Create Own Blogs

Transform Your Blog Into a SEO Machine

2014-08-20T00:51:00.001-07:00

When my daughter turned two, the only people that showed up to eat birthday cake at the party were immediate family members – mom, dad and her big brother, Adam. Why? Because we didn’t send out invitations or put any effort into getting guests to show up.

While this may be perfectly fine for a family event or a toddler that doesn’t know the difference, who wants to put time and effort into a business blog if readers aren’t showing up? Over 80% of blogs stagnate with no traffic and few readers but, like Jillian’s birthday party, the problem often lies with how people are invited to participate.

Simply having one doesn’t make it generate results.

What are the most effective ways to get blog posts read?

Sharing on social media
Using an email list to distribute new posts
Purchasing Google or Facebook advertising to drive awareness
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Using ALL of these options is ideal, but if you can only chose one, then SEO gets my vote every time.

If you have a few hours to invest, here are 3 ways to transform your WordPress blog (or website) into a search-friendly traffic generator. All of them are free, other than the time you’ll invest.

1. Install a good SEO plug-in.

My favorite free SEO solution is WordPress SEO by Yoast, which makes it easy as red light, yellow light, green light. Pretty easy, right? Make sure to keep in mind that simply installing this plugin isn’t helpful in and of itself – but many bloggers stop at this first step. Its real power lies in understanding how to use it correctly and choosing the right keywords.

2. Do keyword research.

Head over to the Google Keyword Popularity Tool and invest some time in keyword research to better understand which keywords drive the most traffic. The trick with keywords is to never assume you know which ones are best; ALWAYS do research to ensure you are using popular keywords that best suit your product, service and/or blog topic.

If you use localized keywords for your SEO efforts – such as “az life coach” or “life coach in phoenix” instead of just “life coach,” you are much more likely to rank well – with the added benefit of landing more targeted readers. This is especially important if you are a local business.

I recommend creating a free account on AdWords (or log-in to your account, if you already have one), then search for the keywords you think are most likely to be searched. Adding your city and state will give you local search results to review, plus some great ideas for blog posts that fit what people are looking for. Using the keywords you entered, Google will bring up a list of other relevant keywords that were actually searched for in the previous month. I prefer to export them to Excel, get rid of unnecessary columns, rank them from most to least popular, then save the document for easy reference later.

3. Choose one keyword, then include it in your post permalink, title, and first sentence.

Make sure you have WordPress set to name the page URL as your post name (which can be changed in settings> permalinks> post name), this will automatically put the keyword in your post URL – also called the permalink. This is an essential component for SEO success.

Then, simply use the default text for the “SEO title” field at the bottom of the page (which is your title plus the name of your blog), and copy the first sentence of the post into the “Meta Description” field. If good writing dictates NOT using the keyword in the first sentence (which happens often but is not optimal), then paste in the first blog sentence that DOES have the keyword in it, or write one that uses the keyword and describes the post in a way that people will want to read it. Put the keyword in the “Meta Keywords” field, then you are all done.

SEO magic happens when you identify one keyword to focus on, then put it in the trifecta of permalink, page title, and page description.

Make sure that keyword is included in the body of post a few times, is relevant and appropriate, and then hit publish. While there are other steps and tactics that help boost SEO, that’s fodder for another article!

One last note – be sure and offer multiple ways for readers to subscribe. If you can’t convert them to subscribers via email or RSS and/or they aren’t seeing your new posts show up on social media, odds are good that they won’t think to return to your site. Your SEO may bring them to your blog the first time, but it may not bring them back. Keep this in mind as you consider and implement these strategies.

Want more detail on mastering Yoast and SEO? Head over to the Yoast Definitive Guide to Better Ranking.

Remove Unused CSS to Reduce the Size of your Stylesheets

2014-08-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

The CSS files of your website may have several redundant rules that are no longer used by any element on the web pages. For instance, you may have added a site search box on your website and associated styles went into the stylesheet. Later, if you decide to remove that search box, the styles may continue to exist in your CSS though they aren’t being used anywhere.

These unused entries in your CSS files increase the page load time of your website and also affect the site’s performance as the browser has to do extra work parsing all the extra rules. And even if the impact on performance is minimal, it would make your task of maintaining CSS easier if the files are kept clean and well-structured.

Opera and the Firefox browser have a popular add-on called Dust Me that scans your current web page and lists all the unused CSS rules that are defined in the stylesheet but not used on the page. Google Chrome users however do not need to install any add-ons as the Developer Tools built inside the Google browser itself offer this option.

Remove Unused CSS from the Stylesheet

Here’s how you can easily find all the unused selectors in your CSS files in Google Chrome:

Open any page of your website inside Google Chrome and then launch the Dev Tools available under File -> Tools -> Developers Tools.
Click the Audits tab inside Dev Tools and select the “Web Page Performance” and “Reload Page and Audit on Load” options. Now click the “Run” button to begin the CSS audit process.
On the results page, expand the “Remove Unused CSS Rules” group and select the CSS file(s) that are linked from your site. You may ignore the CSS files added by social plugins and widgets since you do not have control over them.

Here you will get a sorted list of all styles that are defined in the CSS file but not used anywhere on the current page.

You can copy and save the results in a text file and repeat the steps for couple of other pages on your site. This is essential as not all selectors may be used on all pages. You can find the count of various selectors in the combined resultset, maybe using Google Sheets, and the selectors with the highest count can probably be “safely” removed.

How To Copy From Right Click Disabled Websites

2014-08-20T00:11:00.001-07:00

Copy-pasting some body else work is very common. Though, very few people actually give the credit link or mention about the source. Specially, in Blogging people copy each other content and increase plagiarism. Apart from all Auto-bloggging tool, most common form of copying a page is by selecting text > mouse right-click and copy the content. Though in WordPress, we can easily disable this by using disable right click WordPress plugin. Though according to me right click gives a bad user experience and for Bloggers, you can always fight such copy-paste blogger using Google DMCA.

Now for me, when I have to write a tutorial, I take information from the pages on Internet and give proper credentials with link in the post. Now, the problem which I have faced recently is many of these sites have right click disabled and it’s pain to copy from these sites normally. So, here I have compiled a series of possible ways to copy content from those pages. FYI, many websites disable CTRL +C options to ensure better security from hackers and malicious sites.

Ways to copy text from Right click Disabled pages:

Most of the bloggers and webmasters uses JavaScript technique to disable right-click, to prevent scrapers sites from stealing their content.

Many times we often come to websites where we found contents useful like how-to , Guides and we copy it into worded or notepad. Generally we select some text and then right click to copy. But on Protected sites a message box appears saying “Right-Click on this site is disabled. Hold Ctrl key and click on link to open in new tab”

But there are numerous way through one can copy contents from Right Click protected sites

By disabling browser JavaScript in browser
Using Proxy Sites
By Using the source code of the site

Disabling JavaScript in Browsers [Google Chrome]

In Chrome browser, you can quickly disable JavaScript by going to settings. See the screenshot for better explanation:

Goto Setting >> UnderHood Tab >> Content Settings
or enter chrome://settings/content
Then Select Do not allow any site to run JavaScript

Similarly if you are using Firefox, you can remove the tick from “Enable JavaScript” option.

Using Proxy Sites

There are many proxy sites, which let you disable JS while browsing. All you need to use those proxy sites, which offer such features and you can quickly use right-click on click disabled sites.

Through Viewing Source Code

If you have to copy the specific text content and you can take care of HTML tags, you can use browser view source options. All the major browser give an option to source of the page, which you can access directly using the format below or by right click. Since, right click is out of question here, we will simply open chrome browser and type: view-source: before the post URl Like

view-source: http://createownblogs.blogspot.com

And find the paragraph or text you want to copy and then paste it into any text editor.

Well, using this trick ethically or unethically is in user hand but for a normal blogger like me and you, this tip will certainly help. Do you use any other plugin or add-on to copy content of pages with right click disabled? Do you also see this feature as bad user experience?

Best Professional Blogging Resources

2014-08-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

When we start blogging and plan to take it to next level, first of all we look out for best set of tools and software’s to make our work easier. The problem is there are so many options for everything and it’s hard to decide which one to select. All tools are good in a way or other, and most of them have different features. When I pick any professional blogging tool, I make sure that it’s full of features and is value for money. In last 5 years I have tried various blogging tools, for example I started with Windows live writer as my first editor, and now I use WordPress default dashboard for writing because it’s evolved so much. I started with All in one SEO plugin for SEO optimisation, but now I use Thesis theme + Easy WP SEO combination to make my blog rank higher.

The point is picking that right set of tool, and this is why I maintain this page. This page consists of those blogging tools which I personally use and recommend. Some of the tools that I have tried and works great, they are also part of it. I keep updating this page when ever I find something brilliant and remarkable. So if you are a regular visitor of ShoutMeLoud, I suggest you to keep checking this page every month to discover new tools.

If you have questions for any specific tool which is not listed here, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] or tweet me at @denharsh and ask about it. So, lets get started with recommended blogging toolset:

Blogging platform:

Self hosted WordPress Platform (WordPress.org)

Blogging furniture or physical tools:

Herman Miller chair for pro-bloggers.
Yeti blue mic for voice recording and podcasting.
Macbook Air laptop for great performance and mobility.

Email software:

Feedburner (Free)
Aweber (Paid) 1st month is for $1 only.

Web-hosting:

Bluehost (Shared hosting great for new WordPress blog) (Discount coupon added into link)
WPEngine (Managed WordPress hosting)
Knownhost (managed VPS)
Linode (Unmanaged VPS)

Domain Names:

ShoutMyDomain (Accept payment via Paypal)
Godaddy (Use this link to get domain name for $2.95)

WordPress Themes:

Thesis Theme (This is the framework I use at ShoutMeLoud)
Genesis Theme ( Best alternative to thesis theme. Grab the pro-package which give access to all the current and future skins)
Codelight : Beautiful modern theme for tech-blogs.

Social Media Management Tool:

Hootsuite (Supports Google plus too) : Perfect for managing all social profile from one place.
Bufferapp : Perfect for keeping your social-media profile updated.
PostPlanner : Best Facebook tool to manage your pages.

Image Capturing tool:

SnagIt! : Best tool for screen-capture and image editing.
Image Optim : For Image compression on Mac.

Screencast software:

Camtasia (This is the video recording tool I use for creating videos for my Youtube channel. You can check my video blog here)

SEO tools:

SEMRUSH (This is the only tool I use for Keyword research and discovery.
Ahrefs for Backlink

Monetization Program:

Google AdSense : Best contextual ad network.
Viglink : Best way to monetize your outbound links.
BuySellAds : For quality direct advertisement.
Infolinks : For in-text ads. Good for tech niche.

CDN:

MAXCDN : Very cheap and easy to configure with WordPress.

WordPress Pro plugins:

EasyWPSEO: Best plugin for Keyword optimization and works perfectly with WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Curationtools for Curation WordPress theme and plugin to quickly curate content.

Affiliate network:

Proxies:

Buyproxies for your desktop Keyword research or other SEO tools.

Design:

48 Hours logo for logo designing.

Google AdWord Campaigns Tab Introduced in Blogger

2014-08-16T22:44:00.002-07:00

Google is trying to integrate it's wide range of services to Blogger; allowing millions of blogger user to easily implement it's services to their blogs. And latest update on that matter is, Google have just made changes to the Blogger dashboard and therefore connecting AdWords with Blogger.On the first two days of July/2014; like me many Blogger users have noticed that their Blogger blog's dashboard now have a "Campaigns" tab for AdWords.

Google has integrated Adsense and Google Plus to Blogger and now Adwords. Though Adsense was integrated a long time ago, Google Plus connectivity is fairly new. 90% to 95% of Google's revenue comes from Advertising. And, AdWords is the most greatest "Weapon of Mass Earnings" in the arsenal of Google.

So; what are the reason behind this new change from Google and Blogger. And how it will help the Blogger and Google users.

More Revenue for Google

Google's revenue was over $15.4 billion in the first quarter of 2014. And the company's revenue is increasing in each quarter substantially in both USA and International territory. The reason being; improving the products, importantly for mobile.

We got lots of product improvements done, especially on mobile. I'm also excited with progress on our emerging businesses.
Larry Page, CEO of Google.

This change also will be fruitful for Google because. As blogger has a huge number of users and thus, more of blogs. And most of them are serious about their blog's branding and success. So this update clearly will have a great impact on the Blogger user.

Another Great Tool for Blogger Blogs

Many wants to take their blog to the next level and this AdWords tool inside blogger dashboard will help that cause. This will allow you to see the results of you AdWords campaigns in your dashboard also a direct view of the impact of your blog's stats because of it. This helps you optimize your campaign properly to meet your budget and needs.

Improving the Image of Blogger as Blogging Platform

This new change will definitely increase the use of Blogger as a blogging platform. Despite of its easy nature of use and don't forget it's free of charge; Blogger in certain issue do fail to attract professionals to use it for blogging. Many choose other platforms like Wordpress, Tumblr, Livejournal. But this certainly a plus point for Blogger. (As if Adsense Integration was not enough!!)

Yet Another Reason for using Google for you Online Life

The Oxford dictionary defines the world Google as-"Search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet using the search engine Google". Somebody in the Google's boardroom meetings saw this and they vow to change this by taking Google from just a "search engine" to a "human necessity"(almost). All the products of Google (Android, Blogger, Search engine, Youtube, Gmail, Google Plus, AdWords, Adsense,..... and that car that runs without a human driver) had a great impact on human life worldwide. And Google every day trying to find new ways to connect these products and invent new ones to enrich our life and making huge bucks in the process.

Clearly it is a new attempt by Google to integrate and connect its products in ways that the users and customers can use for their own interest. Now let's see how to use this.

How to Use AdWords for Blogger Blogs

Click on "Start now" to connect and setup an AdWord Campaign for your blog.
You will be redirected to AdWord website. If you are new you have to sign up or if have an AdWord account already you can use that.
After signing up or signing in use tools to create your Campaigne and fill the billing information. And start running it.

That it you have now AdWords Campaigns for your Blogger blog. Do share your views on this recent addition of Blogger in the comment's section.

How to Add Lazy Load in Blogger Blogs

2014-08-16T21:24:00.004-07:00

For webmasters and web developers who wants their website's and blog's to load faster in browsers Lazy Load is well known name. There are many easy solutions for to implement Lazy Load in your website if you are using WordPress or any other system. Except for us Blogger users there's no plugin or simple code to use Lazy Load. However with a little outside of the box thinking Lazy Load can be used in Blogger.

In this post we are going use a jQuery lazy load solution that is fast and easy to implement in the Blogger blog. Not only the post images, every images of every widget/gadget or section of your blog can be lazy loaded and it will cause absolutely no problem to your blog's functionality, design, content, SEO, or whatever you are worried about.

Lazy load is a super pro-feature that will make you blogger blog awesome but it will take some focused hard work too implement this.

What is lazy Load?

Lazy loading is a design pattern commonly used in computer programming. Its purpose is to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed. In other words load things when they are needed not loading them all at the sometime. Lazy Load in websites loads objects (i.e.. image, iframe) only if any only that is in the user's browser viewpoint size is at that time. Instead of loading all the elements at once load then in need to load basis.

Why Should You Use Lazy Load in Your Blogger Blog

Many will ask why use this but the question should be why not. Our website's and blog's are no longer just a webpage with some text and one or two pictures. They are now filled with images, embedded elements, social media buttons and badges, advertisements, slides, and many other must use items. In spite of loading all at once, load them only when the object comes to the viewpoint of the user's viewpoint.

Lazy load is truly for the users or visitors benefit. Throwing all the data of the website at once to browser to load may cause the impression that the website is going to take forever to load. This could lead to a performance hit.

These tips in this post are for anybody who is using Google's Blogger platform; especially for:-

The brilliant custom Blogger template makers. They spend very long time to develop the beautiful looking and functional blogger templates. And many of them release the templates for free of charge. Some of them try sale the template in places like freelancer.com, themeforest.

Unfortunately many of the custom made templates fails in speed test. They are awesome and but sometime they take an awful long time to load.

Adding lazy load to you blogger template means a new super professional features to you Blogger template which attract more free-users downloads and/or buyer.

The professional or want to be professional blog's hosted in blogger.
Blog's which uses a lot of image everywhere.
Blogger's who care about their visitors comfort and bandwidth.
If you are tired of the slowness of you blogger blog.
Anybody who is using blogger for blogging, learning, earning.

Adding Lazy Load in blogger requires making serious change in your blogger blog's template and entire template. Before making any changes you must backup you blogger template.

Enough chit chat; in this post we are going to try to use lazy load for images and other elements in our Blogger/Blogspot blog.

Add jQuery in Blogger

First we will need to use jQuery in our blog. All most all the custom made blogger templates available usesjQuery as it helps to add many pro elements in the blogger blog like; related posts, pagination, next and previous post and much more. If you are using the default templates given by blogger then your blog probably do not use jQuery in you blog. Check if you are already using jQuery in your blog.

For this particular solution you will need jQuery version 1.7 or above. I am going to use jQuery v1.11.1 for this.

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

If you are not using the jQuery then;

Go to Blogger dashboard > template > click 'Edit HTML'.
Find </body> and paste the jQuery code just before it. Please note; I am assuming that you are not using jQuery and any other elements that uses jQuery. So I am calling it as late as possible but you can put this in any part of the blog. Many use this just above </head>.
Save template.

The jQuery should be used before any other element and script that uses jQuery.

Add Lazy Load codes in Blogger

This particular solution is given by ressio.in which one of the popular lazy load solution. It is a fast and mobile-oriented jQuery plugin for lazy loading of images/videos/iframes with build-in support ofjQueryMobile framework. Works find in in IE 6-11, Chrome 1-31, Firefox 1.5-27.0, Safari 3-7, Opera 10.6-18.0, iOS 5-7, Android 2.3-4.4, Amazon Kindle Fire 2 and HD 8.9, Opera Mini 7.

