SEO Knights

How To Auto Link KeyWords In Blogger With JavaScript

2018-02-26T10:48:00.001-06:00

We have talked about internal linking in Blogger, before and it's important to manually link your keywords to pages, that you deem to be related. Doing so manually will avoid any punishment from Google that being said there is a handy JS library that's we have found that we believe would be helpful if you're wanting to link ultra-specific phrases that you keep constant across your website.

For instance let's say you write out the title of a post and link to it on your blog posts, this way you have strong anchor text that directly related to that post. Instead of manually adding it every time you write out a blog title you can do it manually.

I want to point out something very important about this script and library and that is that it affects every word that appears so if you choose to auto link the Word "SEO" every appearance of that word would be linked to the same page, therefore its important to only use the script to auto link to long tail keywords or phrases.

How To Begin

You will need to make sure your blog has one version of JQuery running on it this possible by viewing the template source or by viewing the source of your website if not adding it is fairly straightforward. Add the below code to the header of your blogger blog.

All that this does is load the latest version of the 1.x version of JQuery on your website you could try running a newer version but this one worked for us in testing.

Next, we will want to use the link-it JQuery library. I went ahead and converted the code to function in Blogger you can add this code right above your closing </body> tag or in the header (it just needs to be after JQuery but before your rules).

//<![CDATA[

if (typeof jQuery === 'undefined'){

console.log('Link it requires jQuery to run');

}else{

(function ($) {

"use strict";

$.fn.linkIt = function (options) {

let settings = $.extend({

linkColor: "#ff0000",

linkClass: '',

link: {

word :'',

url: '#'

linkTitle: '',

newWindow: false,

caseSensitive: false

}, options);

let str = $(this);

let newLink = $('<a></a>');

str.each(function (index, element) {

let strHtml = $(this).html(),

query = "\\b" + settings.link.word + "\\b",

flags = settings.caseSensitive === true ? 'g' : 'gi',

target = settings.newWindow === true ? '_blank"' : '_self',

linkClass = settings.linkClass !== '' ? settings.linkClass : '',

title = settings.linkTitle !== '' ? newLink.attr('title', settings.linkTitle) : '',

regex = new RegExp(query, flags);

newLink.attr('href',settings.link.url);

newLink.attr('target', target);

newLink.css('color',settings.linkColor);

newLink.addClass(linkClass);

newLink.text(settings.link.word);

newLink = newLink.get(0).outerHTML;

let result = strHtml.replace(regex, newLink);

return $(this).html(result);

});

};

}(jQuery));

}

//]]>

</script>

Now that you have the library I can now demonstrate how to write the rules to get the JS loaded to affect the keyword of your choosing I will also explain how to only target the article body of your website.

So directly below that library, we are going to need to make another script tag which will read like the below line.

//<![CDATA[

$('.post-body').linkIt({

link: {

word: 'SEO',

url: 'https://seoknights.blogspot.com'

}

});

//]]>

</script>

So the above code basically says that anything in the .post-body class (which is the default for a blogger article needs to have the word "SEO" linked to the given URL. You can change the word and the URL to whatever you want!

You can also do long tail keywords or even use multiple keywords in the same script and I will show you how.

//<![CDATA[

$('.post-body').linkIt({

link: {

word: 'SEO',

url: 'https://seoknights.blogspot.com'

}

link: {

word: "Blogger Rocks',

url: 'https://google.com'

}

});

//]]>

</script>

If you need to link multiple words or phrases just copy and paste the second link code that I have. You will now be able to auto link multiple keywords (long or short) in the same article in Blogger.

While this can be incredibly helpful for SEO remember not to abuse this spamming internal links all to the same pages of the same phrase can get you into serious trouble with Google that being said, auto-linking long keyword phrases to pages on your website can seriously improve your internal link structure but also make your website better for users.

Breaking SEO Myths: XML Sitemaps Will Boost Your Ranking

2018-02-15T15:00:00.000-06:00

Breaking SEO Myths is a series of posts where we are dedicated to breaking apart myths, and misconceptions in SEO to help webmasters optimize their websites correctly and to not be fooled by "SEO Experts".

This first installment in the series takes apart a myth that states having an XML Sitemap will boost your website rankings. This is technically a myth because its premise is incorrect.

