Free Blogger Tricks

Google Will Penalize Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement

2012-08-26T07:50:00.001-07:00

Google announced last week that it will start penalizing websites that violate copyrights on a consistent basis. In other words, if a certain website is found to be violating copyrights of other people regularly it will lose search rankings and possibly even be removed from Google’s index.
They will calculate the number of copyright infringements based on the amount of DMCA takedown notices that Google receives from content owners. Here’s a quotation from a Search Engine Land article explaining the process:

But as it turns out, there is a way that Google can guestimate if there’s copyright infringement happening, by making use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” requests.
These requests are one of the ways to get content removed from Google. Anyone can file a request. It’s not proof of copyright infringement. It’s merely an allegation, and one that can be challenged. But Google evaluates each request, and if deemed valid, content is removed.
The requests are a pain to file, and they only remove an individual web page. If you’re a big entertainment company, it’s like playing Whac-A-Mole. But now, Google’s shift will change the game from a page-by-page basis to a site-by-site one. Beginning next week, a site will a lot of requests against individual pages will find all of its pages ranking lower in Google.

Overall I think it’s a valid measure, and it should certainly help to control the levels of content theft and plagiarism around the web.
I don’t think the update will have a large impact on small publishers, though, but hey at least you have one more weapon now to fight against people ripping off your content.
What do you think?

Prevent your Blogger Blog from Redirecting to Country-Specific URLs

2012-08-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Google, as most would know, redirects Blogger blogs to country-specific domains. For instance, if you open example.blogspot.com in your browser, you might be redirected to example.blogspot.in if you are located in India or to example.blogspot.com.au if you access the same blog from Australia.
The main reason why Google implemented country-specific redirection is selective censorship – they can now easily block a blog, or a particular page on a blog, in one country but still serve it in other regions.

Blogger and Country-Specific Domains

My traffic logs suggest that country-specific redirection in Blogger is now live in at least 15 countries. Here’s a complete list:
India [blogspot.in], Australia [blogspot.com.au], UK [blogspot.co.uk], Japan [blogspot.jp], New Zealand [blogspot.co.nz], Canada [blogspot.ca], Germany [blogspot.de], Italy [blogspot.it], France [blogspot.fr], Sweden [blogspot.se], Spain [blogspot.com.es], Portugal [blogspot.pt], Brazil [blogspot.com.br], Argentina [blogspot.com.ar], Mexico [blogspot.mx]

Prevent Blogger from Redirecting to Country-Specific Domains

This country based URL redirection does mean some negative consequences to your Blogger blog. For example:

The social stats – or Facebook Likes, Google +1s and Tweet counts – for your blog stories may be diluted as the URLs for the same story become different from different visitors.
You will have a similar problem if you are using an external commenting platform like Disqus or Facebook Comments.
Also, if canonicalization isn’t implemented properly, it may cost you some Google juice as external websites may link to your country-specific pages.

If you are not happy with the idea of Blogger redirecting your blog to a different URL, you can add the following piece of code to your Blogger template and it will always serve the .com address to your visitors irrespective of their geographic location.
Go to your blog inside the Blogger Dashboard and choose Template. Then click the “Edit HTML” button followed by “Proceed.” Next, copy-paste the following code into the template after the <head> tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
var blog = document.location.hostname;
var slug = document.location.pathname;
var ctld = blog.substr(blog.lastIndexOf("."));
if (ctld != ".com") {
var ncr = "http://" + blog.substr(0, blog.indexOf("."));
ncr += ".blogspot.com/ncr" + slug;
window.location.replace(ncr);
}
</script>

Click the Save Template button and now your Blogger Blog will always serve with the blogspot.com URL.
This simple script parses the domain name (document.location.hostname) of your blog page and if it includes a country-specific URL (like blogspot.in), it will force-redirect the visitor to the blogspot.com address using the /ncr switch.

Push Blogger To Maximum Load Speed - Series

2012-08-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

Blog speed is an integral part of a blog's Traffic strategy. Blogs that load faster and quickly taking less time to display all elements, increase readership, search engine traffic and thus revenue. A Good blog design with poor load time means waste of efforts and time. Not everyone uses fast internet connection or LAN or Wi-Fi. With the advent of smart phone technology, Mobile internet use is increasing every single month and leaving behind Computer internet connection in Market demand. Browsers have made themselves compatible with iPhone, Android, blackberry and Windows Phone. People living in USA are biggest consumers of smart phones. USA is amongst top three countries which has largest internet users. In order to attract more traffic from USA as well as UK and Asia, you need to make sure your blog loads quickly and its design is compatible with major browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer8. In this series I will share some rarely shared secrets that web designers use to ensure their designed website templates take less time to load instead of forcing the visitor to wait for several seconds. We will be sharing every tip we applied to reduce load time of MyBloggerTricks.

An ideal load time is as minimum as 5-8 seconds but achieving such timing is rare as we can't sacrifice blog design a lot for the sake of a boost in loading time. We will therefore ensure to keep design of blog neat and clean by adopting smart ways of optimizing the scripts and images. Graphic Images, third-party widgets, plugins, JavaScript and JQuery are responsible for 80% of slow load time in both blogger and Wordpress blogs. Our purpose would be to optimize them all.

Following is the list of topics we will discuss in this fresh new series:

Blog Load Speed Series

Part1: Disadvantages Of Slow Loading Blogs

Part2: Optimize Images In Blogger To Increase Load Speed - CSS Sprites

Part3: Decrease Load Time By Optimizing JavaScript - How Many scripts allowed?

Par4: Which Widgets You Must Use In Blogger For Faster Load Time?

Disadvantages of Slow Loading Blogs

Following are some points that highlight possible pit falls linked with slow loading web pages or slow website speed that effects your blogs ranking, revenue and readership:

Discourage visitors to stay longer thus increasing bounce rates
Decreases PageViews. People wont navigate the blog a lot and would tend to leave it as soon as possible
Drop in PageViews means drop in Page Impressions thus serious loss in Advertising revenue
You wont get targeted sponsors if your page views are less than 2-3K
Ad spots can not be sold at higher prices
People wont share your content on social media networks
Visitor wont turn into reader and thus no increase in the number of subscribers
Fan following on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ would increase at a slow rate
People would tend to read your Feeds than preferring visiting your blog. Again this effects your Blog PageViews because Feed visits do not count a lot except for Adsense
Search robots can skip indexing a page which is too dense and filled with scripts and graphics
Search Rankings for a page is badly damaged
Google loves serving its users with quick loading sites and penalizes those which take longer time to load
Traffic from Internet Explorer would suffer due to browser crashing. IE often crashes when the page takes a longer time to load
Traffic from smart phones would decrease because mobile internet connections are not very fast. People love to visit sites that can be browsed easily and quickly using their handsets
So on...

What's Next?

After realizing some of the biggest disadvantages of blog speed factor, it would now be interesting to discuss effective ways to tremendously reduce the number of elements that may be causing the blog to take a longer time to load. Instead of sharing non-practical tips like CSS and HTML compressing or Image Compressing, we will share tips for BlogSpot blogs that we apply to all our designed templates and also to MBT blog. I am sure you will learn a lot with this new exciting series. I will share some advanced technical tips that will be both practical and easy to apply. Kindly do not hesitate to ask for anything un-cleared. Do share some of your secret tips or any query that you wish to clarify.

Peace and blessings buddies. :)

Settings For Blogger 404 Error Page, Redirects and Meta Tags!

2012-08-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

Its big, its exciting and its worth an applause! Blogger finally introduced the most awaited SEO features for Google hosted BlogSpot blogs. Blogger Team is trying every possible effort to get closer to its biggest competitor Wordpress in terms of development. Its believed that BlogSpot blogs are not well optimized due to limited Search Engine optimization features but with the introduction of Meta Description for individual posts, custom redirection for broken links, nofollow attribute, 404 error pages, custom robots.txt and robot header tags features, blogger surprised almost everyone today. The problem of wrong post description appearing in social networks like Facebook and Google+ will all be solved thanks to Meta Tags for posts and pages. We will look into each feature one by one so that you may understand clearly the importance of these technical SEO terms.

What are the new Search Features?

Six important SEO options have been added to Blogger in draft which are:

Meta Tags for Homepage and Sub-pages
404 Error Page
Custom Redirects for broken links
Custom Robots.txt For Advanced users
Custom robots header tags For Advanced users
Nofollow attribute for post Editor links

Caution: Out of six new features only two which relate to crawling and indexing of search robots are restricted for Advanced users. I would therefore recommend not to play with them because wrong settings can terribly effect search credibility of your blog therefore keep them as default.
To set the new SEO settings do this:

Go To draft.blogger.com
Then Go to Settings > Search preferences

Now here you will see three important sub-sections which we will discuss one by one.

Meta Tags

The word meta here refers to Meta Description. It tells visitors what your blog is all about. In search engine results page.

Previously we would manually set meta description for blog homepage but now you can set it using this page. So what's new? The new addition is that by enabling this feature, meta description for Posts will activate and you can then configure Description for posts using the blog post editor. To activate this option do this:

Click the Edit link
Choose "Enable Search Description?"
In box define your blog in no more than 150 characters.

Note: You must write the same description here that you have written manually inside your templates.

4. Click Save changes
5. Since the above description wont work correctly in custom templates therefore we need to insert some code inside the template. Please go to Design > Edit HTML and just below <head> paste the following code for meta description:

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

6. Save your template and all done!

Meta Description For Posts
Now open Blogger post editor and you will see a new option for post description:

Now make it your hobby to write a one line description for every post that you publish. Write no more than 150 characters or 15 keyword phrases. By doing this every new post that you publish will have a separate clean description that will attract more visitors by providing precise description of what you post is all about instead of a chopped random snippet of text chosen by search robot. This will help both robots in better indexing your posts and also Facebook and Google+ to display correct description for your posts.

Errors and redirections

Most of you know that Google webmasters give you several links which are either broken or no more exits. Broken links refer to Pages that no more exits on your blog because for some reason you may have deleted them. Now if some website is linking one of your posts that you deleted then you wont get the reward of the PageRank juice from that website to yours instead if people click that link they will land no where in your blog and will see a 404 Page not found error. There was no concept of a 404 error page before instead this page would appear:

But now you can create your own custom 404 error page. Check ours by writing anything illogical at the end of our blog URL in your address bar or simply click here

Therefore in order to redirect deleted post links to new links and create a custom 404 Error page do this:
404 Error Page

Click the Edit link next to Custom Page Not Found
Inside the box write a message that you want to display when readers land on a missing page (404 page):

You can write any message inside this box using simple HTML but once you click save changes and see how your error page looks, you will see that it looks dull and grey and appear inside an ugly box. In order to give it a good designed look with custom CSS styles just like ours then kindly wait for my next post.
Broken Link Redirection

Click the edit link next to Custom Redirects
Click the checkbox to simplify the options
Now you get a From and To input options
Insert the link of your deleted Post inside From box and insert the link of your new post inside To box.
Click Save changes

You can create several redirects by clicking the New redirect button. If you are confused where to redirect a deleted page or post then you can simply redirect all broken links to your Homepage in order to flow all PageRank juice there.

Crawlers and indexing

Do not worry, its not that advanced and horrifying! :)

This section includes two options which are robots.txt and robot header tags. You may not touch the robots.txt option however you can manage settings for robot header tags severed to search engines. All our long techy SEO tutorials that provided solution for optimizing Blogger pages, posts, homepage, archive and search pages can now be implemented with a simple click of a mouse.

The robots meta tag lets you control how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. In order to keep things simple use the following settings as shown in the screenshot below:

The above recommended settings will tell search engines to index your homepage and all its content, to index your posts and pages but must not index archives and should also not take description suggestions from Open Directory Project (noopd).
Normally, search engines use resources like the Open Directory Project (noopd) and the Yahoo! Directory (noydir) to find titles and descriptions for your content. Generally, you will not want them to do this. The noodp tag prevents them from doing so.
What does unavailable_after Meta tag does?
Though you wont need them but for understanding we would explain it. Most blogs promote seasonal products by writing posts. If you are promoting a new product offer on monthly basis which would expire the next month then you must tell search spiders to stop indexing the old product posts and index the latest one. This will help spiders to give more importance to your latest posts than old repeated posts.

rel nofollow

To understand what is a nofollow link attribute and when should you use it, then kindly read this tutorial:

When should you nofollow an external link?

Internal links should never be tagged as nofollow. See What Matt Cutts recommends

Now whenever you need to create a link in post editor you will see two options

Open this link in new window
Add rel="nofollow" attribute

Choose to open the link in new tab only if the link is pointing to an external site and choose the nofollow option only for links that point to low quality sites or login pages. To understand what links should be attributed as nofollow, I would highly recommend that you read our article on nofollow as shared above.

Liked This latest Change?

I am sure this would greatly improve the way your posts and blog is indexed and crawled by search robots and the way they appear on search results page. It is a great way to improve the quality of your blog and attract a better targeted traffic. Feel free to ask me as many questions as possible in order to throw away all confusions and misconceptions or myths related to SEO that may still be troubling you. I will publish the 404 error page tutorial tomorrow and will share several Designs to give your blogs a new stunning look. Remember to add a new habit to your blogging and that is "adding post description to every new post that you publish". Peace pals! :)

How To Find and Redirect Broken Links In Blogger?

2012-08-25T06:10:00.002-07:00

I personally really liked the Page Redirect option among the latest search preferences by blogger. It lets you easily redirect or cloak deleted, missing, non-existing or removed posts in your BlogSpot blogs to an existing location. Normally for pages that are not found, blogger automatically displays the 404 Error page but this can harm your PageRank from internal and external links. Suppose you had a post and people started giving it backlinks and it got circulated everywhere, if for some reasons you decided to delete that post, people and robots will see a URL error i.e Page Not Found error. All that PageRank juice which was pointing this specific page will be lost therefore you must learn how to redirect missing pages in blogger both for redirecting PageRank juice and also for making your blog more search engine friendly because this is the only way to reduce the number of crawl errors you see at your Google Webmaster Account. We will be dealing this tutorial in a detailed manner to make best possible use of Custom Redirection.

