Blogging Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings

May 20, 2011

Despite of many articles on SEO for Blogs, I am writing this one because most of them need professional SEO techniques and good amount of time. Here I will be sharing few simple tips which can increase your Blog Post’s Search Engine Visibility and can be implemented while writing posts.

Keywords

Keywords are an important aspect for Search Engine Optimization, keywords are what we input when we search on web, picking up the correct keywords thus helps a lot in increasing your Blog Post’s Search Engine Rankings.

Selecting Keywords
When you are starting with your post, it is recommended to include keywords relevant to your post and which are more popular. You can use Google trends for checking popularity of the keywords, and then include the most popular and relevant keywords into your post. Inserting more popular keywords basically means that they are searched more, and hence chances of you getting Search Engine traffic also increases.

Inserting Them
Make sure all the keywords are relevant to your article and it is recommended to have one keyword per line, too much of keyword density or too similar keywords will only help you score negatively. It is also highly recommended to insert the keywords in the post title and subtitles(Between header tags) and you should time to time bold, italicize and underline keywords in between the paragraphs to emphasize them when Search Engine bots crawls your article.

Linking

Linking is also a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization for Blogs, there are many long link building techniques and methods which give good results.

Interlinking
Interlinking for your Blog posts means that linking keywords or words of your article to other posts of your Blog. Below are two more good ways of interlinking.

Recent Posts Or Further Reading
You can also include a “Recent Posts” Or “Further Reading” section in footer of your post which will simply display related posts to your current post, this will alsoincrease usefulness of your article, like if your reader wants to learn more about that particular topic he/she can simply browse those links. If you are onWordPress, you can use WordPress Related Posts Plugin for inserting automated Related Posts rather than doing it manually.

Breadcrumbs
Its also advisable to have breadcrumbs in header of your posts or pages, breadcrumbs are navigational links which tells the location of your article,
like “Category>> Subcategory>> Article“,
Example: “Blogging Tips>> Making Money>> Choosing Advertising Platforms”. If you are on WordPress you can use Breadcrumb NavXT, it is a great plugins and produces breadcrumbs very efficiently.

I hope these few points helps you with Search Engine ranking for your articles.

Guide to Sitemaps – What? Why? How?

April 15, 2011

A website/blog is like a book, and thus it also needs a index or table of contents. In web terminology we call this ‘table of contents’ sitemap. There are mainly two kinds of sitemaps.

HTML Sitemap: It is meant to be accessed by your website’s visitors, which helps them to browse your website, see what they have point of interest in and increase your website’s/blog’s usability. It is simply a hierarchical list of links on a web page. Most of the (premium)WordPress themes now have in built Sitemap page template. Otherwise some or other WordPress plugin is always there to do the job. Click here for an example of a HTML Sitemap.

XML Sitemap: These kind of sitemaps are meant for search engine bots to crawl, you can submit one of these to search engines after building it. It is one of the most important aspect in large websites. Click here for an example of an XML Sitemap.

Creating a sitemap

HTML Sitemap

If you are using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla, both kinds of sitemaps can be built easily using various plugins/components, like you can use this to create a HTML Sitemap on WordPress.

Otherwise, if you have a normal website, you can easily create it with any usual WYSIWYG editor. You should start by creating a list of your pages, then adding the sub pages below the parent pages, and then linking them. After the skeleton has been made, style the sitemap page(using CSS), match it to your website layout and then put it live after testing all the links.

XML Sitemap

Creating an XML sitemap has never been this easier. If you are on WordPress(like me) you can use this amazing plugin Google XML Sitemaps. It builds your sitemap very adequately also, it notifies all major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, every time you create a post about the new content. If you are on Joomla, you can use Xmap it has much more features that its WordPress counter part.

Again, if you have a normal website, and you are an advanced user(who knows XML, HTML, etc) you can create the sitemap yourself. The below example shows a Sitemap in XML format. The Sitemap in the example contains a small number of URLs, each using a different set of optional parameters. Please remember that your sitemap should always be UTF-8 encoded.

{code type=XML}
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod> 2005-01-01 </lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority> 0.8 </priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-12-23 </lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00 </lastmod>
<priority> 0.3 </priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-11-23 </lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
{/code}

Thanks to sitemaps.org for supplying with this brilliant example,
you can see the tag definitions here.

The other and more recommended way to create sitemaps is to use any of the XML Sitemap Generator services available online, you can find plenty of them online.
The one I like is XML-Sitemaps.com (Maximum 500 pages).
It does most of the job itself, and just leaves the uploading part for you.

Specifying Sitemap in robots.txt file

You should include the location of your sitemap in your robots.txt file so that search engine finds it when accessing your robots.txt , you can insert it using the below code.
{code type=CSS}
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
{/code}

After you are done with your XML Sitemap. I will recommend you to submit it to your Google Webmaster account. Google will index it in a little while, and you can see effective results.

Other types of sitemaps

Of course there are few more kinds of sitemaps, I am including a few below.