An XML sitemap is a basically a giant collection of your website's pages that you submit to Google so it can crawl your website. Additionally, it uses the sitemap as a way to discover pages on your website and it uses it to know if you have newly published pages.

Now while this sounds like it will boost your rankings is actually a misconception. Technically speaking it's not going to boost rankings as Google can discover pages on your website through other means. Additionally, you might not have known that Google also accepts RSS feeds, and even text-based HTML documents as sitemaps so there is nothing special about XML sitemaps.

In fact, a website with a solid internal link structure might not need an XML sitemap at all! However, we strongly recommend submitting one as its the easiest way for Google to identify pages for the index, if you're building a simple HTML based website creating an HTML document with a link of links is also an option that can help Google find pages on your website.

One particular issue that occurs is that when your site does not have any form of sitemap your time to index increases dramatically especially if you have a lot of new content going onto your website all the time.

Conclusion

While XML sitemaps will by no means increase your rankings it makes sense to submit Google a list of your website's pages so it will be able to discover and crawl them efficiently. While you can get away with not having an XML sitemap, it's highly discouraged as it can make getting new pages indexed by Google considerably harder.

Additionally, you don't need an XML sitemap, in fact, your able to submit simple HTML pages filled with links, you can even submit your RSS feed and Google will process it like any other sitemap.

How To Optimize Images For SEO On Blogger

2018-02-14T15:00:00.000-06:00

Blogger the very platform that powers this blog, and developed by Google has sort of an image problem. Let's explain images are uploaded fine and Google's servers are great at delivering them quickly but it does a couple of things poorly that truly hinder them from ranking well and ranking your images well in Google, can make the difference when it comes to gaining website traffic.

Before, we jump into how to optimize these images we first, need to address what goes into image optimization for SEO. First and foremost is the actual filename you want to optimize the naming of your files so that way the keyword that you're attempting to rank for is in the image.

Name Your Image Files With Your Keyword

So if you have a screenshot, of a particular program like Google Chrome you don't want to name your image file screenshot-123.jpg you would want to name it google-chrome-flags-window.jpg. See how the image text matches the keywords Google Chrome and it explains what the image is showing the "Flags Window" which allows you to turn off and on various experimental settings in Google Chrome.

So, the first step before anything is making sure your image has a good name that includes your keyword. No more generic image names like download(1) they all need proper and unique names.

Compress The Image For Improved Performance

Yes, Blogger does not by default compress images in any meaningful way, which means you're going to need to do this yourself or suffer from having an incredibly slow website. I recommend using one of the many free online tools including the ones below.

TinyPNG / TinyJPG
Imagify

Now your images have been compressed so they won't slow the site down and they have good naming that includes your keyword this takes us to the next part.

Alt Text & Title Text Optimization

Alt Text & Title Text were both built to aid screen reader users so that their software could provide text to describe the image too them. Without this text, the image would essentially be non-existent to screen readers.

So when writing title and alt text for your images, you need to include the keyword for the article you're trying to rank for. Now, on Blogger the only way to add this text is by going onto the article changing the compose to HTML and by manually finding the images.

After you find your image you're going to want to add this code to the image the text will look something like this.

Afterwards, congratulations you have managed to add proper alt text to your image and in doing so you have keyword optimized the image.

Closing Thoughts

When making use of images there are also some important design choices when deciding to include them on your website that while not directly related to SEO can lead to a better user experience. Most user's hate having images interrupt their flow of reading so make sure to align them to the left or right of the content that way it does not disturb them and shift their focus away from their content.

Additionally, make sure to not serve overly large images to users as it can slow down the loading of your website and negatively affect user experience.

Finally, make sure to use images in every way that you can don't leave a post barren of images if you can help it because while our 500-word recommendation is great for Content SEO as we all know an image is worth a 1,000 words.

How To Improve The Load Time Of Adsense Advertisements

2018-02-13T15:00:00.000-06:00

This post is indirectly related to another important aspect of SEO and that is the performance of your website. Users and Google both want you to have a fast loading website to deliver the best experience possible.

However, ironically if you're using Google's advertismenet program you might find yourself suffering from slow load times due to the placement of these advertisement. So, how can you resolve this while still being Adsense compliant there is actually one method you can do.

Your typical Adsense advertising code will look something like this.

