My Blogger Tricks

Do AdWords Customers get Special Treatment in Search Results?

2014-09-05T23:09:00.003-07:00

Do AdWords Customers get Special Treatment

Do AdWords Customers get special treatment in organic search results? This is a question that's become quite common now among webmasters, especially those advertising their website with Google AdWords. And that's understandable, considering the money they spend in doing so. A lot of people also think that if someone buys that ad spot on the right side of the page, then his website gets some sort of an algorithmic boost, and gets an advantage over others and thus ranks higher. Is there any truth to it? And if so, is it any fair to the other webmasters? Google answers this important question in a latest video uploaded by Matt Cutts.The original question was asked by Christoffel
from Dublin, asking;

I am an important AdWords customer and recently I have seen a drop in ranking for my site. Why can't I get advice on optimizing my site for Google's search results through my AdWords point of contact?

Here is Google's response to the question.

Does Google AdWords benefit advertisers?

First of all, it's a common misconception that advertisers who buy an ad spot on the right side of the page get an algorithmic boost of any kind to make them rank higher in search results. Well the fact is, the algorithm is the same for everybody, with no exceptions. So any such assumptions can be safely dispelled, and the 'conspiracy theories' put to rest.

Just to be clear, such a practice would not be fair to webmasters who are not using AdWords. AdWords is only supposed to bring up sponsored ads for a website in search results page, and does not effect the search results themselves. So advertisers, by no means, get any sort of benefit in the organic search results.

As long as 'special treatment' and 'special points of contacts', Google doesn't allow that either. As asked in the question, you do not get any special advise on optimization or advertising or anything just because you use Google AdWords. This makes sure everyone has the same resources and support channels with Google. Google's quality team has been working hard at dispelling this misconception, and Google says it wants to be as fair as possible, so that no on will think someone is getting special treatment. If they have an increase in ranking, it's because of some other factor(s).

How does Google Treat Websites with Sub-domains?

2014-09-05T23:07:00.000-07:00

How does Google Treat Websites with Sub-domains?

Making sub-domains on a domain has now become pretty popular, and many bloggers are now using sub-domains to create custom pages, such as contact and about pages. Although they look professional (and classy :P), they raise a concern. Usually, they are not part of a theme or template, and are custom designed. So some of the on-page SEO elements might be present. And Google Panda and Penguin is said to be domain-level penalty, with one low quality page effecting the whole site. So the popular question arises; how does Google view these sub-domains? And what is the difference, if any, between sub-directory structure and sub-domain structure?
Sub-domains and sub-directories

A sub-domain is an extension of a domain name. But instead of the www prefix, you have your own custom prefix, such as blog.mybloggertricks.com etc. The option to create a sub-domain really is provided by your hosting provider. And those who have the option with their hosting, they take benefit from it, and create sub-domains. You might have seen people having contact pages like contact.domain.com or about.domain.com. This looks professional, which is why many bloggers and webmasters use the option.

(Note: You might be running sub-domain blogs, such as domain.wordpress.com. These sub-domains work differently, so don't get confused)

Sub-directories are folders within your site's main directory. Some people have their blogs or other CMS installed in sub-directories too, such as www.domain.com/blog. This is another way of organizing your site.

But as far as the question of which is better is concerned, it is entirely up to you. Sub-directories are located in a single sub-domain. But there is nothing wrong with having many sub-directories. You can go for what's easy. But I would personally prefer sub-domain structure, because it is easier to implement, and keeps the URLs short(er).

Sub-domain or no?

Now comes the question of what Google thinks. A long time ago, Google only allowed two results from one single sub-domain to appear in search results. Hence, people started making a bunch of sub-domains to make sure most of their content gets into search results. Now, Google considers results from all the sub-domains.

As far as how those sub-domains are treated, well, they get the same treatment the whole website gets. So any malicious software you install on a sub-domain will effect the whole website, so be careful.

5 Things to Remember Before Disavowing Links

2014-09-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

5 Things to Remember Before Disavowing Links

As we have previously discussed, Google recently launched a Disavow Links Tool. Using this tool, bloggers and webmasters can 'disavow', or disinherit some selected incoming links to their websites, so that Google won't consider those links when evaluating the website. The idea is to prevent spam-backlinking, that can bring down a website's ranking, because Google considers the quality of the backlinks to a website more than the quantity, and hence penalizes for bad or spam linking. So for any malicious websites trying to link to your site, their links can easily be disregarded. But before you go on disavowing every link that looks suspicious to you, there are a few things you should be mindful of first.

Some people might be too lazy to remove the bad links to their website by hand. Well, unfortunately, this tool isn't for them. The disavow tool isn't a shortcut. Google's Matt Cutts warns that this tool should be used with caution. So before scraping out a text file with the bad links on it, take your time and think of a few things beforehand.

Have you been penalized?

We discussed this in our previous post as well, but I'll mention it here again anyway. Google penalizes a website that has bad links pointing to it. If your website has been penalized, you will know from the messages you'll receive in your Webmaster Tools dashboard. Otherwise, a random drop in traffic due to another reason such as server problems, redirections, broken links, or something like a site-wide noindex (by mistake) can be easily confused with a penalty. So much so that in more than half such cases, people think they've penalized, when they actually haven't.

So before you jump to conclusions and start getting rid of your links, please first determine whether you've been actually penalized or not.

Keep the ration up

When you are disavowing links, you are cutting back on the number of backlinks to your site, while having the same number of out going backlinks. Gaining backlinks takes a lot of time, and effort. And if you are disavowing some, you better have a plan to replace them with new ones. So you should come up with a new strategy before going all gangster on your old backlinks :)

Are the links really hurting you?

This is another important. Are those links really hurting you? There's not much by way of knowing what links are good for you, and what are bad. You might find the bad ones indicated by Google in Webmaster Tools. So bide your time, and let Google identify the bad links for you or you might just end up axing your own feet.

Google gets more power

Another concern that this tool raises is that Google now gets more power over your website (not that it doesn't already have a lot). It doesn't say so, but Google could develop something against a site that submits a lot of links to be disavowed, since it hints at a shady past. Also, who knows whether your site will be flagged when some other site disavows links from your site?

It takes a lot of time!

Once you submit a list of all the links you want to disavow, it will take some time for Google to act upon your submission. So you'll have to be careful the first time. And if you make a mistake, it'll take days, maybe weeks to rectify that mistake. So only make submission when you're really sure about what you're doing.

Hope these tips will help you out. If you have questions, well let's hear them! Oh, and there's a small announcement. Some of our beloved readers have been asking about Muhammad Mustafa, and why he isn't writing. Well, he is going through his exams these days, and will be free at the end of this month. But he might be appearing every now and then in between. So stay tuned, and wish him luck :)

How To Turn Your Blog Posts Into A Video?

2014-09-05T23:01:00.002-07:00

How To Turn Your Blog Posts Into A Video?

One of the greatest influence in the online word is the power of the written word. People, especially bloggers mostly make use of writing to convey their message to their readers. But have you ever thought of using images, or videos to do the same? Of course, a lot of people use videos and images on their blogs or websites. But how about presenting your awesome blog posts in the form of a video? Maybe not every follower of yours is following your lengthy blog posts that you share on social media, So why not try something new, and present your blog posts in a whole different way?

At this point, you might be thinking you don't have the time or maybe the know-how to create and edit a video, so why bother? Well, say hello to Wibbitz! This is a nice little tool that will help you make a video from your blog posts with little effort!

Wibbitz

Basically, Wibbitz is a web app that will crawl your website or blog, and extract the most important information. This will then be converted into an audio and video presentation. The audio can include narrations of your latest blog posts, so that your readers can hear those updates rather than reading them.

This is a relatively unique concept, which you can make use of to better advertise your website. A video can say a lot about your website, and will get you more followers as a result of your video marketing.

Create a video for your site

Visit the Wibbitz homepage, and look at the bottom. Fill out the email and site URL fields, and click on Create Your Clip. This might take a few minutes, since it involves a lot of processing. So sit back and relax!