Note: The custom redirect limit is 10 links/URLS for each BlogSpot blog. You can not redirect more than 10 links or pages for the time being. Therefore redirect only important pages.

What are Broken Links?

In layman terms any page or post that you delete in your blog or website is termed as a broken link by search robots. Its called broken because the link points to a missing content and displays a 404 error page.

How To Find Broken Links?

Sometimes you don't remember which posts were deleted by you or which URLs are causing crawl errors and making it difficult for search spiders to index your blog more smoothly. To find broken links in your blog no matter you are running a Google blog or Wordpress or any website, the method below applies to all:

Go To Google Webmasters Account
Select your blog
Click the link under crawl errors

4. Next click on Not Found

If you are running a blogger blog then you will observe several missing/broken URLs list , this is because most of your dynamic pages like comment page and search pages needs to be removed from search indexing using your webmaster account and if you see too many errors then do not panic, it wont effect your blog SEO too much but removing errors is always good than letting the error list grow. I will discuss the techy part of it in some other tutorial for this post we will keep our focus on deleted posts links only.
Now carefully look at the URL errors and note down the post links that you come across. In my case I had deleted a post I once wrote on Feedburner and also one on HostGator Plans that I deleted due to some reasons. The links would look like this in the error list:

Since people were linking back these two posts therefore I had to redirect them to homepage so that I keep receiving the PageRank juice and keep Blog indexing by robots smooth. Anyone who would click this links would see a 404 error page instead. So what we did was redirecting both these pages to Blog homepage. The procedure is defined in next step.

Redirect Broken Links

It is always wise to redirect broken links to homepage or any related page. This will flow the backlinks generous juice instead to homepage or any page that is related to that deleted post. Lets see how we redirected the two links above.
Redirect to a Related Post: Redirecting the Hostgator Link
Clicking the hostgator link which is at Priority#5 as shown in the screenshot above opens a new window from where you can copy its full URL

This is the link:

http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/2012/02/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

The part of link we are interested is the highlighted ending portion.
Now lets learn how to redirect the above broken link to an existing post (related link) which also speaks about HostGator hosting plans and the link for it is:

http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/2012/01/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

Don't get confused that the above two links seem exactly similar except the month 01 and 02. Its just a coincidence :)
Lets now redirect the link:

Go To draft.Blogger.com or just blogger.com if you have upgraded to new interface
Then go to Settings > Search preferences
Click the edit link next to custom redirects
Inside the FROM box I would insert the broken link
and Inside the TO Box I will insert the link for an existing link to which we want to redirect the missing/broken link

6. Click the Save link followed by the Save Changes button
7. The link in now successfully redirected to an existing post.

Redirect To HomePage: Redirect the Feedburner link
Since I had no related post for feedburner so I redirected it to my homepage and this is what I recommend to you all. Redirect to related posts only if you have any else simply redirect all broken links to homepage.
The procedure is same except for the TO box. I need to redirect the feedburner link from this:

http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/2011/06/hack-feedburner-count-postscomments-of.html

To homepage link

http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/

See the screen shot:

Notice that inside the FROM box I inserted the ending portion for broken link and inside the TO box I simply inserted a forward slash i.e. (/)
Click save and all done!

Need Help?

I just hope this demonstrative tutorial may prove helpful and locating and redirecting missing links in your blog. The method will redirect all links in your blog no matter how many times they are interlinked thus not saving both PageRank and traffic from external links that point to you. Without the above method you will have to manually locate and edit the links which could take months!

It is a new addition in our services apart from 302 redirect services for blogger to wordpress migration that we already offer. I juts hope you find it easy to implement the above method correctly. I use it for the SEO of this blog and our other blogs. Please let me know if you needed any help. Wish you peace and love! :)

Why Description Meta Tags Not Showing In Custom Templates?

2012-08-25T06:01:00.001-07:00

Meta Tags for Homepage, posts and pages wont display in custom templates if you view the browser source file for your blog. This is because custom templates are coded by third party designers and therefore we would manually need to insert the necessary code to make this feature of latest search preferences work in your customized blogs. The method is really easy. We would delete any existing Meta Tag for description inside your templates and would replace it with a dynamic code that will act as a meta tag both for homepage and as well as for individual posts and pages.

You will also like reading these related posts:

Enable Meta Tags in Blogger

First and foremost you will have to activate the meta tags feature. To do this follow these steps:

Go To draft.Blogger.com > Settings > Search Preferences
Click the Edit link
Choose "Enable Search Description?"
Inside the box describe your blog in no more than 150 characters.

4. Click Save changes
This will automatically add meta description for your blog homepage and you will also activate the Search Description option inside Post Editor.

Add some search description for any of your existing post and then publish it. check the Browser source file for it and you wont be able to see the description appearing. The meta tag for description is not showing because you might be using a custom blogger template. In order to fix this problem and add the necessary code follow this:

Go To Design > Edit HTML
Backup your template
Just below <head> add the following dynamic code for meta description

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

4. In order to avoid repeated use of Meta Description you will need to delete the static meta tag code that you added previously using old traditional way. This code is located somewhere below <head> and can look like the following:

<meta content='YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION MENTIONED HERE' name='description'/>

or like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content='YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION MENTIONED HERE' name='description'/> </b:if>

Instead of the text "YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION MENTIONED HERE" you will find description set by you for your blog.
5. Finally save your template and you are all done!

What does this Dynamic Meta Tag code does?

It will present homepage description to search robots when the robot crawls your Main blog page and it presents description for post or page when any of your post or page is indexed. This simple three line code represents description for every single post for which you may have written a search description.

Why Write Search Description?

Search Description or Meta Description for post, if written well can rank you higher by providing search robots with a brief summary of your entire post. Robots love brief and precise snippets of texts that describe the entire concept behind the post. Therefore write one or at most two liner descriptions for every post that you write so that it may attract more visitors by providing the visitors as well as search robots with a brief summary of your post content. Peace and blessings. :)

20 Hot SEO Tactics Every Blogger Must Know!

2012-08-25T04:30:00.003-07:00

Every website / blog owner should know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Why? Because Search Engine Optimization forms the back-bone of your website. If done right, it can work wonders for your blog. Otherwise, your blog will be nothing but a large content farm with lots of content that is not being put to good use. As a result, the content (posts) grows old and rots away (becomes outdated). SEO is like the transmission of a car. No matter how big or powerful your engine is, if you have a faulty transmission, or no transmission at all, you aren't going to win any races. Hence for a blog, everything should be perfect, not just the content you write. We have previously written some similar posts on 13 Killer SEO Tips For Beginner Bloggers. Here, I will share some more of the tips, big and small, that I have learned. This is more of a checklist than anything, So take a look at it and see what you aren't doing.

1. Titles and Meta descriptions

The title is the king of your content. It is the first thing web surfer looks at. It must be concise, informative, and eye catching. Google displays only up to 66 characters of a title. Therefore, it's a good idea to keep your titles short. However, don't restrict yourself to 66 characters only. Give include all the necessary information in your titles. We have written a post in length about this topic. How to Write Search Engine Friendly Post titles?

As far as Meta descriptions are concerned, Google no longer uses Meta Keywords in ranking criteria. However, Meta descriptions is still just as important. Whenever you share your posts on social media, the meta description appears next to the title. It should not be wordy. Keep it concise, and give a short description of our post in a few lines. Check out the following posts for more information about meta descriptions

Why Meta Descriptions Appear In All Search Results
Meta Tag Generator Tool For Blogger

2. Sitemaps

Sitemaps are extremely important. And I can't stress this enough. A sitemap is a list of all the pages present on your website. For search engines to index all of your pages, you need to create a sitemap of your website and submit it to all the major search engines. There are tools that generate sitemaps for you. But it is a long topic, which we have discussed in more detail in previous posts. In fact, these topics are covered in a SEO Series.

Blogger SEO Pack Techniques 2012

This series can further help you to optimize your website for search engines. We recommend you take a look at all the posts in the series for a better SEO understanding.

3. Focus on Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of any search engine. Every search is performed based upon keywords. Users enter keywords in search bars rather than whole sentences. For your blog niche, you need to find out what keywords people are looking for. It would be such a waste if you have a good content but few keywords to take your post into a search list. Therefore, concentrate on using the maximum number of keywords in your posts, especially in the introductory paragraphs.

4. Keep your focus dynamic

Blogging is all about changing trends. Keeping in accordance with the current trends is a good way to keep search engines happy. Search engines like to see latest content on your blog. So keep a look out on the latest happenings around you, and blog about them. Also keep changing your keyword focus. Readers might not always be entering the same search terms. Such things are dynamic, and subject to change. Change your perceptions accordingly, and anticipate what the readers might be looking for. Use keywords accordingly.

5. Interlink

Interlinking is one of the most important part of SEO. Always link your new posts to the already existing relevant ones. If your webpages are adequately linked, the older pages that have stalled and are getting lesser and lesser traffic daily will get a new life boost. Secondly, when a search engine sees many links, it knows that the website has a lot of content to offer. But if your pages are standalone, and have no linking, then the search engine might skip the un-linked pages. Not linking pages is a bad practice and should be avoided. Read out article on Interlink Pages To Flow The PR Juice.

6. Go where there is lesser competition

Putting your efforts in relatively newer markets can pay off if that market grows. Everyone is using popular networks like Facebook and Twitter to propagate their business. So chances are, you have a lot of competition in your niche. So why not try alternative sources as well? Sites like Pinterest are getting hot. And they are new, which gives you the perfect excuse to socialize on them!

7. Look at your content

All SEO tips apart, your content has to be good for it to survive through ages and stay on top of the rankings. SEO tips can only do so much. The rest has to come from the content itself. And writing good quality content is a form of Search Engine Optimization in itself, since it helps with rankings. Once you have written some content, ask yourself the following questions before publishing it

Does the content make sense?
Have I used good grimmer and punctuation and made little spelling mistakes?
Is the content useful?
It is unique/original?
It it worth sharing and linking?
Is it appropriately detailed?
Does it have visual content, such as images or videos?
Does it have examples, references, unique ideas?
Is it interactive enough with the readers?
Are there enough calls to action to invoke engagement?
Does it ask readers questions about their own experiences?

If your answer to most of the above questions is yes, then you have got yourself a good content.

8. How to name your files?

This is a small, but very useful tip. Most people overlook it. Give your images and videos meaningful file names before uploading them to your website. For example, instead of using a name like image007 for the intro image, I have named it "top 20 SEO tips". This helps in better search ranking and is a good SEO practice.

9. Help search engines index your page

To help search engines better index your webpages, you can add a file named robots.txt in your site's root directory. In that file, add a command "User-agent: *" (without quotes). What this does is, it invites bots to freely crawl pages on your website.

10. Headings and sub headings

Headings are a good way of organizing your content. While writing an article, there are certain W3C guidelines that should be followed. In general, you should use only one h1 heading. This is for the title. Do not used h1 for any further sub heading. Use h2s for main headings. And if there are many main headings, then use h3 for all. If you want them to look bigger, just use CSS styling instead of changing heading levels. Also, number your headings if they have a list, such as this one.

Learn more; Optimize Blog Post titles using h2 tag

11. Social Bookmarking

Social media is a great way of increasing backlinks, and traffic to your blog. Backlinks give you a better search engine ranking. It is a good SEO practice to add bookmarking tools for your readers. Add options for liking on Facebook, or Tweeting on Twitter so that your readers can reshare your content and spread the word. See our post on Social Bookmarking Widget For Blogger to learn more.

12. Anchor texts

Anchor texts can be as important as the links themselves. Use keywords instead of using statements like "click here" for links. It is a good SEO practice. Secondly, if you are linking to the same page multiple times, use different anchor text each time. Same anchor texts give the impression that the links have been automated. Search engines don't like auto-bots. That is the main reason why purchasing backlinks is discouraged, because they use the same anchor texts for your website everywhere.

13. A word about "nofollow"

No follow is a good way of filtering lower quality websites that you are linking to so that it doesn't look like you are giving away backlinks. It also helps in maintaining a good sites-linking-to-you / sites-to-which-you-are-linking ratio. This ratio can seriously effect your Page rankings. Generally, put a rel="nofollow" attribute to links that go out to lower quality websites. Also, never add nofollow to any of your own pages. Learn more about When should you tag external links as nofollow.

14. Optimize Images

Image optimization is an essential part of SEO as well. People search for images almost as much as they search for text. Hence it is very important that you make the images on your site easier to find. Always add titles to your images. Search Engines look for titles. Add ALT tags as well. These help in user-accessibility. People who are visually impaired use special browsers to use the internet. These browsers spell out an image's alt description for such people. Hence, add this attribute to help your disabled fellows.

15. Tags and categories

To make your site easily navigable, don't use too much tags and categories. Set some categories in your niche at the start, and then stick to those categories. It is a good practice to only add one category to each post. Do not add more than one. That's bad SEO. You can, however, use multiple tags. For more information, read the following article

What are blog labels or Categories?

16. Update frequently

Search engines love fresh content. But then again, who doesn't? People are looking for new content every time they visit your website. Whenever I visit any site, the first thing I look for is the time stamp under the latest post. That gives a very good idea of how frequently a website is updated. Service websites don't need to be updated so frequently. But content related sites and blogs must be updated frequently. For blogs, a post frequency of at least one post per day is very important. The more, the merrier. But try to write at least one post per day. It makes your site look fresh, and also improves your Alexa rank. And the more the topics you have written on, the more traffic you'll get.

