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Ways to Get More Traffic and Traction byPromoting Your Content Like a Boss

2017-08-22T04:47:00.001-07:00

Some bloggers seem to have all the luck.
They get way more shares than you. They get tons more email subscribers than you. They get much higher search rankings than you.
And it sucks, right?
Because their content is good, but it’s not great.
Certainly it’s not that much better than yours.
So what are they doing differently?
Why is their content so much more successful than yours?
The difference is in the way they promote it.

What Promotion-Smart Bloggers Know That Most Bloggers Miss

As a blogger, you’ll have been lectured many times on the importance of good content.
Time and time again you’ve been told you must create high-quality content. Awesome content. Even epic content.
But smart bloggers know that while quality is important, it’s just one piece of the content puzzle.
In fact – and prepare to be shocked – it’s not even the most important piece of the puzzle.
Don’t believe me? Ask yourself: who gets more traffic – the blogger who’s great at writing and good at promotion, or the blogger who’s good at writing and great at promotion?
The answer should be obvious. The blogger who’s great at promotion will run circles around the talented writer every time.
Consider this: the New York Times doesn’t publish a list of best books. They publish a list of best-selling books.
See the difference? It’s all about promotion.
And the following tips will show you how to promote your content like a boss:

1) Think Cross-Channel and Multi-Format

When the average blogger thinks about content, they usually think in terms of blog posts. And they often don’t consider at all how readers first encounter those posts.
The boss blogger, however, knows how to combine promotion tactics and content formats for maximum effect.
That means blending search, social and email:

Email and social allow you to stay connected to your audience.
Social and search enable discovery, bringing new traffic and subscribers.
Search and email give you consistent visibility with your readers.

Content is at the heart of all three channels, but you can’t just push out the same content in each. Different formats work better in different places.
Long-form text is good for search. Shareable images work well in social streams.
So a boss blogger creates assets in many formats.
They’re not just creating an endless stream of 800-word blog posts. They create charts, diagrams, SlideShare presentations, downloadable PDFs, infographics, quizzes, expert interviews, whitepapers, videos and podcasts.
Each asset is created with promotion in mind, knowing that different formats get traction in different channels.
And each channel makes different demands on the content creator.

Email Subject Lines, Tweets, Facebook Posts

These need headlines that grab attention, surprise the reader, include numbers (as in, list posts), align with cultural trends or leave a curiosity gap.
Examples:

Blog Like a Honey Badger
I Thought I Knew Analytics, Until I Watched This Video
101 Ways to Make Your Sales Prospects Smile

SEO-Motivated Content

This requires titles and headings that align with phrases people are searching for – including complete questions and phrases – and long, detailed articles.
Examples:

How to Market an Event
Keyword Research Strategies
How Does Social Media Affect SEO?

Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare and YouTube

These visual channels require evocative images that grab attention. Do this by including a person’s face and a headline or subheadline from the article. Be sure to size images appropriately for each network.
Examples:

If you want a single piece of content to get traction in several channels, combine tactics.
Use provocative images with embedded headlines as the featured image in a post. Then embed a video with a striking thumbnail image or a slideshow with a compelling title slide.

Pro Tip!

To create headlines that get traction in both social media and SEO, use a colon to separate the search-friendly keyword from the social-friendly click bait. This gives you good key-phrase prominence (phrase appears at the beginning of the title) but still lets you leverage human psychology in the rest of the headline/title.
The following are some examples from my blog:

Competitive Analysis Tools: 5 Free Ways to See the Analytics of Any Website
Neuromarketing Web Design: 15 Ways to Connect with Visitors’ Brains
Internal Linking: 9 Best Practices for Internal Links
Ego Bait: 5 Simple Ways to Leverage Blog Mentions
Thank You Pages: 9 Example of Missed Opportunities

Each of these was effective in both search and social.
So, are you publishing in different formats?
Are you tailoring each piece of content for each specific channel?

2) Use Your Blog as the Ultimate Networking Tool

Boss bloggers are power networkers.
They know that the difference between a popular blog and a deserted blog is relationships. So they’re constantly using their blogs as tools to connect with other people.
Want to build relationships with influencers? Invite people over, have a conversation and deepen those connections. If the website is a house, the blog is the living room.
Here’s how to use your blog as a power networking tool:

Take a stand. Rant a little. State an opinion and invite dissent. Start discussions that power players will be unable to resist joining.
Move the conversation from the blog into social media and vice versa.
Source topics from relevant communities on social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Quora. Intentionally focus on communities where your target influencers are known to hang out.
Write detailed, thoughtful comments. Share half-formed ideas and ask for input. Talk to people in the comments of their blogs.
Write response posts, adding to what people have written elsewhere. Most people will be flattered that their writing has inspired other people.
When you share a blog post, mention specific people who would likely be interested in what you wrote. Use social media to find specific people who will love the content. For example:

So ask yourself: are you making friends on your blog?
If not, you’re doing it wrong.

3) ABC. Always Be Collaborating.

A boss blogger doesn’t work alone. They collaborate – with friends, influencers, readers, even competitors.
Collaboration strengthens your network and goes beyond simple outreach because it creates bonds through content.
Turn strangers into friends by including them in round-ups. Interview the major players in your niche. Ask them to contribute a quote.
The advantage of collaboration is that each co-creator is also a partner in promotion once the content goes live.
And here’s a trick that most bloggers miss: get the voice of your target audience into your content.
Looking to increase engagement with your readers? Come up with a content idea that would benefit from their input. Conduct a survey that puts their views and experiences at the heart of your next post.
Collaboration has two huge benefits: it shares the burden of creating content easier, and it creates allies when it comes time to promote the content.
Example: 6 Questions for 6 Analytics Experts
This post is part of a series where we ask questions to influencers on various topics. This post included input from Justin Cutroni (Google), Neil Patel (QuickSprout) and Dr. Pete (MOZ). Most people love to be interviewed, so the outreach wasn’t difficult.

Are you using your blog to create reasons to contact people?
Remember – you’re a publisher. You can create reasons to contact people anytime.

4) Go Big or Go Home

Big results come from big efforts. The pros know this well.
Eighty percent of bloggers publish posts that are 1,000 words or less:

Example: Survey of 1000+ Bloggers.
But boss bloggers know this, and when other bloggers zig, they zag. So they go big.
They know that content that goes way beyond what’s expected gets more traction than a dozen medium-quality posts.
Content that’s more detailed, more comprehensive, or simply asks the questions no one else took the time to ask cuts through the noise created by less-ambitious content.
Try one of the following:

Do a survey of a large number of people in your industry.
Collect data over a long date range and publish the insights you discover.
Publish a guide that explains every aspect of an important topic.
Build an interactive tool that helps your audience make important decisions.
Do a series of live webinars.
Write and self-publish a book.

Bigger content is far easier to promote. It’s more worthy of shares, links, opens and clicks.
Bigger content also gives you an advantage for longer. Because content that is harder to create is also harder to replicate.
The Internet is ravenous for originality. So feed that appetite with original research.
At Orbit Media, we spent around 100 hours to create an original piece of research that answered big questions in our industry.
How much time do people spend blogging? What percentage of bloggers use editors? How are people promoting their content?
The post was covered by some of the biggest blogs and podcasts in the industry and has been translated into four languages.

So are you creating something truly original?
Are you investing enough time in your content?
Are you going big?

5) Get Strategic About Your Content

Most bloggers publish a steady stream of loosely connected posts.
Each week they take an idea, write it up and publish.
The next week? Another idea.
Even if they stick to a strict publishing calendar, they end up with a collection of posts with no underlying strategy. The posts may relate to each other, but then again, they may not. It’s mostly down to luck.
The boss blogger takes a different approach. They start with a plan to dominate a topic within their niche and then systematically create the posts (and other types of content) required to make it happen.
By staying focused on the topic for longer, they get bigger benefits. They don’t create isolated posts; they create interconnected hubs of content.
The benefits to the boss blogger are many:

The key phrases they target are interrelated, so they support each other.
The connections they build with influencers stay relevant to their content for longer.
The most recent subscribers to their lists are more likely to be interested in subsequent posts because there’s topic continuity.
They have better opportunities for internal linking between posts.

And they don’t move on to the next topic until they reach the minimum amount of content and connections to be truly influential on that subject.
A strong content hub does the following:

Offers value on several interrelated sub-topics
Targets several key phrases
Includes content in various formats (as discussed in point #1)
Appears on more than one website (e.g., via guest blogging)
Includes content created by various collaborators

Here’s what it looks like:

Example: Lead Generation Website Best Practices (and related content)
First, we created a detailed, practical post and aligned it with a valuable key phrase. Then we published an infographic and five guest posts on similar topics. After several weeks of hard work and focus, the post ranks on page one, above many famous and authoritative websites.
With the hub built, Google now does most of the hard work of promoting the content within the hub. Pretty cool, huh?
So are you focusing on one topic long enough to get real results before moving on?
Are you creating a deliberate structure between your posts and the rest of the content on your blog?

6) Use Your Analytics to Actually Do Analysis

Most bloggers look at their traffic stats, smile or frown, and then move on.
But they’re not doing real analysis. They’re certainly not using the data to guide their next move.
The boss blogger, on the other hand, knows that analytics is not a scoreboard – it’s a decision support tool.
They use insights gained from their analytics to influence their promotion strategy:

They learn which posts are traffic champions and which posts are conversion champions, and they know how to use one to promote the other.
They know which social networks pull in what kinds of visitors, and they adjust their promotional activities on those networks accordingly.
They know which topics get traction, which keywords get clicked, which formats work best, and they use that information to create content that is already optimized for promotion.

If you’re not currently using analytics, you’re blogging in the dark.
And if you’re using analytics simply to keep score, you’re missing a huge opportunity – the ongoing improvement of your blog and its promotion. A process based on trials, testing and a regular review of analytics.
So, are you making decisions based on data?
Do you know what’s working and what isn’t?
Are you truly analyzing the performance of your content?

Are You Ready to Start Thinking Like a Boss?

In a crowded blogosphere, great content isn’t enough.
You need great promotion too.
That’s why popular bloggers are as serious about promoting their content as they are about creating it in the first place.
They think long term. They aren’t limited to one tactic. They focus on relationships. They make decisions based on evidence.
Because that’s how a boss gets it done.
The hard truth is that if a blog post is created without a plan for promotion, it won’t get the traffic or the reach – or the end results – it deserves.
So adopt a promotion-focused mindset and start taking action.
The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be the boss of your blog, your network and your niche.

This Nigerian Man Built A Solar-Powered Tricycle ‘Keke Napep’ In Lagos

2017-08-22T03:46:00.001-07:00

A Nigerian man was reportedly pictured riding his recently built solar-powered tricycle (keke-napep) around Yaba area of Lagos state.

This is one amazing innovation considering the surge of Keke Napeps (tricycles) in Lagos.

This Is What Jay-Z Had To Say About His Elevator Fight With Beyonce’s Sister

2017-08-22T03:44:00.002-07:00

For the first time since 2014, JAY-Z has finally spoken out over the viral video that showed his wife Beyonce‘s sister, Solange, apparently attacking him.
Speaking on Rap Radar podcast last week, he said the disagreement didn’t mean they hated each other.

‘I fought my brothers and argued with my brothers my whole life. It just so happens, who we are, these things go into a different space, but it ain’t nothing.
‘We had one disagreement ever. Before and after we’ve been cool. She’s like my sister. I will protect her. That’s my sister, not my sister-in-law, my sister.’

Although the hip-hop legend had stayed quiet since the incident, the allegations of infidelity on his part became rampant after Beyonce addressed the issue with her Lemonade album, and JAY-Z himself confirmed on the 4:44 album.

Bishop David Oyedepo Happily Celebrates 35th Wedding Anniversary With Wife

2017-08-22T03:43:00.001-07:00

Senior Pastor of the General Overseer of Living Faith Church aka Winners Chapel, Bishop David Oyedepo and his wife, Faith, are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary today August 21st.