Once finished, you'll get an embed code for your video. In all likelihood, this is all you need. But if you want to tweak the video a little, you have the Customize Clip option below. Here, you'll get to re-size the video, put in a voice over, or put in Loop or Autoplay. You can also change the Soundtrack from among the six different options. Once you're done, simply click on Update Clip, and you're done.

This is a pretty good tool, and will create HTML 5 embed code for you, which will be accessible across multiple devices. The voice synthesizer is pretty good too, with just a slight hint of synthesized speech. The biggest hitch though, is that it can't process special characters such as the apostrophe, and hence speaks out the HTML codes for them, which sounds pretty awkward.

What has having your own blog taught you about SEO?

2014-09-05T22:58:00.000-07:00

What has having your own blog

If you have any interest in the web-development industry, you will find that there are countless entries on the internet about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - from so-and-so hot SEO tactics to the best SEO practices, and so on. There are also tonnes of blogs and websites like Search Engine Land, SEOmoz etc that provide SEO tools, guides, tips, and more. But can you learn all about SEO from these sources? For a person working in the SEO industry, or working as a SEO, is it necessary for him to have a blog or a website? Have you learned something about SEO that you wouldn't know if you haven't had your own blog?Most people create a blog to create an outlet to their thoughts, or to share content with friends, family or the world. But there's a lot more to
blogging than meets the eye. When you create a blog or a website, you step into a whole new mind-set of a webmasters, and basically get a new perspective on the whole 'SEO' for websites. If you're only working on reducing spam, then you will always look at the bad things out there, and how to reduce them. To be fair, you have to look at the other perspective as well, i.e. look at the good content out there as well, and work for its enhancement.

It is the natural instinct of people to want to get a higher ranking in search engines, and to make their content available to the whole world. It doesn't mean that they are spammers, and should be cast aside. Instead, they should get an opportunity. It's a natural instinct to want to do better.

If you have a blog or an online presence, you'll definitely learn a few things you can't learn otherwise. For example, if you make a list of 'top 10 such and such things', you'll get more clicks etc. You also learn about keyword selection, how to write a proper title, what things are more popular (such as iPods, Chrome extensions etc). It's always helpful to actually see all stuff in action, and not just learn about it in an academic way.

HootSuite For Blogger - Install the App Now!

2014-09-05T22:54:00.001-07:00

HootSuite For Blogger - Install the App Now!

Probably one of the best things about blogging in this age has to be the level of automation you can get nowadays. Long gone are the days when you even had to add html styles in your posts by hand. It is amazing how easy things have become today. You might already be familiar with social media automation, and how you can cross-publish your posts across multiple platforms. HootSuite is one application that's pretty well known in this regard. Well, now there's good news for bloggers! HootSuite has finally been integrated with Blogger! Now, you can automate the whole blog posting process right from where you manage your social media!

HootSuite is a very popular application that connects with all your social media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and so on, and amalgamates them all into a single dashboard from where you can update them easily. It gives you powerful features, such as scheduling your posts, cross-publishing on multiple platforms, and more, all from the convenience of a single browser tab!

HootSuite integrates with Blogger!

This functionality has now come to Blogger! You can now update to Blogger, and more, right from your HootSuite dashboard! I, for one, was really looking forward to a solution that'd allow me to create and manage Blogger posts right from where I manage my social interactions. Now that this feature is finally here, let us look at what you can do with it.

View content - You can view all your published content, posts, and even pages right from HootSuite. You can also see the comments on your posts and pages.
Create posts - As mentioned already, you can create and edit your posts in the stream. No need to visit Blogger separately for managing your blog posts.
Share content - What better way to share your blog posts than on social media right from the number one social media manager? You can use HootSuite to easily share your posts and pages to your connected social media networks.
Multiple blogs - Instead of just one, you can monitor multiple blogs that can be affiliated with different accounts.

Join now!

You can connect blogger simply by signing into the social media management dashboard that is HootSuite, and then adding Blogger easily from the dashboard. Alternatively, you can visit HootSuite's app directory, and click on the "Install App" button right below the Blogger icon.

HootSuite also held a Google+ hangout on the 28th, where they talked about Blogger integration with HootSuite, and also gave a live demo. MBT was especially invited for this event. And it was pretty informative, especially since there was a Q&A session at the end, where people asked some useful questions. Here is the link to the hangout.

Why Should you Optimize your Site for Mobile Devices?

2014-09-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Why Should you Optimize your Site

The trend of using mobile devices to search for content online is steadily on the rise, and gaining momentum. And tablets really seem to be advancing the cause, since more and more people are buying and using them. So how are these evolving trends changing things, and how does it effect you as a website owner? The focus is now centering more towards responsiveness and adaptability, which means that more content needs to made and optimized for mobile devices.

What the numbers say?

In the last quarter of the year 2012, almost as much as 11% of the internet users were using mobile devices, more than 6% of which came from smartphones whereas less than 5% came from tablet devices. And although tablet devices nowadays have a computational power comparable to desktop devices (well, so do smartphones, but screen size matters a lot here), users still want the content optimized and rendered specifically for tablet devices. Hence, in a way, smartphones and tablets can be treated in a similar way.

But what about now? According to a study, from the first quarter of 2012 to now, mobile internet usage has gone up by a staggering 26%, whereas tablet usage has grown by 19%, both very impressive figures in themselves.

Desktop figures, however have taken a beating, with a decline of 6%. This, considering the size of desktop users, is a large decrease. but then again, who has the time to start up a computer everytime they need to Google something, right?

What should you do?

These stats indicate that it is probably time to give more thought into optimizing your website, and aligning it more towards mobile devices. Here are a couple posts we have written that should help you out.

What Are The SEO Benefits of Using Tumblr For Content Marketing?

2014-09-05T04:51:00.001-07:00

What Are The SEO Benefits of Using Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the many social networks out there. But it's not just another social media network. Many people underestimate the usefulness of Tumblr, even though it has huge potential for SEO and social media marketing. Tumblr is quickly growing in popularity. But still many people are unaware of its benefits. So, in this post let's talk a bit about Tumblr, how it works and how to get started using Tumblr for online marketing. And most importantly, what are the SEO benefits of using Tumblr?
What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is a blogging and social networking platform that hosts more than 131 million blogs and is among the top 15 websites in the United States.
Tumblr was founded by David Karp and currently owned by Yahoo. Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme's HTML.

Social Networking and Blogging combined

Tumblr includes both blogging (and microblogging) and social networking features. Tumblr has all the blogging functionality of a blog platform such as WordPress, blogger, etc. Tumblr also include all the social networking features of a social network site such as Facebook or Twitter. This makes Tumblr a unique platform.

Why Tumblr is a big deal?

More than 131 million blogs as of 20th September.
Tumblr is among the top 15 websites in U.S.
More 50% of Tumblr users are under the age of 25.
Many people are switching to Tumblr (most of them are teens).
Tumblr has unique 300 million monthly visitors.

By 2011 Tumblr had three times more blogs than WordPress. Today Tumblr is the largest hosted blog platform on the web having 300 million blogs. And a large number of world’s largest, leading brands have presence on Tumblr.

Tumblr also has a huge potential for SEO and social media marketing .With user numbers and popularity on the rise, it’s a perfect marketing tool for businesses.

Tumblr – The Benefits?

1) Customization

You are aware that impressions do matter. Tumblr allows you to customize your page. Choose your layout style and find a design that matches your page’s theme. A variety of themes are available. Choose the one that fits your business.

2) Dofollow links

Most blog software creates allows you to create a link to yourself when you comment on a blog post. Links bring traffic to your site when they click the link, but each link can also count as a “vote” for your site with search engines. These backlinks increase your page rank and help your site rank closer to first in search engine results. Dofollow blogs create normal links that count as a vote for your site.

Tumblr offers you a Dofollow backlink for each link you share, which is the biggest advantage. Unlike Facebook or other social media, sharing on Tumblr can actually do you good outside of that social media, and aside from bringing you traffic, it will also help you increase your PageRank.