17. Look at your blog load time

A slow loading blog does not fare very well with readers. You'd think search robots would have no problem with this. But unfortunately, that isn't true. And it's logical too. Google has to return millions of search results in a split second. It does not like a site bogging down its search bot. Do not upload too many heavy files to your blogs. Rather, upload big files on sharing websites, and provide your readers with a direct download link. For more information about how to reduce blog load time, check out the article below.

11 Useful Tips to reduce blog load time

18. Reduce your bounce rate

Reducing bounce rate is key to your blog's success. Bounce rate is the amount of people who leave your website during the first few seconds of their visit. The lower, the better. Blog load time can effect this rate. But the most important factor is website design. An attractive and elegant design will retain visitors, while a website which is difficult to navigate, is cluttered up with ads, or has faulty design will lose visitors quickly. Of course, the content quality and frequency also play a part. So work on those areas and reduce your bounce rate.

19. Typography

Typography refers to your content styling. Who doesn't appreciate good styling? Good includes things like italicizing or bolding text, proper line spacing, headings, padding etc. Work on these to make your content look good and easily readable.

20. Validation Checks

Once you are done with some basic SEO, you need to validate and check it for any errors. Start by checking any broken links. There are Blogger and WordPress plugins that help you do this. But you can do it manually as well by visiting the W3C Link Checker.

Next, you need to visit the W3C HTML Validation Tool and W3C CSS Validation Tool for validating your HTML and CSS for any errors. After that, you can validate your SEO by using a good SEO plugin. Such plugins are available for both Blogger and WordPress.

Top 10 SEO Strategies To Protect your blog Against Google Panda Update

2012-08-25T04:15:00.002-07:00

With the recent release of the Google Penguin, the talk is all about Google's algorithm updates and how they effect websites. Yesterday, I wrote about what these updates are all about. And as promised, I am here to share some tips for recovering from the Google Panda update. Google Panda was the first radical change in the search model since many years. And basically, it was aimed at getting rid of low quality websites and bringing higher quality websites in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Many bloggers saw a drop in their traffic, drastic in some cases, while some also benefited from this update. The impact was negative by far, and this update effected 12% of the total websites when it was first released.

With this update, we can say that Google raised the quality bar for many bloggers. Now, much more was expected from them. Good quality and basic level SEO became mandatory for keeping up in accordance to the wishes of Google.
This update had by far the widest, most negative impact on websites ever, and to this day, some blogs have not fully recovered from the gaping hole in their traffic that was bitten off by the vicious Panda. So here, I am going to talk about some SEO tips that will help you counter the traffic loss from Panda, and prevent any future updates from harming your website.

What sort of websites were hit?

Before I dive into my tips, let me tell you a few things first. Google's basic aim behind this update, apart from promoting quality, was to discourage spam. Basically, it hit the following kind of websites;

Low quality - This much is pretty obvious by now. Websites with low-quality or "thin" content got effected. You might think your content was good quality, but the fact is, quality doesn't mean just good English. It also includes adequate quantity, inter-linking, etc.
Content farms - Google also discourages content farms. Sites with just quantity, but no quality content and inadequate SEO were effected by this update pretty badly.
Duplicate content - Redundant and duplicate content is hated by everyone, including Google.
Slow site load time
Excessive use of advertisements - I have seen many such sites where there's an ad left, right, top, bottom, and within the content as well. As a blogger, I know the guy's feelings, as he wants to earn money. But as a web-surfer, I hate it! It comes under lack of user experience, which is not good in Google's big eyes.
Over optimization - According to Google, it penalized websites that used black-hat SEO tricks to get their low quality content to the top results. One good example is something.com. No seriously, this is a website! If you go there, you will see just one word on the entire site, and that word is "something"! What a joke huh? Well get this. The content was negligible, but prior to Panda's release, this site came on top of Google's SERPs when you searched for the keyword "something". Freakishly weird, yes? Needless to say, black-hat SEO tricks were used a lot those days.

There's one important thing you need to know about Google Panda. Earlier, search result showed webpages based on their individual quality. After Panda though, things changed. Panda was a domain-level update, which means one bad quality page could impact the whole website's rankings. So this became the bane for most blogs, who had had poor quality content from the time they were newly launched, and their owners didn't know much SEO or quality content.

Tips for recovering from Panda

1. Write good quality content

Okay. I know I have said this a lot. So I won't repeat it (after this one more time, I swear :P). So you know you have to create good quality. But how? Well first of all, improve your grammar. Use spelling and grammar checks available in good editors like Microsoft Word etc. Secondly, write a good intro paragraph for your posts. Keep your posts above 400-500 words. Use Images and videos whenever possible, and most of all, inter-link your pages. For more about quality content, visit Google's guidelines for writing quality content.

2. Remove poor quality content

This should be your first step. Hurry and go into your archives, and review the content from long ago, when your blog was still new. Chances are, you didn't write much quality posts back then. Either update those pages, or remove them. Google penalizes websites on a domain-level. So any one bad post can be the weak link Google has been looking for.

3. Get rid of ads

Once you are done trashing your old, low quality posts, it's time for dumping your ads. Look at your website from a critical eye, and look for any obtrusive ads. Generally, one banner at the top, one ad at the side, and one in the content is fine. But don't push those boundaries. Never ever use more than one ads within the content.

4. Become active on social media

Ever since Google introduced the +1 button, it has been expecting people to use it. The more +1s you get on your content, the more Google likes you. And this isn't just about Google+. You have to be active on other social media too. Google likes it when people from various social media come to your site and share or like your content.

5. Get rid of duplicate content

You might very well know that plagiarism is a very bad thing, and Google hates it. What you might not know is, you might get into trouble if someone else copies your content. Thus far, Google can't tell the difference between original and copied content. Thus, you need to manually complain against such content copiers. Don't just ignore them. Lodge a complaint with Google against the offending sites. See how MBT treats those that copy its content.

6. Get good, but not cheap backlinks

People might say otherwise, but backlinks are a force to be reckoned with. They can really help out your blog with the traffic and rankings. But those backlinks should be genuine, and good quality. Work on building backlinks by writing guest posts, articles, etc. Never buy backlinks. Such backlinks are bot generated, and are considered as spam. Not only that, they are low quality backlinks which do more harm than good for your blog. Google frowns on these backlinks. You should too.

7. Learn basic SEO

SEO is very important. I said earlier that people got penalized for over-optimization. You don't need to do that. But you do have t learn basic SEO. This includes meta descriptions, keywords in titles and paragraphs, image optimization, etc. Look at my 20 Hot SEO tactics for more info.

8. Un-index poor quality pages

If you don't want Google to index a low quality page, you can simply noindex that page. This simply excludes that page from Google search. This is a good way to hide your "About Us" or "Contact" pages, which are there just for the user and have little quality associated with them.

9. Avoid keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing means using excessive keywords. It is considered as a black-hat SEO technique. Using too many keywords is like calling for doom to come. A lot of keywords cry out to Google to check the page out. But once Google sees a high density, it knows you are spamming it, and it does not like that one single bit. So avoid this practice if you love your rankings :)

10.your links

You might want to interlink maximum of your older posts into new ones. Not only does this breath new life into them, it also helps out crawlers. And Google likes this practice. We already talked about backlinks, or inbound links. Now, let's talk about out going links. Keep an eye on the number of dofollow links you give away. You're in serious trouble if you have more outgoing links than incoming links. Google considers this as spamming, since anyone can get a website running and add links to it to supplement their main website.

Those were all the tips I had for now. I will be writing a dedicated post on recovering from Penguin update. So stay tuned :)

How To Recover From Google Penguin Update Penalty?

2012-08-25T04:09:00.002-07:00

Like the previous updates from Google, such as the Panda, the latest Penguin update has left much destruction in its wake. And since there's been just a few days since this update was released, people are all eyes and ears on this topic. Indeed, these algorithm updates from Google have become sort of like tsunamis for webmasters, which leave the ones close to the edge, devastated. Google Penguin was no exception. Although it wasn't the same magnitude as the Panda, it still caused widespread damage, and effected around 3% of websites.

It is worth mentioning that this time, the update benefited more people than before. But that may be because bloggers were expecting something worse than Panda, so the Penguin came as no surprise. For such people who benefited from the update, well and good. Congratulations :). For the rest, however, you need to work hard from now and learn something from history. Earlier, I shared tips on how to recover from the Panda update. Well now, it's time to talk about some recovery Tips from the latest Google Penguin update.

How's Penguin different from Panda?

Google Penguin and Google Panda basically work on the same concept. The idea is to bring up quality content on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) rather than content that has good SEO. So Penguin can be considered as the update over Panda.

But if we really dive deep into it, we can see a slight difference. While the Panda focuses on the uniqueness of the content and eliminates low quality or copied content, Penguin is working on removing webspam, and removing sites that use 'black hat' SEO techniques, such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden texts, etc. Unethical tricks, in other words.

One thing I'd like to say is, if you got hit by Panda, it's not that big a deal, since many and more websites were effected by it as well. I mean, sure the update hit your traffic and your earnings. But at least you know where you went wrong. You can repair the damage done by by applying these simple Google Panda tips.

If you got hit by Penguin, then you are in more of a trouble. It means Google doesn't like your site! And it's that serious. You seriously need to think over some things, because chances are, you are spamming or tricking users in some way even you might not realize. Don't worry though. It is still reparable. It will take some careful analysis, and lots of hard work though.

If you got hit by both Panda and Penguin, then you might want to pay special attention here. Now's your chance to learn your lessons. First, read our tips on recovering from Panda, and then come back to this post. Of course, some of the tips are going to be same. But hopefully, after applying them, you will be prepared for whatever beast Google has in store for us next.

How to recover from Google Penguin

Google Penguin was officially launched on 24th April 2012. So if your traffic has dropped after that date, then you are hit by Penguin. Otherwise, it could be a Panda refresh. Either way, the following tips will help you get through the mess and also prepare yourself for the next updates.

Start using Google Webmaster Tools

If you aren't already doing so, then get going! Google Webmaster Tool is great. It gives you all sorts of guidance related to your website. It has tools that help you do proper SEO for your website. It can help remove sitemap errors. You also get messages from Google informing you about any mistake you have made. They will tell you when you're spamming, And you'll get to know if there's some negative SEO associated with your website, for example when someone points spam and cheap backlinks to your website just to harm you. This could be a real problem, so go and get yourself signed up!

Make your content user-friendly

Now this is Google's main point of focus. It's all about quality now, and the user experience. There are quite a few things I want to say here. Some people asked me to look at their websites and see why they got hit. And in them, I noticed quite a few things.

Firstly, the site navigation wasn't clear. Buttons weren't clearly visible, layout was unusual, and it was all confusing. Obviously, these things don't fare well with the readers.

Secondly, and most importantly, there were simply too many ads! I understand people are eager to make money off their blogs. But that doesn't mean you have to clutter your content with ads. In fact, this is something Google dislikes in particular. Too high an ad to content ratio, and you're staring trouble in the face!

Then, there was the post layout. It is always recommended that you use a nice long intro paragraph, with just one intro image for each post. And use a read more page-break after the intro paragraph so that maximum number of posts can be displayed on your home page.

Needless to say, you need to look at your website from a critical reader's point of view, and you'll automatically see things that could be the cause of a high bounce rate. Google doesn't like a high bounce rate.

Keyword stuffing

Look at your content again, and if you are doing this, whether consciously or sub-consciously, stop immediately! A high keyword density, or too many keywords in a paragraph or post, is a call to search engines saying "Check me out! I have the most content available". And when Google sees that you obviously spammed it, it won't be happy. Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO tactic, and you should avoid it at any cost. Change your older posts if you have to.

Get rid of spam backlinks

There are a couple of things worth mentioning here. Firstly, never ever buy backlinks. These are cheap and automated links that do more harm than good. Stay away from SEO and links optimization. Don't use any automated SEO or links software. It is never good.

Secondly, guest posting is good, but irrelevant posting is a hazard. If you are accepting guest posts irrelevant to your niche, or even writing about irrelevant stuff, then that's not good. And if you are guest posting on other blogs not related to your niche, then you might have a bigger problem. See, Google ranks backlinks according to their relevancy as well. So if you are getting irrelevant backlinks, then they aren't much better than those cheap backlinks money can buy.

Use social media

First of all, get yourselves social media pages for your website, especially on Google+. Add sharing buttons on your posts, and encourage people to share your posts. If you socialize, then Google will give you more credit for your website.

So these were the tips for Penguin recovery. Some of these might be similar to those for Panda recovery, but that doesn't mean they don't apply here as well. There'll be one more post in this series. So stay tuned :)

When Will The Next Google Penguin Update Take Place?

2012-08-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

Google has been quite active lately, introducing new algorithms and other minor updates. These updates dictate how well your website performs and how much traffic you get from the search engine. Now Google doesn't want webmasters finding a comfort zone for themselves, because if they do, they will trick Google and effect the quality of results returned on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). To achieve this, Google introduces lots and lots of updates, both major and minor, to counter web-spam. So it might be kinda hard to keep up with them. But blogging is all about flowing along with the wave currents, or with the trends, if you will. So it is very important for webmasters to understand the nature of these updates.

In this post, we will talk about what these updates are all about, and how frequently Google brings updates. We will also talk about some of the flaws in the latest updates, so you know what kind of stuff you should be on the lookout for.

A brief update history

Google was launched in March 1998. In internet terms, that's pretty long ago, considering that the world wide web was invented just 8 or 9 years before Google was born. I can't imagine how internet users survived before Google! We sure as hell can't live without it now :P. Anyways, at that time, Google was just a simple keyword based search engine, and it returned pages that had the most number of user query keywords in them.

The very first update from Google was the Google Toolbar for browsers, and the Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) in 2000. This was when Google started ranking pages intelligently, and the concept of PageRank came into being.

in 2002, Google launched its first official update, code-named the 'Boston' update. Google started monthly indexing of webpages, the so-called Google Dance.