They got married in 1982 and have four children. Celebrating his wife on social media, Pastor Oyedepo wrote;

“Happy 35th Wedding Anniversary to my Heaven-sent Wife, Faith Abiola Oyedepo.
It gets sweeter by the day!”

Why National Broadcasting Corporation Banned Davido, Olamide And 9ice’s Songs

2017-08-22T03:40:00.003-07:00

The National Broadcasting Corporation NBC has placed a ban on some of Nigeria’s most popular tunes for alleged violation of the commissions rules and regulations regarding music lyrics and videos.

The commission which is responsible for making sure there is a degree of sense and meaning in the contents released by Entertainers into the industry has deemed it fit to ban Olamide’s new jam WO and his previous song Wavy Level amongst other songs.
Davido’s Banana anthem FALL did not survive the blow neither did the remix of IF. Another song that was listed for ban was 9ice’s controversial song Living Things, a song that has been criticized to be a glorification of fraudsters.

It could be recalled that the visual for Olamide’s new song was released just some days ago and the Ministry of Health already consider it a hazard to the nation giving the level of indiscriminate smoking seen in the already viral video.
The ban implies that these songs would no longer be played on TV stations and radio stations

Watch Jay Z Pay Touching Tribute To Linkin Park’s Chester Bessington

2017-08-22T03:38:00.004-07:00

JAY Z in his set during V Festival paid tribute to Linkin Park‘s Chester Bennington who committed suicide in July.

The rapper performed his collabo with the band “Numb/Encore” of their joint EP “Collision Course.”
“Can you guys light it up tonight for Chester?” JAY Z told the audience, “Linkin Park, one time, tonight. Please make some noise so he can hear you all the way in heaven tonight!”
“Numb/Encore” won Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 2006 Grammy Awards
Watch video
https://youtu.be/pkpBX6EeMv8

Top 10 Killer Ways To Promote YouTube Videos For Higher Traffic

2017-08-22T02:02:00.002-07:00

Do you have a YouTube channel & publish videos regularly?
It doesn’t matter how much time you put into creating your videos; if you are not marketing & promoting your videos, your work will never be seen by the majority of your target audience.
But YouTube video promotion is an art which anyone can learn… with a little discipline.
In this guide, I have shared strategies and techniques that you can follow to market & promote your YouTube videos.
These tips are tested, proven, and work for videos from almost every niche. Think of this post as a checklist that you need to follow once you are done producing your videos.
So without further delay, let’s learn the art of YouTube video promotion!

How To Promote A YouTube Video & Get More Views

I have covered all major promotion techniques in the sub-topics below.
Note: In upcoming posts in our YouTube promotion series, I will explain these sub-topics in detail. If you are a professional YouTuber or are planning to become one, you should subscribe to our blog updates or download our iOS/Android app to stay updated.

1. Video Title

The titles of your videos are a major deciding factor between them being widely seen & shared across the internet, or only getting a small number of views.
It’s a good idea to do proper keyword research to find what people are searching for and then crafting a great title around that.

Here are some tips for writing great video titles on YouTube:

Keep them short and to the point.
Add the current year if you can (Ex: Best Tips for 2017).
Make it attention grabbing.
Include keywords in the beginning of the title (where possible).
Use “Power Words” (Ex: Best, Awesome, Incredible).
Use emotional triggers words (Ex: Sensual, Lonely, Passionate, Censored).
Capitalize your headline title. Use this tool to help you.

2. Video Tags

One of the biggest mistakes that hinders the growth of your YouTube video’s organic promotion is incorrect tag usage.
Tagging in YouTube works differently than it does in a blog post. If you’ve never paid attention to YouTube tags, now’s a good time to start. You can even go back and edit all of your old tags.
Here are some rules for using YouTube video tags:

Use a unique branded tag so that your videos are shown in related videos. Ex: Use your brand name in all videos. (See below screenshot.)
Use your main keywords as the video tag.
Use a variation of your keyword as a tag (take help of the YouTube auto-suggest feature).
Find the tags used by high ranking videos & use those in your video. You can use the TubeBuddy Chrome extension to help you find tags used by others.

Do remember, YouTube video tags are an important factor for the organic ranking of videos.

3. Use A Custom Thumbnail

Verified YouTube accounts can take advantage of the custom thumbnail feature. A good video thumbnail helps you stand out in the related video and suggested video section.
Here are some tips for thumbnails:

Have a resolution of 1280 x 720 (with a minimum width of 640 pixels).
Upload in either .JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.
Keep it under 2MB.
Try to use a 16:9 aspect ratio as it’s the most used in YouTube players and previews.

I don’t want to confuse you with these technicalities, but it’s important for you to know this so that you can craft a thumbnail that works well on desktops as well mobile devices.

You can use Canva or YouZign to design a thumbnail for YouTube videos in minutes.
Watch this video to learn more about creating clickable thumbnails:

Subscribe on Youtube

4. Focus On Branding

There are a few branding things that you should do from now on which will ensure every video stands out. One of those things is using a branded intro and outro.

YouTube intro: A 3-5 second clip that runs at the beginning to showcase your brand.
YouTube outro: This runs at the end and can be as simple as showing related videos for your channel or asking users to like & subscribe to videos.

Getting a YouTube intro & outro video is easy, and you can create them yourself using Camtasia or you can hire someone from Fiverr.
Take a look at this video and see the outro I got created for me from someone on Fiverr: (Browse to 3.53 seconds for video outro)

Subscribe on Youtube

If you don’t have a channel logo yet, do get that designed, too.
Check out: How To Build A Personal Brand (and why you need one)

5. Share Videos On Social Media Channels

If you are a video blogger, you should have some social media properties for your YouTube channel. This gives you an opportunity to create a community outside of YouTube & direct traffic from other popular social media/social networking channels.
Here are some of the social media properties that you must create:

Facebook page
Twitter profile
Google Plus page
Instagram profile
Pinterest profile

You can use a tool like Buffer to schedule videos to be shared on your social media channels. You can take advantage of IFTT + Buffer integration to automatically share your newly published videos on your social media pages.

One important tip here:

Always share your video after a regular interval.

I typically share each video at least 10-15 times within eight months after publishing. Also, use hashtags when sharing so that others can easily discover them.

6. Start A Blog For Your YouTube Channel

If you are a full-time YouTuber, you shouldn’t miss out on creating a blog for your YouTube videos. These days, it’s pretty easy to embed YouTube videos onto a blog & you can create a blog on any free or paid platform.
I recommend you to create a blog using WordPress & use a video-specific WordPress theme. It’s better for you to use Managed WordPress Hosting so that you don’t have to worry about blog maintenance.
At the same time, you can use plugins like:

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin – to make your blog rank higher.
YouTube Viral Subscribe plugin – to automatically add a “subscribe to channel” tag after every video.

If not WordPress, you can take advantage of other platforms like:

Medium
Tumblr
BlogSpot

Bonus Tip: You can also buy a domain name & redirect it to your YouTube channel. This way when someone asks you “How can I find you on YouTube?”, simply share the domain name. Use this coupon from GoDaddy to buy a domain name for less than $2.

7. Create A Playlist Or Add Video To An Existing Playlist

A YouTube playlist is a great way to get more views on your existing videos. When you are done uploading a new video, add it to a playlist (either one you create or an existing one).
If you are creating a new playlist, follow these steps:

Give a meaningful name to the playlist & have a keyword in the title of that playlist.
Add a detailed description of the playlist and put your keyword(s) in there.
Group similar videos into one playlist.
A single video can be listed in more than one playlist.

YouTube playlists also appear in search results. By doing this, further discovery of your videos is increased.

Watch this below video to learn about creating a Playlist on YouTube:

8. Use Calls To Action

People on social media sites need to be told about the actions you want them to take.
At the end of the video, or even somewhere in middle, ask viewers to like & subscribe to your channel. At the same time, you can ask them to share the video with others who might benefit from it.
Most of the prominent YouTube stars use this technique to take advantage of their existing viewership. If you have never done this before, start doing it from your next video onward. You will be amazed to discover that by simply asking, the number of shares increases by a great extent.

9. Interview Influencers In Your Niche

This one is not a direct YouTube video promotion technique, but it fits perfectly in the overall strategy of your channel promotion.
Interviewing an influencer gives you an opportunity to get access to an already thriving community in your niche. Not only you will grab the attention of others who follow that particular influencer, you will also get noticed by the industry as a whole.
You can find the top influencers in your niche & you can interview them using Google Hangouts or Skype. For Skype, you can use a tool like Ecamm call recorder.

10. Spend Time Learning At YouTube’s Creator Academy

One mistake most of the growing YouTube marketers make is they just focus on publishing more videos & stop learning.
YouTube is one of the fastest changing platforms, and it’s important for you to learn about all of the existing and emerging tips and tricks.

You can use Creator Academy by YouTube to learn some pro tips for making the most out of your YouTube videos (and your channel as a whole). When I started learning here, I was surprised to learn so many growth hacks & tricks which I would have otherwise missed.

Promote Your YouTube Videos And Get More Views

Well, these are some simple promotion strategies & techniques that you can use from today onward for your YouTube videos.
These tricks and tips will surely help you get a lot more traffic, and ultimately, more subscribers.
Now it’s your turn to share how you are promoting videos on YouTube after you hit the ‘publish’ button. Let me hear about your promotion strategies! I’ll keep updating this post with all of the best suggestions from the comments section.
If you find any of the listed tips useful, share them with your YouTuber friends! And don’t forget to join me on YouTube!

Best way To Moderate YouTube Spam Comments Automatically Using Artificial Intelligence

2017-08-22T01:55:00.000-07:00

Artificial Intelligence is here, and many companies are offering it to us to improve our work flows.

Earlier, I talked about the web app (also iOS app), SmartModeration, which automatically tackles spam comments on Instagram and Facebook (check out my review here). I’ve been using it for almost a year to tackle the spam comments on ShoutMeLoud’s Instagram and Facebook pages.
The big news: The same AI technology can now help us combat spam comments on YouTube.
Recently, SmartModeration has integrated with YouTube, so you no longer have to worry about moderating and tackling spam comments on your videos. If you are a YouTube channel owner or a YouTube influencer, this new integration is going to be so valuable for you.

How To Tackle YouTube Spam Comments Automatically Using Artificial Intelligence

If you have never used SmartModeration before, go ahead and sign up right now. They offer a 3 day-free trial which is good enough to tackle spam comments for all of your existing updates on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
In this tutorial, I’m sharing how to use their new YouTube integration.

Log in to your SmartModeration account.
Click on the Page Management tab (Direct link).

Click on Add New Channel.
Give access to your YouTube channel.
Repeat the process if you have more than one YouTube channel.

Once you have allowed access, it will take a few minutes to scan your existing published and pending YouTube comments.
You should give an hour or so to let the SmartModeration bot to do its magic.
When done, you can use the tabs to quickly find ‘inappropriate’ and ‘automatically hidden spam comments’.

Well, now you’re all set. You can start using their web app or their mobile app to moderate your YouTube comments.

What if you have a new or moderately popular YouTube channel?

Here is the thing, not everyone needs SmartModeration to moderate YouTube comments. If you have a well-established and active YouTube channel, SmartModeration is definitely a good choice.
But if you are someone who gets a limited amount of comments, then you don’t need SmartModeration. You can manually moderate comments by configuring the settings.
Here is how you do that:

Go to the YouTube community settings by clicking here.

Here you can configure settings to manually review all comments.

