best keywords in your URL.

Do not put lame URLs for your blog like

www.mbblogging.com/1234567890.html

Instead give a proper understandable title like the one shown in the image. The one non SEO benefits is users have to tendency to see the URLs before clicking on a results and the results with best URLs gets a visitors. I hope you understand what I mean.

♦ Titles and descriptions.

The above descriptions is true for Titles also. The titles is the outlook of your blog. Most user will be clicking on your blog link in search results while searching for a query by just reading your title. So, put a descriptive title with keywords and avoid short titles.

Keywords are important.

Meta descriptions. Although, Google says meta tags are no more a ranking factor, it is an useful resource to tell the search engine what is your blog/ page all about. You should have a different meta descriptions for each article with your best keywords placed naturally.

Note: Avoid keyword Stuffing. Limit the use of frequency in your posts, titles and URL to a reasonable rate. Moreover, your keywords should be placed in such a way that it should look as natural as possible. The best way can be, writing an article without thinking of keywords and their placements and after completion of your article, editing it by inserting your best phrase keywords accordingly.

♦ Internal linking.

Internal linking

Internal Linking is also an important for on page optimization for your blog. In internal links, you suggest your readers about other posts of your blogs. Do not use direct links for internal linking, instead use anchor text to link your posts to each other.

Do not over do it. Placing too much link in a article will eventually result in penalization by Google's algorithm.

There are several other factors that forms on page optimization technique for your blog. However, these three basic factors are the most important.

If you want to share some more factors for on page optimization technique or want to share your views, do comment.

mb.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog: Link Building

Unknown 09:37 1 Comment Edit

traffic to your blog

Link Building is a part of Search Engine Optimization. However, it was not possible to completely describe it in previous post

Increase Traffic to Your Blog: Search Engine Optimization.

The first part of Increasing traffic to your blog was about social media optimization and you can read it here.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog : Social Media

Link building is way of creating links over the web that points to your domain. Link building has been an important factor in Search Engine Optimization and although its relevance has been lowered by Google, its still is one of the 200+ factors that affect search engine rankings.

Link building has its own benefits apart from increasing traffic to your blog.

♦ It helps in getting your articles indexed in search engine easily.
♦ It helps in improving your PageRank, Domain Authority metrics.

▌ Link building strategies.

♦ Commenting on other blog. There are many high PR blogs which allow backlinks in comments. These are the blogs which have their own comment system or have implemented ComLuv in their blog.

link building strategies

♦ Guest Posting. Guest posting is a great way of both link building and bringing traffic to your blog. Most of the blogs that accepts guest post allow some back links either in texts or in bio or both. You can utilize them to link to your blog. However, it is always advisable to guest post on higher authority blogs than your own.

♦ Directory submission. Submitting your blog to directories is also a great way of free link building to your blog.

♦ Forums. There are several forums like DigitalPoint that allow do-follow backlinks in signatures. You can use them to build quality backlinks to your blog.

♦ Social Bookmarking websites. There are several social bookmarking sites that will generate high quality backlinks to your blog .Setting up your account there and adopting a strategy to link building can build you higher DA and increase traffic to your blog.

♦ Yahoo answers or technorati can also be used as a link building source.

Link building is a great way of bringing traffic to your blog. However, proper precautions have to be taken in order to select the link source. Since Google has algorithms running for penalizing low quality backlinks, do not just select any blog / forums to link building. In simple terms, anything which has higher Domain Authority than your blog is a good place for link building.

mb.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog: Search Engine Optimization.

Unknown 22:46 2 Comments Edit

The last article was about how to Increase Traffic to Your Bog through Social Media. The article was dedicated to use of social media in driving traffic to your blog.

This post is dedicated to driving traffic to your blog through Search Engine Optimization.

In simple terms, Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your blog to rank higher in search engine. Al though, there is no defined way of ranking higher in search engines since no search engine will give the developers a chance to manipulate the search results, still there are many effective practices that will lead to your higher positioning in search results. Some of these practices are suggested by the search engines themselves and some have been discovered from various webmasters across the globe.

▌ Increase traffic to your blog: Search Engine Optimization

♦ Getting indexed.

