SEO Blogging » Tips

SEO Tips to Increase Traffic

Anna — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:59:14 +0000

SEO or search engine optimization is very important for blog sites to increase following and attract new readers. Through SEOs readers can actually know that your blog exists. Here are some tips that you can utilize to increase readership. Otherwise, it will remain invisible and it will be buried along with the many blog sites out there.

Strategic keyword placement is a common technique, for the reason that search engines such as Google and Yahoo, rank sites based on keywords. Your title must have a primary keyword which you can use in headings or other tags in your content. Ensure that image text descriptions or alternate tags contain keywords that are used in your blog posts.

When you link to other pages or websites use keyword-rich links. Make sure that you have the right keyword count. Use these keywords as often as possible, but avoid overkill. A keyword density of 3% should be safe. Use synonyms for your keywords because search engines give attention to them. It also helps reduce monotony and keep readers interested.

Link your blog to blog search engines or other websites and even competitors. It is even better if you can get them to link you. It makes search engines think that you have great bearing. Search engine algorithms give websites different ranks and indexes. Google for example has a unique algorithm which detects additional SEO tips and techniques. Sitemaps and robots.txt files are also other common ways to make search engines aware of parts of your site that you want and do not want to be indexed.

Image from FindYourSearch

What to Do When your Blog is Attacked Online

Mel — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 05:01:03 +0000

Blogging has been one of the most popular things that people do today. Anyone can have their own blog site and write their opinion or write about anything they want. As long they have followers and their posts are interesting to many, it is fine. Now if you are a blog writer and some of your posts were highlighted and you have received bad comments and even a string of profanity from some of your readers what are you to do? Such situation happens to many. Even professional journalist received bad feedbacks from readers, most of them ignore these comments and go on with their lives because they are being paid to professionally but what if you are free to post whatever you like. How do you respond when someone attacks you personally because of your blog post which could be about anything like education? Click here for information.

First of all, if you have been attacked online, search for whoever attacked you. You can also enter your name on the user search to get other more blogs wherein your name might be used and then attacked on their own blog posts.

Check out what they are saying. You may have said something foul about their race, their color, religion, political belief or what not that made them attack you online. Next is to identify if they are damaging your reputation with their comments and feedbacks. Most of these comments would contain things like “you’re a dork or jerk or stupid. These can easily be ignored but they are posting claims that you were in jail or you came from a mental institution, these could easily spread and damage your reputation at which case you can set the record straight. Be sure to just straighten things out and not ignite another fight.

Link Bait Technique: Tickle Their Fancy

Sparky — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:33:00 +0000

Humor is something that is universal. It can be expressed through words, pictures, or video. And you are sure that if your blog is funny enough, you will get the attention of people all over the world and even get them to link to your blog.

This technique is perfect to bait links although I see one flaw – while humor is something that may be natural to some people, not everyone has the gift of expressing humor. I have seen so many bloggers try their hand at humor and fail miserably. There is nothing worse than trying to be humorous and having your jokes fall flat, don’t you think?

If you are not a natural stand up comedian, do not despair, though. I have seen many other blogs which make use of pictures and videos – which they collect from all over the place. This technique works just as well. A word of caution, however: make sure that you acknowledge your sources. Mention the person, the site, or the group which created that video or cartoon strip. Otherwise, you are merely plagiarizing other people’s content and you know that that is a big no no.

Another important note – you can use humorous anecdotes, photos, cartoons, and videos and still convey the core message of your blogs. This is particularly applicable to niche blogs. For example, if your blog is all about religion, you are sure to find a lot of funny content on religion. Use these to supplement your posts and get the attention of other bloggers who would eventually link to your blog.

Addressing High Bounce Rates

Sparky — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:27:14 +0000

We all know that getting people to visit and keeping the attention are two different things. Most often the bigger problem is not the amount of traffic we get to our site but the high bounce rate. After all with high bounce rates the very purpose for doing SEO is defeated. In the long run I would settle for a little less traffic with higher retention rates because that means that your SEO efforts are not going to waste.