This definitely increases the time by which new comments will appear on your newly publishes posts, but you won’t have to pay for SmartModeration.
For new and medium traffic YouTubers, you can use the YouTube Creator Studio app (Android | iOS) on your smartphone to moderate comments.
However, once you reach the stage where your time is money, and you are getting a lot of comments, using an AI tool like SmartModeration can significantly improve your work flow.
Take a 3-day free trial of SmartModeration
Along with this new YouTube integration, they have recently revamped their dashboard:

They’ve also added another cool feature…
AI-Powered Blacklist: Here you can define keywords for your specific moderation needs, and the AI-powered blacklist will detect and hide comments with your pre-set keywords and their variations like frequent misspellings or large spaces in between letters.
I have been using this tool to manage my Instagram and my Facebook for quite some time. And now, I’m pretty excited that I get to use it to moderate my YouTube comments as well. If you are someone who understands not only the importance of comments but also the idea that “time is money”, you should definitely look into using this great service.
Now I want to hear from you: Have you used SmartModeration before? What do you think about it? Are you excited about this YouTube integration? Let me hear your reviews in the comments below! Also, if you use any other Artificial Intelligence comment fighting tool, do tell us about it in the comments!
Here are some more hand-picked articles to improve your YouTube experience:

Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!

SmartModeration is a great tool to use to tackle spam comments on Facebook, Instagram, and now YouTube. It's a little pricey for new marketers, but for those with large followings, this tool is invaluable.

4.5

editor rating

Four Steps to Determining the Scope and Relevance of Social media

2017-08-22T01:50:00.001-07:00

The social networks have reached an extraordinary peak knowing them to manage, can be beneficial to many areas of some companies. Fundamental to them is the knowledge of user behavior to determine the scope of our message and relevance of them. There are many ways to determine the scope and relevance, but it might be good to focus on two simple questions:
1) What number and what kind of people I’m coming with my efforts in Social Media?
2) How will we develop content specifically targeted to these people?

The scope and work closely with relevant metrics, helping you determine the effectiveness of your campaign and how to improve your interactions. It is not only how many people are coming, but if you’re heading to the right audience and relevant at a time.
Here are four steps that will help you examine and understand the scope and relevance of your message in a Social Media strategy.

Step 1 – Determine the current scope

This is the easy part. Your strategy in Social Media interaction likely involves multiple platforms.Measure its scope is to find how many people follow you or have chosen to establish a relationship with you on every platform. For example:
• How many Twitter followers do you have?
• How many Facebook fans?
• How many YouTube subscribers?
• How quickly your audience grows in each of these networks?
• What is the number of page views of your blog?
• What is the average number of retweets your content?
All these numbers will give you a clear idea of the scope and expected growth potential given your current strategy. The goal is to increase your reach, so the following three steps are designed to help you increase your business and know what is happening channels.

Step 2 – Determine the demographics of your fans

The scope is not the ultimate objective measures success in Social Media. You may have gained a huge following on Twitter or Facebook, but that does not correspond with the growth of the business.You may also be struggling to grow your reach and followers you have, are fans and are very committed to you to recommend your content to others.
By measuring your fingertips, you need to look beyond the numbers in general. It is important to understand who are your supporters and fans, and learn about their demographics as possible.Using the measurement information available on most platforms, data can be determined as:
• Age
• Location
• Genre
• Type of content preferred
• Other interests
You can review this information together with the measurement of interactions to determine which subset of the numbers, in general, are more active and also what content is appealing to different demographics within their constituency as a whole.

Step 3 – Calibrate the relevance of content and interactions

Once you have determined who is forming the core of your presence in social media, you’re ready to start developing content that is highly relevant to your audience.
The relevance of the content is the key to the success of your Social Media strategy. You might have a massive reach, but without relevance, is not effectively connecting with constituents, and as a result, you’ll never see the positive results for your business. You can measure the relevance of your content by checking how users interact with it. The following questions will help:
• What content has generated most of the interactions in recent months?
• What was the feeling of those interactions?
• How is the content related to my business/brand / product?
• What were the demographic Highlights of users who interact with your content?
• What content generated less interaction occurred?
• Why did not succeed the content?
Relevance is what enables brands to harness the power of amplification through a network of users.When the content is relevant, is likely to be shared by your followers among his friends and quickly spread and generate value from a wider network. By interacting on social networks, the relevance is the first thing any marketer should consider before developing or publishing content, so you understand what worked and what not, is the first step in creating truly relevant content in the future.

The specific orientation of the influencers in your network of followers is also key, as these evangelists have earned the trust of readers in their sector and have a special impact on them.

Step 4 – Customize the content to increase relevance to the main public

The final step of your reach and relevance is to create and test new content based on what you have learned about the profile of users who follow you through the last three steps. The generation of highly relevant content and targeted to specific groups of users in a meaningful way will begin to grow their interactions.

Then you can compare previous data with new data set to modify and refine your campaign, to identify what is working and what is not. As the relevance of content grows and continues to reach your target audience, increase its power generating meaningful interactions with the fans that will result in business growth and is therefore in sales.Once you get used to controlling a process of regular measurement and have a set of relevant statistics of the trends of your users, you will see improvements in your business driven by the extent of your message through influential users.
Once you get used to controlling a process of regular measurement and have a set of relevant statistics of the trends of your users, you will see improvements in your business driven by the extent of your message through influential users.

Did You Lose Traffic After Migrating To HTTPS? Here’s How To Fix That.

2017-08-17T17:57:00.003-07:00

Should you move your website from HTTP to HTTPS?
Is it worth moving an information site like a blog to HTTPS?

These were some of the questions we all had last year when HTTPS became really common.
If we look at the current trend, it’s a no brainer that our sites should be using HTTPS.

And when you are starting a new site & implementing HTTPS, things are easy.
However, when you are moving an existing/running site from HTTP to HTTPS, things are not that simple.
Moving to HTTPS is indeed a big technical SEO change. At times, people make mistakes here & start losing their SEO traffic.
However, one can quickly avoid this if they are following all the right steps before & after moving their site from HTTP to HTTPS.

There are a few tools that let us check for proper SSL implementation, but they are not geared toward SEO. These tools usually check for canonical & SSL certificate implementation, which is not enough when you are doing an SEO audit after moving your site to HTTPS.
So, what’s the solution?
SEMrush, which is the most popular SEO tool, recently added an HTTPS implementation audit feature in their site SEO audit feautre. As some of you may know, SEMrush is the most comprehensive HTTPS SEO audit tool I have ever come across.
In this guide, I will share how you can use this tool to check if there’s anything wrong with your HTTPS implementation.

If you have migrated your site from HTTP to HTTPS recently and have noticed a drop in traffic, or if you are planning to move your site to HTTPS sometime in the future (which you should), this is the tool that you should be using.
SEMrush is a paid tool, however, you can use the link below to sign up for a 14-day free trial (you can simply cancel the subscription before 14 days is up).
Test drive the HTTPS feature of SEMrush (14 days of unrestricted access)

How To Use The HTTPS Implementation Site SEO Audit Feature

Note: This feature can be used by existing SEMrush users & new users who are signing up for the first time.
Here is what you need to do:

Create an account on SEMrush or log in to your dashboard.
Click on Projects on the left side column.

Click on Add New Project & give your project a name (see the below screenshot for the reference).

Click on Save & then click on the “Site Audit” option.

This part is pretty easy & straight forward.

Depending upon your site’s size, select the number of pages you want to be crawled.

SEMrush crawlers will start crawling your site & within a few minutes, you will have your report ready.
Along with any HTTPS issues, SEMrush will show all other SEO issues present on your site.
In my case, it took about 5 minutes to crawl 400+ pages.

Now, open up the generated report & on the next page, click on the HTTPS Implementation tab to find all existing HTTPS implementation errors on your site.

In this case, all reports are OK apart from one subdomain HSTS issue (which is not major).

An Example Of An HTTPS Implementation Error:

Let’s look at ShoutMeLoud, a big site where there are a few HTTPS SEO issues.
This is a screenshot from the ShoutMeLoud.com HTTPS audit report:

Here I have discovered a few site-wide links which are still HTTP.

Fixing this issue helped me lower down the number of redirections & will help search engine bots to crawl the site more effectively.
Discovering non-secure pages:

This issue is triggered if the SEMrush Bot detects an HTTP page with a <input type=”password”> field. Using a <input type=”password”> field on your HTTP page is harmful to user security, as there is a high risk that user login credentials can be stolen. To protect users’ sensitive information from being compromised, Google Chrome will start informing users about the dangers of submitting their passwords on HTTP pages by labeling such pages as “non-secure” starting January 2017. This could have a negative impact on your bounce rate, as users will most likely feel uncomfortable and leave your page as quickly as possible.

If you have effectively implemented an SSL certificate & are serving all of your pages properly, this result should show zero non-secure pages.
However, in my case, I have 2 sub-domains which I have yet to move to HTTPS.

Depending upon the complexity of your or your client’s website architecture, this tool can help you discover severe SEO issues which are not easy to discover manually.
Most of you who have used my earlier guides on HTTP to HTTPS migration will either have no issues or very minor ones.
If you need those tutorials, they’re here:

However, it would be very unwise for anyone to be over confident & not use another tool to ensure the HTTP to HTTPS migration is problem-free.

Since SEMrush offers a 14-day free trial, it’s a good starting point for anyone to test out their HTTPS implementation.

Check your site’s HTTPS implementation issues

Go ahead & do a complete SEO audit using the above tutorial.
Let us know what kind of HTTPS implementation issues you have found using this tool. Also, if you are stuck somewhere while fixing the issue, let me know in the comments section below and I will help you along.
Know someone who is waiting to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS? Share this guide with them to help them avoid any SEO blunders!

Changing Domain Names? Learn How To Tell Google About Site Address Change

2017-08-17T17:54:00.000-07:00

Do you know you can change your domain name without losing search traffic?
Yes, it’s possible.

But once you have changed your web address, you need to do some post-site address change things to ensure you don’t lose organic traffic.
If you don’t tell Google about this change of address, you might be putting your site’s organic ranking into danger.

Let me help you with fixing this potentially big error.
(In the below example, I have placed a URL change request using the Google Search Console. The process is the same for anyone needing to change their domain.)
Let me first give you a background of why I had to change the URL of one of my popular niche blogs.
If you are a regular reader of ShoutMeLoud, you might be aware of our niche WordPress blog. The name used to be WPFreesetup & lately, I realized the name of the blog could be better.
When I started WPFreesetup back in 201o, my goal was different & a lot has changed in the past 6 years.

This is when I decided to change the name from WPfreesetup to WPsutra.
“Sutra” is a Sanskrit word that means a set of texts on grammar or Hindu law or philosophy. (If you want to learn more about Sutras, you can learn here at the WikiPedia page.)
Now, changing an existing website URL is no joke.

It takes a lot of precision to ensure you don’t lose search traffic and a lot needs to be done to move everything (other web properties) from the old domain to the new domain.
Thanks to Kinsta hosting customer support, changing my domain name took only 5 minutes.
When you change URLs, one thing you need to take care of is 301 redirection. Every page from “Domain A” should now point to “Domain B”.
For example:
DomaninA.com/123.html should 301 redirect to DomainB.com/123.html
You can verify the same using an online redirect checker. Here is one such redirect checker.
Here’s my redirect status:

I hope this clears up the basics. Now it’s time to look at the steps that you need to follow for placing a site address change request.

How to successfully place a site address change using the Google Search Console

Login to your Google Webmaster Tool account.
Open the website which you want to move.
Click on the “Gear” icon & select “Change of Address”.

On the next page, pick your new site from the list.
Confirm that the 301-redirects work properly (see above).
Check that verification methods are still present.

Once you have confirmed everything, click on “Submit”.
You will see this message:

“Submitted – Your request for a site move has succeeded. If you believe this is an error, you can withdraw the request.”

What happens after putting in a request for a site address change?

This request allows Google to index your new URL at the new address while minimizing impact to your current ranking in Google Search results.
Additionally, all Google Search results for your site will now be redirected to the new domain automatically for 180 days. You must still update any resources on your site such as tags or headers that refer to the old domain.

Doing this will ensure that traffic fluctuation due to this URL change will not be high.
I hope this guide helps you to change your site address without losing search engine traffic.
In an upcoming guide, I will be sharing other important things to do after changing your domain name.

If you know any blogger friends who are about to change his/her domain address, do let him/her know about this guide. It may help them (& they may buy you a coffee someday).