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
     style="display:block"
     data-ad-client="ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
     data-ad-slot="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
     data-ad-format="auto"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>

It will obviously be different depending on your ID, ad size, etc however, you might be wondering what can I do to optimize this further Google already delivers async compliant versions of the tag, and thats certainly helping. If you have not swapped to this version for whatever, reason I highly recommend changing to it now but there is actually an interesting trick you might not have realized with Google advertisements.

The very first line infact, gives it away it's loading a script file that is required to load the advertisements it then uses the class, style, and ad-format to determine what type of advertisement to serve.

Therefore, if you want to reduce the load time one thing you could do is simply remove the first line of code from duplicate advertisements.

Meaning if you have three of the above codes on your website you can go ahead and remove the opening pagead2.google, code from the duplicates. But to optimize this further take that first line of code shown below.

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

Then depending on your CMS simply add that code right before the closing </body> tag and now your advertisements will only have one JS file being loaded for all of them, and that code will now be loaded after the rest of the document has been rendered. This will improve your load time over traditional async tags.

That's it if you have any questions on this please feel free to ask us below and we will try our best to help you!

5 Ways To Optimize Your Existing Blog Posts On Blogger For SEO

2018-02-12T15:00:00.000-06:00

So, you have a website on Blogger that you have had for years now and it is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of posts, and you want to go back and optimize them. Well, there are some important notes I want to address before you begin doing this so let's start there.

Before you go back to old posts to begin optimizing them you need to ask yourself what is the content that is doing very well and what is underperforming if there are some posts on your website that are generating barely any traffic at all then you will want to ask yourself why that is and then let's look at what can be done to optimize them.

1. First Make Sure The Post Is Not Riddled With Spelling Errors & Grammatical Mistakes

This is a common issue with new writers, their older blog posts are riddled with common spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes because when you begin writing your likely doing it for the intention of getting content out there quickly. Because of this, you're more likely than not to generate many errors in your posts and this is a contributing factor in ranking believe it or not. Google is no linguist but if the post is riddled with broken English and is barely understandable no one will want to read it.

So clean up your old posts Blogger, has a built-in spell checker and I highly recommend you make use of it, additionally, pay attention to warnings in your browser as most browsers come with spell check built into them.

2. Work On That Internal Link Structure

Again this is a common theme on SEO Knights, we put a lot of focus on your internal link structure as it is one of the primary things that can affect your on-page SEO in a very noticeable manner. Additionally, by linking to other posts, you can increase your page views and thus increase your Adsense revenue, sales, or conversions.

Over the years your website's structure has changed so make sure it still has proper labels and that you are linking out to other pages on your website.

3. Link Back To Your Older Posts

This is something that is often time forgotten with really old posts so long as the content is still up to date and accurate you should be linking back to it from newer posts. This makes readers who are likely to never stumble upon the older posts more likely to go back and read what you had written. By linking back to it you're bringing attention to content that is still relevant and useful even though its buried under years of work on your website.

4. If Need Be Rewrite The Post

If the post contains content that is simply wrong, outdated or just bad then you should go back and rewrite it as opposed to creating a brand new page. When you create a new page you're trying to have that new URL rank in Google and ruin any of the potentials that older post had in terms of backlinks and shares.

So if the content needs to be rewritten, rewrite it and push it to show up on the homepage of your website and make green again. When we say make it green again we mean to give it life again and put it back out there for your reader base so it looks like new.

5. Add Relevant Images, Videos & Other Media Sources

Depending on the age of the post you might not have had any images, videos, or anything graphical to help your users understand what they were reading. Not only are posts that contain media more likely to get shared but they also, tend to rank better as they can also rank in Google's Image Search.

Properly optimizing your images for Google can be a traffic source that you have not previously explored and therefore its worth adding media (especially newer or updated images that look fresh).

Final Notes

If you have old content don't let it rot if you can help it, and make it feel part of your website there are certain types of content (news posts mostly) that will rot but if you have a tutorial similar to this post go ahead and make it feel new again. Keeping old content up is not exciting but when you have a lot of new content refreshing older content can be just as effective and a lot of the work is already done.

Don't Ruin Your Internal Link Structure

2018-02-11T15:00:00.000-06:00

Your internal link structure is one of the most important aspects of your on-page SEO strategy. However, there are many ways that people tend to ruin this and today, we are going to address the common ways that users tend to ruin their internal link structure and how they can avoid it.