3) Tumblr tags

Tumblr features a unique tagging system. If you want to add a tag, simply start typing a word and Tumblr will suggest you the relevant tags. Unlike Facebook, Tumblr tags are already used for content discovery. Thus by using relevant tags, there is a good chance of your content to be discovered.

4) Microsites

You can use Tumblr to quickly set up simple, easy to manage and free microsites (Now called as Simple Sites). You can even use your own domain name with these microsites.

Microsites can also be used for redirection to your main website. By building a sleek microsite with quality content would increase your page rank within months.

5) Branding

Tumblr is an excellent platform for promoting your brands. With Tumblr becoming more and more popular, it’s a perfect marketing tool for businesses that are trying to extend their reach. With more than 300 million unique users, you can easily promote your brand. By posting quality content, you will have a strong online presence on Tumblr. You might have heard that “the best marketing strategy online is to Be Everywhere” - Pat Flynn.

Pinterest Announces Guided Search For Easier Content Discovery

2014-09-05T04:45:00.003-07:00

Pinterest Announces Guided Search For Easier

Search engines are great for answering specific questions. For example, a tutorial for building Android apps, weather conditions in a city, and so on. But don't you sometimes feel at a loss to pinpoint what you're looking for, and randomly sift through the internet for a chance encounter? Perhaps you need some creative ideas for your upcoming vocations. But there never existed a search engine that could help you with such stuff.

unitl now.Pinterest has today introduced their Guided Search to help you find ideas. It is a predictive search engine that is powered by social curation, and is made for exploring new stuff. Guided Search is perfect for situations when you don't know what you want to ask! It helps you get ideas from more than 30 Billion Pins hand-picked by other people, such as travelers, foodies, techies, and so on!

How it works?

Whenever you search for ideas, such as suggestions for vocations, working out, cooking, etc. descriptive guides will help you sift through all the good ideas from other Pinners just like you who are/were interested in the same thing(s), and have suggestions for you. You can scroll through the guides and tap any that look interesting to steer your search in the right direction. Hence, 'guided' search.

Suppose you're home alone, and have a mood for cooking. You can look up recipes that are easy to make. You can use the guided search from Pinterest, and use Pins from other wannabe cooks to guide your search and get specific - Chinese, homemade, quick-to-make, and so on. You can also search for specific styles for when you decide to get a new haircut, for example.

The guides are there to get you where you want to go, but the best part is leaving a little room for a pleasant surprise. Exploring getaway ideas might lead you to a treehouse adventure, a motorcycle trip down the coast, or maybe even something else you didn’t know you were looking for. You might be surprised where you end up!

Now Search Twitter Hashtags And Users With Bing

2014-09-05T04:41:00.002-07:00

Now Search Twitter Hashtags And Users With Bing

Search is one game Microsoft just won't give up on, even in the face of stern competition and enormous odds. Constantly adding new features, Bing is all gearing up to take on Google. In a fresh announcement, Microsoft has taken its partnership with Twitter further to include more content from the microblogging site on Bing Search. Starting this week, Bing will include Twitter hashtag and handles searches in its search results.

Hashtag search

Tweets have been showing up on Bing search for quite some time. And you could even embed Tweets on Bing maps. With this new Twitter-Bing integration, users can now perform hashtag searches to find trending topics on the social media.

People on Twitter generate millions of tweets every minute - content that can benefit others outside the social network. Granted that not every tweet is useful, but if you combine the popularity of a tweet (i.e. re-tweet/favorite count), its age, and the authority of its creator, you have a recipe for quality content that can be helpful outside Twitter.

So, how do you do a hashtag search on Bing? Simply add a # symbol before your search term while searching on Bing!

Searching for a hashtag then surfaces top results from Twitter in the search results.

Search for Twitter handles

Users can also search for specific Twitter handles, and celebrity-related tweets. This can be done by entering the @ symbol before a username. Bing will deliver a list of matching top Twitter profiles, and include relevant tweets related to the specific Twitter handle in its search results.

Celebrity searches on Bing will also now include the top content from Twitter related to the celebrity.

Bing will start rolling this update for all users in the next week. If you're the lucky one to get it earlier, let us know what you think of these new changes in the comments section below! We'd love to hear from you.

WordPress 4.0 Beta 1 Now Available For Download

2014-09-05T00:24:00.001-07:00

WordPress 4.0 Beta 1 Now Available

WordPress has come a long way from the boring old 2.0+ version to the much more optimized and streamlined version you see today. With the 3.9+ update, WordPress greatly improved the media experience for users, letting you create audio and video playlists on your site to enhance the user-experience. WordPress continues its rapid stream of updates, and has announced that WordPress 4.0 is now in open Beta. It boasts of many new features.

Note: It is an open Beta, and not a final release. So it is not recommended to run on a production site yet. You should run it out on a test environment first because there might be bugs / incompatibilities with existing plugins.

The final stable release is expected to be rolled out next month. Until then, you can help test the new features they've been working on!

What's new in WordPress 4.0?

Preview Embedded URLs

Now you can see previews of embedding via URLs in the visual editor and the “Insert from URL” tab in the media modal. Paste in a URL, such as a YouTube video, onto its own line in the visual editor and see a live preview of what it will look like! Pretty cool, right?

Media Library Grid View

In addition to the standard list view, the Media Library now has a “grid” view. Clicking on an item takes you into a modal where you can see a larger preview and edit information about that attachment, and you can navigate between items right from the modal without closing it.

Plugin installation

WordPress has improved the user experience while installing plugins. When searching for plugins and viewing details, you’ll see some early visual changes as well as more information about the plugin itself.

Editor

The editor intelligently re-sizes and its top and bottom bars pin when needed.

Cursor improvements

WordPress has made some improvements to how the keyboard and cursor interact with TinyMCE views such as the gallery preview.

Widgets

Widgets in the Customizer are now loaded in a separate panel.

In addition to these, WordPress has also made some small changes, such as the option to select a language when you run the WordPress installation, and some changes to formatting functions.

Are you excited about these changes? You can use the WP Beta Tested Plugin to test the new update out! And don't forget to report bugs - this will help make WordPress better!

10 Biggest SEO Myths Busted!

2014-09-05T00:20:00.001-07:00

10 Biggest SEO Myths Busted!

Are you stuck in your old ways and not willing to let go? Or maybe you have heard too many stories too many times and believe them to be actually true. However, the fact is, there's a lot more to SEO than meets the eye - and less. Here are some misconceptions and myths about SEO that need to go away! If we didn't know better, we'd believe these in a heartbeat! Are you aware of these 10 SEO Myths that need to be busted?

1. Buying ads helps rankings

There's a myth going around that Google and other search engines favor those who buy ads. This is actually not true. There are plenty of high ranking websites that don't buy ads. No amount of ad buying will get you organically ranked higher. The instant a search engine starts determining ranking based on ads is the instant it loses credibility. Simple as that.

2. SEO is everything...

...since never! It's always been about a mix. SEO is fundamental, it's important and can fuel growth. But what'll it grow? You need content, social media, and a host of other things beside SEO to make your site a success.

3. Marking up content doesn't help ranking

Wait, what?? I thought structured data helped! Until only recently, I had this strong misconception, and I think many of you do too. Marking up your content will help search engines gain a better understanding of your content, and allow them to use that content in unique ways in the SERPs, but installing the code for structured data doesn’t boost rankings, nor does its absence hurt them.

4. My content is awesome

This is probably one of the most popular myths out there. Everyone thinks their content is gold. Maybe it is, but that's not something for you to decide. Content is deemed great by your visitors and search engines, not you. All the standards in the world won’t help you if no one likes your writing style, voice or message.

Never delude yourself into thinking what you produced is excellent just because you put time into it. Watch what visitors engage with and seek to follow that same pattern.

5. Links are all I need

While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this hair: sharing, encouraging, incentivizing, buying – it’s all the same. You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path. Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing tem naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings. If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties.