2003 was a pretty busy year for Google. The Boston algorithm was updated, and a new algo was introduced, called the Florida update. This was much like the recent Panda update, and left many websites devastated. The Fritz update ended the monthly Google Dance and now, pages were being indexed on a daily basis.

The Austin update was the major algo in 2004, and it continued Google's crackdown on low quality, black hat SEO websites. Apart from that, Google began investing, and raised its market share.

By the start of 2005, Google emerged as a major search engine, and its share prices doubled. This is when it continued its efforts for fighting against spam by bringing many updates, such as the Bourbon, Allegra, Jagger, and Big Daddy updates. The "nofollow" attribute was introduced around this time as well, and Google started XML Sitemap submission. Google continued working on these updates in 2006 by Supplemental updates. This went on in 2007 as well, although Google started Video, News, and other searches.

2008 wasn't much constructive either, with no algorithm update from Google. However, Google introduced the Caffeine update, which was a major algorithm and infrastructure update. This update was perfected in 2010, and a new update was introduced in May, infamously known as the 'May Day' update. It impacted a lot of webmasters around the globe.

In 2011, most of you will remember, Google unleashed the Panda update, which was a major algorithmic update and impacted lots of websites. Google also introduced the +1 button around that time. Google continued to update the Panda in 2012, and more than a dozen Panda updates have been rolled out to this day. The most recent update from Google was the Penguin update, which was again a major algorithm update.

How frequently does Google bring updates?

Well, judging from Google's update history, Google now brings a major algorithm update each year. But it introduces hundreds of smaller minor updates. Take the Penguin, for example. It has only been here for like two weeks, But in that time, Google has introduced more than 50 minor changes and updates. The total count for last year was around 500-600. So, yeah. Google is busy as a bee these days.

Google also updates its previous algorithms now. The Panda 3.6 was released just after Penguin was rolled out. And the indexing is now done every minute. Google also updates the PR of websites every 3-4 months. The latest PR update was in the start of May 2012, so we can expect the next update to take place in August 2012. So fasten your seat belts, and start working on recovering from the Panda or Penguin updates.

What are these updates all about?

Like I have talked earlier, Google introduces these updates to fight against web-spam. The idea is to bump up quality content on search results, and push down the ruthless and black-hat SEO websites that use spam and unethical SEO tactics as a shortcut to gain the best rankings. So the priority is given to quality and original content, and duplicate and spam content is being pushed down. Of course, Search Engine Optimizers know how to duck and dodge these updates, which is why Google is constantly updating to stop them from finding their comfort zone.

There can be another possible implication from all this ruthless updating and stuff from Google. We now are getting the feeling that Google is trying to monopolize the market for itself. Of course, it already has a monopoly of sorts. But it only has around 2/3rd (64%) share in the industry, and it wants more than that. By introducing all these updates, it wants webmasters to follow its own rules. In short, it is trying to bring the game to its own home turf. Other search engines are presented by a problem here. They either can copy the idea, and make Google look like the big guy who is also their mentor, or they can just ignore the changes and be taken by the tide that is Google. Now of course, Google takes a gamble with such big updates, because it doesn't make webmasters happy. But considering that Google is the biggest in the industry, it can take risks. Smaller engines can only look in awe.

Some problems with Google's algorithms

Now it also seems, that Google isn't entirely aware of what's happening with these updates. There are some loopholes that some webmasters know exactly how to exploit. And Google isn't aware of that. Otherwise, it would never allow such thing s to happen. Let me give you an example.

Type into your browser address bar, www.something.com. You'll find just one word on the entire site; "something". Yeah. That's right! But there's more. If you check the PR of that website, you will find that it's at PR 5! Consider this blog you are on right now. It is at PR 4. See the problem? Previously, this website came out on top of SERPs when you searched for the word "something". Thankfully though, that's been fixed by the Panda and Penguin updates. But the PR remains the same.

Google is also returning irrelevant search results since the Penguin update. Search for "Panda Recovery" on Google, and it will show you Pandora Recovery instead. Weird, huh? There's a lot more anomalies of this kind, and WPMU has written a detailed article on this.

What's happening here? Well, I'm not really sure. But looks like there are some flaws in Google's algorithms, which the veteran black-hat SEOs are striving to exploit. Hopefully, this will fixed in the next algo update from Google, because this gives black hatters an unfair advantage over people like us who write original and quality content.

Well, that almost concludes our Google Panda and Penguin series. If you have any questions or problems, feel free to comment below or contact us. Take care :)

How to identify SEO Over Optimized blog or website?

2012-08-25T03:54:00.000-07:00

If you were anywhere near this blog or other blogs about SEO and stuff these past few days, then you'll know what the fuss is all about with Google's updates. Google has been pretty active lately, what with the Penguin and Panda and 50 other minor updates. In essence, it has been going to great lengths to return good quality search results to users. Google is coming down, and coming down hard on "spam" websites that are over-optimized with respect to SEO. We've been hearing a lot about this "over-optimized" thing. So what exactly is SEO over-optimization? And how do you know when your site, or some other site is over-optimized?

Now SEO over-optimization is not a good thing. If you are using such tactics, then stop immediately! I know some sites have found loopholes in Google's algorithms, and are exploiting them with over-optimization, but that doesn't mean you have to do the same. Who knows when the noose will tighten? Search Engine (over-) Optimizers might be winning battles and skirmishes, but it's a war they cannot win.

Head of Google's web-spam team, Matt Cutts, said in March that Google has been working on penalizing overly optimized sites for the past few months. He explained that with this, Google plans to level the battlefield so that no one has an advantage, and the top rankings are determined by brute strength, i.e. good content, rather than cunning tricks (black hat SEO). This way, sites with little SEO but good content will come up, while sites with extra SEO but poor content will go down. So let's now talk about what things entail over-optimization, and how you can detect or avoid it.

What an over optimization penalty entails?

Despite clear statements from Google such as "crackdown on black hat SEO", the idea as to what actually incurs Google's displeasure is still vague. Google doesn't let people in on the secrets. As they said;

While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics

But gathering facts from the messages and notices Google has been putting out, we can get a general idea as to what things we should avoid. Here are some over optimization practices that you need to stay away from.

Bad inbound links

Recently, Google started giving out lots of warning messages to webmasters through the Webmaster tool, informing them about some bad linking structures with their sites. Here at MBT, we always discourage buying backlinks. These are bad, automated links. So take a look at what sort of links you have. Start using Google Webmaster Tool to get notified.

Another fairly common practice is making inbound links from other websites one might own. Usually, people create multiple sites to supplement their main site. These sites, of course are low quality. Some people might even employ automated mechanisms to make these side-websites look genuine. So if you have links coming to your website from other sites you own, then this practice falls into the category of over-optimization.

Link anchor text is also very important. Anchor text is the text that displays instead of the actual link. For example, Google is the anchor text for the link www.google.com. Now if many of your inbound links have the same anchor text, then it hints at automation. This usually happens when you buy backlinks, which is why you should never do that.

Cloaking and hidden text

Now you might not be aware about you backlinks, but you sure as hell know what you are doing when you hide or cloak some content. This is a ruthless black hat SEO technique. Cloaking means hiding some content from the search engine, or displaying a version of some text to the search engine that is different from the one presented to the user. This is usually used in over-promotion, phishing, etc.

Hidden text is text that is made invisible to the readers so that they can't see what they're clicking on. This trick can be achieved by playing around with colors. For example, white text won't show against a white background. These techniques are unethical, and cheap. And you should never use them.

High keyword density

Using too many keywords in your titles, meta descriptions, intro paragraphs etc is considered as over-optimization, since putting up more keywords is a desperate attempt at gaining a search engine's attention. Google has started penalizing sites that have a high keyword density. Usually, anything above 2-3% density is high.

Excessive interlinking

Interlinking content within your site is a great SEO practice. We always recommend people to interlink more often. But there's a catch. In an attempt for over-optimization, some webmasters interlink so much that there are more than a couple links in any given post pointing at the same page. And to make matters worse, they might even link repeatedly to their home pages. Well that, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.

Improper heading structure

H1 tags are a lot more appealing to search engines than other tags. So some people use multiple h1 tags to gain attention. Well that is just plain wrong. Always use one, and only one h1 tag per page. Use h2 and h3 tags for headings and subheadings.

Too many redirects

Now if you have changed the file name for a page, then redirects are okay. But redirecting just for the sake of gaining ad income or directing you to affiliate pages is just sad. Too many redirects, and Google will catch you spamming.

Duplicate content

It often happens that those who are unable to write good quality content, they resort to these over optimization tactics. And since they don't have much content to write about, they re-use their content a lot. While quotes and stuff are okay, but copying paras from old posts and rephrasing them is wrong.

Pop-ups

You know someone's desperate when you see pop-up ads on their websites. While pop-ups themselves are bad, some webmasters make it even worse. They deceive users by designing an exit 'cross' button where a cross would normally be. And when someone wants to close the ad, they click this button, which is actually a link to an ad or something. While this ensures a high click-through rate, it is highly unethical, and must never be used.

Well, here were the basic over-optimization tactics that you should avoid. If you are using them, then I'd advice you to let go of them. If you've been hit by Google as a result of these tactics, you can always read other posts in this series to get a better idea. Good luck with your Panda and Penguin recovery :)

What is the ideal Word Count limit For an Optimized Blog Post?

2012-08-25T03:49:00.001-07:00

Nowadays, there are no constraints on digital media, as compared to the print media. There is no limit to the physical resources available, there is no cost for writing extra stuff, etc. Indeed, there is little limitation to what you can do to your content online. This liberty comes at a cost, however. For a lot of bloggers, especially new ones, the question as to "Where to stop?" can be challenging. You see, there are no clearly demarcated boundaries that dictate how long a blog post should be. You might be able to convey your message in 200 words, or you might need more than 2000 for the same purpose. So how long should your blog post be? In my opinion, it's more a matter of best practices than it is of predefined do-and-don't rules. So let's talk about how an ideal blog post should look like.

What to consider?

While writing a blog post, there are a few things that you should consider. First of all, your niche. I wouldn't say there's a limit on blog post length, but I'd definitely say that length is niche dependent. Generally, sites that aim to inform have a lower average post length than sites that aim at interacting with people. Latest news websites don't need to have a lot of words, as the aim is to provide the most headlines to the readers in the shortest space possible. Technical and review websites have to be more detailed, since readers are looking for each and every detail about a product.

So it's really a matter of what niche your website is. This very blog you are reading of course is in the blogging niche, but in a broader spectrum, it falls under the 'inform and educate' people category, along with the technical and (sometimes) review categories. Hence, over here, we need to generally write long posts.

There one more important thing. Decide on your average word range, and try to stay close to it. That way, your blog will gain consistency. This does not mean you should restrict yourself to a word limit. Play around with those numbers, and check your analytics for any pattern. Once you decide on a suitable range, go with it!

What we recommend, and why?

I know I said there's no fixed rule, but you should set yourself a target. For most starting bloggers, this target should be around 500 words. And if you get a grip on things, you should set up a higher target. Here at MBT, we have set up a target of at least 800 words. Many people ask me why we have such high limit. Well, there are many reasons for this

Why...?

First of all, the latest Google updates have been all about content quality. Google's penalties have made it necessary that webmasters give more value to content by offering more text than other media such as videos etc. Crawlers and search spiders can be considered like readers. When they see a post that is short, alarm bells start ringing immediately. Short posts are usually seen as spam by search engines. People post short posts on other websites they own, and links those posts to their main website to increase backlinks. Hence, short posts can be seen as spam. You don't want search engines to get that bad first impression.

Secondly, Google is all of a sudden emphasizing a lot on spam. It's all about quality now. Who knows Google might start edging out short, spamy posts in future updates? For that, you need to have a decent amount o words, so that you can safeguard yourself against future update penalties. At some level, the Panda and Penguin updates have also penalized websites that lacked quality and had short posts.

Another advantage of having a sizable post length is, it will have the perfect keyword density. Too long a post will mean too many keywords, while a short post will have too few. The 500-600 range is perfect for optimizing your keyword density. Such a post can be adequately formatted and given proper structure easily, without making it too boring. This makes sharing on social media easy.

Last, but not the least, posts around 500-1000 words are reader-friendly. They aren't too long to be boring, and not too short so much so that readers might them inadequate and spam. In my opinion, this is the perfect post length range.

And in the end...

Before we leave off, there are some tips I want to share with you. These are more like guidelines than tips. And I wanted to include them here because I've seen a lot of people violating the 'writing code'.

First of all, always use headings. Use just one h1 per page, and use multi-level headings and sub-headings to your content. This makes it more interesting, and easier to scan and read. Readers like things that are organized.

Secondly, break your content into short paragraphs. It's more interesting that way. And if makes things easier for you, keep your sentences short. I've read countless articles where people try to express their chain of thought in one fluid sentence, but those sentences end up making little or no sense at all. This is something that will come with experience.

Finally, check your grammar. Blogging environments might have spell-checks (which you should always use), but most don't have grammar check. WordPress does have a simple grammar check, but it's not very efficient. Blogger has no such thing. But hey! Most of you use Microsoft's Word right? If you have the 2007 or later edition, then that's pretty cool. Paste your text in it, and run a grammar check. It will remove redundant, out of place, fragmented words. It will even check the punctuations for you. Hence, it is a neat little tool which you use to improve your post quality.

That's all for this post. And the series as well, since this was the last post in the series. Thank you for staying with us :) Oh, and do let us know what's your average post length, so that we can compare averages. Thank you :)

10 Crispy Tips To Write Optimized Blog Post Titles

2012-08-25T03:44:00.002-07:00

Title is the most crucial part of a blog's overall structure. It can either construct or demolish our entire post. Selecting an ideal title may become complicated if we don’t concentrate on accurate strategies. Every blogger wants his post title to be enriched with rich keywords words so his readers can taste the sweetest part of the blog. Generally a post title represents whole content in small peace of words. A post title not only enhances our blog but also has some significance towards SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Writing an optimized blog post title is becoming a problem for nearly every blogger. The prime reason behind it is lack of proper guidance. Today we will learn about some practical Top 10 Tips To Write a Perfect Blog Post Title.