The first step towards search engine optimization is getting indexed by search engines. Google will never show your blog in results until they know about it. It is absolutely sure that someday Google crawler will crawl your articles unless you have disallowed them. But this someday is what you don't know. So, why not to do it manually.

Submitting your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and other search engine engines is the first step that tells them your blog exist. Google crawler will then crawl your blog and index all your pages in their search engine.

♦ SEO practices.

Search Engine Optimization include doing keyword research for your blog and finding the long tail keywords with low competition and high searches. Long tail keywords are those phrases which have low competition and hence will drive more traffic to your blog.

Keyword Research Basics for Bloggers.

SEO for beginners include writing value contents, keyword planning, on page optimization and link building.

Search Engine Optimization SEO for Beginners.

Content is King.

Top 5 On-page Search Engine Optimization techniques.

How to Get On the First Page of Google.

How to Submit your Sitemap to Google.

♦ Link building.

Link building as a part of seo

Link building is a process of creating inbound links for your blog. Internal linking is also a part of seo which included cross linking your blog's article. External link building is done through commenting and guest posting. Writing great content will lead to other bloggers linking your blog in their articles naturally.

We will discuss link building in next chapter in details.

You don't need to be a professional search engine optimizer to drive traffic to your blog. Writing great contents and following these beginners seo practices will ensure higher ranking of your blog in search engines.

mb.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog : Social Media

Unknown 13:50 3 Comments Edit

This is the first article of the series about how to increase traffic to your blog. No matter how well you write and to whatever topic you devote your blog to, you are going to face difficulty in bringing traffic to your blog initially.

When you start up your blog, your search engine optimization process won't kick in for some time. May be a week, may be a month you have to wait for. You don't have subscribers to your blog and no one really knows about your blog. Then comes the role of social media.

Social Media can bring you a lot of traffic to your blog in any condition: whether your blog is new or is an established one. However, you must know how to fully utilize these social media in order to increase traffic to your blog.

▌ By social media, I mean non other than:

♦ Facebook
♦ Google+
♦ LinkedIn
♦ Twitter

▌ Set up yourself.

The first step towards utilizing social media to bring traffic to your blog is to set up your profile if you don't have one and adding people you know to your profile. You have to look genuine there and for that, you have to put your own display picture along with your bio. Now its time to import all your contacts and connecting with them.

▌ Increase your influence.

After setting up your profile, you need to reach to maximum people. Add people in your friend list and circles whom you know. Search for people with same interest in different groups and communities over the social media and join them, follow them or connect with them.

▌ Set up your blog identity on these media.

Now to increase traffic to your blog, you have to market your blog over these media. This can be done by creating pages, asking your friends to like or subscribe to these pages and join your blog community and asking them to re share it to reach to maximum people.

You can even use paid advertising in order to reach to people who are interested in blog's niche. These people will eventually be your readers and will bring regular traffic to your blog. However, buying twitter followers is not a good idea. You can Google about its reason.

▌ Marketing your content.

Facebook Page for my blog.

I presume that you have set up your profile and community and pages for your blog. Now its time to share your content to your subscribers. Using catching titles and images in your link share is a better way of driving traffic to your blog as compared to posting plain simple links. Putting up an image increases your chance of re sharing.

▌ Communication with readers.

There will be people who will like your links and re-share them. There is no problem giving them a word of thanks. People will comment on your links and may praise you or criticize. You have to take the criticism in a constructive way and give a thanks to the praises. You have to satisfy your readers who have queries. And provide solutions to the problems asked by other users in different communities.

The basic aim of social media optimization is to reach to maximum people and connect with them. Social media is a great place to drive traffic to your blog with very less efforts.

If you think the article misses any points, feel free to share in comments. :)

mb.

Tips to Increase Domain Authority.

Unknown 05:48 7 Comments Edit

I have already written an article about What is Domain Authority. Domain authority is an SEO metrics from Moz and is a calculation of how well a domain will rank in Search Engines.

Domain Authority is a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100 where climbing from 10 to 20 is comparatively easier than 50 to 60. It is based on Mozscape web index comprising of link counts, MozRank, MozTrust scores and several other factors.

▌ How is Domain Authority calculated.