6. Social is that is needed

Social takes time, I can’t be bothered with SEO, so I’ll just do social. There was a time when ranking a website was like making consommé. You wanted one thing – clear broth. At that time, you could focus on a single tactic and it would boost rankings. Today it’s more like trying to make the world’s best seafood chowder. Success depends on a complex mix of ingredients, freshness and timing. One ingredient alone won’t bring success, and yet without that one ingredient, you don’t have a chowder.

7. I need to rank #1

Yes, it’s nice to rank on top, but you know that actual rankings fluctuate on a daily basis. Does the #1 spot actually get you more clicks and conversions and the # 2 or #3 spot. Depends on the phrase sometimes. And for those trying to get off page 2 of the SERP and onto page 1, be careful. Often the click through rate (CTR) of the top spots on page 2 are far better than the CTRs on the lower positions on page one. If you rank well on page 2, be careful when planning your assault on page one. Unless you can get above the fold, it might be better to stay put and own the top of the second page. All of this will, naturally, vary a great deal form site to site, page to page and even across individual phrases. Sometimes people research on one phrase and buy on another version, for example.

8. Title tags save your content

It’s important, but even the most well-crafted title tag can’t elevate a site skipping everything else. This is a somewhat common refrain from bloggers as some of the most popular platforms don’t include things like meta descriptions in their base code. Plugins exist to easily add them, and allow access to a bunch of other common areas SEOs like to fiddle with. You should spend time getting the title right, but this alone won’t save a sinking ship.

9. Usability has nothing to do with SEO

While technically a different discipline, its time more folks starting seeing them as similar. Both focus on improving a website for users. Investing in SEO and not investing in usability is like tying one sneaker and going for a run. Yeah, you’ll be OK, but wouldn’t it be a better experience with both shoes tied?

10. Videos are all I need

Since when? People like video content, which can easy and fun to produce. Videos enrich your content, and some people base their content strategy on videos. But let's face it, embedding videos can negatively affect page load times, frustrating visitors. And a video alone won’t help rankings. You've got to give the search engines something to understand, as they’re not going to “watch” that 4 minute rant you posted. A transcript maybe.

How Can Students Become Millionaires While Studying?

2014-09-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

How Can Students Become Millionaires

Seems far-fetched, doesn't it? Looks like an ad similar to the ones that say 'Google pays me so and so', yes? Well, you might be only half right, because nothing is impossible, or should I say, impossible is nothing in the world. It is only a matter of perspective and setting up goals. Now most of you are thinking, people can easily earn money by creating a blog, but that money definitely isn't in seven figures. Well, perhaps it's time to think outside the box.

The idea of creating a blog and earning money from it might have been considered 'thinking outside the box' a few years ago. But as of now, it is residing deep inside the box. Hence, the need of a change of perspective, or mindset if you will.You can make some serious money if you have the right aptitude for it. Students, of course are the best fit, because they are quicker learners. But this doesn't other people can't read this post, which will discuss about some of the productive ways of earning money.

Besides creating a blog and earning through advertisements and affiliate programs, you can do many things to earn some good money. Nowadays, earning money is no longer easy. With evolving trends in the industries, skill is the need of the hour. Those who have equipped themselves with it are earning millions, while others are sitting back and waiting for people to lick on their ads (:P). So the bottom line is, people, especially students need to spend their time in more productive things, rather than playing games and chatting on Facebook.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that earning through blogs is a bad idea, or that blogging is not productive. Oh no! Quite the contrary! If you have a blog, then that's excellent! It will help you all the more. But maybe, it's time to equip yourself with some new skills so you can counter anything coming your way in the future.

So the big question is, what to do? Well, here are a few suggestions.

Learn web development

Information Technology has already taken over out lives. Already, online connectivity is the need of the many, with new trends towards online usage growing the form of cloud computing and more. If there;s one thing for certain, it's that computers and the internet are definitely here to stay. So that makes web technologies all the more important.

The amazing thing about this field is, it hasn't gone stale. Ever since Tim Breners-Lee created HTTP in the late 80s, the field has grown in importance. Look at Mark Zuckerberg. He was a student when he created Facebook. In any of you have seen his movie, The Social Network, you'll know how he first created a website called Face Mash, which earned him reputation, and he eventually got approached by some seniors who had a project in mind, which later became Facebook. See how developing a simple website turned his luck? Now, he is a $20 Billion man!

There are other countless examples! Look at Larry Page, the founder of Google. As big as it seems now, Google must have started from scratch at one point. And it didn't just become a proper search engine at once. It was built, little by little. Look where it is now. You can find countless other such examples, like Matt Mullenweg - founder of WordPress, or Sergey Brin, founder of O'Reilly Media. All of these started from zero, yet used their skills to make their companies what they are now.

There are many places you can learn the required skills from. Just Google what you want to do. Personally, I'd recommend Lynda.com, and O'Reilly Media. They are simply the best resources available on the web today!

You don't necessarily need to make a website. You could create your own tools for your blog, or make a web app and implement it on your blog/website etc. There are literally thousands of ways you can put your skills to good use.

Create an app

For those of you who are into programming, creating an app for a smartphone is a really good idea! Not many people think about it, which makes it that much more special. Again, you can learn how to make apps fro the leading online resources such as Lynda.com and O'Reilly Media. There's really no shortage of resources one can complain about.

Now about the app itself. The important thing is to start. The challenge seems daunting, which is why most people can't get past the thinking phase. Grab any good idea that comes to your head, and run with it. Remember; for your first app, you don't really need to be unique. You can make something as simple as a currency-converter or a calculator. This will get you acquainted with the working of things. Once you have your first app, you can start thinking of a unique game or app idea. Forget Angry birds, believe me, there are people who are earning loads of money from much simpler ideas. You can make a simple app too. It'll either be popular, or it won't. But in either case, you'll learn something, and that is why you'll always be the winner.

Popular smartphone platforms are Android and iOS. So it'd be wise to create an app for them. Symbian and Blackberry platforms have since lost their touch. And as a beginner, you ought to give yourself the best chances.

Freelance projects

If you aren't into programming, then you can always look for other work that best suits your needs. Freelance workers are being hired ever day for all sorts of works. Maybe you can show them your skills and get hired. Picking up freelance projects can really buff up your pocket. There are many freelance websites where you could look for work.

Sometimes, it might be hard to find freelance work, because you have nothing to show on your portfolio. You can, however, start with the small websites, such as fiverr, or its alternatives. These will give you a fairer opportunity to show your skills to the world. And also, they will help you get your freelancing career started.

Write articles

Freelance writing is another profitable way to earn money. If you have a good grammar and good writing skills, then you should definitely try this. You can either write for big article directories, such as EzineArticles, or write for blogs that are looking for paid authors. Visit different blogs on a regular basis, and see which ones are looking for paid authors.

Why Every Freelancer Today Wants To Be A Blogger?

2014-09-05T00:09:00.003-07:00

Why Every Freelancer Today Wants To Be A Blogger?

Freelancing and Blogging are among the many ways you can earn money online. We have been sharing tips on both at this blog. But the question is, which one is better? Sure, they both have their share of pros and cons, but the fact is, they are increasingly becoming inter-dependent. Most freelancers are now aspiring to become bloggers at some level or another. Why? Because it's their need of the hour! So the greater question is, should one start blogging as a career? Freelance work is increasingly demanding the presence of blogging, which is why a lot of Freelancers are now bloggers as well. Here's why you should blog if you are a freelancer.

An easier way to get yourself noticed

Blogging gives freelancers an opportunity to represent themselves on a whole new level. Let's face it, the idea of describing yourself in just two lines in a profile is just ridiculous. Hence, when applying for a freelancing job, that is when a blog comes in handy. Besides your bio and portfolio, you can add a link to your blog. Now, you can tap into the vast power of a blog, and show them your entire work. You can show stuff that's not even related to the job you've bid for. This creates a really positive impression, which is why many freelancers are now starting to blog.

