Top 10 Killer Tips to Improve Page Rank

Page rank is based on an algorithm that determines how close your link is to the query that was put into a search engine such as Google. The more important your link is shown to be, the higher it will be ranked on search results pages. The result is that web traffic increases to the links that are ranked at or near the top.

How the Page Rank is Calculated?

The calculations used by the algorithm that determines page rank includes the number of links that are connected to your site. That includes inbound, internal, external, do-follow, and no-follow links along with backlinks. To increase your web traffic, you need to improve page rank so that it pulls in more people who are likely to purchase the products or services that you offer.

Here are 10 killer ways to improve page ranking so that more people will start visiting your website.

How to Improve Page Rank?

Submit Site to Web Directories

A simple, but very effective way to increase web traffic is adding more high quality backlinks. This can be done simply by submitting the content to respected web or article directories. They provide a great way for more people to see your content. Some good directories include the following:

• DMOZ
• Best of the Web (BOTW)
• Jasmine Directory
• ArticlesBase
• Ezine Articles

By finding the right articles and web directories, you can quickly improve your page rank for your content.

Post Regularly

Google like sites that post on a regular basis, so set up a schedule where you have new, fresh content for your site on a daily or weekly basis. Be sure to post on the same day or days each week which will help improve your overall ranking.

Improve Content

If the content is well written, informative, and unique, this will help increase the chance that readers will share it with others. The better the content is presented, the more likely it is to be shared and that will improve its page ranking.

Link Exchange

This is a well-known technique, but it still works. To get a higher page rank, you will need to get other sites that are ranked higher to link to your site. Therefore, you will automatically have good links that will help boost the ranking of your content. This means that you will need to appeal to those with higher ranked sites to agree to share their link with you.

Post on Other Sites

This is also called guest posting, it is another tried-and-true technique that helps you improve page rank. Find blogs that allow for guests to post so that you can receive two or three backlinks in return for what you have submitted. The key is to post on blogs that are in your industry or niche so that you can attract readers to your site.

Add Comments to Other Sites

In addition to posting articles, you should also comment regularly on articles posted on other sites. You will need to set up a schedule so that you can comment on a consistent basis on posts that are in your niche or industry. The more you post, the more active you are in the community which means that more your site will grow in status. While most sites today have Disqus installed which means that a link to your site is automatically posted, others still use the Do-Follow which means you will need to include the link.

Increase Uptime

Be sure that you choose a web host that offers 99.9% uptime so that your website is available to anyone who wants to visit. Long downtimes can significantly cut into your web traffic, so be sure to choose a provider that is reliable and provides guarantees about uptime.

Social Bookmark

The social network is a great way to help increase the visibility of your content and improve page rank as well. By sharing your content on the best social sites, you will get more traffic thanks to the free backlink. Naturally, you’ll want to choose sites that are quite popular like the following;

• Facebook
• Google Plus
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Delicious

By sharing with good social media sites, you can increase page rank considerably. Plus, it will work for you over time to help bolster your site. Plus, be sure to be active on your social media sites by responding to questions so that potential customers will stay close to your efforts.

Multiple Pages

This is another old, but useful technique that can improve your page rank thanks to internal linking. Basically, you will need multiple pages that you link together for articles or content that is similar in nature. It takes a little work, but it is well worth it to see the results over time.

Research Popular Keywords

Focus on keywords that are the most common which means using words that people are most likely to use as queries on search engine sites. By using the most commonly searched keywords, you can help boost your page ranking significantly over time. This means having more visitors and better results when it comes to your sales.

In addition to these ten proven ways to improve page rank, you should also consider the power of advertising. By creating a simple banner and advertising with it on other sites, you can generate a lot of good backlinks which in turn creates more traffic for your page. Keep in mind that you should be active daily when it comes to blogs and forums that are in your niche as well.

Another small trick is to add a link to your signature in forums and emails, although you’ll want to avoid any illegal tactics that will put your website into trouble. By using proper techniques, you can improve page rank naturally which builds for your long-term success. After all, your goal is to be successful by increasing the ranking of your content. So, you should put in the time and effort to do things right to succeed.

Which methods do you use to improve page rank? Share with us in a comment below.

7 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers

SEO, as you might have already know, is an acronym for search engine optimization. In the simplest of words, it's the way search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com and others present your page in users' search results on their sites.

Cool, how do they that?

Well, they do that via sophisticated software tools, called spiders. Consider the whole internet as an empty room, with air particles as websites. Now sneak a spider into that room. Each tiny step that this spider would take now is essentially crawling a website (as the room is dark and full of websites). This is how search engines crawl through the web picking up site after site, studying them and ranking them. This ranking is important, really important. A higher ranked website by Google will always be on the first page of Google's search results for a related query compared to a lower ranked one.

So, in order to get ranked higher, you and I need SEO. SEO is like black pepper without which fried egg might not taste 'that' tastier. In simple words, in order for search engines to find your site and rank it higher than others in your field, you need to optimize it. Let's see how with these 7 simple tips.

Ways to SEO Optimize your Blog

Before starting with our 7 simple tips for a quality SEO, it's important to broadly classify those tips into two basic areas, on the basis of origin:

On-page Optimization

Refers to optimization of your actual web content including your HTML code, your text, as well as graphic content.

Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization, however, deals with things like backlinks (hyperlinks pointing to you site from other websites, apps and networks).