Best 6 Awesome Tools to Find Long-Tail Keywords In Any Niche

2017-08-17T17:45:00.003-07:00

I have written a lot about keyword research and its benefits. One of the major mistakes I have seen many people make is that they will target direct keywords instead of long-tail keywords (LTK) .
If you are not familiar with long-tail keywords, here is a quick example of the difference between short-tail and long-tail:

Long-tail Keywords (Ex. of short tail keyword) – Monthly searches 50
Long tail Keywords vs. short tail Keywords (Ex. of LTK) – Monthly searches 12
long tail keywords conversion rate (Ex of LTK) – Monthly searches 13

You may notice that the last two keywords have fewer searches, but the competition for these two keywords is far less than it is for the short-tail keyword. Also, long-tail keywords drive more targeted traffic than short-tail keywords do, so your conversion (sales, email sign-ups) improves a lot. If you want to learn more about this subject, check out How long tail keywords could equal massive success.
In this post I am sharing some of the best tools for finding long-tail keywords in any niche. Note that some of them are free, and a few of them are paid. I will explain the features of each, and you can choose any one that suits your needs.

Best Online tools to find Long-Tail Keywords:

Answer the Public:

This one is one of my favorite free long tail Keyword research tool. This one is in the line of Ubersuggest but offers one unique proposition. Using this tool, you can search for any Keyword & it would show you common questions asked around that “Keyword” “Topic” in search engine.
Check out Answer ThePublic

SEMRUSH:

This is the tool that all the SEO guys use as a complete SEO suite. SEMRUSH is the first finest SEO tool that was ever built to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

Unlike traditional keyword research, SEMRUSH takes away the guess work & help you quickly find long tail keyword from any website. If you are looking for one perfect tool for long tail Keyword research, look no further than SEMRUSH.
You don’t have to believe me rather for next 14 days use SEMRUSH for free. 2 weeks are enough to help you decide if SEMRUSH is for you or not.
Try SEMRUSH for 14 days

KWFinder::

This is one of the newest entrant in the Keyword research tools market. However, the kind of features & functionalities KWfinder offers, it’s certainly one of the best tool out there.

KWfinder provide all important data about the keywords including difficulty level to help you find the easy to rank long tail Keywords. Persoanlly, after SEMRUSH is this is the second tool I use & recommend.
Check out KWfinder

Google Auto Complete tool:

The auto-suggestion feature of Google search is your first free tool. This is a handy feature from Google, which will allow you to easily find long-tail keywords in any niche. Google auto-populates keywords (search terms) based on popularity. All you need to do is start typing your first keyword, and select the options from the auto-suggestion.
You will need to use another keyword tool to see additional details such as the number of searches, CPC, competition and other important information. (On my micro-niche site, I usually skip the competition check because it is easier to get a higher ranking with a niche site.)

Google Auto-suggest:

This is a tool by Keyword Tool Dominator which actually takes the default feature of Google’s auto-suggestion to the next level.
With this free tool you can easily find all auto-suggested keywords, and it will allow you

to download keywords in .csv format.
You can then use any of your favorite keyword research tools to check other important details about the keyword.
If you are using Google search to find new long-tail keywords, I highly recommend that you make a shift to this one.

WordTracker Keyword Tool:

WordTracker is a popular SEO keyword tool. Using WordTracker Keyword Tool you can easily find profitable long-tail keywords along with important details like searches, competition, IAAT (keyword in anchor and text) and KEI (keyword effectiveness index).
With a free confirmed account you will be able to get 100 keyword results. I actually find this tool to be very effective, as you can easily find long-tail topic ideas. Here is a screenshot of this tool in use, to give you a better idea:

You can also consider taking their 7-day free trial to get advanced features like:

The ability to see 2000 search results
The option to use the related search tools (this is very handy)
Access to search engine data using SEMRUSH
The option to save your lists
The option to get other details like competition details and KEI

You can create a free account for WordTracker and start using this tool right away, or grab a 7-day free trial of their advanced version as suggested above. Here is the link to sign-up for a free account.

UberSuggest:

UberSuggest is a fantastic free long-tail keyword research tool.

I have written about UberSuggest before, and Steven has previously explained how he is using this free keyword tool for finding post ideas.
With UberSuggest you will not get important keyword details like keyword competition and search volume. This tool is best for generating ideas for your long-tail keyword articles.
You can try Ubersuggest here, and read a complete review here.

Long Tail Pro:

LongTail pro is another paid tool, and it offers many features in addition to finding profitable long-tail keywords. They used to be desktop based solution & now everything is on cloud. They are popular among niche marketer & a good tool if you are looking for paid options.
You can grab a complete 10-day free trial from here
.

These are some of the best paid and free long-tail keyword tools and software I have tried and can recommend freely.
Once you have compiled a list of keywords, your goal should be to write down high-quality content, targeting those keywords.
Other long tail keyword research tools:

You can check out this guide to understand what you should focus on in order to create high-quality articles.
And here is a guide to making your article’s keywords targeted.
The key is to write content targeting your users, and then work on optimizing things like heading tags, meta title and description, readability, LSI and keyword density, to make your article search-engine-friendly.
Here are a few more free SEO tools that you should not miss:

If you know of other free tools or software for finding profitable long-tail keywords, do let me know via the comments section below.

Do share this collection with other blogger friends on Facebook and Google Plus!

How To Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines

2017-08-17T17:41:00.001-07:00

As bloggers, when we write a blog post, we tend to write a catchy title so that it will increase the CTR (because readers love to click on things with catchy titles).
But one problem with this approach is that if you optimize your post title for readers, you miss out on one of the most important aspects of post titles: Search engine optimization (aka SEO).

I have talked a lot about the importance of keyword research, and how to perform keyword research, and tools you can use for keyword research. Once we have our target keyword(s) in hand, it’s time to write some high-quality content that keeps both readers and search engines in mind.
Our target is to write content which is reader-oriented, but also search engine friendly. We should apply basic on-page optimization techniques, and use plugins like SEOpressor.

One Title For Readers, One Title For Search Engines

Suppose you write this post title:
“Make Money Online with Infolinks”
Competition in search engines is very high for this title because it contains the words, “make money online”.
But you can optimize this title to make it rank higher on search engines by keeping it about Infolinks (our main keyword).
So now we have two titles:

User-friendly post title: Make Money Online with Infolinks
Search engine friendly SEO title: Infolinks: In-text Advertisement Program (Review)

And how do we create these two titles?

Optimizing Post Title for Both SEO and Readers in WordPress:

Most of the WordPress SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, Platinum SEO, All In One SEO, the inbuilt SEO features of Thesis (…and many others) offer you the option to write a different title for search engines (technically called a “meta title”).
Here’s the difference between a meta title and a post title:

If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, head over to this post:

Now whenever you write an article, after writing the user-friendly title, go down to the end of the page to the SEO section.
Add in your “SEO title”, which is what will be displayed in search engines. Also, don’t forget to add a unique meta description in 158 characters to make your post even more search engine friendly.
I recommend you read this post which talks about how to make your blog post targeted for certain keywords.
Make it a habit to optimize your blog post for both readers and search engines. This will help you rank better and increase your readership.
When you write a meta title for search engines, always keep CTR in mind. A catchy post title will help you get a better CTR, and search engines follow click patterns to judge the quality of a page. This will ultimately help you rank higher.
For more SEO tips, refer to the following articles:

If you have any other questions related to creating meta titles, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer your query.
Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!

Best 3 Easy Tweaks to Get More Clicks from Google Search

2017-08-17T17:39:00.003-07:00

Ranking #1 in a Google search is the best thing that can happen to your blog, and while it’s not impossible, it is certainly not easy.
When you are ranking among the sites on the first page of a Google search, but your site is not in the top three search engine positions, how can you use that rank to improve your position? This is an important question and one which requires a review of a few different techniques you can implement to get higher CTR from a Google search. I have tried and tested these factors and they have worked for me, so they should work for you too.

et’s have a look!

Tips to increase your click-through-rate from Google’s search engine:

Star rating in Google search:

Showing star ratings in a Google search is a powerful way to get more CTR. Not only does it make your results stand out within the search engine results, it also helps in getting clicks. It offers more information in the search engine and thus helps to drive more traffic to a webpage.
If you write review articles, such as web hosting or web apps reviews, for example, you can use the Google Rich Snippet star rating to make your reviews stand out. These star ratings work to rank the product you are reviewing, and they clearly stand out. With a star rating, you can easily make your review article stand out even in competitive keyword results. WP Review Pro is the best plugin for showing star ratings in searches, while also allowing you to add a review box in your blog post.

Along with star ratings, you can also add a nice call-to-action button at the top or at the end of an article that will help you to get more CTR to the product you are endorsing. If you are a blogger in any niche and you review services, products, apps, mobile phones, etc., use this plugin and you will notice a great improvement in the Google search CTR to your blog.
Get WP review Pro Plugin

Remove dates from Google SERP’s:

Dates are very useful for letting readers know when a blog post was written, thus allowing them to understand how recent the information they’re reading is. When you have an older blog, despite having written and published evergreen content on that blog you may notice poor CTR from Google searches due to dates in Google SERP’s. I mention this in greater detail in my Google Panda recovery guide.
There are ways to tweak dates so that they show up in your blog posts but are hidden from Google searches. For instance, on my blog I have a habit of constantly updating my old posts to keep the content/information up-to-date, and this works very well.
If you have been noticing poor CTR for your older blog posts, my recommendation would be to remove the dates from Google SERP’s for your blog posts, keep your content up-to-date, and you will notice a significant improvement in CTR.

Meta description and meta title:

This should probably be first tip I offered in this post, but because it is among the oldest techniques, I am offering it last. Google and most other search engines use your meta title and meta description to show information in Google searches. Writing call-to-action meta titles will help you to get better CTR, and writing detailed meta descriptions using keywords will help you to get better rankings.

You can use plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, or if your theme offers post SEO options, you can use it to write meta-post titles and descriptions that will help you to increase your Google search CTR.

There are other factors such as Google Plus “likes”, or using video thumbnails and instant previews that are also helpful in maximizing CTR from Google searches. But for now, if you implement the latest SEO techniques on your blog as noted above, you will be improving the way your blog post’s listings stand out in Google searches.

Use the comments section below to let me know if you use any other technique that helps you to get better CTR from organic searches.

If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Best way To Get Organic Traffic From Search Engine To Your Blog

2017-08-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

I think you’ll agree with what I’m going to say:
Getting traffic from search engine is hard..buying traffic is easy.

But do you know
Organic traffic (Search traffic) is the best traffic for your blog or business.. as it sends you most targeted traffic.
Well, there are ways by which you can start getting traffic from search engines naturally. You will learn it right now, here.
There are unlimited ways by which you can drive traffic to your site. We have already discussed some of the working and actionable methods like using Blog commenting, Guest posting campaign, using Flickr, buying paid traffic and today we will see how we can increase and get organic traffic to our blog and Websites.

The best of profitable visitors which you can get to your site is from Organic search results. This means, when people search for something and land on your website because these are the people who are most likely to convert into customers or clients. In blogging, it’s also most profitable as users will be seeing more high CPC Adsense ads, as they will see ads based on their search term.
Even direct advertisers look for the blog, which gets natural traffic from search engines. Now, there are many search engines like Google, Bing but we mostly target Google as it’s one of the most used and popular search engines. For Bing, you can refer to our earlier guide on Getting Started with Bing Webmaster tools.

If you have noticed ShoutMeLoud monthly traffic reports, then you might have checked that ShoutMeLoud gets its maximum traffic from Organic search results. Getting traffic from Organic search is always beneficial when it come to generate income from advertisements and affiliate programs.
Another good reason to get organic traffic is that we get targeted visitors thus it increases the chances to lower down bounce rate and revisiting of readers.
Apart from organic traffic there are other ways to drive huge traffic from social networking websites like Twitter or sometimes images might also help you to get targeted traffic.
Here are few articles which might help you to get good traffic apart from search engine traffic:

How to increase organic search traffic

There are various things which you can do to get organic traffic and most important is SEO and we will start with the same.