We are going to try and implement this in the blogger:-

Again go to the template editor of Blogger.
Find </body>.
Paste the following JavaScript code just before it and click 'Save template'

<script type='text/javascript'>//<![CDATA[
/*! Lazy Load XT | (C)2014 RESS.io | MIT License
 * BLOGGER Implementation by Muntasir Minhaz http://www.techinfoknow.com/2014/08/lazy-load-blogger.html */
(function($,window,document,undefined){var lazyLoadXT='lazyLoadXT',dataLazied='lazied',load_error='load error',classLazyHidden='lazy-hidden',docElement=document.documentElement||document.body,forceLoad=(window.onscroll===undefined||!!window.operamini||!docElement.getBoundingClientRect),options={autoInit:true,selector:'img[data-src]',blankImage:'data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7',throttle:99,forceLoad:forceLoad,loadEvent:'pageshow',updateEvent:'load orientationchange resize scroll touchmove focus',forceEvent:'',oninit:{removeClass:'lazy'},onshow:{addClass:classLazyHidden},onload:{removeClass:classLazyHidden,addClass:'lazy-loaded'},onerror:{removeClass:classLazyHidden},checkDuplicates:true},elementOptions={srcAttr:'data-src',edgeX:0,edgeY:0,visibleOnly:true},$window=$(window),$isFunction=$.isFunction,$extend=$.extend,$data=$.data||function(el,name){return $(el).data(name)},$contains=$.contains||function(parent,el){while(el=el.parentNode){if(el===parent){return true}}return false},elements=[],topLazy=0,waitingMode=0;$[lazyLoadXT]=$extend(options,elementOptions,$[lazyLoadXT]);function getOrDef(obj,prop){return obj[prop]===undefined?options[prop]:obj[prop]}function scrollTop(){var scroll=window.pageYOffset;return(scroll===undefined)?docElement.scrollTop:scroll}$.fn[lazyLoadXT]=function(overrides){overrides=overrides||{};var blankImage=getOrDef(overrides,'blankImage'),checkDuplicates=getOrDef(overrides,'checkDuplicates'),scrollContainer=getOrDef(overrides,'scrollContainer'),elementOptionsOverrides={},prop;$(scrollContainer).on('scroll',queueCheckLazyElements);for(prop in elementOptions){elementOptionsOverrides[prop]=getOrDef(overrides,prop)}return this.each(function(index,el){if(el===window){$(options.selector).lazyLoadXT(overrides)}else{if(checkDuplicates&&$data(el,dataLazied)){return}var $el=$(el).data(dataLazied,1);if(blankImage&&el.tagName==='IMG'&&!el.src){el.src=blankImage}$el[lazyLoadXT]=$extend({},elementOptionsOverrides);triggerEvent('init',$el);elements.push($el)}})};function triggerEvent(event,$el){var handler=options['on'+event];if(handler){if($isFunction(handler)){handler.call($el[0])}else{if(handler.addClass){$el.addClass(handler.addClass)}if(handler.removeClass){$el.removeClass(handler.removeClass)}}}$el.trigger('lazy'+event,[$el]);queueCheckLazyElements()}function triggerLoadOrError(e){triggerEvent(e.type,$(this).off(load_error,triggerLoadOrError))}function checkLazyElements(force){if(!elements.length){return}force=force||options.forceLoad;topLazy=Infinity;var viewportTop=scrollTop(),viewportHeight=window.innerHeight||docElement.clientHeight,viewportWidth=window.innerWidth||docElement.clientWidth,i,length;for(i=0,length=elements.length;i-edgeY&&elPos.left<=viewportWidth+edgeX&&elPos.right>-edgeX)}if(visible){triggerEvent('show',$el);var srcAttr=objData.srcAttr,src=$isFunction(srcAttr)?srcAttr($el):el.getAttribute(srcAttr);if(src){$el.on(load_error,triggerLoadOrError);el.src=src}removeNode=true}else{if(topEdge1){waitingMode=1;checkLazyElements();setTimeout(timeoutLazyElements,options.throttle)}else{waitingMode=0}}function queueCheckLazyElements(e){if(!elements.length){return}if(e&&e.type==='scroll'&&e.currentTarget===window){if(topLazy>=scrollTop()){return}}if(!waitingMode){setTimeout(timeoutLazyElements,0)}waitingMode=2}function initLazyElements(){$window.lazyLoadXT()}function forceLoadAll(){checkLazyElements(true)}$(document).ready(function(){triggerEvent('start',$window);$window.on(options.loadEvent,initLazyElements).on(options.updateEvent,queueCheckLazyElements).on(options.forceEvent,forceLoadAll);$(document).on(options.updateEvent,queueCheckLazyElements);if(options.autoInit){initLazyElements()}})})(window.jQuery||window.Zepto||window.$,window,document);(function($){var options=$.lazyLoadXT;options.selector+=',video,iframe[data-src]';options.videoPoster='data-poster';$(document).on('lazyshow','video',function(e,$el){var srcAttr=$el.lazyLoadXT.srcAttr,isFuncSrcAttr=$.isFunction(srcAttr);$el.attr('poster',$el.attr(options.videoPoster)).children('source,track').each(function(index,el){var $child=$(el);$child.attr('src',isFuncSrcAttr?srcAttr($child):$child.attr(srcAttr))});this.load()})})(window.jQuery||window.Zepto||window.$);
//]]></script>

Please remember that the jQuery should be above of this code always. Do not remove the license comment at top of the code. The coder tried hard to build this and I tried had to run this in Blogger.

You have just added the codes of Lazy Load but still the main work is remaining.

Basic Setting of Lazy load: Required Changes for Image and iframe Tags

Image tags in html looks like this;

<img src='bloggerimage.png' width='200px' height='200px' title='maybe a title text' alt='maybe a alt text'/>

Now for lazy loading we need to change the only src='...' to data-src='...'; like this:

<img class='lazy' data-src='bloggerimage.png' width='200px' height='200px' title='maybe a title text' alt='maybe a alt text'/>

Now the image will be lazy loaded. As you see here; src='...' to data-src='...' and aclass='lazy' is added and both is a must.

It is wise to add a noscript tag for the images in case users wonder in you website disabling the JavaScripts:-

<img class='lazy' data-src='bloggerimage.png' width='200px' height='200px' title='maybe a title text' alt='maybe a alt text'/>
<noscript>
<img src='bloggerimage.png' width='200px' height='200px' title='maybe a title text' alt='maybe a alt text'/>
</noscript>

Now image will load even if the JavaScript is disabled. Inside the noscript tag do not change src="..." todata-src="..." and do not add class="lazy".

For iframe add use data-src="...." instead of sre="..." in the tag; like this:-

<iframe data-src="//www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ftechinfoknow%2F&amp;width=280&amp;height=62&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=false&amp;header=true&amp;stream=false&amp;show_border=true&amp;appId=282574525118582" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:280px; height:62px;" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>

YouTube videos are also can be emmeded using iframe and they can be lazy loaded by doing the same simple thing:-

<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="lazy" data-src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pcnCF1brqWs&rel=0" frameborder="0" height="480" width="640"></iframe>

Now that's you have an idea how lazy load for images and iframes works. Let's try to implement it in blogger's different parts.

Lazy Load the Post Images in Post Pages of Blogger

Normally images after uploading an image in post editor it will look like this in HTML of post editor:-

<a herf='bloggerimage.png.jpg'>
<img title='maybe a title text' class="lazy-loaded" height="600" width="800" src="bloggerimage.png.jpg" alt="maybe a alt text"></a>

Change this to:-

<a herf='bloggerimage.png.jpg'>
<img class="lazy" title='maybe a title text' height="600" width="800" data-src="bloggerimage.png.jpg" alt="maybe a alt text">
<noscript>
<img title='maybe a title text' height="600" width="800" src="bloggerimage.png.jpg" alt="maybe a alt text">
</noscript>
</a>

Remove the <a> tag completely if you do not want the images to be clickable. As mentioned right above; thesrc="..." will become data-src="...", class="lazy" will be added and for noscript tag there will be no change.

If you have done all the above that means the in the post image will be lazy loaded in the post pages.

Lazy Load Images in the Default gadgets/ widgets, Snippet Images and Other Parts of Blogger Blog

This part is very tricky and requires making huge changes in you blog's template. You need not only to lazy load images of widgets or gadgets; such as; Popular Posts, Author info and bio, search results from the default blogger search box and more. Also require to add lazy load to the images in the post summaries (read more post summaries) of the home and index pages. These need to be updates from the template and they are very tricky.

However we are going to add lazy load value to all of them. First let's know a little basic thing. Go to you template and just look for the <img (image tag) in you blogger template. Almost in ever one you will find something like this;

<img expr:src='data:something.something' ..... />

The <img tags will come with expr:src='' instead of src=''. It's the same actually; it's basically telling that get the image from something.something. Now inside of the something.somethingpart you will find thing like these;

data:sourceUrl : Load the header image/blog's logo. I suggest you to leave the header image along as it's the first think your blog that loads. So there's no need to lazy load this.
data:blog.postImageUrl : Loads the first image of your blog.
data:post.thumbnail : Loads the thumbnails; the 72x72 sized cropped images of your blog posts.
data:post.thumbnailUrl : Also loads the thumbnails.
data:post.authorPhoto.url : Loads the profile picture from your blogger or Google plus account.
And more like this.

Now to lazy load them all we need to do in something like this;

<img class='lazy' expr:data-src='data:something.something' ..... />

As you see I just change it to expr:data-src='data:something.something'. Adding the data-src='' that is required for lazy loading. Do not worry this will work perfectly. Also added theclass='lazy' to. I do not think the <img tags you will come across will have any class attribute before adding it, unless you or the template designer added it. Also you may want to add a noscript tag for the image too.

<img expr:data-src='data:something.something' ..... />
<noscript>
<img expr:src='data:something.something' ..... />
</noscript>

As you see it's the same principle. Now let's see the example below for changes in the popular posts widget images.

If you are using the blogger's default popular posts and you show images with them then;
In the blogger template editor Look for <b:widget id='PopularPosts1' locked='false' title='Popular Posts' type='PopularPosts'> or use the 'Jump to widget' button on it to go to the popular posts.
Look for this <div class='item-thumbnail-only'> inside it
Inside that you will find a <img tag like this;

<img alt='data:post.title' border='0' expr:src='data:post.thumbnail' expr:height='data:thumbnailSize' expr:width='data:thumbnailSize'/>

Just change the expr:src='data:post.thumbnail' to expr:data-src='data:post.thumbnail' and add the class='lazy'. Also are a noscript tag along like this;

<img alt='data:post.title' border='0' class='lazy' expr:data-src='data:post.thumbnail' expr:height='data:thumbnailSize' expr:width='data:thumbnailSize'/><noscript><img alt='data:post.title' border='0' expr:height='data:thumbnailSize' expr:src='data:post.thumbnail' expr:width='data:thumbnailSize'/></noscript>

After that save you template and you will see the lazy load working just fine and the images also appear when JavaScript loading is turned oof in the browser.

I think this example help you to understand the point. Just find expr=src='' in an <img tag and make necessary changes to it. It's not that complicated as its sound. And these changes will not cause and problem to your blogger template, blog's design and in loading the blog.

Lazy Load for Images of Auto Generated Widget or Gadgets via JavaScripts of Blogger

New custom made templates are getting more and more complex for the average user and most of them come with little or no instruction to edit. That makes it harder to implement Lazy Load in blogger. But still we can use lazy load for images in other parts of blogger. It will be difficult than before but we can still do it.

It will be tricky to use Lazy Load in the auto generated gadget/widgets by JavaScript for an average Blogger user. Most custom made blogger blog's use them. Widgets or gadgets like related post, features posts, label wise posts, and more like then are generated by JavaScript and most of them requires jQuery. This means one part of the job is done; adding jQuery to blog. These gadgets generates post link and details with images which are sometimes unavoidable for providing a better user experience to visitors.

Despite this you can easily implement lazy load for images generated by these auto generated widgets. Let's see the following example:-

<!-- label wise recent post -->
<script defer='defer' type='text/javascript'>
hposts=5;imgr = new Array();showRandomImg = true;aBold = true;summaryTitle = 250;
function showhomeposts(json) {j = (showRandomImg) ? Math.floor((imgr.length+1)*Math.random()) : 0;img  = new Array();for (var i = 0; i < 15; i++) {var entry = json.feed.entry[i];var posttitle = entry.title.$t;var pcm;var posturl;if (i == json.feed.entry.length) break;for (var k = 0; k < entry.link.length; k++) {if (entry.link[k].rel == 'alternate') {posturl = entry.link[k].href;break;}}
var thumburl;try{thumburl=entry.media$thumbnail.url;}catch(error) {s=entry.content.$t;a=s.indexOf("<img");b=s.indexOf("src=\"",a);c=s.indexOf("\"",b+5);d=s.substr(b+5,c-b-5);if((a!=-1)&&(b!=-1)&&(c!=-1)&&(d!="")){thumburl=d;}else thumburl='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw_khBMUes7wVdVzpUrVruPipbnC1ZK8CO85-rci1magIqhIgEt7_PxYoThdkpmxPvCiVS2ei7Q6KL6sQX2XYCDyxjBCgfhv6WLDVRB9-Bhp6zAzksQ-GkKcsX4-zaeNqX0qmF5xpIlkA/w200/picture_not_available.png';}if (i==0) {

var trtd = '<a title="'+posttitle+'" alt="'+posttitle+'" href="'+posturl+'"><div id="plw" class="plw"><div class="entry"><div class="feature-image"><img class="wimage" src="'+thumburl+'" title="'+posttitle+'" alt="'+posttitle+'"><h2 class="onetittle" >'+posttitle+'</h2></div></div></div></a>';

document.write(trtd);}
else{var trtd = '<a href="'+posturl+'"><div class="widgeth"><li>'+posttitle+'</li></div></a>';document.write(trtd);}j++;}}
</script>
<!-- Goes in widget content -->
<script type='text/javaScript'>
    document.write( & quot; & lt; script src = \ & quot;
    /feeds/posts /
    default / -/LABEL?max-results="+hposts+"&orderby=published&alt=json-in-script&callback=showhomeposts\"><\/script>");
</script>

On the above example in line-7 find <img class="wimage" src="'+thumburl+'" title="'+posttitle+'" alt="'+posttitle+'">. It indicates the HTML class of the image and its source. Actually the entire line-7 indicates what the HTML of generated gadget will look like.

You will find something similar in your auto generated widgets like this. In most cases there will a line or section in the main JavaScript code where you will find the possible HTML which indicates the structure of the generated widget. It also requires for building CSS styles for them.

Now coming to the line-7 again where we will add the lazy load settings for the images;

Find <img class="wimage" src="'+thumburl+'" title="'+posttitle+'" alt="'+posttitle+'">.
We are going to change the class to or add class="lazy" and change the src="+thumburl+" todata-src="+thumburl+"..
After replacing it will look like this:- <img class="wimage" src="'+thumburl+'" title="'+posttitle+'" alt="'+posttitle+'">.

Done. Now images generated by this gadget will be lazy loaded. For auto generated widgets like related post, recent post, featured or label wise post and others this is what you have to do. Find the HTML setting in the JavaScript and add required thing for lazy load. Unless they are encoded; you will easily find them.

Right now I am using this kind of solution in the related posts section of my blog. Ask the person who have made the blogger template and/or ask the author who have given you the widget code and tutorial. Also I will try to help.

SEO Impact of Lazy Load

Many say that adding a lazy load feature will increase your rank in Google and other search engines. There are others who say it does completely opposite of that because of the empty src attribute in the <img tag of the websites. Both assumptions are somewhat wrong and also right. Actually it's complicated but let’s simplify.

Dose it increase search engine rank?

Remember; you are adding lazy load only for the images, videos and iframes in you website or blog. It stops visitor’s browser to load all the images at once instead the images are loaded only when they come in the view port of the user’s or visitor’s browser. In most cases the lazy load will increase the page speed, or at least reduce the time takes loading all the images in webpage. You might be using lazy load but for other elements in you website it might be still slow to load. Improving the perceived performance of your site for users can really help your rankings.

Google is concerned about page speed it’s old news. If fewer people bounce back to the search results because of performance problems with your site, your rankings will improve. So just adding lazy load will not increase you visits and page views, a fast loading website will; provided that your website is containing original content and on-page SEO is done properly.

Dose it reduce search engine rank?

Lazy load solely do not increase (fast loading webpage dose) and certainly not responsible for decrease in the rank of your site. I have not found any examples where the website’s rank went down because of lazy load.

Only slight problem is that Google will not be able to index your images for image search but there’s remedy for that too. There are some easy technical fixes such as:

Use <noscript> tags that show the images for users that don't have JavaScript enabled and search engine bots. As you noticed I have incoraged this in the whole post.

This is a better solution; link to your images.

<a href="/imageblogger.png "><img data-src="/imageblogger.png"…..></a>

It doesn't seem to matter to image search whether the image is in the <img src or in the a href. So the above snippet would get the image lazy loaded and the full size image linked will be indexed in image search.

For blogger it's easy as after uploading the post editor shows the images in linked form. Also by resizing the Google photos or picasa images you can load a smaller sized image in the blog and the original sized image will be indexed.

How Fast the Lazy Load Will Make a Blogger Blog

Lazy load will make you blog faster than before most certainly. But it's not the only factor to truly making your blog loading fast. Instead of lading all the images of a blog pages from top to bottom at once; Lazy Load will load you images one by one as visitors scroll down top to bottom. Not only to the destop viewer also to the mobile viewers too.

Most mobile devises run on a low-speed internet connection and also they have problems loading websites that contains large dates; especially the images. Lazy Load will help you mobile viewer to load you blog smoothly.

Lazy Load You can also use lazy load for iframe items, like Facebook like box and button, YouTube video. No matter how much codes you have in your blogger blog or website, images are the ones that takes most of the bandwidth and you should optimize their loading by lazy load.

Demos of Using Lazy Load in Blogger Blogs

There are three domes we made for you.

Demo 1: For a custom made blogger blog template.
Demo 2: For a default blogger blog template.

The process of implementing Lazy load is same for both default templates and custom made templates.

Demo 3: This website techinfoknow.com is hosted in blogger and using lazy load proudly. Rome around the blog to see its beauty.

Suggestion and CSS codes for Beautifying the Use Lazy Load

I suggest you that:-

Only after completely writing a new post, implement these changes for lazy loading images.
Copy the entire post's HTML from the post editor and save it in a notepad. Then make the changes in the codes. Update/publish you post and see if they are working.
If you have lot of post in your blog then I suggest you do this from newer to older posts.
Do not rush into making these changes.
If your blog has too many posts do not rush in changing them. Do this changes one post at a time. Check if it's working properly even in noscript. Then movie to another post.

Use these CSS codes to beautify and avoid problems in Lazy Load.

If you use a responsive template and after uploading an image if you fix the width and height of it in the post editor; then you will need to add this CSS code in your template:-

@media screen and (max-width: 700px)
.post img {
width: auto !important;
height: auto !important;
max-width: 100% !important;}

(max-width: 700px)

<style>

Use the following in your CSS code for a fade-in load effect of images.

.lazy-hidden{opacity:0;background:#038D1A url('https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin2oIay-H1JMRjCsONAeNzfOPX6C0YJd2EK6AOQuD7I_cYiPZKASpg7VjjqOAa_JUdcU3j5owO-hpRzNp8EiqVzkfhGvyDyy5_AjyaqrITThsgLDmcxSVp5yQeKv1llgr2mRr25x-QdyJo/s1600/bs+loading+dot.gif') no-repeat center}
.lazy-loaded {-webkit-transition: opacity 0.4s;-moz-transition: opacity 0.3s;-ms-transition: opacity 0.4s;-o-transition: opacity 0.4s;transition: opacity 0.4s;opacity: 1;}

<style>

Use this code below so that the blog and images do not look wired in noscript mode;

<noscript>
<style>img.lazy{display:none;}</style>
</noscript>

Make changes to these posts according to you Blogger template design.

At the end; I hope the post gives the whole picture about Lazy Load and using it in Blogger blogs. You probably have question regarding this tip even you have great knowledge of blogger templates and codes like HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Do put forward them in the comments box and I will try my best to solve them.

Adsense and SEO Friendly Custom Robots.txt for Blogger Blog

2014-08-16T21:12:00.001-07:00

Robots.txt contains the guidelines or rules for the bot-crawlers about how they will crawl and index your website or blog. Blogger allows to set some very basic SEO settings very easily from the dashboard. One of them is setting a custom robots.txt for your blogger.