1. Create SEO Friendly Blog Post Titles

Post titles are important for SEO. They really are since they are deal makers or breakers. Whenever you write something, make sure you give proper attention to the post's title. Make your titles simple, intriguing, descriptive and gullible so that people may know what is this all about and what to expect. An even better approach is to wear searchers shoes while giving a title and think how would you Google it if you were looking for content like this.

Also, don't forget to include keywords in your title and keep it under 70 characters (or search engines would crop it before looking).

2. Improve the quality of your content

If you think 'content' isn't important for SEO, think again! Your content is the most important part of your site. While writing, don't copy-paste from elsewhere, don't stuff it with keywords alone, don't bombard it with images and multimedia files and don't write any lesser than 300 words. These all would affect your ratings quite poorly.

So, write original, use keywords in scenarios instead of straying them around (like I didn't use SEO here, SEO there in every next line), use images where they suffice and make sure you name them properly to appear in image search results, i.e. an image with the "img009.jpg" name would never appear in the image search results but "tips_to_success.jpg" would. The best would be to use text content and wrap them proper in HTML tags like <H2></H2> etc. (search engines likes content this way). Also, make sure your blog post's length is somewhere between 300-500 words - crossing over is fine but lesser isn't.

3. Keywords are keys

Keywords are terms that others may use to search for your content. While keywords are important for SEO, don't go on and stuff your site with keywords. This would make your content appear like a spam to spiders, who would neglect it henceforth.

Ideal is that once you have chosen your title (and included your keyword in it, as I have added keyword SEO in title above), use it in page URL, in your starting and ending paragraphs, as well as in article body where required without sounding awkward. Additionally, you may link it using anchor text to relevant resources in and out of site.

Adding keyword in the post URL using Custom Permalink

4. Meta-tags are important, but not 'that' much

If we had been living in early part of 21st century, meta tags might have done all the SEO for your site. Unluckily, we aren't. Google and other search engines have long left using meta-tags for finding site information. Hence, if someone tells you meta-tagging is all you need for your sites SEO, tell them it isn't.

Nevertheless, it's important that you use your keywords in your meta-data. Some themes already do that for you, if they don't (you can check that using page source or using view source code from browser), don't sweat. You can use 3rd party plugins like All in One SEO Pack and Scribe.

5. Socialize!

Make others talk about your site and share your content on social media sites or their blogs. It gets even better if somehow sites with high ratings link back to your site. This makes spiders think that you are someone important that everyone these days is talking about, resulting in enhancing your ratings dramatically.

Guest posting is another good approach for that. Comment on other sites, make friends with bloggers (best in business) and make them comment at yours. These tiny little things do matter a lot, resulting in enhanced SEO of your site.

6. Link in and Link-Out

Hyperlinks or Links are important from SEO perspective. You can use them to:

Link out to other sites, networks and posts, or even to your previous posts (also called inbound or backlinks) using anchor element with keyword.

Or even better, make others to link in to you, via sharing your content on their sites or social media networks.

As mentioned, an even outstanding strategy for building links is guest posting.

7. Write Often

Sites with new content every day, or twice thrice a week have still far better ratings than those who post every fortnight. A better incoming content frequency makes spider come to your site regularly, resulting in better ratings and enhanced SEO.

Are we done then? Well, trust me - your sites rating is in your hands, not in Google or Yahoo. SEO is just about doing things neatly and in a sophisticated manner. Walk your site these 7 steps for a quality SEO and you will witness the difference yourself at Google, if no place else.

Remember, code clean, write original, socialize... this is what SEO is all about!

How to Build High Quality Backlinks

One of the secrets to creating more web traffic with your posts is to build in some backlinks. To build high quality backlinks is one of the most popular methods to boost your content over the competition. However, finding the right methods to build the backlinks is going to take a little effort.

Everything starts with understanding what a backlink is and what it will do for your content. From there, you can then extend your efforts to build even more backlinks using creative and effective means that maximizes the potential of your content.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is an incoming hyperlink that connects the web page or content to another website. Backlinks are very important when it comes to page ranking as Google rates them highly. However, the backlinks themselves must be of good quality in order to generate the rankings needed to boost your content ahead of the competition.

Quality of the backlinks is important because having 10 good ones will beat 200 bad ones in terms of Google rankings. So, you must strive for quality each and every time. However, it will take time to build up backlinks to your articles because people will have to see it and then decide to link to it in order to add more value to their site.

If you look at adding good backlinks as a long term strategy, you will eventually reap the rewards that they offer. What follows are some interesting ways to start building good quality backlinks so that you can start your success today a little bit at a time.

Create Long, Interesting Posts

One of the easiest ways to start creating good backlinks is by writing a good, long tutorial post that uses images, charts and other graphics to really make it interesting. It will need to be from 1000 to 1200 words long and not have any filler, so the information really needs to be good and tight to make it interesting.

How-To guides often make the best long posts, especially if you can really hit the details so that people will fully understand how to do what you are explaining to them.

Participate in Forums

A person who is active in the forums when it comes to the subject that you are writing is building a network of potential fans who might offer high quality backlinks to their work. This is a delicate matter as you don't want to come across as someone only interested in what they can do for you. This will mean offering quality backlinks to those who participate in the forum as well if you find their articles useful and informative.