SEO – Make Search engine easily access your blog

SEO is all about search engine optimization. Making your site more search engine friendly and giving them what people are looking for. There are various aspect of SEO and it starts from On-page SEO, off page SEO, and on Site SEO.

The best place to start is with On-site SEO. Make sure your site is not only indexable but also all important part is crawlable by Google bots. We always prefer to give you tips on SEO and quality articles, both the things go hand in hand when you want to generate traffic from search engine.
It is important that you must take good care of Titles, Tags, URL, Descriptions, broken links etc. There are many things which must be taken care about when it comes to SEO. You can refer a checklist of SEO, which will help you with good organic traffic.

SEO optimized content: Write content that search engine understand

Content marketing is the best way to attract organic traffic. The key is to write content based on something what people are seeking for. For example, this piece of content is written to make people understand how ogranic traffic will help and how you can increase it.
Similarly, a Website selling fashion cloths can write about content based on what kind of fashion trend is going on and channelize it to drive traffic to their product page.

Though, writing SEO optimized content is not easy as it consist of many steps, which starts from doing Keyword research, writing content based on our Target Keywords and then promoting the content to increase it’s search engine friendly.

We have already covered everything you need to write content which drives organic traffic, and below are few articles which you should check out right now, which will help you to make most out of content marketing to get organic traffic.

Link Building – It works as a trust vote

Link building is a part of SEO strategies. Search engines loves quality links and hate irrelevant links. Thus it is important to have relevant and quality links to your blog.
Links can be backlinks, outbound links, reciprocal links, connect to other blogs directly or indirectly but the only thing to remember is to get links from good PR and same niche blog.
Specially avoid falling into the trap of buying backlinks for sake of improving your search engine ranking as Google have rolled out an algo update called penguin update, which will flag all such sites who are using spam ways to get links to the site.

The best and easy ways to get link to your site is by Guest posting and blog commenting. Write content which are not only unique but also attract organic backlinks, which will help the most.

Maintain blog frequency – Regular content keeps reader happy

Many bloggers don’t get time to maintain their blog frequency thus search engine bots also don’t like such blogs much. It is not that tough to maintain blog frequency, just need to be bit organized. But writing post frequently doesn’t mean that you write articles not related to your niche. Always write article related to your niche and take care about keywords.

Make traffic revisit

So you succeeded in getting traffic from your search. But what next?
Many bloggers miss out on taking this to the next level, and later on regret.
Don’t you want that visitors should stay on your blog regularly? If you haven’t thought about it, you should. As returning visitors are audience, brand advocate.
These people are the one who will share your post on social-media, will tell people about your blog.
How can you do that?..
.. The process is simple as you need to play one secret trick. You need to give them option to subscribe.
I’m sure you have your Facebook page, Twitter page all setup..but are you giving them option to subscribe via email?
Understand one simple yet powerful thing,
You might not check your Facebook, twitter always, but you will always check your emails. If my email hits your inbox, you will either open it or delete it.
Point is, you will see it & take an action. Since ShoutMeLoud sends high quality posts to email subscriber, our open rate is about 16.3%, which is a good number.

Do a simple math:
Email was sent out to approx. 6000 subscribers
16.3% opened the email : == That is 978 readers
6.2% clicked == that is 372 returning visitors…
.. These are the people who will be sharing or commenting & increasing the social value of the post.

Want to do the same for your blog?
Offer email-subscription on your blog. Good placement is after blog post & the sidebar…
.. This is what we use at ShoutMeLoud
Harsh has put a brilliant & easy to follow guide here to getting started with it.
You can read his guide over here & create email subscription box for your blog. If you looking for the best plugin to add the box on your blog, use this easy to use WordPress plugin call OptinMonster.
This is by prominent WordPress developer, and trusted by thousands of bloggers around the globe.

Social media promotion:

Social recommendation is the best way to promote a product and people are more likely to trust something when their friends or family recommend something to them. Google understand it and they are taking social media as a great signal to rank a content…
..You need to make sure your content are sharable..
and you should add social bookmarking buttons on your blog so that people can easily share your content on their favorite social bookmarking sites.

Avoid unethical ways

Many bloggers use unethical ways like link farms to get good search engine ranks and drive traffic but it can result in your getting your blog blacklisted. Getting good ranks in search engine through ethical way might take time but it gives good results in long term to increase organic traffic.
There is no rocket science or secrets to get good amount of organic traffic for your blog. You just need proper strategy for same. If you know any useful strategy to increase organic traffic then do share with us.

How To Change Post URL of Already Published Post Without Losing Traffic

2017-08-17T17:31:00.002-07:00

What you are going to learn today will help you throughout your online career. This tutorial is useful for any blogger, writer & SEO professionals. In this guide you will learn about:

What is the slug in SEO
What are stop words
What is 301 permanent redirect
How to edit post slug of a new post in WordPress (BlogSpot users can follow this guide)
How to change the Post URL of already published post
How to set up redirection in WordPress

Most of us learn about on page SEO at the later stage of our online career. Chances are, you might have already published a good number of blog post before you learned about the keyword optimization.

If this sounds like your story?
Well, I’m sure the next thing that made you stuck in your progress is: How do I take care of already published posts?
If you had tried editing the post slug of your old posts, you might have encountered 404 error & various other issues. This guide is the answer to all your questions & issues that you may or might encounter while changing already published blog post link.
Before you look into the solutions, first you need to understand some basic yet most important SEO terms. This term applies to any kind of Website or blog that you are running. Knowing this will also help you to analyze SEO techniques of other blogs & make your blog structure more search engine friendly.

What is post slug in SEO?

To understand post slug you need to first understand permalink. Read this guide that explains what permalink is & best permalink structure for SEO.
Post slug is the words that come in a blog post link after your domain name. For example,

Google-amp-WordPress is the post slug in the above screenshot.
In WordPress, post slug is automatically created from the post title. In the above screenshot, I have edited the post slug to make it search engine friendly.
Let’s take a step back & let me show you what is the default slug created by WordPress when you write a blog post.

As you can see the default slug created by WordPress is:
how-to-add-google-amp-to-wordpress-to-speed-up-your-mobile-site
The problem with default slug (Above example) are a lot of stop words which are useless & not recommended when you are optimizing your post for specific keywords.
This is a good time to learn about stop words.

What are stop words in SEO?

The most common words which are filtered by the search engine in a query are called stop words. An example of such words are: a, an, the, are, by, both…
There are many stop words that shouldn’t be part of your post slug. Here is the mega list of stop words. Stop words are not used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.

Post slug with stop words: how-to-add-google-amp-to-wordpress-to-speed-up-your-mobile-site
Post slug without stop words: Google-amp-WordPress

In the first one, you can see you have 13 words in your post slug. In the 2nd one, we have only three words in post slug. This means that the important keywords in the first option (Google-AMP-WordPress) are given only half the weight they would have if there were no SEO Stop words. The second one (Post slug without keywords) contains more keyword juice than the first one.
Bonus tip: You should avoid using too many stop words in your post title, description (Without affecting readability), image alt text.
I don’t recommend you to go back & edit all blog posts & change the slug to remove the stop words. However, you can do that for important published posts which are not performing at all. Moreover, using this you know how to take care of future blog posts.

What are 301 permanent redirects:

When you are changing the post URL or permalink structure, we use 301 redirects. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location. You can set 301 redirects using .htaccess at the server level or if using WordPress there are plugins to help you such redirection.
This is the best way to move your WordPress.com blog to self-hosted WordPress & migrate BlogSpot blog to WordPress.

We will be using 301 redirects to notify search engine when we change post slug. I have explained this in details in the upcoming section of this guide. For now, it’s a good time to watch this video to learn more about 301 redirection:

How to change the Post URL of the new blog post:

When you are writing a new blog post in WordPress, click on edit below post title to change the post slug.

Clicking on edit will bring a screen like this where you can remove the stop words.

Make sure there is – (dash) between every word. Here is the final result:

This is one practice you should follow for all your future posts. Now, if you are wondering how to do it for already published posts, follow the steps.

How to change the Post URL of already published post

Like above, we do the same step for the already published post. When we edit existing slug, it would result in broken post. That means, if the search engine has already indexed your old slug or you have shared the post on social media, clicking on those links will result in 404 broken page. To avoid this, what we do is take help of 301 redirect feature.
Note: BlogSpot users can follow this guide to learn about custom permalink

How to set up redirection in WordPress

One of the reasons I love WordPress is for its simplicity to get tedious tasks done with the help of plugins. There are many WordPress plugins that will help you to set redirection. The one that I use is free redirection plugin. If you are using Yoast SEO premium, redirection feature is available for you already. You can also use any other plugin if you like. The only thing you need to ensure is, it should be a 301 redirection.
For this example, I’m using Redirection plugin.
Here is the scenario:

Already published post with URL: https://WPSutra.com/how-to-add-google-amp-to-wordpress-to-speed-up-your-mobile-site
New URL After editing the post slug: https://WPSutra.com/Google-amp-WordPress

Go to Tools > Redirection (or redirection tab of any other plugin that you are using). You can also set redirection using the .htaccess method.
Here you can set the 301 redirect from old post to the new one as shown in below screenshot:

What this would do is, when someone will click on your old URL, they will be automatically redirected to new URL. This would ensure you wouldn’t lose any traffic after changing post slug of the already published post.
Do note that you would lose your social media shares number & that is a very little trade-off you need to make when dealing with editing old post URL. I usually do this for editing my old blog posts or dealing with non-performing blog posts.

Fine points when dealing with editing already published posts:

It’s completely fine to edit old post slug as long as you are setting up 301 redirect.
You would not lose any search engine traffic when editing post slug & setting up 301 redirect.
You would lose social media share as the post link changes.
It’s not recommended to change the slug of a high ranking blog post.
This is part of On page SEO.

From now on you should definitely practice this for all your new blog posts. At the same time, you can start editing post slug for the non-performing posts. Make sure you also follow steps listed here to make your post keyword optimized.
If you have questions regarding Stop words, 301 Perma redirect or changing post URL after publishing, feel free to ask in the comment section below. If you enjoyed this guide, do share it with your friends on Facebook & Google plus.

Exclusive List of Websites & Directories To Submit Your Blog

2017-08-17T17:28:00.003-07:00

Here is an exclusive list of Websites, directory and places where you should submit your blog. Most of the sites listed here are free, and if you are creating a new blog/Website or have not submitted your existing Website to these places, you should go ahead and create one.
This also includes many social networking site and social bookmarking profile. It’s not an extensive list like 1000 sites or something, but I’m creating a list of those sites which are important and will be helpful in either search engine ranking or tracking your site report.

Where to submit your Blog?

Let me start the list with Webmaster tools as it will be first step to get your site on search engines. Submitting you blog to other sites will help in better indexing and crawling of your blog. Especially when you create a new blog, it takes time for search engine bots to find your blog and crawl it, by submitting your site to these Websites which is listed below, it will help in faster indexing. Though if your sole motto is to let your site index in no time, here is a quick guide : How to index your site in 24 hours.

I’m not adding those directories or sites, which asks you to place a link back to verify the site ownership, as it will be considered as two way link exchange. Though, there are few directories which are quite useful and you may consider adding the link for a day or two just for the verification.
Many of these sites like Alltop requires you to have feed on your blog, so I recommend you to burn your feed using Feedburner before you get started.

Google Webmaster tool:

This is an official tool by Google, where you can not only add your Website but also submit your sitemap to Google. This will ensure, Google will quickly crawl all your links and index them. More over, GWT works as free SEO tool for your website. You can apply various SEO techniques using GWT data
.

Bing Webmaster tool:

Official Webmaster tool by Bing, and like Google tool, submitting your blog to this place will ensure your site is visible in Bing. Learn how to submit website to bing webmaster tools, and how to use bing webmaster tool.

Facebook:

Facebook could be huge for your blog traffic if you do the marketing right. To submit your Website to Facebook, you need to create a Facebook fan page, and that’s how you start. Simple and easy.