So why do people really leave your site? What can you do to lower your bounce rate?

The top reason for immediately leaving a site is lack of relevance of a site’s content in the search user’s eyes. This can simply be because the user entered a very vague/generic term and you rank really well for some generic keywords. Or it can be because you knowingly opt to squeeze your way into ranking well for terms that you are not at expert on (Sounds familiar?). This can also mean that your site may have in depth and good content about the search term but instead of landing on the relevant page you redirect them to a single landing “homepage” where, at a glance, people won’t realize that the info they need is just a few clicks away.

If you know why people are leaving your site you will be able to make necessary changes. So remember – make sure users land on pages with content relevant to their query because in the internet where there are millions of choices no one will be giving you a second glance nor a second chance.

Fonts Do Matter

Sparky — Wed, 25 May 2011 05:12:52 +0000

With the internet growing at an enormous rate every day, websites are indeed in stiff competition. Most businesses now opt to go online hoping to raise public awareness of their products and services and improve sales as well. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to give attention to the details you put in in your website- content, graphics, photos, list of categories, etc. Improving your site’s readability is one sure way to get the attention of web users and prospective clients and keep them coming back.

First thing to consider is the fonts you use. Make sure the fonts you utilize are simple and can easily be read, not too small and straining to the eyes during prolonged exposure. A font size of 11 or 12 is best. Keep in mind that web users are fast surfers so you would not want them to change to a different web page right away. Fonts that are cool to the eyes and not difficult to read should be used.

For the titles of your websites and web pages, avoid using very colorful fonts. Better use a combination of black or dark grey or any dark due and a brighter color. Neon colors are a no-no. Choose darker or lighter colors if you must.

It’s best also to use just one font type for one whole page and even for the rest of your web pages. Arial and Verdana are highly recommended for fast reading. Readers usually go for the contents of your site but if at first glance they find the page barely readable because of your fonts plus a crowded page set-up, they will, no doubt, leave instantly.

Getting .gov and .edu Links

Sparky — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 06:55:37 +0000

Thinking of more ways to get links from sites that can actually pass substantial link juice? In case you’ve overlooked them you should look into sites with .gov and .edu extensions. Note that while a good number of .gov and .edu sites rank really well the extension does not guarantee good link juice, hence, it is still a good idea to choose among the .edu and.gov sites you want to target for getting backlinks. In general though these sites rank pretty well because they get high quality links and are of institutes that are reputable.
So how do you get .gov and .edu sites to link to your site?

Comment on their blogs – Of course some blogs make use of the “no follow” attribute which will render any links useless. So choose which blogs to participate in and comment on those that not only doesn’t use “no follow” but also allows automatically posts a link to your site. You don’t have to link drop this way and get censored for this irritatingly obvious tactic.

Write a good review on a government or university program – After you write one and post it in your blog make sure to let the department/institute involved know about your positive feedback. Most institutions like getting good press so hopefully (you can also hint on it) they will link to your blog post on their news pages.

Donate – If you see that they list donors and the contacts of the donors then do donate to the institution or charity that the institution supports. An added benefit will be the tax deduction you may get.

Common Coding Errors that are Bad for SEO

Sparky — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 06:54:36 +0000

According to Bing Webmaster Center’s Rick DeJarnette some of the most common errors that can tank a site include:

An invalid mark-up code – To make sure that your mark-up code is valid use a validator such as the W3C Markup Validation Service. Of course when validating you should know which errors to look out for by asking the following questions:

* Does your file contain a document type declaration (DTD) statement?
* Are all of your tags closed properly?
* Are your tags written in lower case letters?
* Are all of the tag attribute values, even numerals, as in

, enclosed in quotes?
* Are the tag attributes used in your code valid?
* Are you using deprecated tags?
* Are your tags positioned in the right place in your code?
* Are your tags nested correctly?
* Are you using the escape special character & for the ampersand character in your href attribute URL values?