Write e-Books

An e-Book is one of the best ways to help spread the word about your talents and you can ask your friends to share it with the world through social media as well. You can also send your links to the best in social bookmarking sites as well to help augment your efforts.

With e-Books, you don't have to write very many, but it does help if you create ones that are very useful, highly readable and can be shared so that you can build high quality backlinks.

Create Special Days

One of the more interesting ways to build high quality backlinks is creating special days like St. Patrick's Day, Halloween or Valentine's Day to offer discounts on your products or services. You can actually build up to the day as well with special writing and content features to help pull in more traffic.

Remember, you'll need to do some research on your audience to see what type of holidays and content works best for their interest, but Valentine's Day is one that everyone shares, so that is an easy one to write good content, or run a contest that is bound to get good, high quality backlinks.

Have Free Products

Everyone likes free products and this can help you boost the number of visitors to your website. You can have a free e-Book or even a promotional gift if you want. While it may take some investment, the result will be getting more web traffic which in turn creates more demand for your products or services.

Videos

YouTube may very well be the biggest marketing tool of the moment with no signs of slowing down. If you can create a funny, interesting video then you will start getting some great backlinks. Today, the technology to create a solid, professional-looking video is dirt cheap compared to just a decade ago.

You can create "how-to" videos or find something interesting to make a video about as long as it relates to the industry in which your business is in. The key is to do something fun and enjoyable for your audience so that they will start sharing it with their friends.

Interact with Other Blogs

When you read a blog or see a video you like that is within your industry, don't just say "good job" and leave it at that. Write a good, interesting comment or review so that you can really share your thoughts. Remember to be positive, articulate and get right to the point. If you can write your thoughts in an entertaining, audience-pleasing way, you can start building up an audience for your comments and reviews.

Do Guest Blogging

Want to make a great impression? Find a good place to guest blog and write until you get that post to go viral. This will not only attract you an audience, but by helping out someone else you will build high quality backlinks as well.

It will take time, effort and the ability to write well. But if you can pull it off, your stint as a guest blogger will pay off big time for your efforts. The key is to write something that attracts people's attention and provides you with a place to write again for the blogger.

Guest blogging can be very rewarding in more ways than one, so if you have the time to do it right, then you should market your services as a guest blogger.

These are just some of the methods you can use to build high quality backlinks and start building up your web traffic.

The Basics of Google Analytics for Beginners

If you're a business owner or a member of a marketing team, you probably know that businesses depend upon data. Tracking trends and patterns is what allows you to get ahead of the dips in the market, and make informed decisions on the direction of your company.

Those same rules that apply to business apply to owning a website. In order to deliver the best possible experience and ensure that customers from around the world are able to access your site, you need to understand from where traffic is coming from and how to leverage that information to your benefit.

Setting Your Site Up With A Tracking ID

Google Analytics won't start collecting data from your website until you've implemented a tracking code into your website's files. The tracking code is basically a block of JavaScript code that will collect data about the html that visitor used to get to your site, any cookies that the visitors has collected during their browsing history, and information about what type of browser the person is using.

The importance of this information provides you with information on how to conform your web-site to the target audience, especially in terms of design. If customers are visiting your website from an eCommerce directory, you may want to modify those links so that the customers arrive at a landing page instead of a home page. If more customers are using smartphones and tablets instead of laptop browsers, you may have to redesign the site so that it is responsive and can be easily read from a small screen.

In order to track each individual page on the website, you will need to add a tracking code before the </head> code of your template. If you are using a site like WordPress or Joomla! that depends on templates, you may just have to add the tracking code on the main HTML index file. Keep in mind that it can take upwards of 24-hours for Google to begin collecting information and importing that data to your dashboard, so don't expect to see measurable results right away.

Tutorial: How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

Researching the Data

Once you insert the code into your site, it will begin tracking data from anyone who visits your site. This data is then sent back to the Google servers and stored in your Google Analytics profile. From there, you can determine what type of information that you want to look at.

The two features of Google Analytics that are often most useful to new users is the ability to track where customers are coming from, and the ability to see keywords that have been effective in drawing in audiences.

Traffic Origins

Open up your Google Analytics dashboard and click on 'Acquisition'. You should see a few options, but you want to pull 'All Referrals' so that you can the entire list of visitors.

Next to the referral path will show a few links with a number of how many people visited your site from that link. From here you can click on the link and find out the reason for the traffic. Maybe someone has written a review on the service, you can check to see if the advertisement campaign you are operating is producing results.

Keywords

Within the same 'Acquisition' directory is another option called 'Search Engine Optimization'. Click on this link and then click on 'Queries' to look up a list of keywords being used to describe your site. The dashboard will display an overview of up to 1,000 words or phrases used on Google that brought new visitors to your site. You can use this information to modify your posts and producing content to increase the results of certain key phrases that you feel would benefit your customer outreach.

Demographics

Underneath the audience tab, you can also track demographics. This little option will allow you to view the age, gender, and interests of individual users and segments of your visiting population. Say for example you run a senior care facility for the retired and want to put together a A/B split test to determine which advertising campaign works best. After adding the campaign to a landing page or section of your site, you can look back and find out if retired citizens are the ones responding to your ads, or if you are just bringing in traffic from younger generations who may not be interested in your services.