When a robot search engine crawler is visiting a page or website, robots.txt is the first thing it looks for is the robots.txt file. As a Blogger user you now have the option to control what the search engine crawlers should follow and index from your website or blog.

Every blogger blog has a default robots.txt but with advanced changes in blogger you can change it according to your needs. In this post, you will know about the default robots.txt of blogger, how to add or edit a custom robots.txt for your blogger blog and some useful examples of robots.txt with an adsense friendly one. So let's get started.

Default Custom Robots.txt of Blogger Blog

Every time you create a blog in blogger a default robots.txt is created and until you change it by the setting is dashboard it remains same.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

It is same for each blog and it is adsense friendly. If this is able to satisfy your SEO need for the blog that you do not require to replace it by adding a custom one in by dashboard settings.

How to Add Custom Robots.txt in your Blogger Blog

Follow these instructions below;

Go to your blogger dashboard > Settings > Search Preferences > Crawling and Indexing.
Click 'Custom robots.txt' > click 'yes'.
Paste you custom robots.txt. (An example is given below)
Click 'Save changes' to save the custom robots.txt.

That's the way to insert or edit custom robots.txt. Now let's see how to write a custom robots.txt for blogger.

A Proper Custom Robots.txt in your Blogger Blog

The following example is a proper robots.txt for your blogger.

# robots.txt of mysite.blogspot.com thanks to techinfoknow.com
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /p/*
Disallow: /view/*
Disallow: /?m=1
Disallow: /?m=0
Disallow: /*?m=1
Disallow: /*?m=0
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

The above example is an adsense friendly custom robots.txt for your blogger. Now we will explain what each line means here and what more you could add to your custom robots.txt.

Tips for Writing a Custom Robots.txt for Blogger Blog

# robots.txt of mysite.blogspot.com thanks to techinfoknow.com
This a comment line. You can add more and this will not affect you sites SEO or robots crawling what so ever. I suggest you to keep this line on if this post is helping you.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow:
These lines are only for the adsense crawler. If you are or want to display adsense ads; this line allows the adsense crawler to visit all the pages of your site as per the adsense guideline. If it is not required you can simply remove them from the robots.txt. Then the adsense crawler will follow the instruction you have set for all the crawlers.
User-agent: *
This is used for all the crawlers (except ones for which a separate rule is set, here the adsense crawler) and all instructions are written below it.
Disallow: /search
This line indicates that any page with /search in the URL will not be crawled and indexed by the crawler. These line is very important for making your blog SEO friendly as it stops search engines to stop indexing label, search query, archive pages. Because they are not a unique page or URL and also to avoiding duplicate content.
Disallow: /p/*
To block robots to crawl the pages for your blog. But if you want your pages to be indexed by crawler then just delete this particular line.
Disallow: /view/*
Stops crawling of the blogger's %%% links. If you are using %%% views then just remove this line and if you are not using it them don't remove the line.
Disallow: /?m=1 Disallow: /?m=0 Disallow: /*?m=1 Disallow: /*?m=0
These lines are here to stop robots crawling of mobile redirect pages. If you do not use them, you might see your blogs links in mobile search results have ?m=1 or ?m=0 with them. They are necessary to avoid the duplicate pages problem. If you are not facing these problems or if you don't need them you can remove them.
Allow: /
After you adder the instructions for restricting crawling, these line tells the robots that other links in these blog are free to crawl and index.
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
These lines basically indicates the links to you blog's site map(s). Replaceyourblogslink.blogspot.com with your blog's URL. If you are using a custom dommain in your blogger blog, then use that URL.

More Expert Tips on Custom Robots.txt in Blogger

Now some additional tips for customizing the robots.txt for your blog.

Prevent a Certain Page from Crawling and Indexing

For preventing a certain page, post or link in your blog all you need to do is to add a new disallow rule afterUser-agent and before Allow: / like this:-

Disallow: /p/secret-page.html
Disallow: /2014/01/secret-post.html

As you see, all you need to is to add the link after the yourbloglink.blogspot.com. Now if you want to stop crawling posts from a particular year add Disallow: /2014/* and posts from a particular month of the year add Disallow: /2014/01/*. As you see you can go nuts according to your needs.

Adding Separate Instruction for a Particular Robot Crawler

If you want to add crawling instructions for a particular robot add this line:-
User-agent : Name of the bot
Then add the Disallow rules and Allow rules respectively. In place of Name of the bot you need to add the particular name(User agent) for your desired robot crawler (List of robot crawler).

Adding More Sitemap

You can add multiple sitemaps in the robots.txt. Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED is default for every blogger blog, but you can add more. For example: Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500; this is for the first 500 post for your blog. You can add more. Here are some useful links to understand blogger sitemaps.

Stop robots to crawl the Entire Blog

Do not want the any robot. Then delete everything and use;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Or stop a particular robot to crawl your blog, then use;

User-agent: Name of the bot
Disallow: /

Check and Analyze your Robot.txt

There are many tools available in the web for checking your robots.txt. But for checking how the google robots (i.e..Adsbot-Google, Mediapartners-Google, Googlebot) will crawl in your blog you should use google-webmaster's tool. For this; go to your website's webmaster dashboard > Crawl > Blocked URLs. Using it you can see how these robots works on your blog according to your specified robots.txt.

That all you need to know about blogger custom robots.txt. Hope information on this post have helped you.

How to Add Custom Robots Header Meta Tags to Blogger

2014-08-16T03:54:00.000-07:00

You can set and edit your blog's robots setting now from the Blogger's dashboard settings. With new advance changes in Blogger dashboard, Blogger blogs have now become SEO friendly. Before that your blog’s indexing and SERP (search engine results page) listing was at the mercy of the search engine crawlers.

Only way you could implement robots tags in your Blogger blog by manually adding Meta tags to the template of the blog. But this didn’t help you as there was no way to add separate robots tags for each page and posts. It was one of the reason Blogger was lacking behind in SEO settings and user friendliness from other blogging platforms.

Now you can set and edit robots tags for the Blogger blog's home page, index pages (i.e. labels, archive pages) and for each individual posts and pages. This gives you complete and proper control over your blog’s SEO. In this post we will see how to:

Robots Meta tags for blogger and their meaning.
How you can add Robots tags your entire Blogger blog.
What you Robots tags should tick/use for each type of page in the Custom robots header tags settings.
Adding/Editing Robots tag for individual Blogger posts and pages.
Checking if the Robots tags are working.

Now that you have an idea whats coming, let's Dig in.

Meaning of Robots Meta Tags for Blogger Blog

Before you set robots tags for your blog you must what each tags means and how they will impact your blog’s Indexing in search engines like Google and Bing. Let’s look at the table below;

Robots Tag	Google	Bing	Meaning and Descripting
All	Yes	No	No restrictions for indexing the page. This is default for all pages. Do not worry if you are not using it.
nofollow	Yes	Yes	Do not follow the links on the page.
noindex	Yes	Yes	Do not show webpage in search results and do not show a "Cached" link in search results.
none	Yes	No	Combination of noindex, nofollow
noarchive	Yes	Yes	Do not show a "Cached" link in search results.
nosnippet	Yes	No	Do not show a snippet in the search results for this page.
noimageindex	Yes	No	Do not index images on this page.
notranslate	Yes	No	In search results, do not offer translation of this page in other languages.
noodp	Yes	Yes	Do not use metadata from the Open Directory project (DMOZ) for titles or snippets shown for this page.
unavailable_after	Yes	no	Do not show this page in search results after the specified date/time. Date/time must be specified in the RFC 850 format. (11 Oct 2014 18:00:00 BST)

Using "All" tag is not essential but not harmful. Crawlers will automatically crawl and index you blog without the header tag "All". It's the other restrictive robots tags you should properly use. As we have an idea about these robots tags, now try to implement them in the blogger.

Adding Robots Tags to Entire Blogger Blog Properly

Now For adding Custom Robots Header Meta Tags to the blogger blog,

Go to your Blogger blog's Dashboard, > Settings > Search preference > Crawlers and Indexing.
Click "Edit" beside "Custom robots header tags".
Tick "Yes" radio button.
Now Set the header tags for "home page", "archive and search page", "default for posts and pages" according to your blog's need.
Click "Save changes".

That's it you have set custom Robots tags for your blog.

What Robots Tags should you Tick/Use for your Blogger Blog

Now question still remains what are tags you should tick in the "Custom robots header tags" setting in blogger. For this you should properly analyze you blog. As you see the "Custom robots header tags" setting in blogger is divided in three parts; "home page", "archive and search page" and "default for posts and pages".

Now take this particular blog for example and try to find what's appropriate for this blog in custom header tags.

Robots Header Tags for Blogger "home page"

You definitely allow search engines to index your blog's home page. However, your home page also is a accumulation of summary of your posts and contains snippet with automatic small sized image. These images might be problem and will be treated as a duplicated item by the crawlers. So, here just tick "noimageindex" for the home page. This will not impact your home page's visibility in the search engine.

Robots Header Tags for Blogger "archive and search page"

This section is for archive and search pages or the label pages of the blog. As you know label pages shows the links and it may contain the summary of your posts in the blog with auto-generated image or your full post depending on your blog's templates and use of jump breaks.

Whatever the case may be you do not want the label pages to be indexed by the search engine. This will reduce your PageRank and SERP position severely and search engines will treat them as auto-generated pages with duplicated content. Google ignores both auto-generated and and duplicate pages in a website/blog. Label pages have both qualities.

So; you want to set "nofollow" and "noindex" as robots tag for the archive and search page or label pages. And as a bonus use "noimageindex" for the same reason as home page.

Robots Header Tags for Blogger "default for posts and pages"

Generally, you want these post and pages to be indexed. So, leave it empty and do not tick any tag here. If you want to different tags for your particular posts and pages; after saving your work in "Custom robots header tags" you can do it from the post/page editor.

Also if your are using meta description for your blog properly then you should tick "noopd" for each category as it prevents search engine to import metadata from Open Directory project (DMOZ).

You must note; these suggestions are made for a typical blogger blog. If your blog very different then you should set the custom robot's tags according to your blog and its content. Use them Properly and it will help increase your search engine visibility and PageRank.

Add Robots Tag for individual Blogger Posts and Pages

After enabling and saving your settings in "Custom robots header tags"; you can now set separate robots tags for each post and page in the Blogger. For this; when you are writing in the post/page editor (creating a new post/page) click the "Custom Robots Tags" on the right under post settings.

After clicking it you will see that "default" option is ticked. It means that whatever you saved in the "Custom robots header tags" for "default for posts and pages" will be implemented.

For making changes of Robots header tags; first untick "default" option and tick the tags you want save your post/page and click publish.

Check if the Custom Robots Tags are Working

You do not have to worry about the "Custom robots header tags" as they will work properly and you do not need to make any changes to the template of the blog or any other settings for that. But I know you have a curious mind and you want to see if your settings are showing and working.

You will not find them in the page-source view of your blog's pages as they are not implemented in the template of the blog. These tags can only found in HTTP header fields as Google accepts robots tags which are directly added to the Headers of the HTML Page. Once you applied the custom robots tags follow these instructions for any Blogger page types.

Go to you blog and view any page.(Home/posts/pages/label-pages)
In major browser; right click on the blog's page and click "Inspect element". This will open the "Developer Tools" in the browser. Also can open it :
For Chrome, go to Menu > Tools > Developer Tools > Networks or keyboard shortcut "CTRL+SHIFT+I".
For Firefox; Menu > Developer > Network or the keyboard shortcut "CTRL+SHIFT+Q".
Click the "Network" tab.
From several columns/items, find the URL of the current page and click it.
You will see two sections on the displayed information "Request Headers" and "Response Headers".
Under "Response Headers"; you will find "X-Robots-Tag" along with you selected robots tags. (Image above)

This proofs that the custom robots header tags are working. Hope Tips in this post helped you to improve your blog's SEO. Don't hesitate to state you problem using the comments section below.

5 Social Media Management Tools to Fit Everyone’s Needs

2014-08-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

When it comes to managing your social media, there are lots of different tools to choose from. Depending on your needs, you could get away with using free tools or pay anywhere from $9.99 to $1,100 monthly for more professional level features. Here are some of the top social media management tools used by marketing professionals to get the most out of your social media marketing campaign. Everyone from personal enterprise users will find something that fits their needs in this list.

TweetDeck

If you just need to manage multiple Twitter account plus your personal Facebook profile, then TweetDeck is a simple, free tool to use. You can download it to your desktop (PC or Mac), use it on the web, or use it as an app in Google Chrome. It allows you to create multiple columns to view your timeline, interactions, mentions, keyword searches, Twitter lists, direct messages, favorites, and other activity. You can also schedule tweets to publish at a later time.

HootSuite

Need something a little more robust? Say hello to HootSuite. HootSuite allows you to manage multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook (profiles & pages), LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, WordPress, and Mixi. If you only need to manage up to five social profiles, you can use it for free, otherwise it is $9.99 a month for an account with unlimited social profiles, Google Analytics integration, and other features. The benefits of HootSuite over TweetDeck is that Pro account holders can have multiple team members manage social profiles, and instead of just columns, you can create tabs with up to 10 columns each which makes organizing streams from multiple social profiles much easier to manage. You can use it on the web or on mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, and Keitai.

Buffer

Looking for a simple solution to keep your social media networks constantly updated? Then Buffer might be a good choice. With Buffer, you can create a custom time schedule for your Twitter, Facebook (profiles & pages), and/or LinkedIn account. Then simply add updates to your accounts using the Buffer dashboard or the Buffer bookmarklet. The updates will be sent out at the next available time slot on your schedule. You can use the account for free to schedule 10 updates for one Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn account, or you can use the $10 per month Awesome Plan which gives you unlimited updates to up to 12 social profiles plus two team members to help you manage your accounts. You can also see basic analytics for your Twitter updates including retweets, clicks, mentions, favorites, and impressions per tweet.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows you to monitor your brand, quickly review your social conversations, publish & schedule updates across multiple networks (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), manage team members, and see your social media results through comprehensive reporting and analytics. You can manage up to 10 social profiles for $9 per month, up to 20 for $39 per month, up to 40 for $59 per month, or unlimited for $899 per month. Use this tool on the web or via mobile apps.

ArgyleSocial

Large businesses, corporations, enterprises, and agencies who need the ultimate social media management solution will want to check out ArgyleSocial. This tool goes beyond just allowing you to publish and schedule updates. You will learn more about your brand’s engagement across your main social networks, get in-depth analytics, measure social ROI, integrate social sharing into your website, and much more. Plans start at $300 and go up to $1,100 per month. Agencies can also look into a white-labeled solution for their clients.

Even More Social Media Management Tools

While the five tools listed above are industry favorites, they are certainly not the only fish in the social media management sea. Here are some additional social media management tools that allow you to manage at least two or more social networks.

Crowdbooster – This tool allow you to manage Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Pricing for one Twitter account & Facebook page is free. Additional accounts can be added for $39 to $99 per month.
Postling – This tools allow you to monitor what people are saying about your business across social media networks including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress, LinkedIn, and YouTube as well as publish to multiple networks. Pricing starts at $5 per month for up to 5 accounts – each additional account is $3 per month.
Seesmic – This tool allows you to publish and schedule posts to multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook (profiles & pages), LinkedIn, and Tumblr. Pricing is free for 10 posts per day on up to 3 accounts, $4.99 per month for 50 posts on up to 10 accounts, or $49.99 per month for unlimited posts to unlimited accounts.

About the author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follower her on Twitter.

How To Write Guest Posts With No Connections or Authority

2014-08-15T09:28:00.001-07:00

Creating the website is by far the easiest part of process. Whether you succeed as a blogger or not depends heavily on your ability to get your blog in front of the right audience. The most brilliant, insightful, and beautiful blog on chocolate written by the world’s leading chocolate expert means absolutely nothing if no chocolate lovers ever find out about it.

Luckily, like anything, marketing is a learn-able skill set. If you ever learned anything (coding, basketball, walking, making noises with your face, etc. ) then you are more than capable of learning how to get your blog in front of the right people.

I eventually did learn to get that site of mine to about a 1 – 2k unique people a day. But it was a frustrating process, that took many months. A very frustrating process that a lot of bloggers face. If you are the kind of person that believes in making this process a little less painful by learning to market your blog as effectively as possible, then this post is for you.

Now, there are many ways to get that traffic without doing SEO or getting into Social Media. It just so happens that one of the best ways to get traffic so is through guest blogging. But whenever I mention this, I always get a few people emailing me and asking me how they can do this if they are just starting out.

“But Mark, I have no connections to bloggers in this niche..”

“How can I do this if I haven’t built up my credibility?”

“No one in my niche even knows who I am yet, why would they let me guest post?”

The truth is you don’t need fame, recognition, or have any connections to be able to land guest posts on popular blogs. You just need to know what you are doing.

1.Google The Social World To Find Rare Opportunities.

The most difficult part of guest blogging is finding the right bloggers. If you find someone who wants a guest post, you really don’t need to be an authority figure to be able to write for them. All you need to do is prove that you’ve written good content before, even if it’s only on your own blog.

There are plenty of bloggers out there that’re looking for guest posts. Instead of spending your time trying to convince people who absolutely don’t want guest posts, go after people who have guest authors frequently.

This is where Topsy comes in.

Topsy is like the Google of the social media world. It looks through Twitter and Google Plus to find what you are looking for. Because fewer people use Topsy to find places to write for than Google, you can land some pretty rare opportunities this way. Use Topsy to look for bloggers in your niche who have tweeted their latest guest post or tweeting the latest guest post on their own blog.

Use it just like Google to search for guest posting opportunities. (I’ll explain this more next) After you search for something like: fitness “guest post”, you can then use the bar on the left to narrow down your results to as recent as you would like.

You can then go on to narrow down the results further to links only clicking onLinks in the sidebar under search.

2.The Quickest Way To Get Guest Posts

To be honest I probably should’ve started with using Google to get guest posts before I mentioned Topsy because learning how to use Google to find guest posting opportunities will help you understand exactly what to search for in Topsy. But I really wanted to start out with something everyone doesn’t always talk about.

Using Google to find blogs to guest post for is straight forward. Google your “keyword” and “Submit a guest post” to look for bloggers who are actively looking to publish guest posts in your niche. The Submit a guest post part should be in quotes, because this makes sure that Google looks for an exact match. So if you are looking to make a guest post about fitness, then your query should look something like this:

Keep in mind that not everyone will use the exact words “Submit a guest post“. You can also look for things like “guest post by” Here are some variations of these to keep in mind:

“Write For us”
“Contribute to our site”
“Add blog post”
“Become an Author”
“Submit a Guest Article”
“Bloggers wanted”
“Guest post guidelines”

Once you find blogs that have had guest posts in the past, send them an outreachemail asking to write for them. These bloggers are much more likely to say yes to a guest post than the ones that have simply never had a guest post before.

Use the Google blog search to narrow down your search results to blogs only. This will reduce the amount of noise and useless links that appear in the search results. Click on more on the Google search and choose blogs.

But what do you do if you are OK with finding guest posting opportunities related more to than one keyword? Do you just do a separate search for each one? No. If they’re related, you can easily condense all those searches into one search and still get relevant results. You do this by using the OR operator.