Google plus:

Like Fb, we can create Google plus page for our blog or Website, and this works as the starting point of your blog footprint on Google plus. Learn how to create a Google Plus page for your blog.

Twitter:

Twitter is one of the famous micro-blogging and social networking site. I already discussed why your Website needs an official Twitter account and having a profile on Twitter for your blog, will help you to get a free link. Though it will no follow, again it’s very useful for blog branding. Learn how to create a Twitter profile.

Ahrefs:

This is a site to measure your blog backlink, and a free account will let you monitor one complete site. Simply go ahead, register a free account and under reports > add the new domain. Add your blog and verify your ownership. Now, Ahrefs will help you to keep a track of links to your site. Very useful if you understand the importance of backlinks. Link: Ahrefs

Google Analytics:

Not a typical place to submit your blog but very useful to keep a track of your site stats and the best part is it’s free stats tool by Google. Highly recommended for a new site to add GA on your blog.

BlogCatalog:

Blogcatalog is one of my favorite Web directories to submit a Website. They manually accept or reject a blog submission, so make sure your site have enough content before you submit here. Also, while adding your blog, take care of proper category. Link: BC

Alltop:

Not for new blogs, but if you have a quality blog, make sure you add your blog to Alltop. Very useful for giving good exposure to your site. Requires you to create a free account before submission. Link to submit

Pinterest:

Pinterest is a popular image-based social networking site. When you submit your blog to Pinterest and verify your profile, you earn a free high-quality backlink. More over, it will help in improving your online brand presence. Join Pinterest.

IMT Website submitter:

This is an online tool, which submits your Website to over 3000 places. For example, sites which stores site analytics, site price and so on. Those links might not be very high quality, but it will help in quick indexing, and improving backlink profile of your blog. Link
If you like slides, you can use this slide on your blog or for your team:

Websites to submit a new blog from Harsh Agrawal

This is a quick list for now, and I will keep updating the list with time. For now, I hope this list will be helpful for your new blog to get started online. If you know more Websites, which will be useful for any new blog, and we should submit our blog there, let me know via comments.

Ten Basic SEO Tips for Any New Website

2017-08-17T17:24:00.002-07:00

Once I’ve created and launched a new website I look to promote it online using various SEO techniques. These techniques generally stay the same no matter what type of website I launch – be it a blog, business site or brochure site. Today I’d like to share with you my top ten tips to follow after launching a new site; hopefully these will help new developers and act as a nice reminder for those more experienced.

Backlinks are an essential building block to help your site and some of the methods below will help you gain those valuable backlinks, other methods will help spread the word about your site, help you inform search engines your site exists and help you track backlinks, errors and search queries.

Basic SEO for a New Website:

Be it BlogSpot, WordPress, Static Website or any other platform, when you are launching a new Website, there are few basic SEO techniques, which goes for every type. These SEO tips, should be followed by everyone, and if you have question regarding any of these tips, feel free to ask me via comments.
Before, we move ahead here are few articles worth reading:

Create and submit sitemap

Sitemaps help search engines discover all the content on your site, essential for new and old websites alike. You should ensure your sitemap conforms to the sitemap protocol and there are many free and paid for website and software companies that can automatically create a Sitemap for you. If you are using WordPress, you can use Google XML sitemap plugin to create sitemap for you new WordPress site.

Webmaster’s tools

Google, Bing and Yahoo all have webmaster sections for you to log in and tell them about your site. Once you have confirmed you’re the site owner you can submit your sitemap you made above, view details of sites linking in to you, top keywords and any errors they find when crawling your site.

Blog Commenting

Make your comments useful, not spammy as this will only waste your time when the editor deletes it. Comment on blogs relevant to your website and hopefully they’ll allow you a backlink. If not at least you are spreading word about your site to the relevant readers and you never know, they might have websites and add a link to you.

Social Bookmarking

Another useful way to spread word about your site and hopefully gain valuable links back is to take advantage of social bookmarking. Add pages (not just your homepage) from your site to some of the top bookmarking sites such as; Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. It also useful if each page or blog post from your site offers readers the chance to share your site to their bookmarking account. Consider adding share buttons or a toolbar such as those offered by addthis.com to your pages.

Twitter

Build up a good following of relevant businesses, clients and those in related industries and the benefits can be huge. Post useful tweets and occasionally throw in articles, news, or blog posts from your site with a link back to them. Don’t just jump right in for sell, sell, sell or you’re liable to put off followers. Add a tweetmeme.com button or similar to your pages too.

Facebook

This site has over 500 million members so adding a page on here is a must. Add Facebook like buttons to your website too so that visitors can share your pages with their friends. We have a good number of articles, related to Facebook marketing for a new website. Here are few links, which will help you to get started:

Exchange links

Most webmasters are happy to link to good quality, relevant websites so try contacting a few direct. When gaining links always link to sub-pages or folders, don’t just concentrate on your homepage. Looking for a good tip at finding sites that will link to you? Google “Add Link” followed by your website niche for a list of relevant sites that you can submit links to. Though 2 way link-exchange is a big no. Also after Penguin update, I highly recommend you to get backlinks from relevant niche. Here are few more resources, to help you build links for your new Website:

Submit a press release

Announce to the world you’ve launched, what you offer and why you do it best. Ensure it’s a good, well written press release and if necessary hire someone to write it for you. Then you need to get your release out there. The web has some good auto-submit press release sites that can often gain you links back but also consider local press, trade magazines or any publications concentrating on your niche. Do remember, Matt Cutts (Google Sposkesperson), recently added that Press release doesn’t give SEO advantage, but reports from SEO world shows that Press release still helps in search engine ranking.

Internet Directories

Submit your site to good quality internet directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Yellow Pages and Best of the Web. Some of these are paid and none offer guaranteed inclusion so ensure you meet all terms and conditions before submitting your site. Some directories are deemed to offer good quality backlinks so it could be well worth the initial investment.

Don’t stop your SEO Effort!

This one’s simple, don’t steam ahead, and do all this in one weekend and then forget about it! You need to constantly work hard, publish fresh new content, talk to your twitter followers, post updates to Facebook, build a good reputation on forums and blogs, get to know press contacts and keep them up-to-date with how you’re doing and eventually the web will build trust in your site.

Do remember, SEO is an ongoing effort, and you should keep monitoring your site for progress. You can try tools like SEOMOZ, which will crawl your new Website like a search engine bot, and will give you recommendation to improve your site. So there you have it, the top ten basic SEO things I do to launch a site. I hope some of you found this useful, feel free to share what you do too!

Best 3 Easy To Use Tips for Writing Post Title For High Traffic

2017-08-17T17:21:00.003-07:00

itle of the blog post is just like our face on our body, As we know our face shows the actuality of our over all personality, just like this title of the blog post does the same thing for our blog posts. Your blog post title determines the CTR of your blog post, and a bad title will ensure you will not get enough traffic. There are ways you can write different title for Search engine and for readers, and you should always utilize this technique to attract more visitors to your blog.

Think of writing blog post title as, writing headline for a sales copy, more cheesy, appealing and simple it is, it will work more in favour for you. If you utilize this technique on most of your blog post, it will make your one time readers to read more on your blog.Now it is the time to discuss how you can get more response for your blog by title writing brilliantly, Some useful tips are as follows below.

Tips for Effective Title writing of Blog Post

Use Multiple Keywords in Title

Mostly various bloggers focus on the single keyword in the title of the blog posts. Then they generally get normal ranking for their keyword used in the title. But some advanced bloggers follow the technique of using multiple keywords in the title.

This way increase the probability to find the blog posts in the search of more than 1 keyword. I usually try to use 2 – 3 keywords in the title of my written blogs posts. Here below an image will show the example:

The image is taken from the search engine of my blog post.

In this post Title is – The importance of social media in SEO

Thepossibleossibility to find this post for some keyword searches which are as follows –

Keyword 1 – Role of Social Media in SEO
Keyword 2 – Importance of Social media in SEO
Keyword 3 – Importance of SEO

The above described post in the image is worthy after searching above 3 keywords and there may be some possibilities to find the post some where in search engine after searching the 3 mentioned keywords.

Check out some of the best Keyword research tools here.

2 – Title must be Readers and SEO Friendly Both

Some bloggers more focus on the writing titles seo friendly and some do focus on writing readers friendly, But the intelligent bloggers do focus on both equally.

Now the question is that How to write the title of the post both for search bots and Readers.

3 – Title Must be Descriptive & Long

Short title has very less content to describe summary of the post, But the long titles have enough words in it to describe the purpose of the the post by using multiple keywords also. If title of your blogs posts describes the summary of the whole post, then your blog post is going to attract more eye-balls. This kind of post attracts the readers from all possible ways just like search engines, social media from other posts of the same blog also.

Other things to keep in mind:

Keep your permalink free from stop words
Use your target Keywords in your Post meta title and H1 tag
Keep your post title length limit to 60 characters. <Source>

I always try to apply this technique on writing titles of my blogs posts. For example of the long and descriptive title you can read the title of this blog post which you are reading now.

SEO Checklist : Every Blogger Should Follow

2017-08-17T17:19:00.001-07:00

SEO is an important aspect of blogging, and you need to be careful while planning and applying SEO to your blog. Though I won’t say that there is any fixed methodology for SEO there are few factors which surely impacts in getting good search engine ranking. Getting organic traffic for your blog is really important. Thus all bloggers must take care of SEO strategies while blogging.

SEO is a vast topic, and if you are doing SEO for a new website or SEO audit of a website, it’s important to maintain an SEO checklist, so that you can quickly see how well your site is optimized. Though maintaining a list could be tough, and that’s why I’m creating this list which will help you to cross quickly check your site SEO.

Shoutmeloud has covered all practical and easy tips for all important factors which effect your search engines ranks. We always prefer to provide only those SEO tips that can be use by beginners as well as professionals. If you have missed any of SEO post on ShoutMeLoud then check out the checklist of SEO.

Updated SEO checklist:

You should start from here: On page SEO checklist for 2016
This SEO checklist includes some of the things which you should know, some of the software’s you should be using and many other tips. I tried to cover as much as I could, but feel free to suggest if you have any more tips to add.
There are many new factors which are implemented in 2016 and I will include them too so that your site is ready to compete with other sites SEO in 2016 & in coming years.

Keywords

One of the important aspects is making sure you are targeting keyword with every post/page and also monitoring their performance. There are many such websites and tools like (SEMRUSH, Long TailPro) which will let you track keyword rank of multiple keywords. Here are some useful resources regarding Keywords.

Importance of Keywords in SEO
How to perform Keyword research
Keywords in Title Tag/URL/Descriptions/ Headers
Use Headline Analyzers to create clickable headlines (Ensure to add a keyword in your title)

Link Building

Internal links
Backlinks
Outgoing links

Content

Duplicate content
Quality content

Meta Tags

Meta Title/ Description

Sitemap

Permalinks
Sitemap
Set Redirections
Ping Services

Must perform:

How to submit your blog sitemap to Bing
Submit your website to Google search console

Others

Robot Meta
Image ALT Tag
Robots. Txt
Broken links

2016 SEO Checklist:

Your pages loading time
Check Page Layout Algo
Outbound link
Responsive design (Making your website optimised for desktop, tablets and mobile)

Keyword research tools:

SEMRUSH
LongTailPro
Google Keyword planner

SEO Tools:

SEMRUSH Review
Backlink checker sites
Ahrefs

Helpful tools:

Add social media sharing buttons for social signals (Use SumoMe)
SEO by Yoast WordPress plugin
Image optimization ( Web-ready & faster loading)
Implement CDN using MAXCDN

Above are few SEO checklist, which must be followed by all the bloggers. There are lots more factors which you will get online but I preferred to cover the once which are important for SEO and if done properly than very useful for all the bloggers.
There are no shortcuts like hidden text or keyword stuffing for getting good ranks in search engine, so I would recommend avoiding unethical way of getting good ranks in search engines. Do share your SEO checklist for getting good rank in search engines for your blogs.