Do Post Titles Make Difference to SERPs?

SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Page. More than 95% of Google users look for a query on the first page and no one bothers clicking the next button to see results on the next page. So as long as you are on the first page, organic traffic will prove a blessing. Title plays vital role in bringing traffic to your blog. Major traffic is based on post titles and then comes the content. When Bots crawl a blog they look for all the relevant data inside the post i.e. Title, Descriptions, Bold keywords, headlines and all image tags. So everything counts and only an optimized blog post will let you survive on Google's first page.

1. The Simple You Write The Better It Gets:

We should use most common keywords in our titles to increase our chances of getting a boost in our traffic, but if we select an irrational (illogical) post title then this will not only affect our SEO but also misguide our readers. We should keep in our mind our main intend is to provide quality information to our readers so instead of writing crazy titles we should keep it simple, and Google loves simplicity.

2. Writing Purposeful Post Titles:

We create posts on our blog to entertain our readers the situations gets worse when we start thinking about our self and become selfish. Our readers trust us with closed eyes so it’s our duty to provide them with accurate information. What if we create a post about Apple and we named the title of the post to Mango then the reader who is searching about Mangos will land in a place which he never searched, and hence due to our silliness we will lose a loyal reader. So we should keep our aspiration aside and think about our audience and moreover we should select the titles according to the content of our posts.

3. Make Descriptive Post Titles:

Title gives an idea to our reader what this post is all about, it gives basic knowledge to our readers about the topic which is covered in our post. So we should select a title which clearly tells our reader about our content. We can use creative keywords to make our title unique from other, but we should keep our title within 75 characters.

4. Use Synonyms to Make Your Post Title Unique From Others:

Commonly while selecting our post titles we often perform a search to check whether the keywords which we will use in our title is not taken by someone else, and mostly after searching we come to the conclusions that the keywords are already in use. So in this situation we don’t need to be over exhausted instead we can use a grammatical technique which will give us the same meaning keywords with different words, yes I am talking about synonyms. Basically synonyms are those words which are almost identical or similar in meaning for example, Instead of Creative we can use Artistic, and by using synonyms we are targeting the same content but with different keywords.

If you are using Microsoft Word then you can select synonyms very easily and effectively. To select a synonym

Open Ms Office.

Now just paste the title of your post.

After pasting the title just right click on that word which you want to change.

After pressing right click a drop down menu will be opened and then place your mouse cursor over synonyms.

And here you will see a list of different words with same meaning now select the keyword for your title which suits perfectly your post.

5. Make Your Title Short – List only Important Keywords:

Try to use small but smart titles, by writing small post titles we are realizing the Search engine bots that we only offers specific niche content this is the reason why we maintain quality in our posts. Try to make your titles as short as possible and make sure you never exceed 75 (words) character limits. To maintain quality we recommend you to use 60 characters in your each post title.

6. Using Trendy Words in Post Titles:

Try to use trendy words in your post title to grab the attention of the readers this will not only increase your traffic but will also play important role towards building your audience. People want "Hot" Latest topics. But still we need to use those trendy keywords which are related to our niche and it should be related to our content.

7. Using Important Keywords in Post Titles:

Now this tip is the most important one, Keywords play crucial role towards building audience so you must select your post keywords carefully. As I mention previously keywords present in post title determine how much traffic you will get, the better you select the more traffic you will get. Just search for most relevant keyword and if it matches your content then hit enter and enjoy the fruits of keywords.

8. Using Eye Catching Words

Mostly users look for those articles or content which are the best in the market for example, if we buy a fruit from a shop keeper we always make sure it is of superior quality. In the same way our reader only want to read those content which are of best quality so by using keywords like HOT, Best, perfect, good, excellent we are indicating people it’s worth checking it.

9. Creating Questionable Post Titles:

The world of vocabulary is really huge, we can select numberless expressions for our titles and with the same technique creating questionable titles is the most effective way to get noticed and grab attention of readers. For instance using How, What, How To, in our post titles

10. Be Unique Be the one – Rule the SEO

Google loves uniqueness no matter it is your content or title, unique titles has always proved it self important. Due to unique title we obtain high rank in SERP and hence this will not only increase our traffic but also has great impact in SEO.

So that’s how we can select perfect post titles for our blog and websites. In addition Post titles are the heart of our content so a silly mistake could break our entire post. And if we adopt these instructions we will surely see a huge increase in our traffic. So that’s it for now guys till then Peace, Blessings, and Happy writing. :)

Google Uploaded 9 Videos That Tell How To do Better SEO & Drive Traffic

2012-08-25T03:29:00.001-07:00

Driving traffic to a website is a continuous uphill struggle where you could climb and climb, but never get to the top. You can only climb higher than others. For most, the task is daunting, and many cave in after a certain amount of struggle, and their progress stalls, and ultimately falls back. Many require expert guidance, which many don't get. And so, they go on with the wrong SEO practices. Well now, Google has decided to address this issue by releasing videos that explain the best SEO practices. These are 9 videos about SEO, SERPs, engaging audience, avoiding webspam, and more. They were all were released on 25 June at the same time. Whether you are a newbie or a pro-blogger, you'll find these videos immensely helpful.

1. Creating great content that performs well on Google search results

There are several factors that determine how well a website will perform in search results. But the key is to focus the content on the users, and provide them with a more friendly environment to browse your site. Most people make the mistake of focusing the content on Search engines. It's all about the user-experience now. Bring original content that is different from other sites. Be relevant, and keep updating your content on a regular basis.

2. Finding your site in Google

To check whether your site has been indexed by Google, go to Google, and in the search bar, write 'site:' followed by your domain name. For example, site:mybloggertricks.com. If something comes, then your site has been indexed. If not, then there could be a problem in your robots.txt file or the domain might have been previously associated with malicious content. You can file a reconsideration request with Google from the webmaster tools. If you find that not all your pages have been indexed, you can wait for Google to do it, or you can submit that content manually by going to google.com/submitcontent.

3. Understand which Google searches are driving traffic to your website

Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to see what searches are driving the most amount of traffic for you. Check for queries that have high clicks and click through rates. And check for those that have a low rate to see what's wrong. Also, if your impressions count is high, but CTR is low, then your site might not be appealing to users.

4. Using Sitemaps to help Google find content hosted on your site

Sitemaps are important as they help Google index your website. You should create a sitemap for your website, and then submit it to Google. We have discussed about this in more detail here;

Blogger Sitemap Generator

5. Learn how to Engage with your audience using social media

Social media is a great way to promote your business. Engaging audience on social media is the key to any business' success. You can engage with your audience by holding contests, sharing stories and accomplishments, and announcing products. Interacting with your audience is extremely important, as it will increase the number of your customers, as social media is all about connections.

6. Learn about the Google Webmaster Tools Message Center

Google Webmaster Tools Message Center is your friend! It will give you messages for the latest news and happenings, and announcements. It will also let you know of any behavioral changes in your website, so you can know what's wrong with your site. It will let you know what areas are causing problems and impacting your performance in search results.

7. Errors that Google may find and report while crawling your website

Again, Google Webmaster Tools is there to help you fix any errors on your site. The Crawl errors page in Webmaster tools let you know of any site errors or URL errors. Site errors occur when Google can't access your web hosting server. They need to be resolved as soon as possible! URL errors include not found or 404 errors. Google will also let you know about any other errors it finds on your site, hence you can easily troubleshoot and resolve he errors to ensure you site is once again back on track.

8. Webspam Content Violations

Google is very strict about its rules and regulations. Any site that violates those might be blocked or removed from the search results. Examples of violation include copying irrelevant content from another website, having a low quality blog filled with affiliate links, and creating multiple sites that redirect back to one site to give you more bites at an apple.

9. How malicious parties can spam your site

Sometimes, you might be the victim of spam. Malicious users will post links all over you blog in the comments sections. These comments include links to other website not really related to the topic. Always set links in comments to "nofollow", so that users are discouraged from this practice.

Easy Settings For URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

2012-08-25T01:39:00.000-07:00

Google is the world's largest search engine. It crawls millions of webpages everyday. But one problem it faces is duplicate URLs on a website linking to the same content. For instance, the URLs example.com/blog/category/news and example.com/blog/index.php?category=news can both point to the same page, hence creating duplicates, and reducing site efficiency for Google's crawler. In the interest of good SEO, it is important that you optimize your URLs to avoid duplication. To this end, Google Webmaster Tools now gives you a Configure URL Parameters feature, which will help you recommend actions for the GoogleBot crawler to take, so as to increase your site's crawl efficiency. It will also lessen the resource burden on Google that goes into the crawling of your website. In this post, we will show you how to set easy settings for URL Parameters.

What are URL parameters and how do they increase URL count?

URL parameters are parameters, or values, passed into a URL for searching or refining. For example, if you search for something on this blog, you will see a URL like this; http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/p/search.html?MBT=search_query, where MBT=search_query is the URL parameter. They usually come in a key/value pair, with MBT being the key, and search_query being the value. You can manually search this blog by replacing search_query with anything you want to search for.

You might have seen eCommerce websites, where a product can be found via multiple ways. For example, example.com/tablets/apple/ipad.php and example.com/tablets/index.php?make=apple&product=ipad will both point to an iPad. Notice that multiple URL parameters have been used, separated by an ampersand (&). There can be more parameters, such as color=black, 3g=no, and so on.

Here is a video from Google summarizing what URL parameters are, and how to configure them in Google Webmaster Tools.

Types of URL parameters

Before you dive into configuring URL parameters for your blog, take a look at the different types of URL parameters. This will help you in the configuration process. There are two basic types of URL parameters.

Parameters that don't change your content - These parameters have no effect of your actual content, and are simply for tracking purposes to let site owners know where a certain user has come from, or which affiliate id has referred him. E.g. example.com/index.php?affiliateid=12345, and so on.
Parameters that change your content - These parameters will change the content on your page. Take a look at our search bar. The URL parameter MBT=search_query effects what is displayed on the site. If I write MBT=SEO, it will show me a list of posts that has the keyword SEO in it. It I change the word SEO, then it will show me something else, hence it has changed the content. As per Google's URL parameter configuration tool, there are 5 different types of URL parameters that change a page's content.

Sorts - These are used to sort a list of items according to a certain value, e.g. sort=price_ascending
Narrows - These refine a search and narrow it down to lesser content from a larger set. For example, color=black
Specifies - These determine what content will be displayed on a page. For example, make=apple&product=ipad. Our example with the search feature on this blog falls under this category
Paginates - Displays a specific page in your website. E.g. page=3.
Translates - Displays the content in a specific language. E.g. lang=en

Configuring URL parameters in Webmaster Tools

Before starting off, it is important to note that you can only configure URLs that have parameters in the key=value format. URLs that have a different structure are 'ineligible'. For e.g. example.com/page/3 is not eligible, but example.com/index.php?page=3 is.

To configure URL parameter actions for your site, log onto your Google Webmaster Tools account, and select URL Parameters under Configuration on the left sidebar. You will either see an option to add a parameter, or you will see a message telling you that Google has no problems with your site.

Caution! If your website is okay, then you should leave it at that! If you accidentally set a site-wide block, then it could result in your pages getting de-indexed from Google. So beware of what you do from now on.

Parameters that do not change content

The first thing you should do is, think of all the URL parameters that you know don't change your content. These can include affiliate ids (affiliateid=12345), sources (source=facebook), tracking id (track-id=abc123), and so on. Add each of these parameters (whichever may apply), and then mark them as "Does not affect content".

Parameters that change content

For parameters that change content, select the appropriate option. You will see more options pop up. You can tell Google how that parameter changes the content by selecting from among the five types of parameters we discussed about that change content. You also have the "Other" option for parameters that do not fit into the given five behaviors. You cal also tell GoogleBot how to handle that particular parameter. Here are some of the response types.

Let GoogleBot decide - This is the standard option if you don't know what you're dealing with, or if you can't decide how a certain parameter should be handled. You will be safe with this option selected :0
Crawl Every URL - Every URL with this parameter will be crawled, as Google will identify each unique value. In our MBT search example, MBT=SEO and MBT=blogging are two different URLs, and should be treated accordingly.
Crawl Only URLs with Value - Only the URLs with the specified values in their parameters will be crawled. For example, if I add only the value SEO in the MBT parameter configuration, Google will only crawl URLs with MBT=SEO in them, but not MBT=blogging. This is only useful for sorting purposes, where you can only ask Google to crawl your content that's ordered in an ascending order, and not descending.
Crawl No URLs - Beware! If used wrong, this could have catastrophic results. URLs with the specified parameters will not be crawled at all! If I select this option for the MBT parameter, Google won't be able to access our search results.

What option to use with what parameter types?

Sorts need to be handled with care. If a parameter is never used in a URL by default, then you can select "Crawl No URLs". Otherwise, Sorts generally fall under the "Crawl Only URLs With Value" category. Sorts offer the same content, with just the order changed, which doesn't make a bit of a difference to Google. So between sort=ascending and sort=descending, you should go with either one, but not both.

Narrows are tricky as well. Mostly, they select data from a larger set, making the narrowed data somewhat redundant. For example, lets say example.com/search?product=shoes&color=black shows some 50 black shoes at a store. But example.com/search?product=shoes&color=black&price-from=10 may show just 5 shoes that are above $10. This smaller data-set isn't of much use to Google. So you can select the Crawl No URL option. But again, be sure to double-check your options, because wrong implementation can lead to disaster =/

The rest of the parameter types, Specifies, Paginates and Translates generally fall under the "Crawl Every URL" option.