Custom Campaign Tagging

Custom campaign tagging is more of an advanced feature, but once you get used to the Google Analytics interface, you can use this to separate your campaigns and easily filter through data. Maybe you just want to find out who is coming to your site from your email newsletters, and not from the general site. Google Analytics will allow you to post special links to your content on those channels of communication and then view these results under the acquisition tab and then campaigns.

Determining What Works, and What Doesn't

Using the tools that Google Analytics provides at your disposal allows you to really determine what type of experience you want to provide your customers. Within the first month of use, if start to see trends or patterns in data that you feel you feel you can improve upon, you can use this information as a guide to edit your sites design and layout.

Getting used to the program might seem overwhelming at first, but once you jump right in and start playing around all the features, you'll get the hang of it in no time. Google Analytics really is an important tool that every website owner should have.

How to Optimize Images for Better Search Engine Rankings

When search engines start indexing the pages on your site, they don't just focus on the writing. Web crawlers employed by services like Google and Bing shuffle through your site's structural code looking for any relevant information that they might offer to their customers. Some of the information includes things like backlinks, tags and even images.

Images make up a big part of any website. They help to excite the visual senses of readers and offer a little extra entertainment value. What most blog owners don't realize is that all of the photos that they upload to their site aren't confined to their site alone. Crawlers make sure that these images also show up within their respective search engines sites.

Image searches can have the effect of drawing in large numbers of new readers that were just looking through content in Google images. You can benefit from this traffic and increase your average subscriber by practicing image optimization.

Image Optimization Tip #1: Alt Tags & File Names

Visitors may love images, but computers don't. Computers are designed to do what you tell them without violating any of the parameters. When web crawlers come across images on a website, they really don't know what to do with it because they are made to collect information, not interpret it. The solution to this problem is to optimize images and appropriately label your alt tags so that they display the correct content when someone goes to look for it.

For example, let's say you upload a picture of your dog, and label the "alt" tag by the dog's name, 'Frank'. The web crawler is going to read the alt tag without ever realizing it's a picture of a dog; therefore, the crawler will come to the conclusion that it needs to display the image when someone run a search for 'Frank'.

The minor word choice mistakes may not affect the operations of your website, or how your image is displayed, but it will affect the search results of others and the traffic that comes into your website. Whereas you may have been able to attract the dog lovers in the world using image optimization of your dog tagged 'dog', you are now drawing in crowds searching for their uncle "Frank".

To include the alt tag, simply add alt="this is your alt text" to your image tag. Here's an example:

<img src="pug-dog.jpg" alt="frank dog" />

But you don't have to touch the html code of the image. Once the picture is uploaded, click on it and you will see the "Properties" setting. Add the alt text inside the box and hit OK:

This goes the same for file names on a website. You need to optimize images and file names on everything that you decide to save to your website directory so that this information can be appropriately indexed and be used as a search term. You could name the file of your dog Frank, "pug-dog.jpg", which would encourage the search engine to add Frank into searches being performed with the phrase 'pug dog'. Alt tags and file names play an important interpretation role between you and the machine that makes your blog possible.

Image Optimization Tip #2: Add A Caption

After uploading your images, you should always add a caption to the image, so that average browser understands what they're looking at. This gives your website a more professional appearance and will help to keep people on your page.

Not everyone that comes across your picture using a Google Image search is looking for your blog. Maybe they just want to download the image, and that's all you'll ever get from them. The important thing is that they found your photo relevant to their search, and decided to navigate to your site in order to save it for their own use.

The longer those users stay on the site, the better it looks for you because it plays a role in the "bounce rate". Bounce rate refers to when someone clicks on a link, realizes it's not what they're looking for, and then immediately goes back to the search engine. If you can reduce the number of times that this happens by providing captions and intriguing content that will make people want to stick around, your SEO ranking will improve.

Image caption and SEO

Image Optimization Tip #3: File Size

Improving your bounce rate can be tough because the attention span of the everyday Internet user is incredibly short. It may be as short as 8 seconds. High bounce back rates and slow loading sites can be the death of most blogs because no one wants to wait for the content to load. By the time your website finally loads with the content that you need, they could have easily visited two or more sites and found what they need from someone who was better prepared to handle their traffic.

Optimize images so that you are able to keep the file size as small as possible while retaining the quality of the photo. Images taken from DSLR camera - although they may look great - can be up to 1.4 MB in size if you take them directly off your camera and upload them on your blog. This type of space is massive for any everyday blog, and will hurt your SEO ratings.

Use Photoshop or one of the many online services like Google Picasa to rescale your images or reduce the file size. One service that can perform this ability for free and do a great job is Kraken. When you access Kraken site, it will allow you to upload the picture and download the new image optimization versions to use on your Blogger site.

Putting It All Together

At the end of the day, the quality of your site and overall SEO ranking isn't just about what you have to say. It's the entire package of what you have to offer. Optimize images every chance you get and use the strategies discussed above. Now that you know that you might have been neglecting images all along, you can make necessary adjustments and start to see even better results from all your hard work.

5 Easy Ways to Improve the SEO of a blog & Boost Traffic

5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog

A blogger needs to know at least the basics of SEO. For this, you don't need to be an SEO expert but you need to know the minimum so that your posts are well indexed in the search engines.

The phrase "Content is King" is one of the widest spread Internet memes being used by so many bloggers with the idea that you should focus on having quality content, while the rest isn't that important. This is not true. Quality content is essential, but bloggers shouldn't focus only on this matter. Besides producing quality content, your text needs to be optimized for the search engines.