Great 12 Best Practices To Generate Backlinks to Your Website

2017-08-17T17:14:00.000-07:00

When it comes to generating backlinks for your website, there are a few practices that can help you get the most out of the work you are doing. It’s important to take a look at the best practices to help generate backlinks to your website and take them into consideration in everything you do.

When building links to your site, don’t only focus on adding links, but your other goal should be, driving traffic and get some loyal readers base/customer to your Website. Especially, when Google algorithm is changing now and then, we have to make sure our link building process is not limited to few days/months only, and should work in coming years too. One tip of the thumb: Keep it natural and follow link diversity.

For newbies, who have never bothered about link building, it’s one of the most crucial processes of pushing your search engine ranking. Though, the post-Panda world where we see over SEO over-optimization penalty, I highly recommend staying away from all such shady methods to create backlinks, which do more harm than any good. I’m not going to share what all methods that we should avoid as, that topic need detailed information, and we will save it for the future article. For now, let’s learn some of those best ways, that you can use in 2016 and in the upcoming years.

Effective ways to create and generate Backlinks like a Pro:

Before I move ahead, let me tell you: maintain link diversity. Don’t just try to build links via one method. For example, many young bloggers stick to blog commenting for building links and it’s a bad practice. You should look for other opportunities like Guest posting, article marketing, Email marketing, Social bookmarking and many others. There are more than 101 ways to create links, and here I’m explaining few such methods that you can start today to get genuine links to your Website.
Before you generate backlinks to your site, I highly recommend you to use any of these online backlink checker tools and keep a record of number of existing links you have. Now, set a goal of something like you will be increasing the number by 10-20 Links every day, and you will not only limit it to the homepage but also get links to your internal pages.

1. Great content

No one wants to go to a site that doesn’t have great content to read about. As well as Search Engines that is also looking for great content on the site. For this, Google has rolled out the Panda update to help maintain useful information on the web. A sign that you have great content will be any of the following:

Value to the visitors
Solution to their problems
Useful information on the website
Information frequently updated
Guides for helping the visitors
References from trustable sources like Wikipedia.

When a visitor finds your site content as valuable and useful, they will share your site link with their friends and family, or even link to your site as well. This is why you should utilize your writing skills and knock their socks off with the killer, and interesting content.
One easy way to generate backlinks via your content is by creating list and resource pages. An article like 101 ways to be social media rockstar, 50+ blogs to guest blog is some of the easiest ways to grab attention from social media and get natural links to your site. And, especially after Penguin, the best of the links is when you get it naturally and from the relevant niche. Something which worked years back and will work forever. You should also check out: 11 delicious ways to judge high-quality content, which will help you to create more quality and user centric content.

2. Social networking sites

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter are huge in today’s day and age. If you are active on sites like these, you can help generate viewers to your website. When you can properly promote your site content /products/service/features, and engage social followers, they will want to share your information with as many people as they can. As a result, it builds backlinks naturally from social networks.
Also, you will also learn more about what people are looking for on the sites they frequent. These social networking sites can be a valuable tool in getting the traffic you want. Not only such sites will help you to get free backlinks but will also help in increasing the social signals to your site and thus helps in improving your ranking further.

3. Reviews

The process of writing reviews can seem tedious, but it helps to write reviews and publish them on your site. This will help you better be able to back link to it. Make sure your reviews are unbiased, and you mention every possible pros and cons of the product you review.
Especially, I recommend you to review the newly launched product as most of the time, product owner link to your review pages from the official site, which works as a high quality back link.

4. Get reviewed

Turn to some of your more popular bloggers to write a review by sending them your products or items that your website focuses around. This can help generate buzz in the internet world and get your site name out there.
If you are an online service company such as ManageWP, SEMRUSH or any other such paid tool, offer a free pro account to bloggers in your niche. If your product is useful, you will get awesome free reviews and feedback to improve your product.
Bloggers who offer services like SEO, link building, theme design, you can offer some free review copies of your service to other bloggers in return for the mention about your services on their blog.

5. Editing Wikipedia

Editing Wikipedia articles that are in relation to your niche can help add another opportunity to drop in your links as well. This can help get the word out even further about your website. Though Wikipedia is quite strict with this policy to avoid spammers and spam links, and you should take care of their guidelines, before adding any links.
One way is, browse few wiki pages in your niche and see which pages need more external links to add more value and develop content targeting that page. Simple but yet very effective way to build quality links.

6. Guest blogging

Guest blogging on popular niche blogs can help get quality backlinks to your site. Start by doing guest posts with blogs that have a smaller readership; then this can help you move forward to those with higher rankings.
You can refer to the Harsh guide on How to craft guest blogging campaign which will help you to prepare a proper strategy and make your guest blogging link building plan, highly effective.

7. Website Plug-in

Website plugins can help drastically. They can give your site a name and help get the word out there. Plus they are perfect for a link. All you need is a good idea, and you can use sites like Freelancer.com to hire any developer to build your plugin.
Another bonus tip here: You can browse WordPress plugin repo and plugins which has not been updates from years and still is very useful, you can recode it and make it compatible with latest WordPress version and launch it again. Drop Emails to all such blogs which cover news related to WordPress plugins and tell them about updated plugin. You can also launch a free theme and keep the download page on your blog and inform fellow bloggers about it. I highly recommend avoiding adding your site link in the footer of theme, as it may lead to over optimization penalty.

8. Free applications
You can develop applications or apps on a site such as Facebook using their developers, and offer them on your site free of charge. This is a great way to get the name of your site out there.

9. Knowledge tools

Another effective way to generate backlinks is by offering some great tools for free on your site. These can be tools like E-books, Audiobooks, etc. This can help get more readers and viewers, and generate tons of traffic to your site in the process. You can install the script to check page rank, check links or maybe loan and tax calculator, depending upon your niche.

10. Uniqueness

Be different and attract others into your inner circle to your site. Uniqueness is one way to get the word out there and have others interested.

11. Employment

If you have offers for employment such as writing, offer them on your site. This will also help generate great backlinks to your site.

12. Interviewing others and get interviewed:

Interviewing someone important in the relevant field and industry of your site and publishing it can help generate additional opportunities for backlinking. Send a request to bloggers for Interview and once Interview is live, you can send a link and in most of the cases, Interviewed blogger will share links on their blog or on social networking sites, which works great. Make sure you take advantage of the post title to make your interview more effective. For example:

Interview with Pro Blogger Darren Rowse (OK title)
What Darren Rowse taught me about blogging in 15-minute Interview (Effective title)

If you are an existing pro-bloggers and get a request for interviews, don’t miss this opportunity as this is one of the easiest ways to get your site mentioned in front of the new audience and generate backlinks which are credible. This will also help in the branding of your blog.

13. Scripts like TYNT:

Plagiarism is not a new thing, and you will often find people copying content from your blog. Also, as a user many times I copy an excerpt of any content from a Website and paste in the forum discussion. TYNT script will help you to get free links when somebody copies your article or a part of it. You can check out complete working and how it works on the earlier post on “TYNT review.” The best thing about this tool is, it’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to configure.

I also recommend you to keep an eye on latest SEO techniques and implement which works the best. Avoid using any automated link building software and tool and keep your link profile genuine and natural. It’s a tedious process to generate links but one of the most crucial and important part of Internet marketing and Blogging to get higher SERP’s ranking.
These are some of the genuine and working ways which I can think of now, and I’m sure you might be having few of your tips. Do let me know what are those working ways to create links, which is most beneficial and easy to implement.

Heading Tags SEO: Tips for Using H1 to H6 Right Way

2017-08-17T17:07:00.002-07:00

As we know, heading tags are imperative for every web document to structure the content. By using Heading Tags, we differentiate our web page content. Use heading tags for headings only not for making Text Large or Bold.
Note: At the end of the article I have outlined 2 common heading tags mistakes by bloggers. Don’t miss reading it!

Definition of Heading Tags

Heading Tags are well-defined by W3Schools that:
<h1> to <h6> tags are used to define Heading on a web document.

“According to W3Schools – <h1> </h1> is the first heading which is critical for any web document and <h6></h6> is the least important heading that holds very less importance in a web document as compared to other heading tags. ”
Defined Heading Tags are:
<h1>some text here</h1>
<h2> some text here </h2>
<h3> some text here </h3>
<h4> some text here </h4>
<h5> some text here </h5>
<h6> some text here </h6>
h1 tag should be main headings which if followed by further h2, h3 and so on. The h1 is usually the boldest one whereas h6 font size is smallest.
Don’t get confuse yourself and stop thinking that Heading Tags as merely formatting for the web pages and Search Engines Heading Tags are for just categorization of content on web page.
Heading Tags come with various attributes to make user-friendly websites but Search Engines use these defined headings solely to index the structure and content of web documents including blog posts.
In other words, you can say that Heading Tags are used to show the web document structure.

How to use Heading Tags for SEO?

Apart from the web designing point of view, there are a few more things that you should know about Heading Tags.

– Purpose of using Heading Tags

The main purpose of categorizing your content with different headings so that your design become more user-friendly and people will get a notion about your website more easily by just reading the Sub-headings.
Now we know H1 tag is most important tag so whenever you going to use it for your webpage heading just try to make it like that people get an idea about your website just reading your heading. So that h1 tag should be in that way which describes everything about your web page just in one shot.

– Hierarchy

Hierarchy on your web page should be like <h1> comes first which is followed by <h2>, <h2> followed by <h3>, <h3> followed by <h4>, <h4> followed by <h5> and <h5> followed by <h6>. For better SEO of your web page, one should have to follow the hierarchy in this way.

– Headings Tags with Keywords

Keywords are first and foremost priority of any SEO Expert. In the matter, we first do the research of best keywords according to the web page and then categorize these keywords into focus keyword, primary keyword, secondary keyword and tertiary keyword. Focus Keyword is always one for the web page. It’s better to include your focus keyword into the title, Meta tags, and h1 of the webpage.

– Frequency of Using the Heading Tags especially h1 tag
It is recommended that one should have to use h1 tag per web page because h1 tag should be like a newspaper heading and other content should be structured with subheadings by following the hierarchy of heading tags. Using of subheadings depend on the way your content is structured.

H1 Tag In Latest HTML5

In the previous versions of HTML, only one H1 tag is allowed to designers to use per web document and what people do that time – they just used H1 tag to wrap the business logo on the web page which is important for any business web page and start the main heading of the web page with the H2 tag. But with the help of updated version of Html i.e. HTML5 which allows the designer to have multiple h1 tags on a web page according to the requirements of the web page design.

Ex: Single page websites.

Well, Heading tags are crucial for the proper On page SEO of your blog posts. One mistake which is common among newbie bloggers is excessive use of H2 or H3 tags & at times skipping H2 tags & only using H3 tags.

This kind of practice is not good & might hamper your On-page SEO score. To learn more about On-Page SEO, read this guide.
Do let me know your learning & understanding about Heading tags for SEO. How do you use Heading tags & why?

Easy way to Creat the right meta description

2017-08-17T17:03:00.002-07:00

The meta description is a ~160 character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO.

What does a meta description do?

The meta description is an HTML tag, which looks like this in the HTML:

<meta name="description" content="A page's description, 
  usually one or two sentences."/>

The function of a meta description for your page is simple: its main purpose is to get the visitor from Google to click your link. In other words, meta descriptions are there to generate clickthroughs from search engines.
Search engines say there is no direct ranking benefit from the meta description – they don’t use it in their ranking algorithm. There is an indirect benefit, though: Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as a way of determining whether you’re a good result. If more people click your result then they’d expect based on your position, they move you up. This is why optimizing the meta description is so important, as is optimizing your titles.

Characteristics of a good meta description

I think every article on meta descriptions will tell you some of these, but I combined all that made sense to me and came up with this list.