The OR operator tells Google that you are OK with results containing eitherkeyword. So if your search query is: “submit a guest post” fitness OR fatloss. Google will look for results with either keyword. You can attach a string of keywords to make it look something like this:

If you’re simply looking for any blog that’s in your niche use the ~ operator. This will tell Google to look for all synonyms of the keyword. Just place the operator in front of a general keyword in your niche. Your search query should be: “submit a guest post” ~fitness.

Ann Smarty of ViralContentBuzz has a much more detailed post on how to combine these operators with even more operators to get exactly what you are looking for from Google.

3.Use Services That Actively Match Guest Bloggers With Blogs

There are a few services out there that match you up with bloggers looking for guest posts. The people here are actually going out of their way to sign up for a service in hopes of getting someone to guest post for their blog..

It doesn’t get any easier than this.

If you can write a decent post, most people here will accept it in a heartbeat. Let’s take a look at few of my favorites.

1.Blogger LinkUp – Blogger LinkUp is one such service. If you sign up for Blogger LinkUp, you will get an email every Monday, Wednessday, and Friday that has a list of bloggers that are looking for guest posts in different niches. The email will have requests from bloggers that look a little like this:

When you find a blog you would like to guest post for, send them a simple email saying that you saw their offer for a guest post BloggerLinkUp, and you would like to write a guest post on this particular topic. The email should be just 2 – 3 sentences. Most of the time you will get a reply almost immediately.

2. Post Runner – Post Runner is a little different. A case study by Court Tuttle posted on SeoMoz showed that using only 13 posts from post runner, a brand new domain name ranked 2nd for the relatively difficult keyword “650 credit score”. Here’s how Post Runner explains itself:

3. MyBlogGuest – MyBlogGuest is owned by Ann Smarty herself. MyBlogGuest is one of the most well known guest blogging communities out there. Once you sign up, you can either look for blogs to guest post on or try and find bloggers to guest post for you. MyBlogGuest has a large database of bloggers that are looking to do both. You can sort through this database to find exactly what you are looking for. Narrow it down by niche, country and even blog power. It even has a job board where you can get paid to blog for other bloggers.

4.How Not To Get Rejected By The Big Dogs.

Make a list of sites that you’d love to be featured on. What would your ideal places to guest blog be? Once you get a list of 10 – 20 places you would love to write for, you should immediately check to see if any of them are actively looking for guest posts, because if they are then you should approach them first.

A simple way to check this is by Googling site:example.com “guest post”. This will cause Google to search for any mention of “guest post” in the given site.

And for the ones that aren’t accepting guest posts (or just happen to be picky)? This is where the Ladder Method comes in.

The Ladder Method

You know what really gives you credibility? Where you have guest posted before. Say you have written for The Huffington Post or Forbes, chances are most bloggers wouldn’t say no to your request to write for their blog. Ok, that’s great and all but you don’t haven’t written for The Huffington Post, so what do you do? Use the Ladder method to work your way up.

Step 1. Write a post for a B list blog using one of the other methods. Guest posting on this blog gives you some credibility.
Step 2. Email a few blogs about guest posting that are a little more popular than this one and add a link to your previous B list guest post in the email. (Just say something simple like here is one of my previous guest posts and add the link.) This will drastically increase your chances of getting a guest post on this blog.
Step 3. Now take this new link and do the same thing by emailing a blog that is even more popular.
Step 4. Repeat step three until you are writing for the top blogs in your niche (The list of 10 -20 you made in the beginning).

If bloggers aren’t responding to your emails the way you want them to, it’s probably because you are skipping blogs in between. You most likely wrote for a small blog and now you’re trying to directly guest post for the biggest blogs in your niche. Don’t skip blogs. Work your way up. Write for a blog that is only slightly bigger than your previous one.

5.Use Ethan Lyon’s Twitter Tool To Find Guest Posting Opportunities

When people tweet out a post by a guest author they sometimes like to say so in the tweet. People also like to promote their own guest posts on Twitter with a simple “my guest post @”. This means you can use Twitter search to find guest posting opportunities much like you can use Google.

Use this awesome tool created by Ethan Lyon to help you automate the process. Here’s how it works:

You can get the tool here: http://ow.ly/8x9gF. You’ll notice that when you click on this link, the Google doc will be in view only. You need to make a copy by going toFile > Make A Copy in order to use it for yourself.

Use Gmail Like A Marketing Machine

2014-08-15T09:15:00.002-07:00

Marketers spend a lot of time on Gmail. For most of us that means staying on Gmail from the second we get up to the second we sleep. Email is an important tool in any marketer’s arsenal so whether you are a blogger, webmaster, or an entrepreneur using Gmail is a must. Here are five solid ways you can use Gmail like a marketing machine.

If you use Outlook or some other email client, this post isn’t going to be of too much help to you. Sorry about that.

1. Manage Your Gmail Better

If you are sending a lot of emails to potential clients or bloggers for potential guest post opportunities, you understand how difficult it can be to manage all those emails and stay on top of replying to all the right people. There is nothing worse than missing an email from someone who could have been of great help to you. This is where Streak comes in.

Streak makes management of important emails easy by allowing you to not only categorize different emails but also make sub categories for where each email thread is in your process (are you still making the pitch, negotiating, is it a closed deal, etc..). You can even group all the emails from the same person together.

You can also use streak to preset when to send the email. You can write the email whenever you want and send it at the time they are most likely to read it. Write an email and set it to send tomorrow morning exactly at 9:30 AM and you can sleep right through 9:30, wake up at 10:00 and see that it has been sent. Isn’t that enough to make you get Streak? All you have to do is click on the send later button when you are composing an email and choose a timing.

With Streak you also get the option of creating email templates. Like most marketers you probably have to send a lot of emails that are very similar to each other, with only a few minor changes. A perfectly crafted outreach email asking for a guest post for example. You can create a template for this in minutes and save a lot of time not recreating the same message over and over again. This will make sending out reach emails a lot quicker. The only thing you have left to worry about is coming up with great blog post ideas to pitch to bloggers.

Get Streak. It will make your life easier.

2. Use Gmail Faster

If you are not careful, Gmail can suck your time away. It is a great tool to help you procrastinate when you are trying to put things off, but even when you are trying to actually be productive, Gmail can eat up your time. I like to think that I have learned a few life lessons throughout my existence. One of the most important ones being that you should always use time efficiently. Here are a few ways you can save time on Gmail.

Multiple Uploads. I like to include images in my posts, even if I am writing that post as a guest author at someone else’s blog. When I am sending that post, I generally have to attach all the images along with the word document. This used to take a few minutes because I would attach each image one at a time. This is a mistake that you can easily avoid. You can save time by uploading multiple files at once. When you click attach a file and the window pops up, you can simply hold control and click on all the files you want to upload to the email in one fell swoop (multiple images and docs all at once).
Use Gmail Shortcuts. Anyone who is a PC gamer knows that it is faster to do most things with your keyboard than it is to do with your mouse. You save time by using keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse to click on the appropriate button on your screen, and this time adds up fast. You can find the full list of Gmail shortcuts here, but here are the most useful ones: undo: z, reply: r, reply all: a, forward: f, save draft: ctr + s, compose: c.
Make Search Easier. When you get a lot of emails, searching through your archives to find a particular email can be a long process and if it is an especially old email, it can even take hours to find. Usually this happens because most people do not delete any emails and archive everything, so that they never have to lose any email. This is great and all but when you need to go search through your emails to find something, you now have a huge clutter to weed through. Delete emails that you absolutely do not need, especially if it spam. There is no need to archive that.
View more in your inbox. Aren’t you a little annoyed that you have to click next every time you want to see more than 25 messages in your inbox? This just wastes time. Go to your Settings and change the maximum page size in the General tab to 100.

3. Get A Better Understanding Of Your Contacts With Rapportive

You talk to a lot of people and naturally, keeping track of who all these people are, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their deal is, can be difficult. Rapportive does this for you. Every time you are emailing someone or reading an email from someone, Rapportive will display important information about them as well as their recent tweets. You can even attach notes to each of your contacts.

It even gives you the option of connecting with your contact via social media right from your Gmail. Sure, this won’t take the place of any social media management tools but it still a great convenience and just adds to the list of awesome things that Rapportive can do.

4. Undo Sending Stupid Emails

Sometimes you look over an important email a million times before sending it and find no mistakes. You only realize that you had made a horrible mistake in that email seconds after sending it. This is where this very awesome undo-sending email link comes in. It actually allows you to un-send an email for a few seconds after you sent it. (It just doesn’t send it for a few seconds after you click send and just cancels it when you press undo) This new undo button can be an absolute life saver.

Set it up by going to Settings and clicking on Labs.

Scroll down until you find Undo Send, click enable and click Save Changes.

5. Tweak Your Inbox: Show Unread Messages First

Weeding through all your messages to find the ones that are unread just makes you less efficient. You can change this by tweaking your inbox to display unopened messages first. Since all your unread messages now float to the top, it will be hard to miss any important emails. As an added bonus, your inbox will also look a lot cleaner and more organized which will make it much easier for your brain to process what’s going on in your inbox. This will also make you less likely to procrastinate because you won’t be tempted to browse through all the emails that you already opened.

Setting this up is simple. Go to Settings again but click on Inbox this time. Where it says Inbox type, choose unread first.

6. Bonus: Remote Sign Out

You may sometimes have to log into your Gmail from an computer that is not yours. If you end up forgetting to logout from that computer, it could end up coming back to bite you. Luckily, you can logout of all computers from anywhere. If you scroll to the bottom of your Gmail page, you should see a link that says details. Click on details and a window will pop up and if you are logged into any other computers, it should give you the option of logging out of all other computers.

9 Killer Ways To Get Traffic Without SEO Or Social Media

2014-08-15T09:04:00.001-07:00

You want traffic.

You want relevant, targeted traffic that will convert.

Yes, we all know you need to have great content, do SEO and share on Social Media.

But there other viable ways to get traffic.

Here are 9 killer ways you can get traffic without SEO or social media.

1. Find And Pull Method

This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to bring traffic to your blog. All you have to do is find popular blogs in your niche and bring the already existing traffic back to your blog. Sounds easy right? Well if you know how, it kind of is.

For this method to work, you need to find out about relevant posts on high traffic blogs in your niche as soon as they are published. You can solve this problem using Google Alerts, which is a free Google service that sends you emails on new content across the web that may be of interest to you. Set up Google Alerts so that it sends you an email as soon as a popular blogger writes an article very closely related to a post you have previously published (We will get into how to set it up soon).
For the second step go to the post as soon as it is published, actually read it, and write out a relevant and helpful comment after the post but instead of linking your name to your blog’s homepage, link to your post on related content. This way when they click through, they are immediately on a highly relevant page that they are interested in. And because they read your comment, which was useful and unique, they already think of you as an authority.

Here is how you set up Google Alerts. Where it says search query, type in a term related to one of your posts that you want to bring traffic to.

Set results type to blogs. How often to once a day. How many to only the best results.

These settings will make sure that you only get relevant posts from popular blogs. If you don’t mind getting a lot of emails you can even set the How often setting to As-it-happens, which will give you a higher chance of getting there before anyone comments. You can go back and set up as many alerts as you want for as many of your posts as you like.

2. Viral Content Buzz Community

Viral Content Buzz is a place where you can earn points for sharing other people’s content and use those very points to get other people to share your content.

Yes, I realize this post isn’t supposed to have social media related methods for getting traffic, but Viral Content Buzz doesn’t really have to do as much with social media as it has to do with showing your content to a community. There is no crazy social media tool, strategy or trick involved. You simply have to submit your content to the site and it will send traffic your way.

On some level it’s nothing more than a place where competent people from different niches gather to share quality content. Now, if you happen to like something shared by someone, you can help them out and Tweet it or Like it on Facebook. The more you participate in the community and share other people’s content, the more exposure you can get for your content.

Viral Content Buzz thoroughly checks your social media profiles to makes sure that your Facebook and Twitter profiles that you are using to promote other people’s content are real profiles with real followers and plenty of activity. This makes sure that none of the people joining the community are looking to take advantage of it. Because these are real people with real followings that are genuinely sharing your content, you get a lot of visibility and traffic.

Join Viral Content Buzz and submit your best content. Your content will be shared by people that would not have seen your articles otherwise and you will get traffic that is genuinely interested in reading what you have to say.

3. Derek Halpern’s Drafting Technique

This is a technique popularized Derek Halpern of Social Triggers. The drafting technique takes advantage of your competitors slip stream much like Nascar drivers do. What does that mean? Well, in Nascar (as well as bicycling and other racing sports) each competitor tends to stay right behind the one in front so that they have to deal with less air friction. As the first car spends more energy pushing through the air, it creates a slip stream right behind where there is less air density for the next car to push through. This means that the second car has to spend a lot less energy to achieve the same results.

Here is how you use the slip stream to your advantage. The idea is simple. You see your competitors somehow land an article on big sites and get huge coverage. Instead of feeling sad about it, you can use this to your advantage to get coverage for your own business or website as well.

When you see that someone in your niche has gotten a post on a huge site, you learn two things:

This particular site accepts guest posts.
The kind of topics they are looking for in their guest posts.

With this knowledge in hand you can contact the blog or main stream media site and pitch them a similar idea for a guest post you they will be happy to publish. They already published something similar so you know they would be happy to do so again. There is simply less friction. Just make sure it is not actually the same idea and that it is something similar that will add some value to their site.

Find blogs that are authorities in your niche and take a look at their posts that are guest posts. Make a list of similar ideas you can blog about and send them an outreach email pitching them a one or few of those ideas those ideas. Mention the similar posts already published on their site and tell them why you think your post will be just as good and maybe even better.

4. Link To Bloggers In Your Posts

Link to other bloggers in your post. That’s really all there is to it. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is never linking out. Link out to others in your posts and they will take notice of you, most of them will tweet about your post at the very least. Some of them will even link back to you. This is a easy and free way to get traffic. Just don’t forget about your readers and make sure that the links are relevant.

5. Use The Intro Method To Get Massive Forum Traffic

Using Forums to drive traffic is pretty well known. It’s also one of the easiest way to send traffic to your site.

Here is how you use forums to send massive traffic. This method was originally talked by Diggy at ProBlogger in much more detail. Go to a forum you participate in regularly and simply start a new thread mentioning your newest post like Diggy.

Think about it. If you were at your favorite forum and you saw a thread to a link that was actually interesting and full of useful information, wouldn’t you be inclined to check it out? Make sure your title is catchy and if your forum is in your niche and it has a high enough traffic, your results should look something like this:

Some forums have rules against this kind of thing so check the guidelines first. If this seems like something that’s in the grey area for a particular forum, you can start your thread with simply giving out free information or part of your post and end it with saying “you can find more tips on how to get traffic here”. If people liked what you had to say or found it useful, chances are they will check out the link.

6. Do Interviews

Interviews are like video guest posts. Interviewing someone is also a bit like linking to someone except now they are much more likely to share and link to the interview. There are advantages to both being the interviewer and the one getting interviewed.

Why Be Interviewed – Obviously this sends traffic, but more importantly this establishes you as an authority in your niche. Why would anyone waste time interviewing someone who isn’t important? Because you will be seen as an authority, people who come to check out your blog or website will be more likely to stick around and comeback.
Why Interview – If you interview someone and post it on your blog, chances are the person you interviewed is going to share it in every way that he or she can think of and probably even link to you. Interviewing someone who is important makes you seem like a bit of an important figure in your field as well. You become an authority by association. Say for example you saw a post by some random blogger where he interviewed Sir Richard Branson on video. Wouldn’t you suddenly think that this blogger is someone important?

Use HARO to get interviews and be interviewed. HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and is a service that used by news agencies like ABC and FOX. Here is how HARO works.

When you go to HARO, you can sign up as a reporter or a source.

If you sign up as a source, you will get emails with a list of people who are looking to interview experts in different fields. Each interviewer will give a summery as to what they are looking for in their interviewee, which looks something like this:

If you qualify, and would like to be interviewed, you can simply send them an email saying so, and you will almost always get a reply immediately. By using HARO, you may be able to land yourself an interview on a huge mainstream media outlet.

If you sign up as a reporter, you just have to fill out who you are looking to interview in what subject every time you want to do an interview and your request will be there in the next email.

7. Use Your Email Signature.

Let all those emails you send work harder for you. Place a link to your website in your email signature. People are lazy and don’t like to take time to find out what your site is or even bother typing it in the URL bar. So make it really easy for them. Make your site only a click away by placing a link to it after your name in your signature. If you use Gmail, there are plenty of other things you can do to use Gmail like a marketing machine.

This makes a bigger difference than you think. Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think talks about how every action you are asking people to take causes the number of people to go through with it to drop drastically. Why force people to take more actions than necessary?

8. Be A Case Study

Businesses and people always need testimonials saying that their product or service works. Be that testimonial. If you end up being a case study that they showcase on their site, it can end up sending you a good amount of reoccurring traffic as well as establish you as someone of importance. If you try a product or service in your niche and found that it was useful, send them an email saying that you use the product and it did this and that for you. Be detailed in how it helped you.

9. Take Advantage Of Communities like Bloggers.com

Bloggers is a huge community of bloggers from every niche. Participating here will send you the best kind of traffic because everyone here is capable of linking to you. Not only will you directly get traffic to your blog from Bloggers but you will also end up getting traffic from any of these visitors who end up linking to you.

Getting traffic from Bloggers is simple. Create a full profile like and just start exploring. Find people in your niche that interest you and comment and vote on their profiles or blogs. Most of the time they will vote you back and you will end up getting that much more exposure in the community.

Link Building – Competitor Analysis Case Study

2014-08-15T08:49:00.001-07:00

As a webmaster Link Building seems like a very daunting task; with so much misinformation, poor advice and varied personal opinions on the web it’s not hard to see why most people can be confused as to where to start – the most common questions I get asked by clients and friends are:

What are the best types of links to build?
How many links do I need to get to the first page of Google?
Should I use the same keyword anchor text or mix it up with brand terms?

Well all of that is relative…

Invariably my answer starts by asking them more about their competition. Competitor analysis is a very important part of the link building puzzle. By understanding what your competition are doing to hold on to those all important and much sought after search engine results then you too can learn more about the types of links you need, what type of anchor text and generally the volumes of links you might need to rank well.

With so many tools available in the market place and the large amounts of data that can be produced by them it has never been easier to snoop on your competitors. In this post I am going to carry out a competitor analysis for Cash Cow UK, a free to use internet auction site, so you can understand a little more about the processes I use to analyse the link profiles of my clients competitors.

Using the free to use Google Keyword Tool I normally find 50-100 keyword phrases that my client wants to rank well for to get more traffic to their site. I then run a quick Google search to find out who the top 5 ranking pages for those keywords are and make a note of them. (There are some more advanced automated techniques that I use to do this but for now I want to keep it simple)

For the purpose of this case study I am going to just focus on 3 key word phrases:

Online Auction – 60,500 UK Searches per month

Online Car Auction – 8,500 UK Searches per month

Free Online Auction – 1,300 UK Searches per month

Intuitively you would think that eBay would be top for at least 2 of these search terms however they only appear once in these SERP’s and in position 2, this is very common to find when you ask a client to tell you more about their market as they often over state and under state their competition’s online presence.

I have decided to look a little more at the back link profiles of uk.madbid.com, ebay.co.uk, uk.ebid.net and totalbids.co.uk in order to find some quality link opportunities. The two tools I would recommend are SEO Spyglass it’s free to trial and less than $100 for a license or you could try the SEOMoz pro tools again it is free to trial but its $99 a month thereafter, however it provides lots of great data, including Social data and tonnes of great reports.