More credibility

Established bloggers have credibility. They have had contacts with professional people, and they have gotten a name out for themselves, and hence gained some recognition. They are also active on social media. Now freelance clients always prefer giving a project to someone who seems real enough, and whom they can contact through multiple channels in case of an emergency.

Take a case study for example. You want some work done, and you've had some bids regarding your project. There's this guy who just has some bio and profile filled out, and then there's another one who has linked to his blog and social profiles, and has testimonials or references. Which one of them would you hire? Or more precisely, whom will be easier to trace, should there be any emergency? See what I mean? Having a blog means you won't be running away, which provides some level of security-comfort to the clients.

Bloggers are prioritized

Bloggers, and people with online presence are always prioritized. This is because bloggers tend to have a broader perspective on thing especially related to the internet, and they are open to ideas. Many bloggers even have a skill-set regarding web-mastering, web designing, working with graphics, and so on. Hence, in projects that require multiple skill-sets, bloggers are preferred as their skills can easily be judged from the blogs they manage.

Something new to learn

Above all, blogging isn't just about writing. It's a lot more than that. Freelancers or people who don't have a clue about web-design can start blogging. But along the way, they get to learn new things, and new technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. And these are valuable skills to have, and expands the variety of jobs they can bid for.

Take a graphic designer for example, who earns his living through freelancing. He might not know about web-development. But once he starts blogging, he will start learning new things. Knowledge is something that stays with you throughout your life. And using these newly-learned skills, a freelancer can pick up the relevant jobs as well, in addition to the jobs matching his previous skill-sets.

Additional sources of income

And then comes the money. We have discussed about making money from a blog countless times. Blogging can prove to be a substantial source of income if done for some time with hard work and dedication. A freelancer does not know whether he will find work next month or not. But to a blogger who has an established blog, this isn't a concern. Income from blogs is more dependable, which is why blogging looks to freelancers like a regular office job, but only one which can be done at home.

When it comes to blogging vs freelancing, both offer real opportunities. But why not take advantage of both if you can? Looking at the opportunities bloggers have, it's no wonder more and more freelancers are coming over to this practice. If you are a freelancers, then it definitely would be a good idea to at least try it out. Who knows, it could be the break you've looking for :D. All the best :)

Add AdSense right After Tag

2014-09-05T00:06:00.001-07:00

Add AdSense right After  Tag

This is a great tutorial which will multiply your current click through rate and add a new boom to your over all Adsense earning. With a big repository of plugins for Wordpress blogs like Quick Adsense, WP users never need to worry while adding Adsense to any part of the blog they wish but in blogger we lack plugins that could do the job automatically. Therefore this week my main focus lies in developing more of such plugins that could provide you great front end experience. Thanks our developer Ahmed Nasir the script developed this time will automatically insert your AdSense Ad right after the opening paragraph (Post summary) or the read more button(Jump Break). The read more link is distinguished by the HTML tag "" , we will use a
simple Jquery code to tell the browser to append an Ad zone with a unique div ID, right before the more tag. In browsers where JavaScript is disabled the Ad zone will instead display at the end of post. You can see the demo on our blog, right after reading this line...

(You will see below a 468X60 Adsense for content Ad).

Update: I have disabled the Ad display for browsers where JavaScript is disabled.

Installing the Script on Blogger

Go to Blogger > Templates
Backup your template
Tick the "Expand Widget Templates" box
Search for <head>
Just below it paste the following JQuery code only if you are not yet using jQuery script on your blog

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>

6. Next paste the following code below <head>

<script type='text/javascript'>
$(document).ready(function(){

$('a[name="more"]').before($('#MBT-google-ad').html());
$('#MBT-google-ad').html('');

});
</script>

Optional: If you want to display the ad at two places i.e. below read more tag and also at the end of post then delete the highlighted yellow code. Also delete the yellow highlighted code from step#8 given below
7. Now search the following code:

<data:post.body/>

8. Just below it paste the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<div style="display:none;">
<div id='MBT-google-ad'>
<br/>
<center>
ADD ENCODED ADSENSE CODE HERE </center>
<br/>
</div>
</div> </b:if>

Replace the bolded text above with your Adsense code. Remember that the code that you copy from your Google Adsense Account must be first encoded inorder to work with blogger templates. Simply copy the code and then encode it using the following MBT tool.

Encode your AdSense code using: MBT HTML Encoder

Copy the encoded code from MBT HTML encoder and then paste it on the bolded text that says: ADD ENCODED ADSENSE CODE HERE
9. Save your template and you are all done!
Visit your blog and then visit any post page, you will see an Ad hanging just perfectly right after the first opening Summary paragraph. :)

Need Help?

I am always open to curious and delicious questions so never hesitate asking for help. If your blog has no Read more functionality or you don't know how to add a a jump break then you can try these interesting tutorials:

5 SEO Signals That Don't Matter Anymore

2014-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

5 SEO Signals That Don't Matter Anymore

SEO signals, or metrics, are a way of quantifying a website's usefulness in a variety of areas. The (late) Google PageRank is a common example. Others include Moz Domain and Page Authority. These are the most common ones, and there are hundreds of others as well that allow us to quickly analyze patterns and trends. Not very signal is useful however, and some have been phased out with changes in SEO over the years. Surprisingly, people still use some of them. Here are the top 5 SEO pointers you need to stop looking at! SEO is not evergreen. What was a widely popular practice yesterday is today's malpractice and tomorrow's crime. Some SEO signals were widely used before, but are not as useful today. Here are give such signals that are very common.

Social media following

Does having a large social media presence help? Of course, but not with website ranking. The number of followers does not have any direct affect on rankings.

However, social media can help indirectly. The more you engage with your social followers, the more traffic you get and the more the likelihood of getting links, which in turn help somewhat with SEO. So it isn't about how many social followers you have, it is about how many are you able to engage!

Keyword Density

Keyword density is simply the percentage of times a given keyword appears in text on a page. This metric was talked about a lot a few years back in context of helping websites rank. But today, it has more of a counter-productive effect. Now it is only used in a high level comparative sense when trying to identify content that might have manipulative patterns, i.e. spamming to get a search bot's attention.

Competitors Backlinks

There are tonnes of SEO tools out there that let you do competitive analysis to see how well you're doing against your competitors. A common metric used in this context is the number of backlinks your competitors have.

It is important to note that this number does not reflect on a coherent understanding of a site's performance. A larger number than yours doesn't mean your competitor will always rank better than you, because the quality of backlinks has a greater weightage. And not to mention that the more backlinks you have, the higher your risk of having a negative backlink profile.

Rank for specific keywords

Many site owners tend to focus only on one or two keywords. As a result they miss the bigger picture and fail to see trends that they should be paying attention to. While it is true that you should target a specific niche, you shouldn't restrict yourself to a particular keyword.

Such site owners look at how well their website is performing for those specific keywords, and consider it to be a success. What they don't realize is, you need horizontal coverage to withstand search engine updates and penalties in the future. Google and other search engines roll out updates frequently, and these updates target search queries.

AdWords Spending

A popular SEO myth has it that Google favors your site if you spend money on AdWords. Some 'consultants' will tell you that the more you spend, the better your standing and the more organic traffic you receive.

That is of course not true. Check out the following post where I have discussed the matter in greater detail.

How To Optimize Your Site Homepage For International Audience?

2014-09-03T04:12:00.002-07:00

How To Optimize Your Site Homepage

Businesses that operate in more than country or locale targeting different languages often deploy different websites, or different sections with language-specific content geared towards individual locales. While managing sub-domains and sub-directories with different URLs for this purpose is easy, it can be a bit tricky to have a common homepage for all these different locales. Here are some recommendations to help you create the right homepage on your website to serve theRecommended For You: Google Tips To Optimize International Websites.

Whenever users from different regions land on your website, you have a few options for handling them. The most obvious one would be to show the same content to everyone, regardless of their region. But that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it? You could also let the users select a preference. Many websites implement this technique, letting users choose the flag of their preferred language country. You could also serve content depending on the users' location.