Boost traffic & increase SERP visibility with SEO

5 Easy Ways to Improve the SEO of a Blog

Now, let's get to know the basics that any blogger needs to learn about SEO, as well as other simple SEO techniques. Below are 5 easy tips to improve the SEO of your blog:

1. Define the keyword

When you write a post, it is recommended to choose the right SEO keyword for your text. Your purpose is to make this keyword - or term - to be searched on Google, and then get your post among the top. For this, you need to use this keyword a few times in the text.

For example, here the keyword could be SEO, but this term is too common and I could hardly get in the top for this search. Then, I'll work with a phrase or a long tail keyword, so that this post will rank for the term "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog". I will use this keyword a few times, but without overdoing it.

2. Use the keyword in the post title

Now that I have defined the keyword, I will use it in the post title. This step is very important, and certainly will help you to get a better SEO rank. For instance, the post title contains the easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog keyword, along with other words to form an attractive and optimized title for SEO.

3. Use the keyword in H2 tags

You must also use heading tags (h2, h3) in your posts. Here, we added the "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog" keyword in a H2 heading. Do this always as it will help you rank well in the search results. If you don't know or don't understand what are the heading tags, I would suggest to do a further research on this topic.

4. Use the keyword in the text

Include the chosen keywords throughout the text. Especially in the first paragraph (please note that I have repeated the title in italics in the first sentence). But be careful when doing this, there is a maximum and minimum limit for that. A good keyword density is between 1.5% to 4.5% for best results. Less than that will have no effect and more can alert the search engines and your text might be considered spam.

5. Publish Posts with 300 words or more

Posts under 300 words have little chance to be among the top results in search engines. Of course, you will be able to rank for multiple keywords that are less popular with less than 300 words, but for the most competitive keywords that have the potential to bring a greater number of visits, it will be nearly impossible.

Thus, it is recommended to write posts with more than 300 words. It's not hard when you really understand the topic you're talking about.

Conclusion

As you can see, with some simple SEO techniques you can improve the traffic coming to your blog from the search engines. I hope you enjoyed these 5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog!

The difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO

The search engine optimization (SEO) is a good way to promote your blog on Google search results and other search engines. For those who don't understand how SEO works, here you can find several SEO articles that might help you, but we need to be also aware of the good and bad SEO techniques that could have a direct impact on our ranking.

This article will shed some light on the terms known as black hat and white hat SEO and we will get to know what's good and what is not when we optimize our website and its content.

What is Black Hat SEO?

From the 'SEO dictionary', the term black hat SEO has to do with the abusive techniques that will force the search engines to look at a specific site and rank it. This might work at first, but the algorithms can already see some of these techniques that have become common for a fast result.

Such practices to trick the search engines are, for example, the excessive use of keywords, especially in headings and subheadings; transparent keywords to the user or the so-called hidden text, automatically generated content, pages redirecting automatically to other content and more.

What is White Hat SEO?

The white hat SEO has to do with the good techniques in the 'eyes' of the search engines. These are considered ethical techniques for the ranking, helping thus, the positioning of a website or blog. However, working on the white hat is a process that requires dedication and results may take longer to appear (this is why so many people opt for black hat in order to 'try' something more 'effective') but the results could be much more safe and satisfactory on a long term.

Keep in mind that Google has plenty of tricks up its sleeve to penalize anyone who doesn't act in accordance with the policies and rules of their website - this includes removing your page from any of the positions. Fair enough, after all, why Google would 'reward' somebody with the top spot if the site doesn't provide good content for its users and at the same time, doesn't meet the requirements of the algorithm?

For those who are interested and want to get to the top of Google search results, visit the webmaster guidelines page. There, you can find more information about how to create good content, how the design of your blog/site should be and how to work with your links. Also, you can find mentions about black hat SEO techniques.

How to Write SEO Optimized Blog Posts

I'm not an SEO expert and what you will read further is not top secret, but the basic optimization that everyone should apply in order to write SEO optimized blog posts. And with these techniques, effort and a bit of patience, you can occupy the best places in the search results of different search engines.

Obviously, not all cases are the same, neither all blogs are positioned in the same manner, some might have greater competition than others depending on how popular the topic is; therefore, when it comes to web ranking, there's no specific time that applies for all. Having said this, let's get to the point of this post.

Focus on a topic

Whatever the topic of your blog is, when you try to write a seo optimized blog post, focus on a specific topic that has a clear purpose, with no distractions. For example, if you write about "Digital Cameras", then the beginning and ending of your post should be only about it. Don't start talking about digital cameras and end up telling about what you have done last weekend. A reader goes to a page because is looking for a specific information. So, unless it is not a personal blog (where you write about your daily life), do not deviate from the topic.

Define the post title

The post title should be short and to the point, so that you can briefly summarize the content of the post. But you shouldn't abuse this either. Although it has to be concise, don't try to 'save' words which might be keys to the search.

Examples:

A collection of all the cameras that have been released last year on the market

The best digital cameras of 2013

Clearly, the first one hasn't been defined very much, and the second one is not only more accurate, but it is also more relevant for what people are searching on the internet.

The keywords

Keywords are those terms that the most people are searching for on the internet and you should try focusing on them when writing a post; these keywords need to be included throughout the entire post, but be careful to not overstuff your content with them.