Below is the output from SEOMoz’s Link Metrics Comparison tool, as you can see there are lots of external links pointing to eBay and ebid however Total Bids who we saw were ranking very highly for Free Online Auction only have 200 external links. So I will probably start here to understand this better.

What we are interested in here is the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA), this is a value calculated by SEOMoz based on the quality of links that are pointing at the page. SEO Spyglass does not have DA and PA but it does give you the Google Page Rank of the linking page and linking root domain which can also be useful to determine good quality links.

Go to Open Site Explorer and input the page you want to analyse; in this case I have input www.totalbids.co.uk

As you can see this page has over 1100 links from over 100 different domains, it has received only 7 Facebook shares and 1 tweet. This looks like quite an easy link profile to investigate to find some great links.

Firstly we want to look at the Anchor Text, this is very easy to do in both OSE and SEO Spyglass:

As you can see a lot of their anchor text is just their brand name there are very few links containing the keyword that they rank well for. I would say over 50% of their links don’t have any mention of Online Auction or Free Online Auction. This means that we are working in a niche where quality counts.

You now want to export the links report into Microsoft Excel by using the Download to CSV function. I normally only export the domains and followed links so that I can see what type of site they are and to determine how easy or difficult it will be to obtain the link. I normally don’t export no follow links as these are often just blog comments and have very little link value.

Now you want to do the same for all of the link profiles of the other competitors and add them to your list. You should now have a master list of several hundred if not thousands of domains to target.

I normally then sort the lists of domains by DA or Page rank and categorise them as one of the following:

Info Site – low quality information site
Education or Government Site – hard to find links
News Site – quality newspaper or news site e.g. Mashable
Article/Press Release
Blog –possible Guest Blogging opportunity or product review
Web Directory – easy to obtain by submitting a link

Then in the same spreadsheet I then put a few notes and actions I have taken e.g. when I sent an email to the webmaster, contact details of the blogger etc.

Advanced Tip: If any of the blogs have a Twitter Account, be sure to make a note of it and write down the number of followers they have and their Klout Score. This will help you determine whether they are a key influencer in their niche and how much effort you should put into getting a link on their site. You can easily find someone’s Klout score by visiting www.klout.com/(username) where (username) is their Twitter username.

Now that you have your list of sites to approach for a link you need to decide what your approach will be. How much time will you spend chasing that elusive link and what can you do to get it.

I normally approach link building with the easy links first I list the site on all the directory sites that I have found and if they are paid directories I will sum up whether or not the quality of the site is worth paying for the link to be added or not. I usually do this by looking at the DA and PA of the pages my link would appear on and whether it would be just as easy to get a free link from another source.

As for the article and press release directories I will submit a few pieces of content to these if they have a good DA but I really don’t value these types of links and I believe the Search Engines have devalued these types of links over time too. However SEO is not just about getting links it’s about getting traffic and brand recognition too so a few press releases/articles now and again never hurt.

If it is a lower value blog or site that I want to target for a back link then I may simply send them a nice email asking for a link adding to their article, in this case their list of eBay alternatives. With this link analysis I also discovered a number of Blogspot, WordPress, Squidoo and other web 2.0 properties. I would consider making some web 2.0 properties myself if I couldn’t persuade the owner to give me a link. For the higher quality news sites and blogs then I will spend time getting to know the blogger or webmaster in order to get a guest post, share an infographic I have created or perhaps get them to review my client’s product. This is where you want to target your most efforts, a link from a few high profile web sites can catapult your site in to the big time so this is where you want to be creative and invest your time.

I hope you found this guide useful and hopefully it’s given you some insight into how easy link building can be by researching your competition.

+Chris Dyson

Are .Edu and .Gov Links Really Worth it?

2014-08-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

Every SEO forum since the dawn of time Google has been debating the power of high authority links such as .Edu or .Gov links. There are literally dozens of articles out there in the great wide web and every few months a different debate begins on how much these links actually effect your rankings.

It’s a common belief in some SEO circles that a link from .Edu or .Gov site is the best type of link you can ever get in order to improve your rankings. This belief comes from the fact it is not easy to obtain control of these domains on the open market as you have to be an educational or government establishment.

So are Google actually giving more or less weighting to certain Top Level Domains (TLD’s) well yes they can, and do look at the case of co.cc domains, but in the case of .Gov or .Edu links they claim not to do so as Googler JohnMustated:

In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get “additional credibility from Google.” Because of that, the whole topic of working especially hard to talk webmasters of these domains into linking to your sites seems a bit problematic…

Some in the world of SEO will scream conspiracy that Google don’t want to let out the secret recipe but then let’s look at these types of links from the proper angle. Google may actually be telling the truth their algorithm may not give these TLD’s a considerably higher weighting than a .com or .co.uk but it is all actually based on Pagerank. Remember that thing Larry Page invented which means links from web pages with lots of links themselves carry more value than those that don’t.

These types of web pages are often well linked to and many have been around for years. So what I am saying is that despite their “perceived” authority due to their offline status as an institue of learning it is actually the quality of the pages that are linking into these sites i.e. Corporate blue chip companies, Major hospitals or large news resources e.g. the Guardian, BBC that make them an authority online not the TLD.

How to get .Edu or .Gov Links?

With the right amount of time, hustle or money you can get a backlink on just about any site you want. Building relationships, investing in the right tools and good content will allow you to get these links easily.

From past experience I have used Broken Link Building on .Gov or .Edu sites, whereby you look for broken links on a resource and inform the webmaster to replace the link with a resource to your own content.

Outreach also works quite well in order to gain .edu links as most universities now provide their students and faculty with blogging platforms and sub domains so it is quite easy to email them relevant content to their blog or studies. If you really wanted to invest a significant amount of time and resources you could look for a piece of research they produced and reference it in a piece of your own content e.g. an infographic and its highly likely that you will obtain a link back as they will naturally want to share this with their peers.

Invite an academic to write an article on your blog or even come and speak to your workforce or at an industry conference you are running, chances are they will link to you as they wish to reference their engagements. As you can see you are only limited by your own imagination as to how you can obtain these types of links but by offering useful resources for Government or Academic webmasters to link to you will have a much higher success rate.

So What is their Value?

If you were to ask me what I look for in a link then, I value backlinks on the number of visitors, neigh, the number of pre-qualified visitors that the link can send me. What I mean by that is if I could get a few hundred visitors to my site from a back link, who are motivated to buy my product or subscribe to my mailing list, I would spend more time and money obtaining these links than just chasing links from Universities and Government sites.

So do Edu or Gov links help get you better rankings, yes but they are no better than any other well linked TLD, and remember after all SEO is not just about rankings!

Google Analytics; Creating Goals For Your Site

2014-08-15T08:25:00.002-07:00

You’ll find your Goal settings in the View column of the Admin screen of Google Analytics.

You’re given two options at the top of the box which will list out all your Goals: +New Goal and Import from Gallery.

If you aren’t sure where to begin with setting Goals and need some inspiration, try Import from Gallery. It will open an overlay with tools to show you different pre-made Goals that were submitted by users and provided by Google.

In the Gallery you’ll be able to filter by category and rating, and sort the results based on rankings. Icons next to the solution titles will tell you what features the solution has. There are multiple things that can be imported, like dashboards, custom reports, and segments. Look for the ones with a flag next to them to review solutions that have Goals.

If you want to create a Goal of your own, click on +New Goal to begin the process. There, you’ll be given a choice between 11 common use case templates, and Custom.

Choosing a template will prefill the name on the second step, and preselect the most appropriate type of action the Goal will be tracking. Selecting Custom will take you to step 2 with nothing preselected or filled in for you.

There are four types of tracking that can be applied to your Goals. You can only track one of theses values per Goal, so each action you want to track will need a Goal of its own.

The four types of values you can specify are:

Destination – A page on your website that a visitor must hit.
Duration – A length of time your visitor’s session must last.
Pages/Screens per session – A number of pages each visitor must view per session.
Event – A visitor must complete an action that results in an Event matching the filter specified.

For this walkthrough, we’ll use the Event value tracking type.

On this website, I have been tracking outbound clicks from the site to the business’s Facebook page as Events (this process was made simple by use of a WordPress Plugin for managing Google Analytics). But I’m also tracking all other outbound clicks, but getting people to visit the Facebook page is the most important of those possible Events.

These outbound click events are labeled this way:

Category – Outbound
Action – domain of the site, in this case www.facebook.com
Label – the actual URL of the page visited, in this case /AdellesCoffeehouse

I have many different kinds of outbound clicks on this site, and a few different Facebook pages linked from this site, so I chose the Label of “/AdellesCoffeehouse” for the criteria this Goal will check for, because it is the most unique and specific item that represents what I’m trying to track.

Next, I leave the Event value as the Goal Value for the conversion. This Event counts each time the link is clicked, which is the count I want to use. If I wanted to assign a specific dollar value, I could click the switch button and enter a dollar amount.

The last option, “Verify this Goal” allows me to check my entries by showing what percent conversion rate I would have based on the last 7 days of data. This tells me that Google Analytics was able to take what I entered as Goal criteria and confirm that there is matching data. When you’re doing this step, do a gut check on whether the conversion rate sounds accurate to you. If it’s very high or very low, you may have set something inaccurately. If it’s 0.0% you have either made an error, or simply don’t have any data yet.

Click the Create Goal button, and you’re done!

Goals will automatically begin collecting data as soon as they’re created, and you can test them immediately by visiting the Real Time tab in your reporting and looking under Conversions. Test your Goal yourself by visiting your site and perform the action you outlined in your Goal with the Real Time Conversions report open in another window where you can see it as you test.

You should always test any new Goals or other big tracking changes you make right away. This allows you to catch potential data errors before too much time elapses, and keeps your Views consistently coherent in the story they tell.

Connect the Dots to Profitable Data: Adding Webmaster Tools, AdSense, and Adwords

2014-08-15T08:23:00.001-07:00

Three major Google products connect to Google Analytics to give you a more holistic view of your online efforts: AdSense, AdWords, and Webmaster Tools.

If you’re an AdSense and/or AdWords user, connecting these accounts will add powerful dimensions, metrics, and reports to determine how AdSense is making you money, and what traffic your PPC spend is bringing you.

Everyone should sign up for and connect Webmaster Tools.

Get Baseline SEO Data Through Webmaster Tools

In the era of Not Provided, pulling Webmaster Tools data in is the best (and basically only) way to see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site, which pages they’re visiting, and how that affects your bottom line.

Click Edit, and you’ll get a new window that will prompt you to sign in again. If you haven’t already added your site to Webmaster Tools, you’ll be prompted to do so, and you’ll need tocomplete the verification process.

You’ll have the ability to choose which Views have access to Webmaster Tools data for the website you’ve associated. Go ahead and associate all current Views with this data to make sure the reports are available regardless of the View you’re working in.

If you create additional Views, you will need to come back to this setting and add them to the list, since GA doesn’t automatically add new profiles to your Webmaster Tools access list; adding new Views won’t require you to verify again, just pull down the menu and check the box next to the View names.

Adding Webmaster Tools unlocks the reporting available underneath the Acquisition section of your reports, giving you data on the keywords that are driving search impressions and clicks that lead to visitors. It will also give you your most popular landing pages, and geographic locations.

The Geographic Locations report can become particularly useful if you’re finding that good portions of your buyers are coming through organic search are from countries that don’t inherently use your primary language.

For example, here we see Brazil is the #2 source for search impressions, yet only received 400 clicks from search, a huge difference from the 18,000 clicks that came from the #1 location. This is likely because Brazil’s primary language is Portuguese.

When looking at popular Brazilian shopping sites, like Walmart, we can also see there is a huge difference in design aesthetic from US based sites.

Brazilian Walmart.com

US Walmart.com

Using a tool like Optimizely, you can easily send visitors from a specific country to a page that’s created for their native language. Telling Google to serve the foreign language page is a little more difficult, but you can find out how to do that here.

Unlike other tools like Demographic data or AdWords linked data, Webmaster Tools data is segregated from your other reports, but it’s the best place to clearly see this valuable keyword information.

Improve Your Site’s Ad Revenue with AdSense Data

If you run AdSense ads on your website, here’s the place to connect your Google Analytics account to AdSense.

You’ll be asked to log into AdSense, and choose a primary Property (i.e. website) and View or Views to use with your AdSense data. Connecting these gives you four additional reports under the Behavior section of GA’s reports, and 8 metrics to use in Segments or Custom Reports.

It’s an opportunity to match your visitor data in a holistic, advanced way with your AdSense data to really fine tune your advertising revenue.

Gain More Power Over Your PPC Spend with AdWords Data

If you are spending money with AdWords, you should absolutely connect Analytics and AdWords. The cross-tool functionality is extremely strong between these two products, and linking them together unlocks major benefits in both tools.

In AdWords, you get:

Access to your Analytics Goals and eCcommerce Transactions to use as conversion metrics
Ability to use Analytics data to build laser-focused Remarketing lists
Additional metrics from Analytics that you can use directly within AdWords reports

In Analytics, you get:

Enhanced and more accurate Multi-channel Funnel data
10 built-in reports powered by your AdWords data that quickly give you actionable information
20 additional dimensions and 12 additional metrics to use in your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports

eCommerce sites in particular will benefit from connecting to AdWords. Merging Analytics eCommerce revenue tracking with AdWords spend tracking means you can create reports in both tools that will show you how to spend your advertising dollars to see real revenue gains. People using AdSense and AdWords will see similar revenue and spend benefits.

Every AdWords user can benefit from linking to Analytics even without using any of the AdWords-centric reports within Analytics through the use of one major feature: Google Analytics Remarketing lists.

Choose from one of four pre-determined or basic Remarketing list types, or create a unique list of your own based on Segments.

It’s possible to create Segments from many facets of your visitor data:

Time on site
Visitors who completed or didn’t complete a goal
Visitors to specific pages or groups of pages
& even combinations or specific orders of these visitor metrics

For example, if you were a retailer specializing in clothing, you could create a segment to remarket to visitors who spent more than 3 minutes on your site, visited the t-shirt section of your site, visited your shopping cart page at least once, but didn’t convert; that series would allow you to use display retargeting through AdWords to encourage engaged visitors to return and complete their purchase.

Making the connection between Analytics and AdWords will require that you have Administrator level access to both your site’s Analytics and AdWords accounts.

It takes about 11 steps to link the two products together, but it’s thoroughly worth it.

Two View Settings That Sanitize Data and Increase Your Reporting Power

Going back to the View level, there are two extremely beneficial options on the View Settings page that can both clean up your page reports and add new ways to report on visitor behavior.

Keep Your Data Sane: Exclude URL Query Parameters

This unassuming box, marked optional, is critical if you have:

tracking parameters appended to your URLs or
system-generated navigation/content URLs that include parameters

This field is a lifesaver to anyone who has a shopping cart system that adds query parameters at the end of URLs, or uses unique campaign tracking parameters in their online marketing. It is comma separated, case sensitive list of parameters you want Google Analytics to strip from your URLs.

If you aren’t already familiar with URL parameters, a little background is in order. A URL query parameter is a parameter and value pair (e.g. param=value) that can do a variety of things like track where visitors came from, hold information about a visitor’s shopping cart, or pass messages from one page to another. They are extremely useful and also quite common, but they can muddy up your page statistics if you aren’t using Exclude URL Query Parameters.

Why? Because Google Analytics counts every single unique URL separately by default. Let’s see an example of how leaving query parameters in your GA data can lead to problems, and how Exclude URL Query Parameters solves it.

Clicking on this ad for Moo that appeared on Facebook…

Takes me to this URL…

http://us.moo.com/?utm_campaign=us_crm_nanigans_api_lpp_all_julysalelps_jul14&utm_source=Nanigans&utm_medium=ad&utm_content=363&nan_pid=1806707877

The query string is bolded above. It starts with a question mark, and each parameter and value pair is separate by an ampersand. The query parameters in this URL are:

utm_campaign
utm_source
utm_medium
utm_content
nan_pid

In this example, Moo is wisely using UTM query parameters to track how their Facebook campaign is doing. UTM tags are used by Google Analytics to help create tracking labels, and Analytics will automatically strip them from the URL, so you don’t have to worry about adding them in this Exclude URL Query Parameters tool; we only need to focus on custom, unique parameters like the one highlighted below.

Since the parameter “nan_pid” is unique, and is not automatically stripped from the URL by default like the UTM parameters are, their pages reports will start looking something like this:

So instead of seeing all the traffic for us.moo.com rolled together into one line item, there would be multiple lines, one for each unique URL created by each unique “nan_pid” value.

This makes it much harder to create at-a-glance reports for how the overall traffic of the home page is performing.

So how do we solve this?

By entering the parameter name, “nan_pid” in the Exclude URL Query Parameters field, Google Analytics will automatically strip nan_pid and any values associated with it from the URL. It will stop Analytics from showing a list of pages like the one above, and instead attribute the pageviews, sessions, etc to the home page.

If you already have URLs with parameters in your reports, adding them here won’t alter those. Try to add your parameters from the very beginning, or as soon as you implement any new parameters on your site. Remember, the Raw Data View you set up earlier will still capture the full URL with the parameters in tact if you need to troubleshoot.

Tap Into a Keyword & UX Goldmine by Activating Site Search

If you have a search function on your website and it uses query parameters, you have access to important keyword insights that can improve your SEO efforts, as well asimportant user behavior metrics.

Site search data has the potential to revolutionize your user experience efforts by telling you exactly what your visitors want from your website when they get there. Four main reports in the Behavior section of Analytics, 6 additional dimensions, and 18 metrics provide a rich repository of what Jared Spool refers to as “trigger words”, terms that tell you what people really want to do when they visit your site, but that you may be overlooking in your internal linking structure.

Setting Site search Tracking to On opens up a menu that allows you to list up to 5 parameter names used in searches on your site. So if the search box in the header of your site used “q=search+term” and an advanced search page used “advq=search+term”, you would add both q and advq to the box labeled Query Parameter.

There is a checkbox option to strip the query parameters associated with search here also, which means you won’t have to include your search query parameters in your Exclude URL Query Parameters list.

If your site uses categories within search, you can list those separately in the Category Parameter box after turning that sub-feature on.

A good example of using both the search term and category boxes of the Site Search feature would be if you had a search by department function, similar to Amazon’s search feature:

So if Amazon were to use the query parameter “term” for the search box info, and “cat” for the department, or category, and they wanted to strip the search terms from the URLs, butkeep the department parameters so they could see the categorical totals by URL also, their setup would look like this:

If your site search doesn’t use query parameters, you’ll have to leave this off. If your site search doesn’t use query parameters currently, it will require either a change to your search engine (best option) or your tracking code (can cause issues if not implemented correctly).

Use Goals to Define and Measure Success

What is one of the most vital tools for conversion optimization and overall performance tracking, yet still overlooked by many new to Google Analytics? Goals. There are as many uses for Goals as there are definitions of success for websites, so let’s get into what Goals are and how to set them up.