1. Serve the same content for all users

You can decide to serve specific content for one given country and language on your homepage. This is the 'default' setting. The idea is to have a separate URL for each language setting, with the homepage / generic URL having the default version of the content.

For example, I could set up www.example.com for m English website, and anyone who enters this URL directly or searches for it specifically will see the website in English. I can then have separate URLs for French, Spanish, and German languages etc (for e.g. www.example.com/fr or fr.example.com). The point is, have a specific URL for each language, so that Germans can see the French version as well.

You can later suggest the appropriate version to users based on their location.

2. Let users choose

Sometimes, you never know what a user might want. A Chinese person sitting in Germany would probably still want the Chinese version of a website. So you decide to serve a country selector page on your homepage / generic URL. You must have seen this implemented on various websites that show flags of language countries, and let users choose which content they want to see depending on country and language. All users who type in that URL can access the same page.

If you implement this scenario on your international site, remember to use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for the country selector page, which was specifically created for these kinds of pages. The x-default value helps us recognize pages that are not specific to one language or region.

3. Automatically redirect users

A third scenario would be to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.

Again, make sure you use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users. Also make sure all the pages – including country and language selector pages:

Have rel-alternate-hreflang annotations
Are crawlable, and are not blocked by robots.txt or by a noindex
Allow users to switch local version or language: you can do that using a drop down menu for instance.

You should, of course, have separate URLs for each country and language version.

Got questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below.

Will Backlinks Ever Lose Their Importance In Google?

2014-09-03T04:07:00.001-07:00

Will Backlinks Ever Lose Their Importance In Google

When Google started off as a basic search engine in its infancy, it had none of the fancy search algorithms. The sole indicator of how relevant a content is to a set of keywords was the frequency of the keyword within the content, and the only way to rank one website over another was by looking at how many backlinks does a site have. However, much has changed now, and complex algorithms like the Penguin and the Hummingbird take search results beyond string matching. The emphasis has now shifted from backlinks to content, but does that mean backlinks will fade away into
oblivion?
Apparently not, as Google's Matt Cutts explains;

Backlinks probably still have many many years left in them, but inevitably, what Google is trying to do is, figure out a way to fulfill the information needs of the users. Some times, backlinks can help the search engine decide whether a certain page serves its purpose. They are helpful in finding out what the reputation of a site or a page is. But for the most part, people care about the quality of the content on that particular page - the one that they landed on. So over time, backlinks will probably become less important.

If Google really could be able to tell when an article was written by an expert, that would help it understand the context, and sort of 'mark' it as a useful source of information for its users. Right now, Google is working on establishing authorship for the content around the web.

Google is also getting better and better at understanding actual language, and one of the big areas it is investing in for the coming few months is conversation search - the sort of search where you could talk to a machine, and it would be able to understand what you're saying, instead of just picking up on keywords and matching them with content found around the web.

In order to understand what someone is saying - like "How old is Barack Obama", or "Where was he born" - to be able to know he is referring to, that's the sort of thing that requires understanding of natural language. As Google gets better at understanding who wrote something, and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably there will be a lesser emphasis on links over time.

However, that does not mean backlinks are going away anytime soon. For the next few years at least, Google will continue to use links in order to asses the basic reputation of webpages and sties. So 'til then, keep workin' on backlinks, y'all, but more importantly, work ion improving your content, and this will guarantee you a safe journey through the future! Cheers

Can You Have Multiple Links On A Page Pointing To The Same Target?

2014-09-03T03:32:00.000-07:00

Can You Have Multiple Links On A Page Pointing

Creating inbound and outbound links on your website smartly is an important part of SEO. We have talked at length about linking strategies that can protect your blogs against algorithmic penalties. Someone once asked me if it was okay to add two links on a page that point to the same target. I just stumbled across Google's Matt Cutts' response to the question, so I thought I'd share it with our readers.

The question was, whether it is okay if two or more links on a page with different anchor text point to the same target. Now obviously, it's a matter of the flow of PageRank, and could be seen as a violation. Let's see what Google has to say about it.

PageRank flow

As per the original PageRank paper that defines how it works, the flow of PageRank is divided evenly amongst the total number of links on a page. So if there's only one link of a page, all the PageRank flows through it, whereas if there are 10 links, this amount gets divided by 10.

So according to this scheme, if you have two links from one page to another, both would flow PageRank. If the number of links on a page is significant, say more than a dozen, then two links pointing to one page would make almost twice as much PageRank to flow to that page.

Anchor text

The flow of PageRank is not effected by anchor text. If it's a link, there's some PR flowing through it, no matter what the anchor text says. But as far as anchor text itself goes, Google has a link extraction process which looks at all the links on a page, extracts them, and annotate them with the document they're pointing to.

The idea is to establish relationships between pages. Say you have three pages, A B and C. A points to B and C, B points back to A, but not to C. C points at both A and B. There are two links from C to B. So the purpose of the link extraction process is to understand how these pages are linked. Given the above scenario, it might form associations such as A-B, A-C, B-A, C-A, and C-B.

Now a single link or multiple links don't mean anything to this algorithm, whose job it is to simply understand the relationships. So when encountered multiple links to a single target, it might select the first link, or any random link, or some (or all) of the links. The behavior depends, and it changes over time, but doesn't have any real impact on rankings etc.

The takeaway from this post is, even if there is some SEO effect, it is negligible, as this is just one small aspect of SEO, and it would be better to simply focus on more important things. Personally, I would recommend that you use multiple links with care.

If you want to give value to an external page, say in case of a guest post, then multiple links would do more good than harm. Similarly, while internal-linking, if it makes sense to add the same hyperlink with different anchor text, then by all means go ahead. But you probably need to check yourself if you're doing it excessively, such as in the case of installing multiple 'Related Posts' plugins, or referring to an affiliate link again and again - that sort of thing is usually not well received.

How To Get Mobile Version Of A Page Recognized By Google?

2014-09-03T03:27:00.004-07:00

How To Get Mobile Version Of A Page Recognized By Google?

There are many ways you can optimize your website to handle mobile traffic. You can have responsive web design, dynamically serve content, or maintain a separate mobile site altogether. But how do you tell Google about this mobile version of a page, so that it can be shown in mobile search results? Users searching Google on a smartphone should ideally see mobile sites instead of desktop sites. So how exactly do you go about telling Google about the mobile version of a
webpage?
As I mentioned, there are three basic ways to handle mobile traffic.

Responsive web design - Webpages 'respond' to the user agents, and re-size and readjust automatically to best suit the user agent that requested a page.

Dynamic content serving - Less used, but useful technique similar to RWD. The type of user-agent is recognized, i.e. whether it is a mobile or a desktop agent, and then content is programatically.

Separate mobile site - Same content, but hosted on a separate domain or sub-domain. Usually m.website.com.

Responsive design involves JavaScript and CSS which work together to handle the resizing and readjustment of a page. If you're using this technique, then do not block GoogleBot from accessing the JavaScript and CSS files. This makes a big difference, because if GoogleBot can fetch them, it can then interpret them and figure out whether a site is responsive or not. GoogleBot can also execute your JavaScript to find new links, and crawl your website better.

Handling mobile pages

Another way to do this is to have separate versions of a page for desktop and mobile users having separate URLs. To let Google know about the mobile version, follow these simple steps.

Step 1: On your desktop page, use a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the mobile version. This lets Google know that these two versions of the same page are related to each other because this is the desktop version, and the other is the mobile version.

Step 2: On the mobile page, do a rel="canonical" to the desktop version. This tells GoogleBot that even though this version has a different URL, the content is the same.

These bi-directional links will help Google establish a relationship between the two versions of a page, and understand the difference between them.

The last step is to make sure that you are properly redirecting smartphone users from the desktop to the mobile version. This redirection tells Google a webmaster has set up a mobile version of a site, and is redirecting smartphone users to it.

Also make sure you're not blocking GoogleBot on any version of your page(s).

Following these best practices, you can help Google correctly identify mobile versions of your page, and serve them in mobile search accordingly.