It should be around 135 to 160 characters.
There is no ‘this number is right’ in this. It depends on what Google adds to your search result and how much they want to show. Google might, for instance, add the date to an article, and that will reduce the number of characters. We wrote about going back to 10 blue links. Bearing that in mind, the rule of thumb is that 135 characters is usually fine. Lately, we have even seen meta descriptions that contain over 250 characters.
It should be actionable, in an active voice.
Of course it should. If you consider the meta description the invitation to the page, you can’t just make it “A mixed metaphor describing a non-existent, yet implicitly high level of qualification.” That’s a dull description. I’ll explain using some examples later.
It should include a call-to-action.
“Hello, we have such and such new product, and you want it. Find out more!” This overlaps the active voice, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s your sales text, where your product is the page that is linked, not the product on that page. Invitations like Learn more, Get it now, Try for free come to mind.
It could contain structured content.
If you have a product for f.i. the tech-savvy, focussing on technical specs of the product could be a good idea. Manufacturer, SKU, price, things like that. If the visitor is specifically looking for that product, chances are you don’t have to convince him. Things like a price will trigger the click. Note that you could, of course, use rich snippets for this as well.
It should match the content.
This is important. Google will find the meta descriptions that trick the visitor into clicking. It might even penalize the site that created the meta description. Next to that, it will probably increase bounce rate and is a bad idea just for that. You want the meta description to match the content on the page.
It should contain the focus keyword.
If the search keyword matches text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use that meta description and highlight it in the search results. That will make the link more related already.
The meta description should be unique.
If your meta description is a duplicate, the user experience in Google will be less. Although page titles might vary, all pages seem the same as all descriptions are equal. If you intentionally want / need / are enticed to create a duplicate meta description, you’d better leave the description empty and have Google pick a snippet from the page containing the keyword used in a search. Visit Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements or use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check for duplicate meta descriptions.

Examples of a good meta description

In the preparation for this post, I have checked some of the various articles that mention meta descriptions. I found a lot of wisdom, but almost no examples. I think actual examples will make it easier for you to construct a proper meta description for yourself. Taking the six bullet points above into account, let’s go over some examples.

The right length

Personally, I like my meta descriptions like this. Dated and two lines of text.

Over 250 characters

Note that the actual meta description inserted in that page was only 76 characters and Google probably decided not to use it for that reason.

In an active voice

Get Yoast SEO for WordPress training. Nuf said.

Including a call-to-action

There’s two, actually. ‘Learn more now’ and the site link ‘Buy Now $ 399.00’. Both entice that click.

Including structured content

8 MP Camera, that’s what I wanted to know. I don’t need that sales text here; I just want that phone.

Containing the focus keyword

And variations. Note that Google highlights Academy Awards as well when searching for Oscars. This will make your search result stand out even more.

Where to start, I have so many pages?

Feel like changing all the meta descriptions after reading this? That might be a burden, with all the pages you have. And where would you find the time for that? Google actually answers this:

If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Simply take it from there. And be sure to optimize all new meta descriptions from now on.

Troubleshooting meta descriptions

I’m sure you can come up with more, but I came up with two main issues:

My meta description isn’t showing.
Google probably made something up for you, as they feel the meta description you created isn’t representing the content of the page, or is duplicate, for instance.
I want to use another description for social sharing.
Do you have Yoast SEO? In that case: check the social tab in the box on Edit Pages. In Yoast SEO Premium, you even have social previews! If not, add OpenGraph tags or Twitter Cards to your website and use any description you want.

Mistakes to Avoid During Facebook Marketing

2017-08-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

It would not be an over statement if we remark that Facebook has become a household name of the current generation. Right from networking to entertainment to education and to business, Facebook offers opportunities that touch every sphere of life of its millions of registered members. So, it is evident that you have surely come across the new role of this social media platform – Facebook marketing.

While in the broader sense you get more profits than loses with thissocial media marketingoption, there are times when losses may prevail! There are situations when business entities commit mistakes with Facebook marketing, and eventually fail to get the desired positive outcome from the project. Learn some of them so that you do not make the same Facebook marketing mistakes too.

3 Simple Facebook Marketing mistakes to be Avoid at any cost

Not creating genuineness

At first you will feel live heaven when you create your business page on Facebook and invite your fans and contacts to ‘like’ it or ‘share’ contents. But if you are not serious enough about creating authenticity of your brand then you can have a bad time with Facebook and product will not get positive footprints any further! A tip for avoiding this is to interact with your visitors by making them understand what are your offers and why are they lucrative, rather than making a futile attempt to broadcast it. Facebook provides an opportunity to interact personally with your clients, so instead of just being a company, be a person to them!

Too predictable

If you present the same old thing in the form of ‘something new’ to your Facebook generated traffic, you cannot expect to win potential traffic that increases your salability. In nutshell, Facebook marketing will never work as desired that way! Although during the initial launching days traffic will come, they will not remain loyal to your page or feel any urge to recommend it to others. So, the tip to avoid this and make this social media marketing a mega hit is to create out of the box ideas that are not at all predictive. Try to introduce your new products or offers to the public, but in a way that they feel personally touched by the post. Ask for suggestions and comments.
I also recommend you to avoid making the mistake by submitting similar type of content in every update. Keep a good variation of Textual, images, quotes and other such content to make your content more interesting and this will help you to target wider range of audience.

Read

Inactive page

Making the Facebook page and totally forgetting it will not work at all. What happens is that as soon as your contacts realize that your business page is not active, they sniff that it is not authentic and hence not to be relied upon! This will give you the inevitable blow that you were always afraid off, and your Facebook face will just remain like a frigid poster and nothing more! Instead, encourage regular activities in the page to win reliability.

With a Facebook page in place, it is not always necessary to post product reviews or various season offers. To keep your crowd engaged you can encourage your fans to send in their reviews about the recent experiences they had with you. You can also post pictures of a recent office party or a special event you were invited to. The idea is to keep feeding the audience something to digest and keep the interactions rolling!

These are just few of those common Facebook marketing mistakes that people make and I also linked out to some of the worth reading resources from the web, which will ensure you will not end up making any such mistakes and you will avoid them at any cost. If you have any of your tip or list of mistakes which we should avoid, do let me know via comments. If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it on Facebook.

How to Get Loyal Instagram Followers & Keep Them Forever

2017-08-17T16:48:00.001-07:00

Do you use Instagram to promote your business? If not, learn why you should start using Instagram for your brand. Be it a business or a blog, Instagram marketing can give you effective results in a short time.
According to the Pew Research Center, Instagram is the fastest growing social network. In December, 2014 it overtook Twitter in the number of users. Instagram has over 300 million users compared to Twitter’s 284 million.

Engagement rate on Instagram is also very high when compared to other networks.

Forrester analyzed more than 3 million interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts on seven social networks. The engagement rates for these brands on 6 of the 7 social networks studied, was less than 0.1%. On that one network, Instagram, posts generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21% which is 58 times more engagement per-follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per-follower than Twitter.
All these statistics prove this is the perfect time to build an Instagram following. So here are working tips to start getting Instagram followers fast and for free.

How to Get Instagram Followers & Keep Them Forever

1. Post quality images: Instagram is all about Visuals

On any social network, be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram, the best way to get fans or followers is by posting quality updates. When you post more quality updates, more people will see the amazing things you share and will want to follow you in order to see your future updates. And don’t underestimate the power of engagement. Engagement on Instagram, in the form of ‘Likes’ and comments will ensure that your images are seen by more people, and will add social proof. When people see that your posts have received a lot of ‘Likes’ and comments they will be more likely to follow you.

Here are some tips to ensure your Instagram posts get more engagement…
a) Curalate analyzed more than 8 million Instagram photos and found that images with a high amount of lightness generate 24% more likes than dark images and that images with a high amount of background get 29% more likes.

The study also found that….
Images with blue as the dominant color get 24% more likes than those with red as the dominant color.
Images with one dominant color get 17% more likes.
Images with low saturation get 18% more likes.
And images with high levels of texture generate 17% more likes.
b) Dan Zarrella also analyzed just under 1.5 million photos from over 0.5 million Instagram accounts to determine what types of posts get more ‘Likes’ and comments. I have listed some of his results below.

Use more hashtags: Dan Zarrella found that the more hashtags an image has on Instagram the more ‘Likes’ and comments it receives. In fact if you look at the above graph you will notice that images with around 30 hashtags received the highest number of ‘Likes’ and ‘comments’ which is also the highest number of tags Instagram allows. You can find the most popular hashtags here.
Stay clear of filters: Photos devoid of filters received the highest amount of ‘Likes’, so don’t get tempted to use one.

Use calls-to-action: Photos with the caption ‘like’ got 89% more ‘Likes’ and those with the word ‘comment’ got 2,194% more comments. So make a goal before you publish your post and write captions which will help you reach your goals.
Share photos of you: Dan Zarrella found that photos with one or more faces got 35% more ‘Likes’ than those without. If you plan to share selfies, then try taking snaps of you with a duck face, as the Curalate study referenced above found that duck-face selfies generated 1,112% more ‘likes’.
If you follow the above tips while sharing photos on Instagram, your photos will receive more engagement, which should convert to followers.

2. Leverage other networks: Interlink Social-network

If you have loyal followers or fans on other social networks you can ask them to join you on Instagram too. If they engage with your updates on other networks they will want to see and engage with your photos on Instagram. They will not only follow you but will also regularly ‘Like’ and comment on your Instagram photos.

UberFacts uses this technique really well. Along with the many photos they post on Facebook, they include a link to their Instagram account and a call to action that asks people to follow them on Instagram. As UberFacts has over 1.5 million Facebook fans and really high engagement levels, this technique should help them get plenty of new Instagram followers. They have 554,000 Instagram followers right now.

An example is this post. It has the text, ‘Follow UberFacts on Instagram!’ followed by the link to their Instagram account. The post received over 65,500 ‘Likes’ and 2,700 shares which should have helped them gain a good amount of Instagram followers. In a similar way you can ask followers from your various social media accounts to follow you on Instagram.
If you have a blog or website you can add a ‘Follow me on Instagram’ button to it. This button will help convert traffic into followers.

3. Invite Friends: Don’t walk alone!

You can invite friends from your other social networks and those in your contact list to follow you on Instagram using the Instagram ‘Find & Invite Friends’ feature. If you choose this option Instagram will contact your friends through email and text messages and prompt them to follow you. This is an easy way to get many followers quickly, especially if you have a new Instagram account.

5. Run contests: Instagram follower magnet

A contest is one proven method for gaining Instagram followers in a short time. If a contest is run effectively and generates engagement, some of that engagement will definitely convert to followers. You can ask people to follow you to take part in a contest to ensure you get the end result you want. It would actually be better to ask participants to do more than just follow you. You can ask them to upload photos, use certain hashtags, mention others, sign up with their email address, etc. This will get you a better return on investment.
An example of an Instagram contest that helped someone gain a lot of followers is the one run by Deftones.

Deftones, an American rock band ran an Instagram photo contest where their fans could easily take part by uploading photos of themselves at Deftone concerts they attended and then tagging it with the hashtags #deftones and the city they attended, like #newyork. Within 3 months of starting the contest, the band’s Instagram account got close to 20,000 followers. People weren’t asked to follow them to take part in the contest, but they followed them anyway. This can actually prove to be more effective as people were not only following them so that they could win the contest. They followed them because they wanted to.

Another example of an easily run engaging contest is this one by Drinkwel. To take part in it, all participants needed to do was double-tap (‘Like’) the photo and then tag a friend in the comments. A contest like this which involves ‘Liking’ and tagging of friends can get you both engagement and followers.
Many of the tagged users will take part in the contest and will be inclined to follow Drinkwel. If you check out Drinkwel’s Instagram account you will notice that they run contests on a regular basis. Following them will ensure that the follower is notified when a new contest is launched

This contest from Android Central is an example of a contest where people needed to follow in order to take part. As I mentioned earlier, asking people to follow to take part in a contest can be a great way to get followers.
To start getting loyal Instagram followers, begin using the above tips and strategies. You can start by posting quality images and inviting contacts, friends and followers from your other social networks. After that you can experiment with contests, and determine which one gets you best results. Always track your results to see what works.

What do you do to generate loyal Instagram followers? Did I forget to list anything important? Please leave your comments below.