What Goals Are & Why They Matter

First, a brief definition of Goals:

A Goal in Google Analytics is a set of criteria defined by you to measure if visitors are performing certain actions on your site.
A Goal conversion is completed when a visitor performs a Goal-defined action.
Goal completions count once per session, so if a single visitor fills out the same contact form five times in a single session on your site, they will only be counted as one conversion for the contact form Goal.
Visitors can complete more than one Goal per session. So if Goal #1 is “visit the contact form thank you page” and Goal #2 is “watch a video”, and the visitor performs both of those actions during their session, they will count as a conversion for both Goal #1 and Goal #2.
You can have up to 20 Goals in a single View, and they are arranged in four sets of 5 Goals each.
You cannot delete a Goal once it’s created. You can change the criteria, but any history that Goal collected under the old rules will stay the same.
You can pause data collection and hide Goals from your reports by switching the Recording setting off.

Why Goals make a big difference on your reporting:

Setting up Goals will add the data showing your conversion rate, number of goal completions, and your set value in the Summary version of many of the standard reports under the Conversions header.

Goals are also a subtab of all the primary Google Analytics reports that will allow you to focus in on your Goal data.

It will also add 4 additional dimensions and a minimum of 14 metrics you can use in custom reports or segments.

Creating Goals For Your Site

How To Configure Google Analytics To Get Actionable Data

2014-08-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

If your analytics isn’t properly configured from the beginning, how could you ever expect to gather any insight?

When it comes to gathering visitor information, GA can’t collect or change data on visits that have already happened, which means time spent waiting to add or correct certain settings is data lost or damaged. Getting a jump start on collecting the right data is the first step to using that data for successful conversion measurement and tracking.

With that in mind, we’ll cover features at the Account, Property, and View levels in your Google Analytics setup you should be reviewing and using. All the tools, settings, and changes we’ll be talking about are accessed from the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, as seen below.

Organizing and Structuring Your Accounts, Sites, & Views

First it helps to take a quick look at how Google Analytics accounts are set up, and how your sites and reports are organized inside those accounts.

Each user of Google Analytics can have multiple accounts. Underneath each account exists one or more Properties, which are your individual websites.

Views, formerly known as Profiles, are where your reports live, and an array of options allows you to set high level rules that affect how you see all your Analytics reports. Settings for Ecommerce data collection, Site Search data, Goals, Filters, Segments, Annotations, Channel Groupings, Custom Reports, Content Grouping, and even Users can all be set at the View level.

Each Property (website) can have multiple Views, and creating additional Views opens up the possibility for deeply controlling and focusing your visitor data through the use of different Goals, Filters, and settings on each View. The main limit to Views is that they only collect data from the time they are created and forward, so if View #1 were created in January, and View #2 were created in July, View #2 would not have the data from January through end of June.

Create a Raw Data View to Dodge Data Loss

There are many Views you can create to Filter and section out your data, but the very first additional View you should create is one for “raw data”. This View should have only features that involve collecting data directly from trackers or Google: Ecommerce, Site Search, Webmaster Tools, AdSense, and Adwords. It should not use Filters or have Goals set up.

The Raw Data View ensures there is always a place to check what is being captured by your tracking code without any Filters or changes applied, providing a kind of sanity check for changes to your other Views.

If you’ve never created an additional View or changed the settings, your default View will be named All Web Site Data, and this one can function as your main View. Pull down the View menu within Admin and select “Create a new view”.

Name this one Raw Data or RAW DATA, set it to your time zone, and click Create View.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to activate Ecommerce and/or Site Search, authorize any Google products you have linked and that’s it. No other settings or Filters should be set up on this View.

Account Organization and Multiple Accounts

Follow the Keep It Simple principle with names, just apply the parent business name, or the website name itself. This will make your account labels clear, and searchable.

Each unique website for a business should have a Property set up to house it. Say for example you have an online store selling custom painted yoga mats, and a separate site focused on vegan cupcakes, each one of these sites should have a unique Property and its own set of Views.

However, if you have an interior design business, and it has both a blog and a store site set up under separate domains (i.e. www.JoesFancyInteriorsBlog.biz and www.JoesShopForGoodHouseStuff.com), you may want to consider using the same Property and tracking code for both. This relates to something called cross-domain tracking.

It can be complicated to set up, but worth it for site owners with a 3rd party shopping cart or multiple closely related sites.

image source

If you plan to manage Google Analytics for multiple businesses, give each business its own account.

This policy makes it easier to pass off ownership of the account to the business itself if you’re working in a contract or agency role; respecting a business’s ownership of its site data is an important facet of responsible data management, and one that will make your life ultimately easier.

Unlock Hidden Power Features at the Property Level

At the Property (or website) level are key tools, and a lot of settings to influence the reports you have available to you.

Under the Property Settings, you’ll see the option to rename your Property, update the default URL, select a default View, set your Industry Category, and then it gets into the good stuff.

There are two major items within the Property Settings page:

Display Advertiser Features (aka Demographic and Interest Reporting)
In-Page Analytics (or enhanced link attribution)

The first enables a suite of reports that provide Google-based demographic and categorical interest data on your visitors, and allows you to use that data to create remarketing lists and research for your display advertising campaigns with AdWords; this data is also useful in crafting campaigns in any other display platform that leverages demographic data for targeting.

The second feature, In-Page Analytics enables a reporting feature that allows you to see your traffic behavioral data overlaid on your actual website, highlighting which internal links, navigation, and actions are most used.

Laser Focus Remarketing with Demographics and Interest Reporting

After the basic options on your Property Settings page, you’ll see a few more detailed options with descriptions and large On/Off buttons. The first of these options, under Display Advertiser Features, unlocks a suite of reporting and Remarketing tools that no online marketer should be without.

By updating your privacy policy, Google Analytics tracking code, and turning on Demographic and Interest Reports, AdWords users who link their Analytics accounts gain the ability to create Remarketing lists based on precisely segmented visitor data. With this feature enabled, every aspect of your site traffic can be used to build targeted remarketing lists.

In addition to this major AdWords benefit, age, gender, and categorical interest data becomes visible through two sets of reports located under the Audience tab.

Now, I need to reiterate, to actually access and use these features, you will not only have to turn the option on but you will also have to make a change to your privacy policy and your tracking code. (See why we didn’t deploy the tracking code yet?)

The instructions for updating your tracking code are really simple, even if you aren’t familiar with code. Add the following bolded line between the “create” and “send” lines of your tracking code, as shown below.

<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-XX’, ‘example.com’);

ga(‘require’, ‘displayfeatures’);

ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
</script>

To read more about how powerful Demographics & Interests Reports are, check out this excellent article on Online Behavior. To learn more about creating remarketing lists, click here. (Trust me, you’ll be happy you did.)

But we aren’t done making tracking code changes, so don’t put your tracking code on your website just yet.

Explore Your Site For Top Performing Links with Enhanced Link Attribution

This powerful evaluation tool allows you to see distinct information for each instance of a link on your pages that you can access from the In-Page Analytics link at the bottom of the Behavior reports menu.

This information is vital to anyone wanting to improve their user experience and their power to persuade visitors.

For example: You’ve set up a landing page that repeats the call to action link to your sales page multiple times on the page: in the header, in a CTA button, twice in the body copy, and once in the footer.

Enhanced Link Attribution will allow you to view your page and see which link drove the most traffic to your sales page.

Example of a In-Page Analytics in “full view” mode, with color highlights that help call out the more or less popular links on the page, with cool colors (blue, green) representing least popular links and warm colors (orange, red) representing most popular links.

In-Page Analytics allows for the tracking of buttons, menus, and javascript-based actions, and detection of elements that drive visitors to multiple destinations e.g. a search box.

This requires another tracking code change to function. Just add the following line directly after the new line you added to turn on Demographic & Interest Reports. Like this:

<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-XX’, ‘example.com’);

ga(‘require’, ‘displayfeatures’);

ga(‘require’, ‘linkid’, ‘linkid.js’);

ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
</script>

(Note: Do not copy and paste the full example code above. Copy the code from the Tracking Info page in the Property section of your account and add in the highlighted code from the example. This will ensure you don’t accidentally erase or leave out critical tracking information.)

The bold text is our Demographic & Interest reports feature, and the bold red text is the snippet needed to activate Enhanced Link Attribution. Two easy changes turn on an entire suite of powerful tools. With both of these changes to your tracking code in place, now you can deploy your tracking code on your website.

Most people will be using code that looks like the example script above. It is the “Universal” version of Google Analytics and it uses a file called analytics.js. This may cause an issue that makes the following error display when trying to load In Page Analytics:

You can get around this by clicking Load in Full View, which will open a new tab in which you see your entire site with the controls and page stats shown above it, and stat bubbles over links & important features.

To stop that error message and use full view mode every time, go back to your Property Settings page and select the “Full view mode” option.

One more important setting to keep in mind: Be sure to set your Default URL correctly for your website.

The box to enter the info is highlighted in the screenshot above. In this example, the site does not use the www. prefix so I have left it out. Make sure that www. is included if your site always redirects to that version, or leave it out if your site always redirects to the non-www version of your domain.

Chrome users: Grab the Page Analytics Chrome Extension to get the full view In-Page Analytics experience without having to visit Google Analytics first, along with other quick data access perks like the real time count of active visitors.

Connect the Dots to Profitable Data: Adding Webmaster Tools, AdSense, and Adwords

Landing Page Tips To Help You Stop Screwing Up Your Conversion Rates

2014-08-15T03:51:00.000-07:00

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So you have a landing page – or maybe 87 of them. Too bad you’re screwing them up.

Landing pages are easy – in theory. In the real world, landing pages optimization is really hard. Now that it’s getting more and more difficult to make money via AdWords and other PPC channels, boosting conversion rates on your landing pages is more important than ever. Hopefully, you can identify some of the mistakes you’re making so you can fix them.

All the examples below are taken from active landing pages (I clicked a bunch of ads on Google to find them). Some of them are not exactly typical landing pages, but since they drive paid traffic to pages where visitors land, they’re landing pages all right.

Here are 21 landing page tips to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes these jackwagons did.

#1 The headline sucks

Everything starts with the right headline. This is the first thing the visitor sees. It’s your one chance to communicate what you’re about, create curiosity, explain your intentions and lure them in.

Here’s how this guy is doing it:

Biggest problems:

The headline sucks! What the hell man! That’s your headline, really?
Totally unclear and missing a value proposition
Your offer to get people to fill out the form is so you can snatch their phone number? Oh how irresistible (NOT!)
Poor call to action
Uncredited testimonial

#2 You have no clear value proposition

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason visitors should take action on the page. It’s the most critical piece of the landing page. People will only take action if they understand and want the value that you offer.

Citibank fails here:

Biggest problems:

There is no clear value proposition.
How is this better and/or different from other similar offers?
Not enough information to get people to take action.
Submit? Oh no.

#3 Your copywriting is terrible

Great copy is very important. A landing page without copy is like a mute salesman trying to peddle his wares- not very effective. The words you use make a huge difference.

The best kind of copy is clear about the benefits, geared to a targeted audience, makes a compelling case for the value the visitor is about to receive and gets the visitor excited.

Let’s be honest, not all of us are good with words. I know many people who struggle with saying even the simplest things. Like these guys:

“Run your business better today” is the best you could come up with?

Biggest problems:

What are you offering here?
Be specific, always be specific
Get me to agree with a problem or make me want the end-benefit
You can’t ask for action after one sentence

#4 People don’t get what you offer

How much time does it take to figure out what you are offering? If the answer is not “immediately”, you need to do better. Clarity above all! People don’t buy what they don’t understand.

This is a landing page I was sent to after clicking an ad for the keyword “business”. Wow. These people don’t really know what landing pages are for, do they? Yet, they’re spending a bunch of money on an expensive keyword.

Biggest problems:

What the hell is this thing!?
That’s your headline? Do you even have one?
No context, no content, no credibility, no call to action, no nothing…
SQL error at the bottom to finish it off. High five!

#5 There’s no scent

Pre-click message (what the ad says) needs to match post-click message (what people see after they click on the ad).

Humans track information in a similar fashion to the way animals follow a scent. If the scent is sufficiently strong, the user will continue to go on that trail. But if the scent is weak, they stop and hit the back button – figuring “this is not what I wanted”. Scent is very important for conversions.

I saw this ad:

I clicked on it and this landing page revealed itself:

Biggest problems:

“What is Startup Weekend”? But the ad said clearly “Start your own business”? It did mention startup weekend in the 3rd line of the ad copy – but it’s not enough. The scent is weak. “Learn how to start a business” in the top right corner is basically invisible.
“What is Startup Weekend” is your headline? It sucks.
“Subscribe Today” is a terrible sub-headline for the email capture box and “Subscribe Now!” is a terrible CTA. What’s in it for me? Focus on user benefits.
They are generally confused about the goal of this page. Is it to get email subscribers or to sell the idea to attend the event?

#6 Your call to action is poor

Your call to action should be a trigger. It should stand out and make people want to click on it. The best kinds of calls to action avoid click fear, are worded clearly and/or loaded with a benefit. It has to be clear what happens after I click the button.

What do you think about this one:

Biggest problems:

“Continue” is the main call to action. While it’s better than “submit”, it still sucks ass. Why would they want to ‘continue’? Be specific about the value they’re going to get.
Phone number at the top, “Our commitment” (who cares!) and “Your Franchise Business!” also looks like a button, but it is not.
For a long page like this, your call to action should be repeated at the bottom.
Social media sharing widget? Come on! Nobody shares a landing page offer. Get rid of it.
Copywriting couldn’t get much worse.
Looks like your 12-year old cousin designed it.

#7 You’re using cheesy stock photos

Men in suits shaking hands? Multiracial workers smiling? Chick with a headset? They’re all out to get you – and kill your conversions. Cheesy stock photos hurt your credibility and show the world you’re… ignorant.

These guys might want you to think that this is their actual team, but most people can smell fake from a mile away:

A simple Google search will bring up tens and tens of other websites using the exact same image. Business intelligence my ass.

#8 You have exclamation marks!!!

Don’t use exclamation marks. People won’t take action because you shout at them. Cheap!!! won’t make people think your stuff is any cheaper. It will just make you look dumb.

Copywriting tip: Imagine you can only use 10 exclamation marks in your whole life. Use them sparingly.

#9 You have too many offers

The best landing pages focus on a single offer. They’re ultra-specific and ultra-targeted. This will also make your ad CPC lower, CTR higher and your landing page will have a better conversion rate since you’re bringing targeted people to the page.

Always make it about a single problem, single product, single offer. These guys don’t:

Biggest problems:

9 offers! Achala maquina. Take this landing page (actually don’t – it sucks) and split it into 9 specific landing pages. Once you get the lead in, you can sell them additional courses over email / phone.
Where’s the headline?
“Register today for an open enrollment program via our online registration form”. Wow what a sentence! You must need a degree from Emory in order to understand it.
Submit? Who wants to submit?

#10 You lack credibility

If you’re offering a solution to my problem, you need to make a case for why you are the right company to solve it. Why should I believe you? What proof do you have? Credibility is very important.

This page wants to solve a certain problem:

The best all natural fat burner? Says who? The model on the stock photo? This has “scam” written all over it. Besides, people don’t believe superlatives. You need to learn to write in a way that makes people believe you.

#11 Your landing page has irrelevant stuff on it

Know your goal: what’s the one thing you want people to do on your page? Focus on that thing only, and remove everything that does not directly contribute to people taking action toward that goal.

Expensive ‘lose weight’ keyword points to this god awful page:

Biggest problems:

Complete lack of focus
Terrible headline
No call to action
Totally useless sidebars
Sports cars, really?
Looks like vomit

#12 You ask for too much information

Behavior = Motivation + ease of taking action + trigger. The less information you ask, the easier it is to take action. In most cases you don’t need more than their email address. Maybe first name. MAYBE phone number. You can always ask for the rest once you get their contact info.

If you have a form like this on your landing page, you’re screwed:

Also – don’t ever use multi-column forms.

#13 It looks like my grandma designed it

Translation: looks like crap.

Crap doesn’t sell too well. First impressions matter. Great visual design helps conversions a whole bunch.

An actual Google ad took me to this site, yikes:

Biggest problem: everything.

#14 It’s not optimized for mobile devices

It’s only a matter of time when tablets will become the main device for surfing the web. The trend is clear. Soon absolutely everyone will have a smart phone in their pocket – and they will use it. I’m already seeing a lot of sites where mobile traffic is close to 50%.

So your landing pages should be built with mobile users in mind as well. Since responsive design boosts mobile conversions, that’s the way to go. But also bear in mind that ‘device is a mindset’. What we’re seeing is that while tablet users usually behave like desktop/laptop users, smart phone users have very different mindsets and behavior patterns. You might want to have totally different offers for people on mobile phones!

Here’s a company that could certainly afford mobile responsive landing pages, but they’re screwing up. This is a screenshot I took with my phone:

Biggest problems:

It’s not optimized for mobile devices! Too small to read, too difficult to fill out the form
Crappy headline
Your CTA is Submit?
Why on earth do you have a ‘cancel’ button? Do you want people to cancel?
The text that matters is smaller than legalese at the bottom

#15 It’s slow!

People are impatient. They have better stuff to do than to wait until your landing page loads. Slow site = poor conversions. Often quoted research on this subject includes an Amazon study that showed a 1% decrease in sales for every 0.1s decrease in response times.

You need to make sure your page is fast.

#16 It’s the same landing page template 5,462 other companies are using

Do you like the landing page below? At least 1,486 people do who’ve bought it from Theme Forest (and probably use on their multiple sites).

So what’s wrong with using templates? Maybe nothing. I use templates too, occasionally.

It all depends on your goals and brand. Your landing pages are an extension of your overall brand. Sometimes, they’re the very first point of contact with your brand.It has to match the look and feel of your main site. And it just could be that your brand is classy enough that it doesn’t want to look like everyone else’s.

#17 You have too much or too little copy

There’s a somewhat easy rule when it comes to the amount of copy you should have on your landing page: the more complicated and/or expensive the offer, the more copy you need. Landing pages generally don’t ask for money, but signing up for something – but that’s a cost too. The more information you ask (more form fields), the higher the mental cost.

In most cases landing pages don’t need a whole lot of text, but sometimes they might. It’s important to nail the right amount of content. Say too little, and people don’t have enough information to act. Say too much, and you bore them + distract from taking action.

Here’s a case of too little information:

Biggest problems:

You’re offering high school diplomas to people who dropped out of school at some point. It’s quite a complicated product, I’d say. Yet – you offer only 2 paragraphs of text and ask people to Enroll based on that? Not gonna happen.
Well it’s not exactly a landing page, is it!? Then why are you driving traffic here! Create a proper landing page for PPC traffic.

#18 You don’t follow the customer thought sequence

You need to understand the thought process your prospects are going through. How do they choose products in your niche? What do they care about? What’s the first thing they want to know? And so on.

In the end it’s about optimizing thought sequences, not just landing pages.

Let’s look at this example. You land on this page, and they ask you to sign up right away.

So their hypothesis seems to be that the thought sequence is as follows:

I’m interested in becoming an author on a website. Where else can I be an author? Oh look – here’s a website where I can be an author.
What do I tell the world about? Oh, my passions! That’s a good idea.
I will earn income? Sign me up!

Is that a realistic thought sequence in the prospect’s mind? I don’t think so.