If you want to increase your Domain Authority, you must know how it is calculated. Unlike Alexa, where ranking is based on traffic to your blog, Domain authority is a combination of several factors.

♦ MozRank - It is link popularity score.

MozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from not-so-popular blogs or getting some links from highly popular blogs. It simply means that blogs with higher domain authority will increase your domain authority with a greater value than a link from lower DA blog.

♦ MozTrust - MozTrust is determined by calculating link distance between the source and the link.

MozTrust can be improved similarly as MozRank. Getting linked from web blogs with higher MozTrust is a great way of increasing your Domain Authority.

♦ Linking root domains - It is the number of unique linking domains to your blog. Each domain that is back linking to your blog is counted just once.

You can improve the number of linking root domains through several link building techniques like Commenting, Guest posting. You can even write great content and get yourself link back more naturally.

♦ All links. It is the number of links to your blog domain which includes do-follow, no-follow links.

It is also improved through creating great contents and let other people link you, or through commenting and Guest Posting.

♦ Writing unique and quality content.

You can assume roughly that Domain Authority is somewhat related to link building in a healthy way and it can only be achieved if you write quality contents which the blogosphere find useful for their particular audience and refer your blog to them.

♦ Domain Age. Your domain authority will increase as your domain gets older.

▌ How to check your Domain Authority.

The best way to find your Domain Authority is Moz's Open Site Explorer tool.

▌ How its different from Alexa and PageRank.

PageRank is calculated solely from the back links and do not includes any matrix such as link diversification and trust score. If you are getting too much links from the same site with high PageRank, you are improving your PageRank.

Alexa is a traffic metrics and the rank is calculated by the amount of traffic your blog receives from the browsers where Alexa toolbar is installed. It do not count the traffic which do not have toolbars. This is biggest flaws in Alexa ranking.

Domain Authority is a combination of several factors and is much harder to be manipulated. It can only be improved by improving the overall Search Engine Optimization of your blog and by practicing natural link building techniques.

mb.

How to Speed up Your Blog.

Unknown 13:43 Add Comment Edit

Blog's loading time is also an important part of Search Engine Optimization. There are various reasons that affect the site's loading time and hence the performance. If your site's speed is on the slower site, then perhaps you need to improve your site's loading time.

Improve your blog's Loading speed

There are a number of factors that affects a blog's loading time. You can work on these factors to speed up your blog.

▌ Number of posts.

The number of posts you display on your homepage directly affects your blog load time. You can easily restrict the number of posts that are shown on the homepage of your blog.

Open your Blogger dashboard > Layout > Edit post.

Click on the Edit option. A pop up windows will appear with various options.

Now, choose the desired number of posts you want to display on the home page. Its recommended to limit the number of posts to a maximum of 10 on home page to speed up your blog.

▌ Optimize your images.

If you have images in your articles, then it is going to slow down your blog. However, Image is an integral part of your articles which you cannot omit. So you need to optimize them. You can reduce your image size by converting it to a .jpg formats which takes much lesser space. You can crop your image to a smaller size or even decrease its resolution in order to enhance your loading time and speed up your blog.

▌ Javascripts and ad-on.

The more you use javascripts in your blog, the slower your blog will be. Try to avoid third party javascripts and even if you use them, use it at the bottom of your blog. If you intend to use one in the sidebar, it may be at the bottom part of your sidebar.

▌ Avoid popups.

Pop ups will considerably slow down you site's loading time.

▌ Ad services.

Ads on your blog also affect your site's loading time. Whether it be AdSense or any other money making program, they are going to affect to some extent. Infolinks has a very bad impression of slowing down the blog's loading time to a great extent. Avoid if you can.

AD services like Qadabra will slow down too.

You can put these minds in your mind to improve your site's performance by reducing its load time.

Bonus: You can measure your blog's speed by using a stop watch.

Go to Stopwatch website: Enter your blogs address and the time will show up. The elements of your blog which is loaded at the end are the one which is taking the maximum time and reducing your site's speed.

Common SEO mistakes you should avoid.