1. Not Internal Linking At All.

The most common thing is people often look at internal link structure as an afterthought mostly because it slows down the editorial process, and once you start off on the wrong foot it's very hard to fix. However, by avoiding this you're not only making your overall on-page SEO worse your content starts to suffer as well. By not properly linking your content to other sources you're leaving your users in the dark when they might have questions.

Previously we have discussed ways to improve internal link structure on the Blogger platform but those strategies can b used on any website. However, if you want a model website take a look at ours, or simply go to a Wikipedia entry and you will see the advantages of a solid internal link structure.

2. Linking The Same Reoccuring Word To The Same Page Multiple Times

So, this is the one that many users who are on WordPress tend to do. Many will install a plugin SEO Smart Links which will go ahead and link certain words to their category archives, and other archives and posts.

However, say on this post every time I mention the word SEO and link it to my archives page, not only is this very annoying its incredibly bad for your internal link structure. By repeating the same link on the same anchor text multiple times it doesn't serve a purpose for Google, and search engines in general instead all you're doing is what would appear to be a form of link spamming which we will cover more in another post. Now, this doesn't mean you can't link the same or similar anchor text to another link but keep it varied as to avoid looking like you're spamming or trying to game the system.

3. Not Linking To Your Archive Pages

So, you have a blog and you're linking to your other posts which is great but you're likely forgetting about another equally important page on your website and that is your archive pages. Archive Pages are what we refer to as they traditionally appear in WordPress. Categories, Tags pages or in Blogger your Label Pages these make for great internal links as you can use relatively limited anchor text sometimes even just the word and link it to your archive.

Now many users are going to jump and say, I already have Breadcrumbs and my categories and tags appear at the bottom of my post, therefore, I am covered right? Actually, no you're not and this is because your article content would still be barren and by adding links you're doing your users a favor.

Users often times ignore your breadcrumbs and your categories and tags located at the footer of your post its a form banner blindness if you would but instead of it being for advertisements it's for non-important content that appears on your website. So linking (at least once) in your post to your archive pages can really make your internal link structure fly.

Does My Small Business Website Need A Blog For Good SEO?

2018-02-10T15:00:00.000-06:00

One question that many small business owners, might have is wonder or not they need to blog if they plan to rank in Google and if they can still have good SEO even without a blog on their website?

So this is actually a two part question does your business need a blog in the first place, and if it doesn't can you still have solid SEO and rank well in Google?

Does My Business Need A Blog On It's Website?

I would normally just and say yes, but its a bit more complicated than that. A blog is a great way to extend your reach online and engage your consumers it also adds more content to the search engines which can help you gain organic traffic. Especially if you are in a business where there is not a lot of other blogs or niches that are providing information for your type of work.

Blogging is great and when combined with a proper SEO tactics including proper internal link structure and writing adequates amount of content you can certainly increase your traffic. However, blogging is also something that your business needs to commit too, if you're going to start a blog you need to cmmit too it. If you only post when you want to and dread doing it you're not doing yourself any favors. If you treat your blog as a way to post happy new year once a year no one will read your blog and most people won't care.

So if you are able to commit to it and add content on a steady basis then you are going to do well if not, then you either need to have someone else write your content or not do it at all, as you're just going to cause yourself more headache than good. This leads us to the next part of this question.

Can My Business Have Good SEO Without A Blog?

Yes, your website can both rank well and have good SEO without ever posting a single blog post. Primarily this can be done through local SEO where you're able to target your specific area and by creating a solid website using schema.org markup, using very long and detailed service pages, that are keyword optimized and written well you can rank well. Just make sure to keep the internal link structure updated, and done properly and you can certainly rank well.

Additionally, many small businesses are able to do well without any sort of online marketing at all, however we strongly recommend you do get yourself a website as most users expect businesses to have a website (not necessarily a blog) to get the information they need.

Closing Thoughts

Your businesses success online can be a make or break situation depending on how you plan to gain traffic. Blogs are great way to gain traffic without needing to spend money on advertising and help you engage your consumer base. You can go outside of the norm and host polls or surverys and responding back to customers on website helps establish your brands and can gain positive customer feedback.

While your website can succeed without the use of a blog, doing so incredibly limits your avenues of growth and solely relies on you having solid service pages, and information (or relying solely on local SEO and Google Maps).