Granted I have not done any customer development interviews here, and I’ll just go with what I think. But here’s what’s a more likely thought sequence in my opinion:

What is this place?
What can I do here?
How is it useful to me?
How does it work? How exactly will I earn money and how much?
I need more details

If we’d create the the page with this flow in mind, I bet we’d have a much better result.

You can only figure out the right thought sequence by talking to people, running surveys, observing people interacting with your site and testing.

#19 You don’t do proper customer research

How do you go about creating the offer, copy and layout for the landing page? Just start writing? Study best practices? Both are wrong answers.

Any proper web job starts with conversion research. You need to figure out who your audience is, what they want, how they talk, what drives them and what turns them off.

#20 You focus on social media sharing

“Add social sharing buttons so your landing page can go viral!”. Yeah right.

Remove all social sharing buttons. You want people to buy/opt-in/fill a form, and not tweet or like. Social sharing buttons usually serve as a distraction, and reduce conversions.

Besides, people only share content, not products (unless it’s something really cool and innovative, like Google Glass). Nobody wants to share your marketing message, be real.

#21 You don’t measure landing page performance

You can only improve what you can measure. Once you have your landing page up and running, make sure you have goal tracking properly configured in Google Analytics or whatever you use. I know it’s obvious, but every month I run into businesses that drive blind. No kidding.

And, your landing page is never done. You need continuous optimization. Build, measure, learn and repeat.

Get a landing page makeover – by people who live and breathe this stuff

Conversion optimization is a science and you’re better off using proper scientists to help you. Same goes for landing pages – it’s a science too. Data-driven design and an evidence based approach are a must if you want to be successful.

You’re busy running your business and you don’t need to be a landing page expert. You need results, and someone else to take care of getting the landing page right. That’s why we created a new service.

Announcing: LandingPageMakeover.com

If you run any kind of paid campaigns (PPC, banners, email etc) and you drive the traffic to a landing page, you absolutely need it to work. ROI is no joke.

Go to landingpagemakeover.com right now and see what it’s all about.

Links for SEO, Website Analyzing & Research Tools

2014-08-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

Here’s some of my bookmarks for SEO tools and other useful SEO related pages. This is by no means a complete list, I’ve been very careful not to overload this page with “more of the same” – each tool here serves a different purpose, few are alike, and all are worth bookmarking.

Website Analyzing & Research Tools

Marketing Grader
This page gives you a nice overview of your website’s marketing related items. I personally liked HubSpot’s “Website Grader” a lot more than this one. This tool seems to have a hard time finding your blog’s RSS feed, social profiles, and other stuff. It’s a great way to get a quick perspective about how your site is doing, but take everything from the report with a grain of salt.

Page Analyzer
Provides insights on any page you scan including keyword density and other good metrics to get a quick overview of a page.

Open Site Explorer
SEOMoz’s very own Open Site Explorer. Their link index is updated every 4 to 8 weeks (depends if they are having difficulties.) You can use it without an account but you get very limited access. At the very least, you’re going to want a free account to get any use out of this tool. I personally use their paid plan (starting at $99/mo) because they offer some great tools and access to more data from Open Site Explorer is just one of the things you receive.

Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is another company that “crawls the web” and creates a nice index of sites and links. Their index is much fresher than Open Site Explorer. You can get a premium account for as little as $49/mo, making it a great value for smaller agencies or individuals.

Uber Suggest
Got a basic set of keywords and want to expand it into 100s? UberSuggest makes it super easy to get a ton of keywords related to any word(s). It’s my preferred method for quick keyword brainstorming.

If I want a lot of data, I use Scrapebox for keyword harvesting.

Chase the Footprint
This tool helps you find links related to your keyword by using footprints. By using footprints you can target both the keyword and the type of link you are really trying to get. Link types may include: communities, donation/sponsorships, resource pages, blogs, message boards, Wikis, and others.

Keyword Spy
This tool gives you insight on the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) efforts of another website, or an industry (via keyword searching.) It can give you estimates on the total number of clicks, or the daily Ad budget for specific websites. It even shows roughly how many keywords (and which keywords) their Ads are showing up for. Below is a quick screenshot of an overview:

Google SERP Scraper
This site may look sketchy or outdated, but it’s a great way to quickly export the SERPs for any query. I think you can do this via Google Docs now, I will update this entry if I find a Google Doc template offering the same functionality.

Google Trends
Who better to get trending search data than from the giant themselves! Google Trends will help you find hot topics to write content about. Viewing the history is a bit more interesting. Historical data can give you future insights as to which topics seem to attract large search volumes, followed by for how long the “buzz” of the topic lasts.

Want examples? Search for Yankees and you can see a lot of spikes during World Series events, especially ones revolving around the Red Socks. Do a search for Red Socks to see more on this.

Google Insights
Google Insights delivers a bit more data on search volume. You can drilldown to more specifics about keywords. Examples include regional searches, searches across Google’s different products, and by topic (health related, financial, news, etc.)

Google’s Keyword Research Tool
The Google Keyword Tool provides you rough estimates on search volume for keywords you enter. You can narrow it down by searching for both Broad or Exact matches for your keyword. This tool also lets you know the average cost per click ($CPC) and the overall competition for it in AdWords. Always remember that the competition bar is not related to organic searches!

PageRank Recovery Tool
Creates all the code you need for an htaccess 301 redirect for pages that have been moved or removed.

Readability
How “readable” is your website’s content? Can the regular Joe understand it? Does the reader need a Doctorid degree to understand the contents? This page will help you get a better idea of how well your content can be consumed by your target audience.

CopyScape
Check to see if someone has been ripping off your content. The premium service is well worth the fee ($25 for a ton of scans!)

Domain Tools

DomainTools
This is my favorite site for looking up the WHOIS data of a domain, server IP, name servers, or whatever else you need to know.

Who is Hosting This
Knowing the real web host of a particular website is useful in all sorts of situations whether you need to . Unlike tools like Netcraft and Domain Tools, WIHT use multiple data sources to give you a more accurate impression as to who is hosting a website. (Recommended by Chris Dyson.)

Lean Domain Search
Search for 100s of available domains by entering in any word you want within the domain. It’ll give you a whole bunch of suggestions.

Expired Domains
Do yourself a favor and sign up for a free account here. Even if you aren’t looking to buy old domains, it’s a lot of fun to mine through this data, and sometimes you’ll find an incredible domain up for grabs!

Chrome Extensions for SEO

PageRank Status
PageRank displays Google’s Toolbar PageRank for whatever page you’re on. If you click it, you can see the page’s Alexa ranking, the website’s IP address, and some useful links relating to the domain.

SEOQuake
SEOQuake provides a lot of free information about the website you’re currently on. Things include Alexa rank, WHOSIS data, Archive.org data, etc.

Mozbar
SEOMoz’s SEO toolbar. Provides Moz Metrics as well as easy access to the server’s IP address, WHOIS data, and other useful resources relating to whatever page you’re currently on.

Check My Links
Checks every link on whatever page you’re on, looking for any that are somehow broken. It also displays how many internal and how many external links are on any given page.

HTTP Headers
Displays the HTTP header statuses of any website you’re currently on.

Firefox Add-ons for SEO

SEO Toolbar by SEOBook
This free toolbar packs a punch but is only available for Firefox. You can display Open Site Explorer data, SEMRush, Compete, Ahref, Directory listings, Google PageRank, and other metrics with this tool. You’ll need to sign up for a free SEO Book account in order to download it.

SEOMoz Mozbar
Displays the SEOMoz metrics on any page you’re currently on. This tool also has nifty links that go to SEOMoz’s web tools on both SEOMoz.org and Open Site Explorer. You can use this for free, but having the paid tool will benefit you more.

Internet Explorer Add-ons for SEO

The best SEO tool for Internet Explorer
This is absolutely the best thing to hit the Internet since the first LOLCAT showed it’s cute furry face. If you are in SEO / Inbound marketing and use Internet Explorer, this tool is a MUST. So much so, I’ve listed it as the only SEO tool for IE users.

SEO Tips, Resources, and Guides

Google Analytics campaign URL builder
Track your data better in Google Analytics by sharing links that have been built out with extra tracking attributes. Generate those links here then share them!

SEO Glossary
Aaron Wall is an established figure in the SEO industry. SEOBook is his company, they have some really great tools (including SEO Toolbar listed above.) This glossary is a great resource for people who want to learn terminology of the industry.

SEO Tools for Excel
Excel is a powerhouse and a must-use tool for most SEOs. This add-on packs a big punch helping you turn Excel into the ultimate tool for SEO.

Excel for SEO
That SEO Tools for Excel link above means nothing if you can’t use Excel. Let Distilled (a globally recognized SEO company) teach you the ropes of Excel for SEO use.

Outreach Letter with Real World Examples
This is an excellent post that has some real life examples of different types of outreach emails for link building. Good information from real data.

SEOMOz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO
A great guide for beginners in the SEO industry, or any small business owner with a website and a bit of time to read and learn.

53 Ways to increase conversion rates
Not so much SEO directly, but let’s be honest. If you are spending time doing SEO, you better get your CRO stuff down right!

How to Find 100s of New Longtail Keywords

2014-08-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

By now you’re probably well acquainted with Google Suggest. Its Google’s search tool that gives you Search suggestions as you type your query into the Google search box.

And while Google Suggest can generate some hilarious and weird results, you can also you it toquickly generate a massive longtail keyword list in minutes.

This article will show you how to combine two awesome Google Suggest scrape tools to generate a list of hundreds or thousands of related keywords in minutes. Then I’ll show you how to turn that huge list of keywords into something you can actually use.

What the heck do I want all those keywords for?

If you’re wondering why you’d want such a list of longtail keywords, wonder no more. I use this Google Suggest scrape method to find keywords for two things:

New content ideas– Stuck on topics to write about in your niche? Scraping Google Suggest will give you content ideas you’re not going to find anywhere else.The results Google Suggest shows you are a reflection of search activity on the web. Sure, the keyword phrases it suggests may not get a lot of searches, but they are getting some. You can use this scrape method to unearth great longtail phrases that are easy to rank for and still generate traffic.
PPC campaigns– Think you’ve found all the right keywords to bid on in Adwords? Maybe not.By scraping Google Suggest keywords, you can find keywords to add to your campaign that you would have never thought of.Just as importantly, Google Suggest scraping is a great way to find negative match keywords to target before you waste your money on them.

Now that you know why you want to scrape Google Suggest, let’s get into my method of actually doing it.

Step 1

Start at Ubersuggest. It’s a free web-based tool that lets you export lists of Google Suggest phrases based on a keyword you enter. Kudos to Ken Jurina for showing me this.

Enter your keyword and select your language. You can choose to scrape Google Suggest phrases from the web, news, or products searches. In this case I’ll use the web results.

Now check the txt box – that will let you download the results in a text file.

Click “suggest” and a suggestion.txt file will download to your computer. Open it in NotePad++, regular Notepad screws up the spacing.

Now I have a list of 242 “prepaid credit card” related keywords that Ubersuggest has extracted from Google Suggest.

Step 2

Here’s where the fun starts. We are going to take all 242 keywords from the previous step and look for even more Google Suggest results using ScrapeBox. While UberSuggest lets you scrape the results for one keyword, ScrapeBox lets you scrape the results for hundreds of keywords at a time.

Not familiar with ScrapeBox? You should be. It’s a powerful way to speed up SEO tasks like keyword research and link building.

I should fully disclose here that ScrapeBox is typically a black hat SEO tool. Sure, it’s popular for mass blog comment spamming, but it’s also a versatile tool that can be used for white hat SEO too. Think of Scrapebox as a weapon – in the wrong hands it’s deadly, but it can be used for good too. And we’re all about the good.

Once ScrapeBox is open, drop that list of keywords from Step 1 into ScrapeBox’s Keyword Scraper Tool.

Select your scrape sources and search engines. There are a number of options here, and your choices will depend on the type of site you are doing keyword research for. The product and shopping suggestions are handy for ecommerce research, but for content ideas I just focus on the main search engines:

Click “Scrape” and kick back as ScrapeBox does its thing. This can take a few minutes depending on the number of scrape sources you picked, the number of keywords in your main list, and the speed of your proxies.

When ScrapeBox finishes running, I click “Remove Duplicate Keywords” and I am left with a list of 574 keywords related to prepaid credit cards.

Want even more keywords? Transfer the list you just scraped back into the main keyword list and run another scrape.

What do I do with all these keywords?

So now you have 100’s of keywords. Are they all useful? Of course not. But with a few minutes of work in Excel, you can turn this unmanageable mass of keywords to a targeted list that you can actually use. Here’s two different ways you can refine the list.

If I’m using the list for PPC keyword ideas, I rely on Excel’s Conditional Formatting and Sort & Filter functions to hone in on the keywords I’m interested.Let’s say I’m running an Adwords campaign offering prepaid credit cards from a major credit card provider. The client is sensitive about their brand image – they don’t want to appear to be marketing to minors.With Excel, I can use the “Text That Contains” Formatting option to highlight uses of keywords like “teen,” “kid” and “child.”This highlights all keyword phrases that contain my specified text. But the highlighted keywords are still mixed in the regular keywords, so I’d then filter the list using the “Sort by Color” option. The “Sort by Color” option brings all the highlighted keywords to the top of the list so I can review them all at once.

The Google Suggest scrape method is great for finding new negative match keywords you didn’t consider. In this case I found people were using phrases I hadn’t considered, like “under 13,” which I immediately add to my negative match list in Adwords.
If you’re doing keyword research for content ideas, you’re going to love what I am about to tell you: With Richard Baxter’s Google Adwords API Extension for Excel you can take your list of keywords from Scrapebox and, from within Excel, grab Adwords search volume data.That’s right – no more flipping back and forth between the web-based Adwords Keyword Tool and your Excel sheet. Talk about a timesaver. Now you can sort all your content idea keywords by search volume, which will show you where you’re best off investing your content-creation time.The Excel extension is free; all you pay for is the API costs to Google, which are negligible. High-five to John Doherty for showing me this.

So now that you know how to build a huge list of longtail keywords using Google Suggest scrapers, what are you waiting for? Get cracking! Test it out now and start generating new ideas for your website or PPC campaign.

Scrapebox’s Hidden Treasures for SEO

2014-08-15T03:31:00.003-07:00

Scrapebox has been getting a good buzz lately from some of the traditional, “white hat” SEO blogs that I follow. I’ve been using Scrapebox for 2 or 3 years now and have picked up on a lot of advanced tactics which people seem to either forget about, or haven’t quite figured out.

This post will let you know why Scrapebox should be in your SEO toolkit… 6 months ago! Scrapebox is really an SEO switchblade, packing more than 10 different tools within.

Attention! At the end of this blog post, I’ll show you how to get this $97 piece of software for only $57!

What is Scrapebox?

Scrapebox is a fantastic SEO multi-tool that is shockingly low price for the number of features it offers. It costs $97, has no monthly fees, and free updates for life.

No matter which SEO “hat” you wear, Scrapebox is the bomb when properly used.

How can you take Scrapebox, a piece of software that has gotten a bad rep for hanging out with the bad kids of SEO and use it for golden link building opportunities that even Martin Prince would endorse?

The secret of Scrapebox is hidden within the add-ons (it’s not really a secret), but there are some great ones that long term users still seem shocked to learn about.

Find Long Tail Keywords

It’s an excellent way to do keyword brainstorming.

Let’s start with these keywords: SEO, web design, classic gaming.

Save your keywords into a .TXT file, load up Scrapbox, click Scrape, and import your keywords. Click scrape. For my 3 keywords, I received 66 keywords. Repeat the process with your new keywords,

BAM! 3 keywords became 1135 keywords, not to shabby!

Return to the main Scrapebox interface and you’ll be able to remove the duplicates. This leaves us with 560 unique, long tail keywords relating to the original keywords. From there, import this list into your favorite keyword metric juggling tool. I personally use Google’s keyword tool and SEOMoz’s keyword tool.

Harvest URLs Like Duff Man!

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to get some URL lists built. Take your keywords, add them to the keyword box and add a custom footprint.

I find I have a much higher success rate and an overall quicker/cleaner process using my own footprints as oppose to using the few radio button options the software comes with.

Start harvesting and go grab a beer, oh yeah!

Once you’ve got the list, you know what to do! Analyze the links and figure out which are good ones to chase down…

Analyze Links Like A Professor

This is better in Excel, or with Link Detective but it’s still doable within Scrapebox.

Download your links (I use Open Site Explorer)

Take those links, get them into a text file (I know, it feels dirty going from Excel to plain text)

Load those links into Scrapebox using “Import URLs” on the right

Click Remove/Filter, and get rid of the duplicates.

From this point, you’ve got a few options on what to do.

Analyze Link Type – Click Addon at the top, grab the Blog Analyzer. It’ll let you know what type of blog each site is. You can even add custom parameters to get a more advanced link profile, I haven’t done this myself because of all the other options that exist. I currently use SEOGadget’s link categorizing excel document.

Followed Check – Click Addon at the top, this time select DoFollow/NoFollow Checker plugin. Let the plugin run it’s course and you’ll be left with a list of followed and no followed links.

Organize, Filter, and Batch Analyze

Check the PageRank of the URL, Domain, or both!

Check whether or not the page is cached by Google.

Check to see what platform (WordPress, TypePad, etc) the link resides on.

Check to see if your link is found in the source code of any URLs.

Link Checking

Got a massive list of links to your site already? Want to know which are still active? Scrapebox allows you to run a batch scan of your link list, it’ll let you know how many of them do, or do not, contain a link pointing back to your website. Nothing to fancy about this.

Example of Scrapebox’s Batch Link and Anchor Check

Find Malware

Scrapebox can find malware located on websites. You can do something like this 100% automated after you load your list. Scrapebox offers a plugin called “Malware and Phishing Filter” which will pinpoint sites on your list that have, or recently had, malware issues.

This is a great way to start building relationships with webmasters which could very well lead to a future link if played out correctly.

Example of Scrapebox’s Malware / Phishing Filter

Massive URL Shortening

I’ve written about the benefits of having your own URL shortening service, but Scrapebox does offer a pretty nice alternative for creating a lot of short URLs with practically no labor.

You can import a text list of URLs you want shorter, and it’ll do all the manual labor, spitting back a nice list of short URLs from a variety of services.

Example of Scrapebox’s Batch URL Shortening

WhoIs Data Collecting

Just yesterday, I read a post at Search Engine Land, which goes into doing WHOIS queries on domains to find out who owns them. If you do enterprise SEO, or deal with sites that have a massive link profile, that post is full of great information.

Example of Scrapebox Whois Collecting

Tip: This is a great, automated way to see when domains were registered and when they are set to expire.

You can even use the Domain Resolver Plugin to get a list of IP addresses associated with every URL in your list, meaning you can cluster sites that are on the same server together for further filtering.

Example of Scrapebox Domain IP Collecting

Get Your Spam On

No.

Play Chess!

In case you didn’t have enough games to keep you busy, Scrapebox offers chess!

One last thing…

A few quick Google searches has led me to an offer on the official Scrapebox page where you can buy Scrapebox for $57 instead of $97.

Tip to use Scrapebox for Link Building not Spamming

2014-08-15T03:27:00.000-07:00

Scrapebox is well known in the SEO community as a Grey Hat, Black Hat, Yellow Polka Dotted Hat link building tool that is mainly used by blog commenting spammers. If you have ever spent any time reading blogs you will have seen the stereotypical comments on blogs. They usually say things such as “Great Blog Post thanks for sharing” with a keyword rich anchor text link to a site selling fake Ugg boots.