If you are not sure about something, just select "Let GoogleBot decide". Don't carry out experiments of your own! If you have questions, feel free to ask them here, and maybe we could help solve them. Cheers :)

Optimize URL Parameters For Blogger in Webmaster Tools

2012-08-25T01:23:00.000-07:00

You were recently presented with a post on Configuring URL Parameters in webmaster tools but details specific to BlogSpot blogs will be shared today because incorrectly optimizing URLs could make your blog posts and pages stop appearing in Google Search. We must congratulate Google for making it easy for webmasters to more easily control how their websites be crawled unlike Bing which never stops begging to optimize "Query Parameters for Normalization" without even specifying what parameters to ignore!

URL parameters help Google to crawl your site more efficiently and give priority to your more useful content by controlling the parameters that effect the site content. In blogging platforms like Wordpress and BlogSpot, there are several parameters, that effect the page content. Famous amongst them are replytocom, Showcomment, commentPage, m and utm parameters. We will be guiding you through all this headache to make it pretty simple to optimize URLs for Blogger blogs and enhance your SEO.

Note: To understand this post clearly kindly first read about some related terminologies in this post:

Google URL Parameters Explained

Some Important Parameters

To check what parameters Google has found out on your blog, simply log into your webmasters account and then click Configuration > URL Parameters

You will then see a list of around 7-8 parameters for which you need to specify their behavior. The number of these parameters could be greater if you are using Google Custom Search

Some of these parameters are:

showComment
m
commentPage
utm_source
utm_medium
utm_campaign
max-results
updated-max
share

Parameters follow a URL with a question mark. See an example of the showComment parameter.

http://www.bloggertricksnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/website-testing-effects-performance.html?showComment=1345044786974

This parameter tells Googlebot about the location of a comment on the page by comment id. In blogger each comment has an alpha numeric id that starts with alphabet "c" and contains numbers as the remaining characters.

Optimization Settings

To make things fast, safe and easy I am sharing below the webmaster sheet for MBT blog to give you an idea of what options to choose for each entry. You will find Edit and Reset link to the right of each parameter. Make the settings for each parameter one by one as shown in the snapshot that follows.

Remember these points:

This method will only make crawling easy for Googlebot and will not make any of your pages disappearing from search.
You need to set Effect and Crawl entries only
To see the structure of the URL you can click "show example URLs" in the popup window to pre-check how the URL looks like.
Effect None here means that the parameter does not change the content of the page.
Effect Paginates here is used for CommentPage and m because both are simple identifiers to show page number for comments greater than 200 in Blogger
Effect Sorts is chosen for max-results and updated-max because both sorts the page content in order of time and date.
For parameters we were not too sure we chose "Let Googlebot decide" instead of choosing "No URL"

The snapshot below will make your task even more easy. Carefully set the options as shown.

Will it reduce Crawl Errors?

Fortunately yes it does! Most of the errors are caused by duplicate URLS or due to absence of canonical link attributes. This method makes it extremely easy to control the URL structure of your Blog within your webmasters account.

Got Questions?

I have kept the tutorial short this time because specific details had already been shared in our previous post. If you have any question that is troubling you or if I could not clarify any step clearly please let us know by posting your query in the comment box below. I hope this tutorial helps blogger users to make their web pages more search engine friendly and smoothen the path for spiders to dig deep.

Answer these simple questions:

How far do you think configuring URL parameters would effect your Search Engine Traffic? Can you use this guide to normalize parameters for Bing?

Peace and blessings buddies. :)

How Often Should You Blog? (Hint: The Answer Might Surprise You)

2012-08-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably come across advice to blog every day.
Perhaps you feel that you must blog every day—and you’re reluctant to even start your blog because you know you don’t have that much time.
Or maybe you’re already blogging, and doing your best to get out a post every single day—but you don’t seem to get many comments or tweets.
The good news is that you almost certainly don’t need to blog every day. In fact, you may well find that posting just a couple of times a week works better for you.
But before you dismiss posting daily altogether, here’s why it could be a good idea.

Why posting every day might work for you

Some bloggers do best when they’re in a steady routine—and you might be one of them. If you find that posting once or twice a week quickly ends up as posting once or twice a month, then you might actually find it easier to post every day. That way, you can build a strong writing habit.
Another reason for posting daily is if you’re writing a news-focused blog in a fast-moving niche. One weekly post just isn’t going to work if you want to be on the cutting edge of what’s happening.
There are also some SEO benefits to quickly building up a lot of posts on your site: all else being equal, the more pages you have, the more opportunities a reader has to find you through search engines. (Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that in practice—one high-ranking post will generally bring you much more traffic than five so-so ones.)
If you’re going to post every day:

Keep your posts short and to the point.
Plan ahead, so you don’t end up publishing sub-standard content when you’re in a rush.
Vary your post types: try video posts, or image-heavy ones, for instance.

Why one, two or three posts per week is usually better

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a shift in the blogging world. More and more prominent bloggers-on-blogging are moving away from daily posting—and reassuring their readers that you don’t have to post every day in order to be successful.
Five years ago, there weren’t so many “pro”-style blogs around, and readers were eager for content. Today, with a wealth of blogs to choose from, readers quickly get burnt out.

I once surveyed readers here on bloggertricksnow about the reasons they unsubscribed from RSS feeds, and the number one answer was “posting too much.” Respondents expressed that they developed “burnout” and would unsubscribe if a blog became too “noisy.”

As a reader, I much prefer blogs that post once a week or even once every two weeks—but always say something genuinely useful—than blogs that post every day just for the sake of it. If you look at the blogs you read in depth versus the ones you skim, you’ll probably realize that you feel the same way.
As a blogger, posting once or twice a week lets me write in-depth, carefully constructed posts—ones that are more likely to get links and tweets. I also get more comments per post this way, and have the time to engage with readers over several days of commenting.
If you’re only going to post twice a week:

Look at which content on your blog is most popular, so you can make every single post a successful one.
Experiment with longer posts, perhaps 1,000+ words.
Focus on evergreen content, so that each post will stay relevant for years.

Finding your perfect blogging routine

As bloggers, we all have different skills, personalities, and constraints on our time and energy. Don’t force yourself to stick to someone else’s blogging routine—it won’t necessarily work well for you.
Your perfect blogging routine might be one post a week, or one post a day. It might involve writing posts when you’re feeling inspired, or writing posts to a set schedule. You might use a content calendar to help you plan ahead with all or some of your content—or you might have differently themed posts on certain days of the week or month.
There’s no “one size fits all” approach to blogging, and what’s important is that you find a routine that you can stick to over the long term—not one that leaves you burnt out after a few weeks.
Don’t worry that readers will get upset if you change your posting frequency. I’ve chopped and changed on different blogs—and I’ve never had a reader complain that they wanted five posts a week, not three, or that they wanted my posts to be on Mondays and Thursdays, not Tuesdays and Fridays.
When you’re experimenting with your blogging routine:

Don’t change things too abruptly: try going from five posts per week to three posts per week, for instance.
Consider surveying your readers to find out whether they’d like more or fewer posts.
Experiment with writing posts ahead of time, or with creating a content calendar.

Blogging shouldn’t be a chore: if posting daily isn’t working out for you, it’s probably not working well for your readers either. Today, take a look at your blogging routine and see whether you want to make any changes—and leave a comment below to let us know what you decide.

"4 Requirements" To Make Money Through Blogging In 2012

2012-08-24T04:54:00.003-07:00

No matter if you are a student, housewife or jobless, blogging is a technical skill that turns a layman into an entrepreneur if applied correctly. We always advise 10th grade students to start learning blogging because by the time they will graduate their tiny blog would have become a revenue generating engine. Blogging is surely an art and it can work only if your strategies are practical and focused. Big internet marketers often launch blogs with the start of each new year so that they could multiply their current income. Creating more blogs is never a big challenge but creating your very first blog is. But before you may start a new blog or take any such decision, we would like to guide you throughout your journey so that you may emerge as a well established professional blogger.

The Four Fundamental Blogging Requirements

1. Build Up Your Skills

I will write a detailed post on "technical requirements for becoming a pro blogger" and here I will just give some highlights. Normally people who succeed with blogging are

Web Designers
Web developers
Internet Marketers

People with any of the above designations have always turned out a productive resource for blogosphere. As a web designer myself, I could have never enjoyed blogging if I lacked designing skills. A blogger is not just an English writer who publishes links to Google, he is the brain behind the content as well as the blog's solid structure. To win the hearts of readers you must exhibit extra ordinary skills by presenting your posts in a professional way. You must design and maintain the blog regularly. A blog with dull grey look and layout is always a complete failure. You must make use of rich HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript effects to create web objects that may provide the best web interface to your visitors. Keeping a blog clean, easy to navigate and easy to search and read, demands designing skills on behalf of the author. Therefore you don't just need to be an excellent writer to become successful blog author but you must also have basic design skills required to stand out the competition.

You can learn HTML and CSS within a month and start creating amazing objects using Jquery and JavaScript the very next month. I will share all these details in my next post.

2. Understand what Search Engine is

Of course everyone knows what a search engine is but if this is true then why do people fail in driving traffic while on contrary others are entertained with immense traffic significantly? Optimizing your blogs is not the end of the story, there is something without which you can never expect to compete those billion of web pages fed into Google, Yahoo and Bing every single day!

Search engines work on the principle: "Produce Quality Content, Publish it first and get Served Forever!"

1. Produce Quality Content:

This term is highly misinterpreted in blogosphere. Quality content is not just about writing lengthy big paragraphs with a word limit of 700-1000 words. Quality content in accordance with latest Google Panda guidelines stands for publishing unique content which must be fresh, latest and new. This is one reason why blogs like Techcrunch and mashable are so successful. They act more like news feeders. Search engines look eagerly for blogs that produce content relevant to the current time, happenings around the world, trends in technology and on going seasonal occasions.

We could have published this post without adding the word 2012 in the title but this single numeric value plays wonders in search engine results page (SERP).

2. Publish it first:

Never wait for someone else to publish a news if you heard it first. Always share tutorials and posts on latest developments.

For example: As soon as people heard about Google+, thousands of tutorials were published the very next day. This is how internet has become, it never waits for anything.

3. Get Served Forever:

One of the things that I practically experienced with search engines especially Google is that if you are the first one to break a news or share it online, Google will direct most of the relevant organic traffic towards you. We are still being served with valuable traffic Alhamdulillah for breaking the following news:

Facebook Video Calling
How To Join Google+?
Undo Timeline

Note that news here means "Sharing it first"

3. Act like a Journalist

What does Journalist does? Of course his job is to keep himself informed with everything. You must subscribe Giant technology corporate blogs and sites for updates in the world of social media and online media or at least visit these sites once a day. What I do is visiting my favorite technology blogs daily and I also use Alexa toolbar which shares interesting headlines across the globe. You can create an igoogle homepage and add RSS feeds of blogs related to your niche so that you may remain updated with latest happenings.

4. Publish Multiple Posts Per Day

If you are posting just twice per week and expecting revenue, then its time that you must open you eyes and wake up from these failed tactics. Read the following detailed tutorial:

Publish Several Posts Per Day To Boost Traffic

This is the magic tip I recommend to all. There is nothing that can build your blogging career overnight except this strategy of post frequency. You must read the tutorial carefully to understand this important demand of pro blogging.

Why Your Blog Makes No Money?

Now watch this interesting video by lisa from 2createwebsite. I really respect and follow her.

So will you launch a blog in 2012?

After having read the four important technical requirements needed to turn out as a speaking blogger, do you think you can start a new blog now?

I would like to share an interesting news here, we are soon going to launch a new blog in February 2012. The niche is based on Affiliate Marketing and Make Money Online. Hope it will be a valuable resource of learning for students (especially) and people who are fed up with their jobs. The blog will be hosted on Wordpress in order to add a different flavor to our network. I just hope this tiny post proves helpful in guiding you to the right blogging spirit. Peace and blessings pals! :)

Three Learning Stages" To Become a Professional Blogger - Part2

2012-08-24T04:50:00.003-07:00

In our previous post on skills required to become a successful pro blogger some commented that how is web designing related to the art of content writing. They are linked so tightly together that they are the loops that form the chain required to strengthen your online existence. Development in technology has broken all past records and new tools and gadgets are out in market every second. People are slowly turning their businesses Online. After 9/11 even IBM shifted to cloud computing, which means even they realized the importance of online media for their safety. Different Content Management systems like Joomla, Blogger and Wordpress are spreading like a crazy wave. Those who can afford are switching to Wordpress and those who can not stick to Blogger. Since you are going to start a profession, that will serve the rapidly increasing internet population with ideas, tutorials, guides and resources, therefore to survive, you need to be extra ordinary in your skills. You must know how to make design changes to your webpage. You need to understand and learn how web hosting works, how data is transferred via ftp and how webpages are structured along with how to market your blog and skills smartly.

Note: These series in no way highlight me as a Pro Blogger. I prefer the title of a peanut blogger and would remain and live so always.

Should you Follow Pro Bloggers?

People like Darren Rowse, ZacJohnson and JohncHow are accidental millionaires. You should never take them as role models at initial stages for becoming a successful blogger but do follow them once you reach stage#3. They had started their careers 8-12 years ago when even social networks like Facebook was hatching out and new to the world. The traffic that they have today is due to those Golden days when competition was Zero to what it is today. To be simple and straight, you should follow them once you start earning at least $500 per month. Before this stage, following their tips wont help you a lot. Most of them talk about affiliate marketing and Ebook promotion. You can surely make money out of these two golden tools but first you need to build a repo online.