Related: How to Choose the Right SEO Keywords

Example:

During the fourth week of the technology, there were many products that are used today, and the most famous experts gave a speech on them.

At the opening of the fourth Technology Week, the experts talked about various topics, including how to choose a digital camera, had discussions about the pros and cons of the iPad, and which are the best smartphones.

In the first example, we have written without paying attention to any terms. While, in the second one, we used phrases that are searched on the internet by the most users.

So, the most popular keywords should be included wisely without cluttering your posts with them, or it can be counterproductive.

Again, these keywords should be included in the posts title, as well.

Rely on synonyms

While it is a good strategy to use specific keywords, we should not limit ourselves to a single word. It is recommended using synonyms because users do not name things in same way and using less keywords, we can avoid leaving the impression that we are being too repetitive and insistent.

Examples:

For those who enjoy good quality pictures, Nikon D7000s Digital Camera is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes great pictures.

For those who enjoy good quality images, Nikon D7000s is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes excellent pictures.

In the first example, we have repeated the word 'digital camera' and 'pictures' twice. While, in the second one, we used the digital camera keyword once and changed the word 'pictures' with 'images'.

This way, the reader will find a greater diversity of words and might enjoy the article more.

Using bold and italics

A good practice when you write seo optimized blog posts would be to make the keywords bold by wrapping them in strong tags, so that they will stand out from the rest. But keep in mind that this shouldn't be done with CSS, but with HTML, i.e. they should not be tagged with font-weight: bold; but rather with <b> or even better, with <strong>.

Examples:

For those who enjoy good quality images, Nikon D7000s is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes excellent pictures.

The result seems to be the same, but it is not. Although these three keywords are in bold, only one is more attractive to robots, which is the first:

For those who enjoy <strong>good quality images</strong>, <b>Nikon D7000s</b> is a 16.2 megapixel <span style="font-weight: bold;">digital camera</span> that takes excellent pictures.

The same goes for the italics. Use them for highlighting important words, but don't place them between font-style: italic; but rather between <i> or even better <em>.

For those who enjoy <strong>good quality images</strong>, <em>Nikon D7000s</em> is a 16.2 megapixel <span style="font-style: italic;">digital camera</span> that takes excellent pictures.

Again, the first one has a better chance of ranking than the others. Thus, it is recommended to highlight the keywords in bold and italics, or to put them between <strong> and </strong>, or between <em> and </em>.

Using External Links

Some may say that we shouldn't use links in the posts because we are giving away our Page Rank. This is not quite true. Using referral links to sites that have already shaped their credibility, will also help us to shape our own. Certainly, we should not flood our posts with links, but we can do it when is needed and especially with sites that talk about the same topics as our own.

Another important thing to mention is that, we should avoid putting the typical "click here" or similar texts. When you put a link, the anchor text should be fairly descriptive.

Examples:

<a href="Link URL">Click here</a> to know more

More information about <a href="Link URL">digital cameras</a>

In the first example, the anchor text is not relevant and descriptive, but in the second it is.

Rank with your images

Posts with images are not only visually appealing, but might help the reader to understand what you are talking about. So, whenever you can, use an image in your post to illustrate the writing, but don't overdo it. Many images or very large images can slow the loading time of the blog.

Related: How to Optimize Images for Better SEO Rankings

New and relevant content

You should focus not only on writing many posts, but also making them relevant to your readers. New and original content is more attractive to the search engines, than a copy & paste (actually, the last gets penalized). So try to write new stuff, even if you think that all has been said. Each person has a different way of saying things.

Also, always get informed before writing a post. Do a research and see if the information is valid; based on that, you will gain the trust of your readers.

Final Words

With these few techniques you can increase the chances of ranking your posts higher in search engines. As I mentioned earlier, these aren't things that no one heard about, but I know that many are beginners and may not know how to write seo optimized blog posts.

It does not hurt repeating that the results won't appear overnight, but with some effort and patience, you should see the desired results over time.

Top three qualities of a successful blogger

The qualities of a blogger should be attended at all times in order to become someone popular on the internet. A blogger should have plenty of ideas for creative writing, along with a truckload of motivation. The results sought will not come overnight and there's no guarantee that this will be easy.

These are the two things that you need in order to fulfill your dream of running a successful blog: a lot of exclusive content and readers' loyalty. In each case, time is required to develop the success. This is a process and not a short-term event.

Related: How to Write SEO Optimized Blog Posts

Top Qualities To Become a Successful Blogger

Here are three qualities of a blogger who as a site administrator will need to have, if your goal is to manage a successful blog.

Patience

A successful blog is a product of time and effort and for this, you will need patience. As I said before, the results will not appear quickly overnight, so it is important to realize this from the start. If you are constantly trying to develop new and creative ideas for writing on your blog and, at the same time, you are worried whether you will see any results, this will only make things more difficult.

The building of a successful business online is a "long term" effort and you must decide if you accept this challenge or not. This is one the most important qualities of a blogger.

Credibility

Much of the traffic of any successful blog results from its unique content, as well as its credibility. In fact, the quality of what's in the site, will have a direct impact on what will become viral visitors that are coming to your platform. If you will provide quality content, people will talk about your blog, and once they do it, others may come to see what you have. It depends on you to publish useful and accurate information and your readers will do the rest.