I know a lot of my regular readers will have a heart attack at the recommendation of using Scrapebox as a “White Hat” Link Building tool. A lot of people in the SEO community hate the thoughts of automated link building and the sheer mention of a tool such as Scrapebox makes their skin crawl. I can already imagine several people ready to jump down to the comments and tell me that tools like this are ruining the internet…

Well “Soapbox White Hatters” I’m going to show you a way that you can actually use Scrapebox to make the internet a better place… in fact a safer place for all!

So what is this Scrapebox Link building technique?

This link building technique utilises some of the free plugins that you can get from Scrapebox, the main tactic in this technique is to find a compromised or malware infected site and open a dialogue with the site owner in an attempt to receive a link either via a Guest Post or by suggesting the site owner replaces broken links with your own.

Scrapebox currently costs $97 (there are a few coupons on the net for $57 if you search around) and for the amount of time and money this tool will save you it is more than worth the investment. Scrapebox allows you to harvest thousands of URL’s from Google and Bing in no time at all and by entering your own custom footprints e.g. “submit * guest post” [keyword] you will find lots of guest blogging opportunities for your niche quickly. You can also import .txt files with lots of different search terms to put your harvesting on steroids.

The first free plugin you will need is the Malware and Phishing Filter once you have installed this plugin it allows you to search a list of sites from Scrapebox to find sites that have been compromised by some form of Malware. If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup on your websites then Google will normally inform you that a site has been infected by malware. Sadly many bloggers and small business owners rarely check their sites for malware and not everyone knows how to setup Google Webmaster tools.

Import your list of scraped URLs into the Malware checker and run it. This will flag up any site that has been compromised by some form of malware. You now want to export all of these bad urls and using the OSE check for PA/DA of the pages. Starting with the sites with the highest authority I then work down my list.

You can run the list through the Scrapebox Whois tool or use Scrapebox itself to check the contact page for any email addresses. You do not want to visit these sites as there is a risk that your computer maybe infected by a virus.

Now you want to send an email to the webmaster informing them of the malware issue on their site and send them a link to some helpful blog posts on how to fix malware infected sites. (If you haven’t checked out John Doherty’s blog post on SEOMoz about outreach email then make sure you do!)

You obviously do not want to ask for a link at this point. Depending on the quality of the site it might be worth using your hustle to track down alternative contact details too such as phone number, Twitter Handle, LinkedIn profile etc.

I have had a very good success rate in contacting webmasters using this technique and quite often I find that they are very grateful for you pointing out the problem on their website. Now that you have the dialogue with the site owner I will leave it to your imagination as to what approach you use next to obtain the link. But, this a good time to check the site for broken links or pitch a guest blog as the webmaster will probably have to recover the content on the site. I have even had a few webmasters offer me the chance to buy their sites for a small fee as they don’t have the time or inclination to fix their site and keep it up to date anymore!

So there you have it one way in which you can use a well regarded spam tool to speed up your link building research and to help make the web a safer place.

More Scrapebox Goodies.

I’m going to cover off a couple of other tasks I like to use ScrapeBox for when I am carrying out my day to day role, and hopefully I can show you some great ways to save time and speed up those monotonous processes. There are a lot of extra applications for ScrapeBox and I am going to leave it to your own judgement as to the “ethical” use of this tool.

How to find Blogs to Guest Post on using ScrapeBox

I know guest blogging has been getting a lot of stick recently and quite rightly so. Some link builders have been really abusing this great tactic over the past few months; but I am sure you won’t be doing that will you now.

In this guide I am going to run through some screenshots so you can see how easy it is to use. I hope you are pretty up to speed with your advanced Google search operators, because you’re going to be dusting them off once you get your hands on ScrapeBox.

In this guide I am suggesting ways to find guest post prospects but you could just as easily use this method to find blogs to place infographics, videos or whatever other outreach projects you are working on.

You want to add in your main keyword in this case I am looking for SEO blogs to write for
You select “Custom Footprint” and add in your different footprints
Select the search engine(s) you want to scrape e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo

Click the “start harvesting” button and go grab a fresh cup of coffee
Once you have finished harvesting your URL’s you want to remove the duplicates (and you can also use ScrapeBox to lookup the PageRank of the domain)
You then want to export the list into a CSV file
I then like to do some basic prospecting to qualify my targets e.g. Web Design, PageRank or mozRank, RSS Subscribers, Social Media presence

I am not going to cover off best practises on pitching your guest posts in this article but if you want some good pointers on outreach I suggest you read my blogger outreach interview.

How to use ScrapeBox to Check for Broken Links

Another ScrapeBox tool you will find quite handy is the bulk URL check, especially if you have a big list of URL’s to check on a regular basis.

Oh and did I mention, you don’t even need to buy a license for this tool it’s completely free!

All you have to do is open the tool and then import a list of links you want to check in one text file. Now upload another text file you want to add in your URL’s. There are two options here you can either check a link to a specific URL is live or just check a link to the domain is live. It only takes a few minutes to check your list and then you can export the failed links and check with the webmaster to see why it may have been removed.

How to use ScrapeBox to Scrape Google Image Search

Do you suffer from your images being stolen by webmasters without attribution? Well you can use Scrapebox to search Google for your image and then return the URL’s. The best way to do this is to make sure your image file names contain a set of random letters and numbers that will make it easy for you to find them e.g. dog-photo-xc345.jpg

You can then do a quick Google image search with ScrapeBox for “dog-photo-xc345.jpg” and the URL’s will be revealed. I would then personally load this list into ScrapeBox and use the WHOIS lookup tool to find the contact information for the domain owner and reach out asking they provide a link to your site for fair use of your image.

“Haters gonna hate… Scrapers gonna Scrape…”

As I mentioned at the start of this post there are lots of other great uses for ScrapeBox such as this article on ScrapeBox Keyword Research and also some additional ScrapeBox Tricks and Tips by Dan Bochichio.

If you have any more Scrapebox tips and tricks drop them in the comments below.

Keyword Research with the Google Keyword Tool

2014-08-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

So many people go wrong when it comes to keyword research. I find all too often people struggle to get keyword research right. They try to rank for keywords that don’t bring traffic or they are so competitive they will really struggle to ever compete with the big players.

The first problem I want to cover is aiming for keywords which are far too competitive to ever seriously rank your website for. The sites you are going up against have a lot of domain authority generated from years of high quality links pointing to them.

The second issue is you want to rank for keywords that will send you traffic, and if you rely solely on the Google Keyword tool you soon realise it can lead you to false expectations. The main flaw with the Google keyword tool is you can’t always find long tail keywords with traffic. Earlier this year SEOmoz wrote an article on the “hidden data” in Google’s adword Keyword Tool.

As you can see below Rand highlighted a number of search terms that were bringing the site hundreds of visitors every month to the site but were not suggested by Google when you research the keyword phrase “Blog Traffic”.

From the table above it is evident that Google is not showing any data for keywords that are bringing in 800+ visitors every month to the SEOmoz blog.

What types of Keywords do you want to aim for?

When you are starting out on your keyword research journey you really want to understand your business and the market you are operating in. In other words you want to find out what “weight class” you are positioning your website in.

If you think about this in a common sense way, when you are starting out you want to target the “easy keywords” that you can rank well for quickly and easily. It’s better to start small, fight in your weight class, develop the content you need to target them and over time you will begin to learn what it takes to rank for the harder and more competitive keywords.

You need traffic to serve the purpose that you need. Early in my career I made the mistake of simply chasing keywords that would just send me traffic. What I should have being doing was focus the following key areas:

Keywords that bring in buyers who will spend money with you
Create keyword targeted content that will bring traffic where people are looking for free information or news and ultimately these people may sign up to your RSS Feed or email list
You want to target a piece of content that’s a little more fun or entertaining and even though this may not be appealing to your target market. The great thing here is that people will seed your content on social media because they enjoyed it even if they don’t believe in the product or service you are promoting

As I highlighted above the best keywords are the one’s which get people who are going to spend money to your site. Often people will suggest you target a particular brand name but all too often these types of keywords are more difficult to rank for as Google often will return large ecommerce providers such as Amazon or the main brand website for these terms.

I find the best way to do this is to help buyers to answer the pre buyer questions they might have. These are people who already know that they want to buy a product i.e. TV, Laptop but are not sure which is best for their needs & budget. So by targeting phrases such as “Product A review” or “Product A vs. Product B” you can often rank for these keywords quite easily with good on page SEO and little need for additional link building to the new pages you create.

Beware of the Panda

But you don’t want to just create one page for every keyword you aim for… Amit Singhal gave us a list of questions to ask ourselves about the types of sites that the Google Panda Update was designed to target.

The question I feel has the most impact for keyword research and site architecture is:

“Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?”

This is very interesting, and what you need to be careful of here is if your web pages target keywords that are very similar, e.g. “How to get blog traffic” and “How to Increase Blog Traffic” then you might be in trouble with the big G. If you do want to target more than one keyword, you are better to target them on the same page, by structuring your content in a way that allows for these different keywords to be covered.

If you follow these tips then you will be choosing the right “weight class” of keywords to target and start to see organic traffic increase over time.

One of the most common tools that people use when carrying out keyword research for their website or blog is the free keyword tool provided by Google. In no way is this blog post meant to act as a fully comprehensive account of all the features and uses for the keyword tool but hopefully there will be a few useful hints and tips you didn’t know about that could improve the way you perform keyword research for pay per click or SEO campaigns.

The first thing you want to do is make sure that you are signed in to Google. The 2 reasons that you want to do this that instead of returning just 100 keyword ideas you can get access to 800. The second reason that you want to make sure you are signed in to the Google Keyword tool is that you have access to so many more features such as Local search trends, Approximate CPC (Cost per Click) and Google search network which shows the number of user searches for the keyword on the Google Search Network per month, based on an approximate 12-month average. This statistic is specific to your targeted country and language, and is only available for exact match type.

Extracting Google Keyword Tool Data

In the below example I have searched for data on the keyword term Protein Shakes (after all everyone is trying to get in shape in January). I have selected the Exact Match types (this is best practice when performing keyword research) & I am using the UK and English for my location and language settings.

As you can see because I am logged in I have the column Local Search Trends available. It produces some nice little green data bars.

Some of the information presented by the Google keyword tool is not very useful in the format in which it is presented within and I find it is better to download the results into a spreadsheet so that you can work with them. Simply select download as CSV for Excel and open the results.

From the results I have downloaded you can now see the searches per month for the keywords we are researching, this allows us to see where there are seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and also to determine if there is a rising or declining trend for a product we are optimising our sites for.

As you can clearly see there is a significant drop in search traffic in August this common across most niches in the UK simply because it is a popular time for us Brits to bring our unique culture to our European neighbours.

Use High Ranking Sites for Keyword Ideas

A pretty cool feature you can use is the find keywords by website feature, this allows you to insert a URL and get keyword ideas for content that is not already featured on that web page. The top ranking website in the UK is proteinshakes.org.uk (who says exact match domains are dead, eh?) I have simply copy and pasted the homepage url into the Google keyword research tool and it has returned lots of results that Google feels this page is relevant for.

By sorting the results by competition we can find some highly competitive keywords with good traffic that with a little on-page optimisation and a few relevant links this page could rank well for too. In the example below Protein Supplements and Protein Shakes for Weight loss have some great search volumes and as they have a high competition it means that these keywords have a high commercial value attached to them that will probably have a good conversion rate too.

Filtering Keywords

On the left hand side of the Google keyword tool are two boxes Include terms and Exclude terms. These do exactly what they say on the tin and allow you to remove keywords that are not relevant to your site’s content.

This a feature that I see many experienced internet marketers ignoring when performing keyword research for their clients especially if the client has advised they don’t offer a particular product or service.

Finding Mobile Browser Search Traffic

With the bumper growth of mobile search and the recent news story just a few days ago on the BBC that mobile devices saw 1.2 billion app downloads in a week. It is very important that you also check mobile search data as part of your keyword research. I’d say the number 1 thing you need to invest your web design budget on this year is a mobile friendly website.

You may have spotted where to change the device data in a previous screenshot (bonus points if you did) if not here it is.

The drop down box “Show Ideas and Statistics for” in advanced settings allows you to easily change the type of device your potential site visitors are using. This is very useful for businesses in the Food and Entertainment industry where mobile traffic is growing rapidly.

Finally, don’t expect that the data in the Google keyword tool is highly accurate; the search volumes are estimates and quite often they are over-estimated.

I hope this blog post has shown you a few features of the Google keyword tool you aren’t already using and if you have any more tips feel free to leave a comment below.

How to add a website to Google Webmaster Tools

2014-08-15T03:18:00.002-07:00

What are Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) is an important resource for any webmaster. It is designed to inform web owners about how “Google bot” is interacting with a website. It gives detailed information on important SEO factors such as broken website links, popular search terms (keywords) and how often Google is stopping by. It’s Google’s way of giving site owners the information that they need to be successful.

Google Webmaster Tools let you access data about the indexing of your website. This does the following:

Displays Google’s view of your site
Helps you diagnose site issues
Lets you share information with Google to improve your site’s visibility in search engine results
Provides you with crawl statistics, recent queries, errors, and other information that Google collects about your site

How to add your website

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools is not to difficult. The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. Since all Google services use the same login, you may already be setup. If you have Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, Google+ or one of the many other services, then you are ready to go. If not, sign up for a free Google Account.

Once you have created or if you already have a Google Account you should be able to use that to login and then create your WMT’s account.

Then click on the “Add a site” link and enter your full website address. Site owners can add in as many sites as they want. Once you have done this it will ask you to “Verify ownership” of the website. To do this you need to add a meta tag to the home page or upload a file to your website that WMT’s will provide. We’ve found the easier and quicker method is to add the meta tag into your website code.

Verifying the site takes only a few seconds but access to the web server is necessary. Verification ensures that you are the site administrator/owner and can get the insight. If you don’t own the site, and you can’t verify it, then Google won’t give you the detailed information.

If you have difficulty setting up your webmaster tools you may need your web designer to help you.

Next you want to submit a sitemap to your new Webmaster tools, you can create and upload a Sitemap and use this page to submit it to Google. Just click Add a Sitemap and then follow the instructions.

Google Webaster Tools are a great set of resources to see how Google is interacting with your site. You can see issues, your site’s linking structure and how people are finding your site. It’s much more than other search engines are doing and something that is highly valuable for any site owner.

How to Improve your WordPress SEO

2014-08-15T03:15:00.000-07:00

I have been using WordPress for several years now, for both my projects and for working on my client’s web profiles. I’m certainly not alone when it comes to utilising this CMS though — tens of millions of sites online are powered by the software. The WordPress Codex says that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines“. I can safely say, that may well in fact be true, but I must admit to you that there is more than enough work that you’ll need to do after you’ve installed WordPress on to your server in order for it to interact well with the major search engines such as Google or Bing.

Obviously I can’t guarantee you first page rankings, and certainly can’t get you lots of quality links, but I hope I can teach you some useful tips to ensure that your site is optimised and improve your indexing rates.

I am going to split this article into separate headings for you to follow firstly we will cover what you need to do to optimise your WordPress Installation and Theme.

Title Tags

By default your WordPress post title will look something like:

Blog Title » Archive » Title of Your Post

Surprisingly, it is the exact opposite of what you should do in order to increase your SERPs. One thing you must understand is that search engines put higher weight on keywords that are near the start when ranking a post. So theoretically you are hurting your chances of ranking well.

Sadly since WordPress is not a static site, it is difficult to generate the title in the way we want. Fortunately there are some excellent third party developed WordPress plugins such as All in One SEO that allows us do that with a just few clicks. First thing you need to do is install and then activate the All in One SEO plugin and follow the settings which I suggest below.

Using this plugin, you can also write / modify titles for specific post or page. You can override the default post title and write a custom title for your meta tags.

Change your Permalink Structure

WordPress out of the box has a very “ugly” URL Structure that is both unfriendly to humans and search engine bots. It does not give anyone any idea as to what the web page is about, as it does not contain any keywords.

http://www.rootswebsolutions.com/?p=29

The goal of making the URL structure friendlier is that your users should know before reading the article what it is about by just looking at the URL. The same goal is to be accomplished for Search Engines as well.

You need to go to Settings > Permalinks and edit the settings to /%postname%/

Make sure you choose the structure that works best for you. And if you must choose a custom structure other than the one I used, see this reference for how to do it.

It’s best to do this on a fresh blog installation, but if you’re making this change on an older blog then make sure you install a redirection plugin. Also remember to shorten the post slug when you are writing an article, as by default the URL will use all of the words in your title.

Add a robots.txt file

Many WordPress webmasters forget about this, but one very easy thing to have on your site is a robots.txt file. This simply tells Google which parts of your website they are allowed to spider and add to their index. WordPress doesn’t come with a robots.txt file from a fresh install, so we need to add one. It’s a very simple thing to add, but it really can help to improve your rankings.

To create a robots.txt file create a text file named robots.txt and put this inside it:

User-agent:*
Disallow:

Upload this via FTP to the root folder of your website:

Like this => http://www.yourwebdomain.com/robots.txt

Headings

Headings are defined by HTML with H1 (largest) to H6 (smallest). You need to use them in your articles when you write. Your article title should be in a main heading (H1), sub headings with H2 and small headings with H3.

Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is very important to help to improve the number of pages that are added to the Google index. Sitemaps improve the “crawlability” of your site as they help the search spiders to find your content. Google XML Sitemaps plugin is great as it automatically creates a sitemap which you can submit to your Google Webmaster tools and it can speed up the the time it takes for your site to be indexed.

Images – Alt Text

One of the most overlooked, but powerful on-page SEO tweaks you can make, is to begin to religiously use the ALT and TITLE tag for your images.

The alt tag is a way to tell search engines what your images are actually about. Not only will it help you get more search traffic to your images, but I think it helps the overall rankings of a page, as well.

Make your Content Easy to Share

Social bookmarking is an effective way of promoting a website, Social bookmarking can add great value to your WordPress SEO allowing visitors to share the website pages and posts on social networks and generating massive traffic free of charge.

Allowing Social bookmarking on a WordPress website encourages visitors to get engaged with your site content and spread the word around to their social networks. There are many WordPress Social bookmarking plugins out there that can be used to add to your Website such as ShareThis.

Internal Linking

There are 2 main reasons why I regularly dedicate time to go back over old posts on my blog and find ways to update those posts with links to other posts on my blog.

1. Readers – my number one goal with any website is to help people find what they are looking for. By interlinking pages you improve the chances your readers will return time and again.

2. SEO – another great reason to interlink the posts on your blog is that search engines look at the links within a post/page to both find content to index but also to work out how to index and rank content.

As you write a new article train yourself to be thinking about what you’re written previously that relates to your new post. As you identify related content start to interlink your posts (you can add links in your new post to old content and/or add links in your old ones to your new content).

Content, Content, Content

Finally the most important part of any SEO campaign is to right compelling, original and quality content. When you are writing an article ask yourself is this something I think people would find useful, would I want to link to this or share it with my friends.

Remember at the end of the day build your websites for people and not search engines.

If you have any more SEO tips for WordPress I’d love you to share them in the comments below.