How Can Content Be Ranked If It Has Very Few Links To It?

2014-09-03T03:25:00.000-07:00

How Can Content Be Ranked If It Has Very Few Links To It?

How many of us, when starting off with a blog or a website, have asked the very same question? It's a common problem faced by every beginner who has content to put on his fresh domain, but lacks the popularity to get backlinks. Now you know how important backlinks are for search engines, and there's a whole science to it. But doesn't it seem unfair that quality content with no links, written by a beginner gets snuffed out by content from other well-established blogs?
Let's take a look at what Google's Matt Cutts has to say about this.When there are no links to a content, everything in general sort of reverts back to the way search engines were in their infancy - before links, that is. At that point, search engines were pretty much judging based on the text on a page.

Keywords

One of the ways Google "judges" a page is through the recurrence of a keyword. When it finds a matching keyword based on the search query, it assigns a certain importance to it on first occurrence. Subsequent occurrences are given importance incrementally, until a certain point. This point marks the optimal keyword density.

Keywords beyond this point are not favored, and this phenomenon is called keyword stuffing. So in case of absence of links, keyword density is a major factor search engines use for ranking a page. This is why we always emphasize on keyword optimization when giving advice to beginners, because they don't have much links to go around with.

Domain

Another factor Google weighs in is the reputation of a domain. This doesn't necessarily have to do with the popularity of a domain, since new ones might have none. Rather, it has to do with previous activities on a domain. A domain you newly purchase might have hosted copyrighted or malicious content, which might have resulted in a penalty. This is why we recommend doing background research on a domain before purchasing it.

Sometimes, a user might use a rare search term, which might not have many results on the web. In such cases, even if there aren't many links to one page that does match up with that search phrase, that page is likely to be returned, because besides being a link-building game, it's a keyword game as well. And as mentioned above, if the keywords on a page seem relevant, that page might be returned in search results.

So to answer your question, no. There's no fair way of ranking content that has few backlinks over a highly popular article, no matter the quality. If you want it to be a fair fight, then you'll have to focus more on link-building and getting on even grounds before you start pitching your quality content into the competition. Otherwise, it's very tough to get new less popular content ranked well in search engines.

Here, take a left out of our book and follow the tips below for building quality backlinks.

How To Determine The Authority of Any Domain?

2014-09-03T03:22:00.002-07:00

How To Determine The Authority of Any Domain?

When it comes to ranking well in a search engine for a certain keyword (or keywords), Authority is everything. More authority beats less authority every time, simply because it can! Certain domains or websites have an authority on certain topics, because every subject has an expert. Search engines today understand authority, and have their algorithms designed so as to give preference to authoritative domains for any search query.
But how exactly do you determine the authority of a website? It's not like a pre-computed number that you can compare two domains with. Authority and trust are two ambiguous ranking factors that every SEO should focus on. They're ambiguous because no one truly understands how Google applies these concepts to their algorithms.

So how exactly do you judge how authoritative a domain is?

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are short previews of the website contents on search result pages. Having a good rich-snippet not only makes your site look good, it also helps gather a better click-through rate.

Rich snippets can be indicative of authority. Simply adding structured data markup does no make rich snippets magically pop up. We have explained in a previous post that it is upto Google to show your profile picture (along with other rich snippet data) in search results, and that there's no guarantee that structured markup will always work.

But one of that factors that makes the rich snippets show up is domain authority. The domain and the page has to have Schema markup and a certain level of authority in order for its rich snippet to be displayed in search results.

Sitelinks in SERPs

A Google search for a particular domain will get you a link to the homepage in the results, along with a few sitelinks below the search listing for the same domain. Google determines the relevance of these sitelinks based on the query. But not every domain is so privileged so as to have its sitelinks listed in SERPs. Only authoritative domains with a good trust rating get their sitelinks added by Google. So if you want to see whether a site is authoritative enough, you should do a Google search for the domain name, and see if any sitelinks appear.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google is now taking content from other sites and displaying it in the search results. In any other context this would be called site scrapping, but Google calls it “knowledge graph”. Despite what you might think about Knowledge Graph, it is clear that if Google is willing to take your content and display it on their site, it must have a certain amount of authority. So far Wikipedia is likely the one domain with the most knowledge graph integrations and its no mystery how well it ranks.

Authorship

Yes as the name applies having verified authorship, means an inherent level of authority. Which means its a pretty fair assumption that if a site has authorship in the results, the domain has some vested authority. In fact authorship might be one of the best signals to build authority……but that’s for a different blog post!

Rankings For Mid-Level Terms

Lets face it, anyone can get on page one for a non-competitive long tail query. However, it takes a little bit more work and authority to rank for mid level or highly competitive terms. If a domain can rank for a mid level term it means that it likely has a certain amount of authority. If its ranking for a highly competitive term then it absolutely has authority.

Great Ways To Improve Your Website's Domain Authority

2014-09-03T03:20:00.000-07:00

Great Ways To Improve Your Website's Domain Authority

The Domain Authority of any website reflects upon how well it is doing in its field. Developed by Moz, this metric is one of the most important ones in SEO, as it will dictate your prowess in search results. I recently did an article on how to determine the authority of any domain, in which I explained how you can tell two domains apart based on their authority factors. As promised, I'm here again to discuss some of the ways you can improve your domain authority.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority depends on a lot of factors, the most important of which is your link profile. This pertains to how many backlinks are pointing towards your site, and how authoritative are they. So as you can imagine, the domain authority isn't an easy thing to influence. It's a site-wide ranking that will only improve slowly.

If you're considering DA scores from Moz, that's a logarithmic scale from 1-100. This means that it is easy to get from 1 to 20, and much harder to get from 20 to 40. So don't be disappointed if your domain authority doesn't rise up quickly. It's a slow process, and you'll reap the benefits in the long run.

Here are some of the ways you can improve your Domain Authority;

1. Improve SEO

In order to improve your domain authority, you need to improve your overall SEO, and that includes all the technical stuff such as site structure, navigability, meta tags, URL structure, breadcrumbs, keywords, alt tags, and so on.

Recommended: 20 Hot SEO Tactics Every Blogger Should Know

If your business is built around content marketing, which is what most bloggers do, then you really need SEO to complement your efforts. Make sure that your SEO is up to par before going any further.

2. Create linkable content

I am not going to repeat how you should write quality content, and how content is king bla bla. Most of you know this major fact by now that content is the most important part of your website. The trick, however, is to create linkable content. What is linkable content, you ask?

Not every great piece of content you write would compel people to share it and link to it. For example, news highlights get shared a lot, but people rarely ever link to them. Tutorials get their portion of shares and links, but what really makes content linkable is how unique it is and how useful it is to others. People will link to your content if;

It presents something new; an idea, a thought, a piece of research, and so on.
It appeals to a person's emotions, i.e. people can relate to it. It can be an event, a story, anything.
It can't be easily reproduced. People usually link to Wikipedia because it has so much information that they can't reproduce it themselves, and find it easier to just link to it. It something were easily reproducible, why wouldn't anyone want to spin it off and take credit instead of giving it? Infographics, in-depth articles, research work - these are things that can't be easily reproduced, and hence get a lot of links.

3. Internal-linking

Often overlooked in the craze over “high quality backlinks” is building of high quality internal backlinks. I can’t overemphasize the importance of internal linking. (See what I did there? That’s an internal link.)

Internal linking weaves a powerful network within your site that benefits both the user and the search engines that crawl and index your site. A site that lacks internal linking is like a collection of pebbles — disconnected and weak. But a site that has strong internal linking turns those pebbles into concrete — interconnected and unbreakable.

The great thing about having more content is that you’ll have more content to link to. And the more you link internally, the greater your ability to create a dense and powerful site network will be.

4. Clean up bad links

SEO isn’t all glory and grandeur. There’s the nitty gritty of wading through spreadsheets and performing mind-numbing repetitive work.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. You’ve got to remove your toxic backlinks. Every now and then, you should dig into your link profile, find the spammy links, and get rid of them.