Consistency

Maintaining a steady stream of creative writing ideas is vital to be able to constantly update the blog. The frequency of publication to a proper schedule is related to the amount of time you have available and your level of motivation. However, it is recommended to establish a sort of consistency, so that people can schedule their own visits accordingly. Just remember that the more often you write, the more people will visit, so their loyalty will grow faster and their referrals will be extended.

To become a popular blogger, it is important to have a healthy source of creative writing ideas, along with a lot of patience and motivation. Ultimately, it will be up to you, as a site administrator, to provide the three qualities of a blogger that we discussed above, who is searching tirelessly his goal of having a successful blog. In the end, your own motivation and patience will be the glue with which all the elements will be put together so that your dream will come true.

How to do natural SEO on Blogger

Although many insist that blogs hosted on free servers, such as Blogger, are not ideal for getting your blog well-ranked, the truth is that a blog hosted by Blogger can be really fast and well positioned on the Internet if you are using the right SEO tools.

Now, given the latest updates from Google, the best would be hiring a specialized person. However, if you don't have the resources or you want to learn doing this job alone, you can choose to begin with the natural SEO.

Here are some tips to do natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Natural SEO Techniques for Blogger

Pick a Good Domain

We must try having our keyword included in the domain name, and even if this may sacrifice our branding, we can use the redirection.

Create Value Added Content

Not only rewrite articles, or write like they would be intended for us. When writing our posts, we should consider our target audience, i.e., giving advices, tips, suggestions or guidance on specific topics and aside, use links, anchor text and key phrases.

The topic of the links is important

They should be of quality and while, it's no longer required to place five or ten links within the text of your website, now what truly matters, is to make the link relevant to the context.

Finally, the domain, in value-added content and a right use of the internal and external links, will prove to be useless if we don't try to update our blog constantly.

How often should you update your blog?

You don't have to do this on daily basis, even if this may be ideal as, this way, we could achieve a greater relevance in search engines. But don't forget about your blog either. Let's say, two or three times a week would be enough. What should not happen is updating only three times a week and doing nothing next week.

Keep in mind that search engines happen to pass daily on our blog in order to index our content.

I hope that you find these SEO tips useful and if you would like to receive more tutorials by email, subscribe for free to this blog, check out the facebook page or add the RSS feed.

4 Alternatives to Google AdWords

Many think that Google AdWords is the only tool dedicated and available to perform a study such as a keyword search, but it isn't so, today I refute this idea by collecting some alternatives that, although are not equal to Google AdWords, at least encourage us to make good keyword analysis for the SEO of our website.

Going back a bit, for those unfamiliar with the main features and tools of Google AdWords, we can find a very simple interface yet complete in every sense.

- AdWords appearance has changed, however there is a chance of returning to the old design;
- allows you to place a phrase or keyword, a web site and use the categories;
- for a better keywords search, you can apply filters such as location, language and add custom fields (competition, local or global monthly searches, CPC, Ad share, etc.);
- displays keyword ideas in columns with the amount of local and global monthly searches and approximate CPC;
- you can download keyword ideas, search results in a format to open with Excel.

Having recalled and refreshed the memory a little with the characteristics of AdWords, now it is time to learn about other options both free and paid.

Google AdWords Alternatives

Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing may not be the tool that we had first thought of, however it wants to provide the best conditions for studying keywords.

After we register, to access the tool, go to Diagnostics & Tools and click on the second option on the list: Keyword Research.

SEMRush: Other freemium alternative that displays a very complete report of a particular keyword or website. However, it has limitations and if you opt for a PRO recurring plan you need to pay a monthly membership from $69.95 per month.

Ubersuggest: This nice and simple online tool searches keywords suggestion as well as potential titles for an article. Personally, I recommend it 100%.

Keyword Eye: If you are looking to perform a keyword research on a particular region, Keyword Eye will be your help. It also has the option of requesting the display of search volume or AdWords competition and a full report of anchor text, keywords and domain.

At first it offers a free plan with limitations and to enjoy all other benefits, we have to pay $9.99 per month.

How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

Google Analytics is a platform created with the purpose of helping us to track the number of visits and page views on our blog, which also uses several filters to check exactly from where the visitors are coming via standard or custom reports.

Google Analytics is the leading free tool that has a good relationship with the internet marketing and offers suggestions and improvements or benefits for our website.

As Analytics is part of the variety of Google tools like Blogger, many bloggers still don't know if it is possible to add the tracking code in Blogger. Implementing analytics in Blogger is very quick and easy, so you don't need to be experts or web developers. Here's a small guide for placing the Google Analytics tracking ID on our blog.

Implementing Google Analytics on Blogger

1. Do you have a Google Analytics account? Then it's perfect. If you don't have one, please Register.
2. Within the account, we'll go to Admin and in the Property column, click the menu, then click Create new property, where we enter the information from the website.

3. Click on "Get Tracking ID" and it will provide a box with a code, select and copy the code (CTRL + C).

4. Now let's go to our Blogger account.
5. Look for your blog and click on it, then go to Template > click the Edit HTML button and paste the code previously generated in Analytics before the </head> tag (CTRL + F in order to find it).