After validation you should still test your pages on different browsers to see how well they fare and make adjustments accordingly.

Bad links – Bad links include mistyped and expired URLs as well as structural and site design problems that compromises your site’s SEO. Link checkers are available online to help you check your links. Some of the more common link problems also include:
* File Not Found 404 errors
* Missing page elements
* Mixed canonicalized links
* Navigation blockages

Other coding errors that can kill your site include:

* Missing, empty, or duplicate title tag
* Missing, empty, or duplicate meta description tag
* Missing, empty, or duplicate h1 tag

For a detailed discussion on each common mistake you can read Rick DeJarnette post here.

Full Content for Your Blog’s RSS Feeds

Sparky — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:27:08 +0000

There are a lot of times when it comes to RSS feeds that publishing your partial content instead of the full one makes a lot more sense. For example if you are an online magazine or a news site and have RSS feeds it might be a good idea to simply publish partial content to protect your content from piracy. Or if you are a cooking site or blog and like to publish new recipes. Instead of putting the entire recipe on the feed you can simply put a list of new available recipes and a summary or intro along with it. Subscribers can then decide whether they want to head on to your blog or site to get the whole recipe.

For most blogs though I find that publishing the full content makes much more sense. This is because subscribers are usually in the habit of reading the entire posts from the aggregators themselves. Unless you really have some content you need to protect or your format is such that your subscribers will see the need to actually head on to your blog then a partial content can actually be a turn off with most of your subscribers ending up not bothering to read entire post most of the time.

Consistency in SEO

Sparky — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:11:09 +0000

Consistency is very important in SEO. Without consistency the effectiveness of all your efforts will be lessened a great deal leading to wasted time and effort. For maximum effectiveness make sure you are consistent in:

Posting frequency – this goes for sites with blogs. Consistency does not mean daily posting but at least have something new each month or each week for your readers (and search engine spiders) to read. Remember to use keywords though (consistency again!) because the blog is meant to serve fresh content for spiders to crawl and you want them to be harvesting a good crop of keywords.

Format – this includes everything from your URLs to your page layout. If you have decided on the URL format to use then be consistent in linking/re-directing links to the preferred URL format so you can maximize your link juice. When it comes to page layout find out and stick to what works for you. To know what works for you observe the conversion rates for pages with different formats. Same is true for the use of headers, images, tagging, and everything else.

Effort – SEO is not a one time thing. You need to be consistent in your SEO efforts meaning that you need to keep abreast of the latest SEO techniques. This is very important because search engines constantly tweak their ranking algorithms, which can lead to new very useful methods that you need to employ as well as lend once useful or insignificant factors suddenly harmful. So constantly check the latest SEO news and be consistent in updating your site to accommodate new happenings.

SEO Conferences: To Go or Not to Go

Sparky — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:11:45 +0000

SEO conferences are everywhere with speakers ranging from persons as knowledgeable as actual Google employees to more obscure self-declared SEO experts. The question though is whether there’s even really any value in attending these conferences? The answer to that question is the same as for many questions: it all depends. Depends on what? I find that the value of attending SEO conferences depends on several things including:

1) The speaker(s) - The expertise of the speaker both in their field and their ability to convey information is vital if you want to get anything out of the conference. We all know how that geniuses doesn’t always make good teachers. On the other hand people who have a way with words can talk for hours on end without really saying something useful. So pick conferences where the speakers have a reputation both for their knowledge and presentation skills.

2) Your motive – If your motive is to learn advanced techniques most likely conferences won’t help you much since most conferences are aimed for those in the beginner and intermediate level. If your motive is to expand your network then by all means attend conferences. Just make sure your at your sociable best and don’t forget your business card.

3) Conference format – Conferences differ in format. I find that I learn the most useful stuff in conferences with workshops. The time given for each speaker is also important as well as the time for Q&A.

Take all these into account when deciding whether a conference you plan on attending will be worth the time and money you’ll need to invest.