Blogging Learning Stages:

Stage#1:

Duration: 6 Months

Traffic: Zero

At this stage you must learn and apply the following:

Start a blog with blogger.com and never with free wordpress
Choose a Topic that may help you Make Money. You should not start writing on anything you like, only selected niches work wonders for a Blog. You need to be logical in the choice of your Blog Niche. People who often end up blogging career with disappointment are those who don't understand what drives money and what keywords actually mean. This will be discussed in Part-3 of the series
Submit your sitemap to Google, link to Yahoo.
Apply all SEO related tweaks to your template. This will turn you into a SEO. Give great focus to SEO articles published at MBT because we share everything here that would work for any blog, may it be running on wordpress or blogger or typepad.
Do not apply for Adsense! It comes in stage#2
Read tutorials on how to customize your template. This will polish your web designing skills.
Keep learning and applying HTML and CSS3 tutorials
Write at least one Post per day of at least 500 words. Adopt the written formatted style of your favourite bloggers. See how they present their ideas with a post and how they format the text to make it appealing.
Always Write on social media no matter what your blog topic may be. Do mention Facebook and Google Plus updates to your readers and keep writing on them when the news is worth sharing. The initial push in traffic depends on social networking sites.
Buy a Custom domain

Stage#2:

Duration: After six months of your start. Lasts for Six more months

Traffic: Above 500 daily unique visitors

Now when you have been applying all tips of Stage#1, you qualify for stage#2. Here you should do this:

Apply for AdSense. Add 336 by 280 just below post titles. Enough! Add Text & image/rich media ads. You should not turn your blog into a fish market of ads. This wont increase your revenue, instead would discourage readership. Read next tip..
Give more importance to readership and less to Revenue for at least 1 Year.
Build your twitter, Facebook, Google Plus Fans and most importantly your RSS Subscribers. How? This will be answered in Part-4 of the series
Write Guest posts to build rich backlinks. Give your best shots with your guest posts. win the heart of the admin as well as his readers. There are many sites that accept guest posts. We accept guest posts from loyal subscribers only.
Don't waste time commenting on forums and blogs. Write only quality guest posts to drive PageRank juice and consistent inorganic traffic.
Work on your Alexa Rank. The best tip to improve Alexa is Post Frequency and nothing else. Keep your posts focused on social media to boost Alexa Rank.
Learn how Web Hosting works.

Stage#3:

Duration: stage3 1 year of your start. Lasts forever

Traffic: Above 1000 daily unique visitors

Target: Succeed in receiving 5000 visitors per day the second year of your blogging.

At the point where you succeed in receiving above 1k traffic daily, you then qualify for stage three.

Apply for Banner Ad services like BuySellAds
Don't increase the Ad spot prices when you start seeing sponsors. Maintain a fixed price for at least 20-30 days. Display no more than 12-15 Ad spots per page.
Never Compromise Blog load time for anything. Beauty matters too but use only those widgets that may help your visitors and do not add widgets just for the sake of attractive design.
Share posts based on Affiliate Ads. Learn what is Affiliate Marketing.
You can now confidently Follow Pro Bloggers! Learn their Marketing strategies and apply them.
Increase your post frequency and make sure to increase traffic by 200%. You must now be able to understand what brings traffic.
Choose Topics wisely now and keep fascinating readers with free goodies and resources
Write at fixed time and don't just publish posts randomly at any time you find your post ready. Schedule your posts to a fixed time. This boosts Alexa greatly.
Start valuing every single hour in a day. Work at most 6-8 hours per day.
You sole purpose should be now building readership, maintaining traffic, interacting with readers more and more.
Keep reading on how to Choose Ad spots wisely.
Choose just one Affiliate product and promote it
Subscribe to biggest technology blogs and keep yourself updated with latest developments. Publish a post on biggest headlines always!
Be polite in your tone even if someone tries to pull your legs.
Each day you must see a change in your Alexa Rank, Fan Count, Subscriber count and unique visitors and PageViews.
Always keep an eye on your competitor. If you think he has shared something you have not yet published then do not wait just post on it in your own unique style with more enhancements.
Be unique in your tone, style and strategy. Success will be waiting at your doors to Hug you soon.

Need Help?

If there is anything I could not clearly explain just let me know pals. I tried to be as honest in sharing this valuable information as I could. I have share almost everything that I have learnt so far. Indeed due to lack of time I could not explain some points in detail but I am sure once we publish the remaining parts of this series, you will have a clear picture in mind about how blogging is done and practiced.

Do let me know how much did this post help you in making your minds clear and in guiding you to the straight and correct track. Peace and blessings buddies. :)

Which Photographs Sell Well and Make Serious Money?

2012-08-24T04:43:00.004-07:00

In our post on 8 ways to make money online, we discussed that you can even earn money by selling your photographs. Photography is an expensive hobby and now you can make money from it as well. To me it was a new concept and I felt interested in finding out its details. Would you like to read what I have found? To begin we need to know the proper terminologies. Stock photography is the term referring to the photographs or images that can be licensed for specific use. And micro stock photography means you can buy high quality and high resolution images at specified prices.

Why Micro Stock Photography?

You must be curious to find out why we need such type of business? Actually this is popular among designers, advertisers, marketing professionals etc. for the use of images in their websites, advertisements, brochures and magazines etc. Instead of hiring a professional photographer who may be much expensive and can cost them in terms of time as well, they prefer to select images or photographs already available, make payment and own it.

How to make good Stock?

Of course you need to have stock of your digital photographs which you are willing to sell. As every other industry, it has also got competition and you can’t sell each and every image of yours. There are some very basic points that can help you gather a good stock; and can pay your hard work.

1-Good quality:

Your photographs must be clean, sharp, and free of digital noise, high quality images with correct exposures. A recommended practice is to shoot your images in RAW format.

2-Commercial photographs:

‘Snapshots’ which are usually your family photographs or still images are not a suitable choice. You must check what is most demanded, if you want to earn a reasonable amount. If you are persistent to capture landscapes and tourist type photographs, that’s fine too; they will pay you less. Photographs or images that can be used in brochures, flyers or advertisements can add up to your stock. For example, if you take a still image of your school going child, it would be rejected. But, if you show him in uniform, hanging his school bag with a brighter smile on his face; this photo can easily be selected by any milk or butter advertisement.

3-No trademarks:

There should be no trademarks and no logos of the company, to whom you are selling photos. Also, if you have an image in which a person is wearing a shirt with its brand name; it may be rejected.

4-Signed Model release:

Each agency has its own standard model releases. Don’t forget to ask for it. It is a form that you fill in and send along with each image containing identifiable person.

5-Technical details:

For technical details and copyright issues, you may like to go through this manual at www.istockphoto.com/training_manuals.php

Where to sell?

There are many micro stock agencies; you should start from the basic step. Your ultimate target should be doing business with the leading company; but postpone this idea until you get some experience and understand the tactics of photographic market. Most of the websites are not doing exclusive business so you can sale the same image to different agencies. We are listing a few of these agencies:

What is a Sister Blog and How To Promote it?

2012-08-24T04:39:00.001-07:00

The most important success key in business is “Planning”. A flawless planning with incredible determination can doubtlessly take you to ultimate heights. We have also achieved many goals using this tool; we thought it would be a great idea to share some tips with you all. Blogging is a science and you can progress only if you select the right thing at the time else you will end up in doing fruitless experiments only.

Time for a Sister Blog?

We have been providing tips to make your blog a success and you have been following us for so long (we are really grateful). Now you have a successful blog with handsome traffic and a reliable source of your living, and you are saving in dollars? Great…congratulations!!!But what’s next? It is the right time to think of expanding your business. As you agree that you are saving in dollars, don’t you think so it will be better to spend them so that you have more dollars to save? Yes, you need to invest if you want to expand your business. It is just like you are paying a little to earn a lot.

Planning A Sister Blog:

By planning here, I mean deciding the theme for your sister blog. It would be preferable to make it a niche if your existing blog offers a variety. You can make any single category as your target. Just like we have a “Make Money” category in MBT and launched the sister with the same goal. But yes, with broadness in it. We could also have a separate blog for “Search Engine Optimization”. So, you should review your blog many times and find out all the possible options. You can go for a totally different theme, but that would require more time and all the efforts once again, you have already experienced. You should also think if you will continue with two blogs or will cease your existing one?

Using Existing Blog:

Well that’s the real relaxing feature of setting up a new blog when you already have a successful one. You can use it as the biggest support for your new set up. This will help a lot if your sister blog is derived from your blog, as I have mentioned above. How? Simple, because your loyal readers would be sharing that interest and would definitely love to follow you there as well. You can then invite a guest post from your sister blog once a week to promote them. It would be as if you are setting up your blogging network; directing the flow of traffic from one blog to other.

Do not Over - Promote:

If you use e-books for your blog promotion; it would be a nice idea to go for a joint publication with your sister blog. But, do not speak too much about it else you may result in loosing readership, who are more interested in learning from your knowledge rather than listening your achievements. So, be careful.

Do not overlook Existing Blog:

Changes are always exciting and we tend to be more enthusiastic when we are launching a new product of any kind. You are not supposed to over look loving and faithful readers eagerly waiting for you, when you are energized. You may have to do alternate day postings but not more than that. Your absence can cause a great loss; especially when your readers are interactive enough with you. You may need to hire professional freelancers to help you cater your sister blog without affecting your base blog. It would be acceptable if the quality is little less at your sister but do not prolong this practice. Remember, your readers are used to get the best from you and they won’t be able to manage on something less.

What’s Next?

We hope this post would make you think of expanding your blog. Inform us through your feedback if you want us to articulate more on planning. Stay Blessed! Stay Happy!

Web Development is Surely The Key To Become a "SIX FIGURE BLOGGER" - Part4

2012-08-24T04:33:00.005-07:00

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Yes you heard it right! No one can be expected to Park a luxury car safely without Practice or prior Driving knowledge. The number of entrepreneurs, bloggers, freelancers and Internet Marketers is successfully increasing but only some of them succeed in establishing their base online after correctly following the survival tactics. From16 February 2011 onwards, there are now over 156 million public blogs in existence but only atom equivalent numbers have turned Blogging into a Online Happy Living, others gave up with disappointment. During my presentations I often ask the crowd this question "How many bloggers are here?" I then see 80% raising their hands but when asked "How many are earning at least $500-$1K monthly with their blogs?" I find all hands down. This is funny yet a big logical fact. How can some one just jump at something without first building the foundation for it. In todays tutorial, we will be focusing on students, housewives and jobless at large and even those newbie bloggers who are looking for every possible way to increase organic traffic and generate revenue.

What is Blogging?

Blogging is not at all the art of publishing links to Google and Making Money with Adsense or any other Ad service. Blogging is a long term business that turns a noob into a skilled entrepreneur. If you are blogging just to earn via Adsense then you are badly mistaken. Ad services cost for just 40% of blogging revenue , remaining is earned via Blog services and Affiliate commissions.

Blogging follows this sequence

Learn Web Development (For becoming not just a blogger)
Start with Google Blogger
Learn SEO
Build Readership
Build Traffic
Display Ads
Promote Affiliate Products
Earn and Enjoy!

To get an idea of what blogging is and how to start a blog, better read these tutorials,

What is blogging and how to start a blog?
How To Destroy Your Blogging Career? - Must Read!

Why are you relating Blogging To Web Development?

Blogging doesn't just require some good written and grammar skills, neither just SEO, its beyond that. Majority of successful bloggers today are web developers or at least having some idea of languages like CSS3, HTML4 and php. You need to provide readers with some extra ordinary skills. You need to develop these skills to present a better blog to the world. During your blogging career, you will often need to create a logo, banner, design a page, create a tool etc. and it would sound weird if you can't do these things yourself and rely on a freelancer. Neither will these skills help you with your blog management but you can even sell your web development skill services and win bids as freelancer. Your readers would love to pay you as much as you want for the services you offer.

No matter what you blog on, you always need to create a video or banner or an ebook and lastly a promotional web page to promote your work. All these is a complete headache and loss of revenue if you don't know basic developing skills.

Your tutorials will sound more logical and correct if you have knowledge about these web technologies. You will be able to format and optimize your posts better. You can edit the codes for your templates without anyone's help and most importantly you can estimate how robots crawl and index your content. You let a search robot dance at your tones!

What is web development?

In part one of our series we discovered the skills required by a professional blogger and we emphasize on web designing but today we will go a step ahead and would talk about web development.

Web designing is limited to learning these:

Web graphics using Adobe Photoshop CS5 at least.
HTML4 and CSS3
Dream Weaver CS5
JavaScript, Jquery (Just applications)

Web designing helps you to design Static websites, your very own blog, add elements and objects to your page to make it more interactive, create logos and banners for blog promotion and helps you in doing small freelancing jobs. It is limited to Static pages only while web development is the next level to create Dynamic pages.

Difference between Static and Dynamic Pages

Static Pages are created using CSS3, HTML, JavaScript and Jquery. Our Services Pages are examples of static pages which involves no programming and is simple display of content. You will learn to create such pages with web designing skills.

Dynamic pages are created using a programming language largely with either PHP or ASP. Wordpress or Facebook are created using PHP and it lets you create amazing programmable pages to create interactive plugins, widgets and auto controllable stuff. The Meta Tag generator and Pinger Tool is an example of a dynamic page. The tool is coded with PHP, even our contact form is coded with PHP. To perform some function you need to learn programming languages and my personal recommendation is that you learn PHP as it has a high market demand and is the perfect bid earning language for freelancers. Parallel to this you must learn MySQL to understand how databases work and are manage. All your images, posts, comments and every single element on your Blogs are stored at Blogger Databases. You will learn to create such pages with web development skills. I just completed my PHP and MySQL learning course this month to become a full time web developer.

So web development is all about creating dynamic pages that perform some function rather just a read only graphics.

Learning Chart

This should be your target to achieve within 6-8 months in 2012.