Unknown 09:11 2 Comments Edit

Search Engine traffic is the life of medium blogs. If you are not so well known Blogger, perhaps your social media influence would be a few hundred followers on twitters, and may be a thousand have circled you on Google+. That simply means you can't expect much from there. With Search Engine Optimization, you have this benefit of "Optimizing once, benefit all time". A well written SEO article will generate traffic for years, and there is no manual need of marketing it on social media day and night.

However, you should avoid these Common SEO mistakes that may hamper your effort to generate traffic through Search Engine.

▌ Crawler Issues.

Google uses crawlers to search and find and eventually index your contents for search engine. If your articles are not indexed, there is no way of getting discovered in search engine. Don't manipulate your Robot.txt unless you are a pro. You might end up disallowing crawler to discover your contents. Moreover, maintain your site in such a manner so as it can be easy navigable. Create a sitemap for Blogger/ WordPress blogs and Submit your sitemap to Google. Crawlers Issues is the biggest common SEO mistakes and must be avoided.

▌ You do not Focus on search queries.

Lets say you have a good quality article and you optimized it for a keyword 'a'. Now what will happen if no one searches for 'a' ever? So, this 'a' factor plays an important role in driving traffic to your blog through search engine. So, start focusing on search queries. While writing your article, just imagine what a person will type in Google search bar to discover that article. Optimize accordingly. Think from a reader perspective. You may use Google Adwords tool to keyword research. Its a common SEO mistakes among the webmasters of not focusing on keyword research.

▌ Bad titles and descriptions.

Even if you get discovered in Search engines, chances are that you will never have traffic if you have a irrelevant title and/or description. Titles are the first thing a user read in search query and it decides your Click though rate. Working with Titles and Meta tags is a must. Put all your important keywords in meta tags and descriptions and avoid this common SEO mistakes.

▌ Not focusing on Quality contents.

Its the quality of the content that ultimately decide the future of your blog, and no matter how much you optimize your blog, the reader visits you for the content. Quality content is always the King.

Read more about seo practices quality content is king.

If you see any other Common SEO mistakes among webmasters, feel free to share with the readers in comments.

mb.

Google Penguin 2.1 updated on 4th October.

Unknown 00:47 Add Comment Edit

Matt Cutts tweeted on 4th October:

Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree. More info on Penguin: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html …

Penguin algorithm

Google updated its Penguin algorithm for the 5th time and named it Penguin 2.1. According to Matt, the change is going to affect about 1% of searches to a noticeable degree.

Penguin was first implemented by Google on April 24, 2012 affecting about 3% search queries to fight web spam.

Penguin basically was released to fight with Keyword Stuffing, Black hat link building techniques and Copied Contents.

▌ Previous Updates:

Penguin 1: April 24,2012

Penguin 2: May 26, 2012

Penguin 3: October 5, 2013

Penguin 4: May 22, 2013 (Referred to as Penguin 2.0)

Penguin 5: October 4, 2013 (Referred to as Penguin 2.1)

Google is constantly working on improving its search results. Google recently updated its algorithm and named it Hummingbird algorithm.

It is important for you as a blogger to practice only white hat seo techniques and stick to original and unique contents. If you have been hit by Penguin, you must already been seeing its effect by a drop in your search engine traffic.

mb.

List of 8 Best Ping Services.

Unknown 10:37 Add Comment Edit

Pinging is a service by which the search engine servers are notified of any content updation. Pinging make sure that search engines know that you have any new article published. This results in a faster indexing of your site.

There are various methods of submitting your content to search engines like submitting your sitemap to each of them. But then, if you write an article you have to wait for the search engine crawlers to discover your updated content. You may have to wait for till then. Pinging again has this benefit of notifying search engines about it.

There are various pinging services available. These best ping services does the work in seconds.

▌ Ways to Ping your blog in seconds

Here's a list of 8 best ping services.

♦ Pingomatic

♦ Ping.in

♦ Pingler

♦ Pingates

♦ Kping

♦ GooglePing

♦ Feedshark

♦ Pingfarm

All these ping services work more or less in same manner and asks for your blog URL along with the feeds (optional for some of them).

I have always used Pingomatic as my best ping service. And have not really tried all. You may give all a try and select the best one.

mb.

What is Domain Authority.