And this would be the entire procedure. Within about 24 hours, we shall see the first statistics of our blog in Google Analytics, otherwise check the following:

- Double check that the code has no spaces or characters.
- Doesn't have errors in the configuration
- There are no poor implementation of the filters.
- The Flash plugin is working or javascript is enabled.
- You will have minor issues if you are receiving visits from China (this conflict is not yet solved, according to Google).

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your Blog

The Alexa Rank in its time may have been pretty important for the SEO, however, these days is already losing its importance due to the changes in the algorithm that Google applies from time to time.

The company displays information about visitors of a website, which in turn, classifies this in a ranking, generating estimated statistics about visitor traffic and links pointing to the website. In a few words, the Alexa Rank does not directly affect SEO, but rather serves as a reference for measuring the traffic type, popularity by country and other metrics.

If you would like to enrich or have a good Alexa Rank of your website, here some ways to do it, with short-term results.

5 Ways to Increase the Alexa Rank

Daily Content: Try to publish at least 2 articles per day and within a month you may start to see some changes in the Alexa ranking.

Install Alexa Rank widgets: Besides notifying about the results of your Alexa ranking, they will also provide an estimate of how many backlinks your website has. There are three types of widgets: button with ranking and links, the other one with the ranking only, and finally, a graph with daily records of visits. Traffic Widgets

Alexa Toolbar: From experience, I would recommend installing the Alexa Toolbar, because once we access the website, Alexa will count this visit and thus, we may get better results in the ranking. Besides this, the toolbar will also provide you more information about the backlinks of a web site, popular pages, reviews, and more.

Request a review: To calculate the Alexa ranking of a website, not only the amount of daily and monthly visits will make a site popular, but the number of reviews or opinions made with stars will also play a role in the ranking. Ask your readers to do a review or purchase Alexa opinions about your website.

Number of backlinks: As I said before, the number of visits and reviews about a website used to calculate the Alexa rank, and the total number of quality backlinks, may increase the likelihood of achieving a higher ranking for your website.

On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

We know that SEO Off Page refers to the search engine optimization techniques that can be done outside of your website, such as link wheels, reviews, social bookmarking, social media (references and followers), sidebar links, among other techniques. However, without a proper on-page seo optimization, all would sum up to a non-optimized webpage without quality, which will not reach the traffic expected to have. This is mostly because search engines (especially Google) pay much attention to the alt and title tags (for images), meta tags, internal links, robots and so on, in order to display the content of your web page to the user who made a specific query in the search.

To never fall in this depression of search engine optimization, you can choose a good and reliable blog platform like Blogger. If you are working only on Blogger, here are some on-page optimization tips that might help you to become successful in the blogging world and increase the daily traffic to your blog.

Basic On-Page SEO Tips For Blogger

Optimization of the robots.txt file: besides alerting Google search engine, this file also helps us to prevent certain pages being indexed by Google in order to protect our blog against duplicate content issues.

Title optimization: In the default blogger template, post titles are not optimized properly for the search engines. To solve this, we need to touch some code in the design and optimize both page and post titles.

Image optimization: Whether your blog is about pictures or images as general topics, by simply adding a keyword related to articles, compressing the image and putting the title="" and alt="' tags, we would be optimizing SEO On-Page a little bit more.

Internal links: Internal links within posts on our blog will not only increase page views but will also help us to be well ranked in search engines.

Blog's loading time: When you start with a blog either new or old, it's important to offer a user experience filled with a fast loading time. Search engines give higher priority to a faster blog than to a slow or saturated one.

Using Google Webmaster Tools: After making sure that your blog is 100% SEO, this amazing Google tool will provide you support with both fast indexing and broken links, HTML improvements, page errors and many other specific suggestions for your website.

Got any other ideas or thoughts about natural and positive techniques to improve the On Page SEO on a web page?

Express them in a comment!

Adding a Meta Description to Blogger

An important part of a good SEO is the implementation of meta tags, which are commonly located in the header of our website, that are being, in the same time, invisible to users visiting the site. Well, to be more succinct, these tags have only one purpose: to include information about the page such as author name, date, key word, description, title, among others.

However, here we will only mention one, which is the meta description in Blogger. This description will appear as a fragment in the search results and as a description when sharing on Google+, Facebook and other social networks. A clear and precise description increases the chances of getting more clicks or visits.
As we will work only on the Blogger platform, here I will leave a little guide to easily add a meta description.

Meta Description in Blogger

The first thing we will do is going to our Blogger dashboard and from there, go to Settings > Search preferences > Meta Tags > Description and click on Edit.

Then check the box "Yes" to enable search description. Finally, click the "Save Changes" button.

Adding Meta Description To individual Posts

Now we will focus on adding the meta description to individual pages. Simply edit the page or post, look for the Search Description setting, and there we enter the text and save by clicking the Done button.

And that's it. However it is best to test if it works and we will do so with the MetaChecker online tool, where we only have to introduce the url of a post or page, click Analyze and then it will show the results, including a complete analysis of keywords, on-page seo , meta tags, URLs, current server status and a rating bar that goes from Horror to Excellent.

If none of the meta descriptions appear (rarely fails), we can do the process manually, but it requires us to touch a bit of code. In this case, go to Template > Edit HTML and insert before <b:skin><![CDATA[ the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription != &quot;&quot;'>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
</b:if>

Of course, we will use again the previously mentioned tool to ensure that the description is placed correctly and if all goes well, our blog would be ready to face a good SEO.