Web Designing (Six Months)	Web Development (Two Months)
Adobe Photoshop	PHP, MySQL
HTML4
CSS3
Dream Weaver
JavaScript (basic knowledge)
JQuery (extreme basic know-how)

Isn't it difficult? I don't have enough time

Time is the main constraint in everyone's life. But high term goals require effort. If you have youngsters at your home then you must guide them to this path. Our presentation on entrepreneurship is what that you must read and watch.

Web development is the easiest yet most interesting field choice for everyone looking to make a living online. Blogging is fun when you know how to present yourself uniquely and share stuff that is creative. People love creative content and they love listening to people with skills. Therefore you must learn this magic art to keep yourself distinct from your competitors. Recommend it to your youngsters and children at home.

End Of Series

Dead jobs with fixed salary is never a clever aim of life. You need a smart living plan and it is surely blogging that teaches you how websites generate revenue, how traffic trends changes, how latest technologies work and how people turn into SIX FIGURE Millionaires by working less but working smart.

This marks the end of our series on pro blogging. The entire aim behind this knowledge sharing was to educate you with the right decisions and plannings. Things aren't that difficult if you apply correct logics. Those who are millionaires today are not extra ordinary Genius mortals, they are common people like you but the only difference that lies is use of LOGIC. Blogging can surely turn out into a business for you if you carefully follow the instructions shared in this series and our previous tutorials. You must first develop skills and at the same time work on your blog. Work on your goals parallely and never stop one activity for the sake of starting a new activity. I wish you all the best with your entrepreneurship endeavors and online goals. Do let me know if you need any assistance related to this series. Would be a pleasure to help you out. Peace and blessings pals! :)

Choosing The Perfect Advertisment Option For Your Blog

2012-08-24T04:27:00.002-07:00

Blog monetization is among the best ways to earn money online. Indeed, advertisements are a primary (and the only) source of income for most bloggers. Hence, online advertisements are extremely important, especially to a blogger. For most blogs, the type of advertisements can determine how much revenue is generated. Not only that, they can also impact a blog's traffic. Good, well placed ads can make a lot of money for you. But if you use poorly configured, irrelevant ads, then forget about generating a decent income. Such ads can ruin your blog's traffic. Hence, choosing the right advertisement is vital for your online success.

When choosing ads for your blog / website, there are many things you need to be mindful of. It's not just about ad size, ad colours, ad placement etc. Ad effectiveness also depends upon the type of ads that you choose. There are various online advertisements option available to you as a blogger. You can choose from Banner ads, in-line text ads, contextual ads etc. Let's look at some advert types, and compare them to see what they have to offer.

Popular Advertisement Options

Banner Ads

Banner Ads are a visual form of advertisements that contain colourful picture advertisements coupled with text. They can be flash files, animated GIFs or simple JPG images. Banners are the most popular form of advertisements, since they are attractive and known for drawing customers.

Advantages - Banner advertisements have a lot of advantages. First of all, banners are easier to make than some other types of ads, such as video ads etc. Secondly, banners can go anywhere on your size, since they come in different sizes. Banner ads attract more people due to all the colours and animations etc. They provide the 'eye candy' to visitors, and hence provide more click through rate than most other type of ads. Banner ads have become an important part of most websites, without which the site seem sort of empty.

Bad practices - Publishers need to be careful about their banners though. Banners with annoying animations can irk the visitors. Moreover, the heavier the animation, the larger the file size, making the website load slower. This is perhaps one of the greatest drawback of using large-sized banners. And if there is anything more annoying than a site loading slowly, it's the sounds that suddenly start to come from god knows where! It is recommended that you do not use sounds with animations, unless the visitor chooses to click on a banner.

Contextual Ads

Recent trends have shown that contextual ads are the need of the hour! Contextual ads are becoming more and more popular, since they are highly relevant to the blog. Contextual ads use your website information such as meta keywords etc and decide what ads are best for you. These are dynamic ads that change according to the advertiser's wishes. Mos such ads usually pay on a PPC (Pay Per Click) basis.

Like I said, these ads are quite relevant to your website, which means a higher click through rate, since most of your visitors are interested in exactly the kind of things displayed on these ads. Such ads need to be handled carefully though. Blogs may need to redesigned slightly to optimize them for such ads.

In-line Text Ads

In-line text ads are another popular form of advertisement. In-line text ads are a form of contextual ads, and are embedded into the text on your blog. Whenever a reader hovers over the specified text, a small pop-up appears containing more information about the product.

In-line text ads have the advantage that they are not obtrusive and don't come in the way of those who don't want to look at ads. But they are highly efficient for those who are interested in some particular product.

Keep in mind, however, that in-line text ads mostly work on large blogs/websites, usually where there are a lot of daily visitors, and they tend to read between the lines. For small blogs, this strategy isn't very effective, mainly due to the low traffic.

Video Ads

Although Video Ads are not as popular as the above, the average revenue per conversion is generally higher. Videos also give exposure to your ads since they can shared on multiple social media networks. But unfortunately, the conversion rate for video ads is low. Not many people will click on a video to play it. Remember; do not make the mistake of starting videos automatically! Believe me, it's really annoying to the visitors, who don't want anything to bog down their loading speed.

Pop-up Ads

Readers get ads on separate browser windows, tabs etc. These are the most controversial form of advertisements. On the one hand, they are very effective in terms of cost-per-click. Users don't have an option to simply ignore the ads. Ads are presented to them no matter what. They can either choose to click on them, or close the windows. Indeed, some websites have pop ups that don't close when you click on the close button. Rather, they open further pop ups. Hence, this ensures a high click through rate.

On the other hand though, pop ups are very annoying to the reader. When an ad obstructs my reading of an article, I simply leave that website. Hence, expect a high bounce rate if you are using pop up ads. And don't let the inflated click through rates fool you. Your conversion rate will still be low, perhaps lower than other forms of advertisements. Browsers nowadays have the option of blocking pop ups entirely. In that case, all your efforts will go to vain.

Therefore, pop ups should be used very wisely. Use them rarely, if at all. If used correctly, they can also contribute a lot towards a decent income.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial Ads can be considered as a form of pop ups. But they appear on transitions. Meaning that they appear between user requests. For example if your website has a movie review with an excerpt at the main page, then such ads can appear after someone clicks on the excerpt to see the whole thing. Since such ads do not interfere much with the users' browsing, this form of advertising is preferred to pop up advertising.

Donations

If you have a blog that provides quality information that readers really need, then you might ask for donations. For this, you will need to build interactions with your audience, and resolve any troubles they have relating to the expertise you offer. Small and new websites don't benefit from this. Instead, they are seen as frauds. So if your blog / website has authority, only then should you go for donations.

And one thing more. Please don't claim that you will be giving the money for charity unless you are really doing so. Falsely claiming donations for charity is not only unfair and against social ethics, it is also a crime. Charity funding comes under a certain legal jurisprudence, with its own rules and regulations. If you claim that the money is for charity, some organization might approach you and ask for all invoices and audits etc. You could be tried in court then and there! So please just ask for donations for supporting your own business and/or your team.

There are a lot of advertisements types you can opt for. But only choose one that's right for your blog. Wrongly used ads can seriously effect your blog's reputation, while well configured ads can add meaning to your life :)

That is it for now. Thanks for all the support guys. See ya soon in the next post :)

Cheers :D

Earn More Money By Using The Brand New Google Affiliate Ads For Blogger

2012-08-24T04:24:00.002-07:00

Blogger is one of the most popular publishing platforms available for anyone who wants to voice their thoughts and opinions on the internet. You can also use blogs to earn money online. If you are a Blogger users, then here is a brand new opportunity for you to earn some extra cash right from your Blogger blog! Google has very recently announced another monetization option for Blogger blogs, i.e. the brand new Affiliate Ads!

The Google Affiliate Ads is a new Affiliate Marketing concept by Google, and a positive initiative towards benefiting publishers who are passionate about certain brands or products. Google says, "We believe your recommendation (about products and services) is valuable, and want you to benefit from it". Therefore, here is your chance to try out your hands at this latest Affiliate Marketing tool!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In the most simplest terms, Affiliate Marketing refers to the promotion of services or products through customers. It works like this: I buy a certain product, and then recommend it to you. Then you buy that product too through my 'referral'. In that case, the product's company will pay me, an 'affiliate', a certain amount of your purchase, as a 'commission'. If you refer other people, then you will get the commission, and so on.

Most popular affiliate ad marketing companies include BuySellAds, ClickBank, Amazon etc. In fact, most of the companies nowadays are offering affiliate programs to anyone willing to join. It's high time that Google do the same. This was a much awaited feature among bloggers.

About Google Affiliate Ads

This great new feature has been introduced in the form of a widget, which you can easily add to your blog posts to earn money. Whenever you write a new post about a product or service from a featured advertiser, this Google Affiliate Ad widget will help you display an affiliate ad on your post. You can choose a relevant ad from the widget. This ad can be a text-link ad, an image or a fully fledged banner.

This feature is different from the pay-per-click model for AdSense Ads. Since Affiliate Marketing is all about the performance of the affiliates, this scheme pays on a par-per-action basis. Thus, you get a greater commission for a larger number of referrals that you make.

Getting Started

Before getting started, you need to make sure that you have an AdSense account. If you don't have one, Google AdSense. You do not need to set up AdSense Ads for this program. Just sign in using your AdSense account.

Once signed up, go over to your blogger homepage, and click on the Earnings tab. There, you will find an option Get Started. You will be guided through the rest of the process. It's that simple really! Browse through available ad categories to pick an ad for your blog.

Here is a preview of the Google Affiliate Ads

Limitations

Since Google Affiliate Ads is a brand new program, it is still in its initial stages. Currently, the number of ad categories is limited. So if you don't see the select ad option, the maybe it's because your blog content does not match the ad categories. Google is working on expanding their reaches, so be patient please!

Secondly, this service is currently limited to the U.S. People outside of U.S. can't use this feature as yet. But then again, it's fresh feature, and will take time to mature. We are expecting Google to extend this limit to more countries in the near future.

If this feature is not available to you, don't worry. It will be made available very soon. We will notify you of any updates that Google makes.

Overall, we think that this is a great new initiative by Google that not only allows people to earn more money through Blogger, but also allows them to connect with their audience by selling products, as affiliate marketing is all about connecting with people and performance-based marketing. Do let us know about what you think about this exciting new feature. And for those who have this advertising option available, good luck with it :). For others, stay tuned :D

Video Marketing Tips For Smart Bloggers - Drive Massive Traffic Plus Income!

2012-08-24T04:22:00.001-07:00

Are you the one who has got strong visualizations? Do you find visualizing your thoughts more interesting as compared to articulating them? Are you the one who is more into background color, music and other video effects while watching a movie? To wrap up, are you a video freak? If yes, how many times have you thought to turn your freakiness into cash? If you have not given it a thought before; do it now! Because we are going to tell you the right ways that could satisfy your passion and drive you massive traffic and finally massive income through overwhelming ad impressions. All you need is to create videos and upload them smartly!

We would highly recommend that you read these tutorials parallel to this one:

How come video Blogging is the way to drive traffic?
How To Make a video popular in YouTube?

Become a VideoGrapher:

You can think of turning your passion into profession. Just like any other career, you need to pay attention and work hard for it. Since, it is not easy to produce competitive videos without proper knowledge. As the very first step, you need to determine the type of services you will be providing i.e. will you be filming weddings only or do you plan to offer extensive editing and professional commercial videos. You may prefer to take some video editing courses to learn film aesthetics, web compression, DVD compression, adding after effects, mixing of soundtracks and the use of film-making programs etc..
Of course, you need some equipment as well such as digital video camcorder camera, lots of storage, editing software, audio equipment etc..
You can then sell your videos online, as there are many sites waiting for your creativity. You can sell your videos to istockvideo, rever or can make on demand videos at Google; just to name a few.

-Promote on Pinterest

Here comes your stunning showcase; Pinterest! You can pin your photos to feel the taste of flicker and can re-pin or comment on it, if you are addicted to facebook. Missing the video giant? You don’t need to miss it anymore because pinterest lets you upload your videos as well. So now you have your videos besides your photos on the same wall. If anyone is following your pins, he/she would definitely have a look at your videos unintentionally. It is just like that you entered to buy a showpiece but you came out with a painting, because it won your appreciation. Hence, do not forget to pin your videos at pinterest and make full use of it. It can gain drive traffic more than your imagination.

-Video Blogging—broadcast your blog:

If you are running a blog but unable to drive enough traffic; you can use video making skills to attract the crowd. Make videos relevant to the posts you publish. If you are writing tutorials; it would be a great idea to show all the steps in the video with audio recording as per needed. You can then upload these videos on video sharing networks such YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion. Don’t forget to mention your blog link in the video. Promote some of your other post topics in the end so that people follow you on your blog to find out what you have got. This would result in creating two different traffic sources for same content; search robots would crawl the text and the videos will gain traffic from video networks.

5 Smart Tips To Make a Better Video:

We will quickly share some of the fundamental tips that you need to consider while making videos.

Your video should be easily understandable with subtitles, if required.
Present quality tutorials with easy to follow steps. Don’t make fast moves while teaching someone.
Do not speak too fast even if you are fluent enough with English because many people find it difficult to grab. Use simple language and speak as if you are talking to a naïve.
Apply all the SEO tips and tricks for selecting the title, adding the description and tag it properly.
Do not try to make video for nothing. Create one when its need is properly justified.

Your Say:

Today’s post was a bit different and did not focus our blogger fellows. Still, our blogger friends should give thought to video blogging because if you are not good at making video; you still have an option to embed one from YouTube that will add spice to your post. You can also make simple tutorials which consist of desktop recording using camtasia or camstudio. All this will add up to your current blog and website traffic and increase the number of your daily unique visitors and page impressions. How did you find our post? Was it informative enough or did we miss something?We are waiting for your positive criticism.
Cheers!