How Long Should A Blog Post Be For Good SEO

2018-02-09T10:41:00.000-06:00

How long should a blog post be for good SEO? This is one of the most asked questions that I get asked personally and it's also one of the most ambiguous questions one can ask. This question gets asked particularly a lot by Blogger users as there is no word counter in Blogger (even though having one would be amazing).

The general rule of thumb is that a good article should contain at least 300 words if you are coming up short of this topic there either isn't much information on it or you aren't doing enough research. However, while this is the recommended length by Yoast SEO, I personally recommend a slightly longer version than that for personal reasons.

I personally recommend that your posts contain at least 500 words (so long as the content being blogged about has enough information for that to happen). If you are writing a post on a Poem that is 50 words long you're going to struggle writing 300 let alone 500 and there is a point where your writing tends to get redundant or it's not understandable.

That being said, I personally recommend 500 words for most forms of content, and this is reflected in the posts on this website every post on SEO Knights is a minimum of 500 words and this is both good for my site but also for you the reader.

There is a keynote though and that is longer posts will have an easier time ranking in Google because Google loves solid content and if we could every post should be a book! Ok not really, but writing more content often times is a solid indicator of there being more valuable and useful information in that respective post and that users will be less likely to skim that article.

Additionally, and more importantly the more you write the more chances you have to work on your internal link structure. As we have covered before a solid internal link structure is what can make or break your website's SEO and we have even gone into how to improve your internal linking on Blogger.

So if you're going to write about a topic you believe that you're an expert on you should write long detailed posts that are going to give as much useful information to your readers as possible that is still in an easy to read and digestible format.

While you're at it you can go ahead and link out to other authorities in your niche to reinforce your points and use the post as a way to improve the overall link structure of your website. Often times its even easier to write if you include videos, graphs, or images to comment on in order to get your word count up.

As a final note it's important to realize that just because you write long interesting posts it doesn't mean you're going to rank in Google but by adding more details to your writing you are improving the quality of content for your readers and are going to make your website more detailed and feel more authoritative. In addition to that statement just because your website isn't composed of long editorial style posts it doesn't mean that its not going to rank in Google certain types of posts and content can't fill that much space and that's ok, content length is just one of the hundreds of signals that Google users when deciding how to rank your website and posts.

How To Improve Internal Linking On Blogger

2018-02-08T17:27:00.001-06:00

Blogger out of the box is an amazing online blogging platform and is a great place to start writing your own content for others to read. Additionally, the platform is created and managed by Google which gives you a good starting point on what to do and what not to do.

One of the most forgotten about forms of SEO optimization is the use of internal links. When you create a website you want all of your content to link to one another this is commonly done through tags or categories but it goes a little bit beyond that.

Take a Wikipedia entry for instance, when you are on Wikipedia and are reading an article like this on Physics. When you click that article three words in, you will notice that the word "Ancient Greek" is linked to, and that link goes to another Wikipedia entry. The reason for this is because it is content relevant to what is being read by the user and it explains the origin of the word physics.

Now, what does this have to do with blogging? When writing posts you want to connect users to not only external sources but internal sources of related posts and while this can seem hard you will notice on this blog, the word "SEO" is being linked to its associated archive page.

While you may wonder what the added value is in this when I already have breadcrumbs it's just another form of reinforcement. Google, when it crawls your website, wants to understand your content which is partially why we have schema.org markup. Google wants to see signals that tell it what does this content mean.

So Google, when it visits the Wikipedia entry, sees the word Ancient Greek and has no understanding of what this word is. However, Wikipedia has linked it to other content describing what that is exactly and when you go to that post its linked to another page further explaining where Greece is etc, etc.

Additionally, a strong internal link structure allows users to also understand your content, which in turn means they are visiting more pages on your website, a strong internal link structure should be the core of your SEO strategy when you have a large content oriented website.

Now when you are on Blogger, there are somethings that you can do to improve your internal link structure and thus improving your overall SEO. If you have a very large blog there is no need to go back and start editing all of your old posts, but you can start off on the right foot this time.

So, you have a topic selected try to word the article in a way that both makes sense but leads to solid anchor text, for good internal links and then look through your older posts to find those links. Once those links are found, simply link them. Also, try to link single words or a couple of words to your tags page.

While you may already have your tags shown in the footer, users are likely to ignore these but are more likely to click on and go to the page if the link is within the article. You can also use this article for reference as there are several links throughout the post that both make it feel more fluid but more informational.