Unknown 13:22 Add Comment Edit

Domain Authority is the Moz's prediction of how well a web page will rank in search engines. Higher value of Domain Authority means better ranking of websites as compared to other blogs/ sites with same content and backlinks.

Domain authority is 0-100 scale. Higher the authority, better is the rankings in search engines. Domain Authority is a logarithmic metrics. Its more difficult to increase domain authority from 40 to 50 than from 10 to 20.

Google's domain authority is 100/100.

Domain Authority is based on several factors like link counts, MozRank, Moz Trust Score, linking root domains and a dozen other factors.

▌ Improve your Domain Authority

Build inbound links. One of the major factors that decide your domain authority is the number of links coming from high authority websites. You will got an inbound link from a higher authority site only if you have valuable content and useful information. The point to be kept in mind is that the links should come from "popular sites".

Increase content. The size of your blog will contribute to your improved domain authority. A blog with many articles, unique and relevant will surely rank higher in search engines.

Authority requires time. You must have seen different blogs ranking on first page for an article written 2-3 hours ago and you can guess, it is not going to happen for a new blog. An older blog is going to be much favorable brand than a new one. There is not much you can do about this point so just go on publishing great articles, both unique and relevant.

The best way to achieve a higher Domain Authority is to improve overall Search Engine Optimization. Particularly, you should focus on link building from blogs with better rankings and domain authority.

Building IN-bound links require:

♦ Linking not just your home URL but different contents and using proper anchor text to link them. Anchor texts are of most importance while backlinking.

♦ Internal linking. Internal linking tells search engines crawlers about the pages which it cannot crawl or missed.

♦ Use diversified linking. Getting all your back links from the same blog is not going to benefit you much. Using different blogs, with higher domain authority is recommended.

▌ Domain Authority Checker.

You can check your domain authority at open site explorer website: www.opensiteexplorer.org

You can read review of Open Site Explorer here.

mb.

This will Negatively Affect Your Blog's Ranking in Search Results.

Unknown 13:00 1 Comment Edit

Practicing Search Engine Optimization increases your chances in Ranking higher in Search Results. However, most people over do it. Links play an important role in deciding your ranking. Al though, PageRank has not been updated for a while, its still one of the 200+ factors that decide your rankings. Link building has been a favorite choice for the Bloggers to fool Google to rank higher in search results.

The best way of creating high quality genuine back links is by writing genuine and relevant content that can naturally gain popularity and is linked back.

Image courtesy of adamr / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Black Hat Optimizers find it easier to create links and rank higher. Hence, Google has some guidelines for link building which must be kept in mind to not to violate terms and negatively affect your SEO process.

▌ Here's how you can negatively affect your blog's ranking in search results.

♦ Buying or selling links. This includes direct buying/selling and using services which guarantee links in exchange of money.

♦ Link exchange. Link exchange is a process in which you host link of other and in return, get a link back to your blog. Link exchange is fine until you over do it. Link exchange to same niche blogs is considered fine. Google webmaster says "excessive link exchange" is a violation. Keep in mind the term "excessive".

♦ Guest Posting. Guest posting is most widely used link building strategy. However, large scale article marketing or Guest posting campaigns with keyword rich anchor text links is a violation to the terms of Google and will negatively affect your link building process.

♦ Creating automated links. Using some automated program/javascripts for link building is a violation.

♦ Low quality bookmarking. Submitting links to low quality directories and bookmarking sites can also negatively affect your link building program.

♦ Too much internal linking. Internal linking is a best way of flow control to other articles in your blog. It reduces bounce rate and guide visitor from one article to another. However, too much linking has negative effects.

♦ Forums. If you are active in forums and creating backlinks in your signature, you need to be cautious. Too much will eventually lead to performance degradation in search results.

♦ Distributing links in some free stuffs. Some webmasters give free themes as a part of giveaway programs and link back their blog in footer or some part of it. Some even build apps or gadgets with a linking back to their blog. This is considered as a violation.

Link building is great way of improving your site's performance. The only thing to be kept in mind is that the backlinks you get should be authentic, genuine and as natural as possible. This can only be achieved if you write great contents so that people around the globe don't feel bad while linking back to you.

mb.

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