You’ll gain a huge competitive advantage by regularly cleaning your link profile. In my experience, this isn’t something that most webmasters are doing with any regularity. Sure, I see webmasters engage in clean-up with a vengeance, but it’s only after they’ve experienced the slump of an algorithm penalty or the heart-stopping experience of a manual penalty.

Don’t wait till a penalty strikes you to clean up your link profile. Do it now and then continue to do it on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

Explaining how to remove toxic backlinks is outside the scope of this article, so let me point you to some resources. This Quick Sprout Traffic University video helps you understand whether you’re at risk for a penalty, and this article on penalty recovery will show you exactly what you need to do to clean up your link profile (even if you haven’t been penalized).

This is the only way you’re going to have a tidy link profile — cleaning it up regularly. You can build the most awesome link-backs the world has ever seen, but if your profile is full of spammy backlinks, you’re not going to experience the success you want from content marketing. Your DA will remain low.

5. Patience is the key

One underestimated factor when it comes to domain authority is the age of a domain. The older a domain, the better its chances of getting a higher DA. As mentioned above, it takes time to build the domain authority. If you're doing everything right, you should see your authority rise slowly. It all doesn't happen within a day. You can’t simply “improve your DA” by jiggering this and tweaking that. Instead, you must look at the bigger picture of today’s SEO — it’s content marketing. And you can only win in the other areas — domain authority, traffic, organic search results, and ranking — by focusing on your content.

In the end, it all comes down to content. Better content means better everything else. You can improve your domain authority. It’s all about your content.

How To Get More Of Your Website Pages Indexed By Google

2014-09-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

How To Get More Of Your Website Pages

When you create a new page on your website, it ideally gets indexed sooner or later. The more pages you have, the more pages you'll get in Google's index, and the more opportunities you can avail. But saying that is taking Google Indexing for granted. Owing to a lot of factors, Google might not index every page it crawls on your site. So what should you do when you see Google giving you the cold shoulder? How can you increase the number of pages indexed by Google?Google Index Status

You can see the index situation of your website from the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. On the left sidebar, expand Google Index,
and then clock on Index Status. Switch to the Advanced tab to see more detail.

In the advanced view, you can view and compare 'Total Indexed', 'Blocked by Robots' and 'Removed'. Google doesn’t index every page it crawls, owing to reasons such as duplicate content, absence of index tags and lack of useful content on a page. You can see the numbers represented by a graph, which helps you analyze trends. Your index status might have taken a hit after an update, for instance. You can work towards recovering from such a hit.

You can also compare the total number of pages crawled vs the total number of pages indexed. If, for some reason your pages are not making it into the index, here are a few tips that can help.

Improving Index status

XML Sitemap - Have a smart XML sitemap. It’s a good idea to have a sitemap index file where different sections are broken out (example: dynamic, static, blog posts, blog categories, etc.). That way, you can submit each sitemap (and the index file) itself and more closely monitor the index status of each; thus identifying any issues within a certain section.
Increase Internal-linking - The more internal-linking you have, the pages connected the pages on your site are, and the easier it is for Google to crawl them. If a page turns up repeatedly in a crawl, Google is likelier to index it, thinking it must be an important page after all.
Remove duplicate content - Fix any duplicate content and crawl errors. When crawl time is wasted on duplicate content and errors, the pages that matter aren't getting the attention they “deserve.” Also, check the non-indexable section in GWT (under Search Appearance >> HTML Improvements).
Use Structured Data - Adding structured data and rich snippets can help search engines understand the content on your site, hence facilitating the index process.
Use Webmaster Tools - Google Webmaster Tools portal is your best friend. Use the Fetch as Google feature in GWT, and submit your site to index.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Backlinks

2014-09-02T22:22:00.000-07:00

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Backlinks

Backlinks are very important for performing well in search engines. But building them can be one of the most tedious tasks you might have to do as a webmaster. So before you go around looking for new backlinks, maybe it's better to get the most out of your existing ones. This will improve the 'throughout' of your existing backlinks, so to speak. After all, you need all the help you can get. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your existing backlinks.

Before you can think about extracting you can from your backlinks, it'd perhaps be best to analyze your backlink profile first. Read the following post to learn more about it.

How To Use Google Analytics To Check On Your Important Backlinks?

Check For broken links

Well ain't it a shame when you work so hard to get a backlink, only to find that the external source got it wrong? Maybe the content linked to was removed, or maybe the source didn't enter the link correctly. Whatever the reason, you're losing valuable traffic.

To find broken links, first extract a list of the link targets from your data set. This is the list of URLs on your site that are receiving links. Next, remove duplicated URLs and compile this list as a CSV. Then, crawl this list of URLs with software like Screaming Frog. Finally, after the crawl is complete, look at the response codes for each URL and find any that are posting 404s. 404s mean that the page is no longer available on the domain.

So now you have a list of old URLs that used to exist on your site, that are still receiving links! To fix this issue, you can either put the former page/content back up, or redirect the URL to a new location on the domain that is some how related. This will ensure that any link equity that is flowing in through those links, isn't wasted on URLs that don’t exist anymore.

Redirect Links

This strategy is similar to the last, but a bit different. For this strategy you will want to sort your data set by anchor text. Next look for anchor text that is relevant to the terms you would like to rank for. Now ask your self, are any of the links that use valuable anchor text pointing at low quality or unrelated content? For example, you might be selling tennis shoes, and have a sales page all about “Women’s Tennis Shoes”, but you might have links that have the anchor text “Women’s Shoes”, pointing to an old blog post that no longer gets any traffic. Wouldn't it make better sense for your sales page to receive those links, than a blog post that hasn't been visited in years?

The trick to executing this tactic effectively is to align the linking intent with the new URL. Therefore you can’t just redirect unrelated links. Everything most be related, so when visitors follow the links, the anchor text matches up with the page they land on. Otherwise that traffic is wasted, and you could potentially setup a false pattern that make appear “spammy”.

Identify Prospects For New Links

Web sites that are already linking to your site, are much more likely to link to your site again, if you give them a reason to. So with this strategy, you can start by organizing the links by domain. Next find the domains that have the most value. You can get a good idea of “value” by looking at flow metrics or DA. Then drill down to see what content these domains linked to. Next create similar content or content with the same angle. Finally do targeted outreach to the individuals at the domains that created the original links and thank them for the original links, and then mention the new content.

You can experiment with outright asking for a new link, but be careful not to come across as to aggressive. You are more likely to get a link from these folks if you provide them really great content with out the overt intention of gaining new links.

Bolster Existing Link Value

Because of the way that the link economy works, often times really great content attracts links from not so great content. This is because mere probability states that there will be more mediocre content than amazing content. As a result often times the pages that link to you, don’t receive links or social traction themselves. This can be problematic because it means that the amount of link equity flowing in is lesser. Therefore with this tactic you can take the links that come from decent content, but aren’t receiving any links themselves, and share them in social media, or link to them from other properties if possible. By doing this you are bolstering the link’s value and in turn helping out yourself and someone else at the same time.

While this is an effective strategy, make sure that you only utilize it on content that deserves your attention. As I stated above, the vast majority of your links are likely mediocre, so you don’t need to hunt for awesome content that's been linking to you. But at the same time make sure that you aren’t sharing really low quality content or outright link spam in an attempt to bolster it. This will make you as a brand look….well dumb.

Identify Popular Content

This tactic is similar to the new prospects list above, but instead of building new content to get former “linkers” to link again, this tactic focuses on building the same types of content that have attracted links in the past. First you are going to want to organize your data set so you can see how many links each URL on your site is receiving. This might require a pivot table in excel, or your data provider might provide this data as a download option. Sort the URLs by which is getting the most links. Now take a look at the topics and types of content that are getting the most links. Are there any trends that stand out? Can you build more content that follows the same topical patterns? If so you are on your way to creating new content that is more likely to attract more links.

To make this tactic as effective as possible you should avoid any URLs that are receiving unnatural or inorganic links. This is because these URLs aren't representative of organic link behaviors.