RSS Feeds: They are not really sitemaps, but rather web feeds meant for feed readers, but they do work as great sitemaps for blogs.

ROR Sitemap: A variant of XML sitemaps, much more robust that XML and support various kinds of formats. See more here.

Video/Geo/ News Sitemap: They content links to your videos/geo-content/news articles so that they are searchable in Google Video/Google Maps/Google News.

Mobile Sitemap: Mobile sitemaps contain a lists of web pages made particularly for mobiles, for search engine’s mobile index. Here is an example of a Mobile Sitemap

Using Google services for a Website/blog

March 5, 2009

Google provides number of services/products to promote your blog or website on the Internet, the good thing about these services are that most of them are free for a very low price. These services are very helpful in various things. And all of its services works great for all types of blogs and websites.

Most of the services have a main focus for improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from Google Search engine via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results(viz. SEO).

Here is the list of Google Services for a Website/Blog :
In the order of their importance

Google Adsense:Offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. Its great for earning huge bucks and trustworthy too(Because its Google).

Feedburner:Allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. The best advantage is it converts a RSS feed to a Email newsletter by “Subscribe via Email” thing.
Google Webmaster tools:Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. One just need to verify the site and add Sitemaps.
Google Analytics:Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives.

Google Apps:
Google Apps provide with Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites complement traditional office software to make teamwork easier. The best thing is it provides with a Email ID of your Domain just by adding MX data into your domain (Eg: [email protected]).
Google Friend Connect:
Grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Google Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website.
Google Custom Search:
Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine for your very own site.

Social Media for Promoting a Web Site/Blog

January 27, 2009

Social Media is a great tool for Everyone these Day’s, It helps everyone to carry out various activities. It refers to a place where the content is not given by the Web Site employees, But given by its various user’s. Social Media is mainly used for Communication or Marketing.

Communication:

It refers for communicating to people through Social Media. Like chatting to Friends with Facebook and interacting to people and participating in various Forum’s.

Advertising/Publicizing:
Advertising someone’s blog or Web Site through Social Media is a great advantage of Social Media.
It involves the following steps.

Steps undertaken for Advertising/Publicizing in Social Media:

Social media marketing
This thing has 2 important aspects

1.The first is a way in which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media by on-page tactics. Such optimization method includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and Bookmark links so that their pages can be easily ‘saved and submitted’ to and for these services.

2.The second one involves the task of building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.

Social media optimization :

These are the method’s for generating publicity through social media,community websites and online communities. It includes optimizing websites so that it’s content can be easily spread to web by website’s own visitors/users it involves installing buttons like using RSS Button, Social news buttons, social bookmarks, track backs and widgets to a site’s page, such as “add to del.ici.ous” links and the MyBlogLog widget and stuff.

The Aim is related to that of Search engine marketing but the difference is the aim is to get traffic from Social Media rather than Search Engine’s. This is the first step and its not enough alone. If we want these thing’s to benefit us the page should have compelling content. A content which user will like and may share with his/her Network.

Other related thing’s:

Social network marketing :
It is the method of advertising one’s product(Any sort of Product) in a Social Networking Web site which leads to increase in Web Presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking websites, viral marketing which spreads throughout the web, email or word of mouth, or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised.

Search engine marketing :
Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a type of Internet marketing that helps to promote sites by boosting their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization(SEMPO), SEM methods includes : search engine optimization (or SEO), Paid placement and Paid inclusion, contextual advertising. Other sources, such as New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

List of blog submission directories

January 16, 2009

Web Promoting Services are the things which have helped blogger’s to make their Blog a hit. It doesn’t only boosts up the Alexa Rank but also a sort of Free Advertisement that can be made for one’s Blogs Which results up in popularizing your blog. Many Pro-Blogger’s as well as newbie’s have starting using these things and It is proved that it helps to grow a Blog much faster.

These day’s using web services is a great thing now in order to increase one’s Blogs/Websites Traffic there are many tools available OR Web Services accessible for doing the same.

We may use Bookmarking Sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Technorati etc.Which come in category of Social Bookmarking to popularize our Pages .

Some people also use Twitter for promoting there posts Like they write “New in [blog name] [post name] [Brief Description] [Link(Most of the time in the form of tinyurl)] ” as their status message in Twitter or Facebook . Thing works great for Newbie’s as well for Blogging Pro’s. I mainly use Google webmaster tools and some Blogging Directories [Full List in the end] like Blogged. Google Webmaster Tools adds your pages in their indexing.

Search Engine displays a site according to its Traffic Rank so you can’t help it. Rather than giving good Meta Tags. We may also just Add the URL to Search Engine. RSS Feed Submission also helps a lot there a lot of them available for them [Full List in the end]. SEO(Sear c h Engine Optimization) is also a foremost step for these thing’s there are some Steps which help’s in increasing the traffic. There are many more services available in the net. Dmoz is a Good example of SEO

List of Directories

Blog Directories:

5starblogs

A1Weblinks reciprocal or $$$

Addyourblog

Allafrica

All-Blogs.net fee or reciprocal

Aviva fee