As bloggers and Store Owners we want to make our websites appeal to both search engines and users.

A search engine ‘looks’ at a website quite differently to us humans. Your website design, fancy graphics and well written blog posts count for nothing if you have missed out the critical on-site SEO covered in this post.

SEO is not dead.

Modern SEO is not about fooling the search engines – it is about working with the search engines to present your products and content in the best possible way.

In this post, SEO Expert -Itamar Gero shows us exactly how…

The Ultimate On-Site SEO Guide for store owners and bloggers

Ecommerce is huge business. According to the United States Census Bureau, ecommerce sales in the US alone hit $394.9 billion in 2016. The rising trend in eCommerce sales and its influence on offline retail is expected to continue well into the 2020s worldwide.

Understandably, online store owners are jockeying for position to take ever-bigger pieces of the eCommerce pie. To that end, SEO has always been a top priority for most eCommerce marketing strategies. Search engines drive the most qualified and motivated traffic that’s easier to convert into paying customers than visitors from other channels. It’s why websites are waging a constant “war” behind the scenes to outrank each other for keywords related to their products and services.

And while having lots of competitors is daunting, you can take comfort in the fact that a lot of eCommerce sites aren’t doing their SEO right. With a solid grasp of SEO best practices and lots of hard work, you can gain high search visibility without breaking the bank.

SEO Guide To Your Online Store – Remove The Headache!

Special Note about this SEO Guide:

This SEO guide and tutorial is one of the most in depth we have ever produced. [Over 7000 words and 20+ images]

It is easy to be overwhelmed and to feel muddled with SEO but in reality it is much more straightforward that it may initially appear.

The rewards for getting Search Engine Optimization right are HUGE!

In addition while this guide is particularly focused on eCommerce SEO, much of what we detail here is equally applicable to your blog or company website.

Two SEO resources you will need:

=> Google Search Console

=> Screaming Frog SEO Spider

What is Ecommerce SEO?

Simply put, ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing an online store for greater visibility on search engines. It has four main facets, including:

• Keyword research
• On-site SEO
• Link Building
• Usage Signal Optimization

In this post, I’ll tackle the most foundational and arguably the most crucial among the four areas: on-site SEO. In our experience, working with 1000s of agencies, we can attribute the greatest impact on overall organic traffic growth to optimizations that we did within the ecommerce sites we handle.

While link building and other off-page SEO activities are important, on-site SEO sets the tone for success each and every time.

The Resurgence of On-Site SEO

On-site SEO is the collective term used to describe all SEO activities done within the website. It can be divided into two segments: technical SEO and on-page SEO. Technical SEO mostly deals with making sure that the site stays up, running and available for search bot crawls. On-page SEO, on the other hand, is geared more towards helping search engines understand the contextual relevance of your site to the keywords you’re targeting.

I’m focusing on on-site SEO today because of the undeniable resurgence it’s been having during the past 3 years or so. You see, the SEO community went through a phase in the late 2000s to around 2011 when everyone was obsessed with the acquisition of inbound links. Back then, links were far and away the most powerful determinant of Google rankings. Ecommerce sites that were locked in brutal ranking battles were at the core of this movement and competition eventually revolved around the matter of who’s able to get the most links – ethically or otherwise.

Eventually, Google introduced the Panda and Penguin updates which punished a lot of sites that proliferated link and content spam. Quality links that boosted rankings became harder to come by, making on-site SEO signal influence more pronounced over the rankings. The SEO community soon started seeing successful ecommerce SEO campaigns that focused more on technical and on-page optimization than heavy link acquisition.

This post will show you what you can do on your site to take advantage of the on-site SEO renaissance:

Technical SEO

As mentioned earlier, technical SEO is mostly about making sure your site has good uptime, loads fast, offers secure browsing to users and facilitates good bot and user navigation through its pages. Here’s a list of things you need to monitor constantly to ensure a high level of technical health:

The Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file is a very small document that search bots access when they visit your site. This document tells them which pages can be accessed, which bots are welcome to do so and which pages are off-limits. When robots.txt disallows access to a certain page or directory path within a website, bots from responsible sites will adhere to the instruction and not visit that page at all. That means disallowed pages will not be listed in search results. Whatever link equity flowing to them is nullified and these pages will not be able to pass any link equity as well.

When checking your robots.txt file, make sure that all pages meant for public viewing don’t fall under any disallow parameters. Similarly, you’ll want to make sure that pages which don’t serve the intent if your target audience are barred from indexing.

Having more pages indexed by search engines may sound like a good thing, but it really isn’t. Google and other web portals constantly try to improve the quality of listings displayed in their SERPs. (search engine results pages)

Therefore, they expect webmasters to be judicious in the pages they submit for indexing and they reward those who comply.

In general, search engine queries fall under one of three classifications:

• Navigational
• Transactional
• Informational

If your pages don’t satisfy the intents behind any of these, consider using robots.txt to prevent bot access to them. Doing so will make better use of your crawl budget and make your site’s internal link equity flow to more important pages. In an ecommerce site, the types of URLs that you usually want to bar access to are:

• Checkout pages – These are series of pages that shoppers use to choose and confirm their purchases. These pages are unique to their sessions and therefore, are of no interest to anyone else on the Internet.
• Dynamic pages – These pages are created through unique user requests such as internal searches and page filtering combinations. Like checkout pages, these pages are generated for one specific user who made the request. Therefore, they’re of no interest to most people on the Web, making the impetus for search engines to index them very weak. Further, these pages eventually expire and send out 404 Not Found responses when re-crawled by search engines. That can be taken as a signal of poor site health that can negatively impact an online store’s search visibility.

Dynamic pages can easily be identified by the presence of the characters “?” and “=” in their URLs. You can prevent them from being indexed by adding a line in the robots.txt file that says something like this: disallow: *?

• Staging Pages – These are pages that are currently under development and unfit for public viewing. Make sure to set up a path in your site’s directory specifically for staging webpages and make sure the robots.txt file is blocking that directory.
• Backend pages – These pages are for site administrators only. Naturally, you’ll want the public not to visit the pages – much less find them in search results. Everything from your admin login page down to the internal site control pages must be placed under a robots.txt restriction to prevent unauthorized entry.

Note that the robots.txt file isn’t the only way to restrict the indexing of pages. The noindex meta directive tag, among others, can also be used for this purpose. Depending on the nature of the deindexing situation, one may be more appropriate than the other.

The XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap is another document that search bots read to get useful information. This file lists all the pages that you want Google and other spiders to crawl. A good sitemap contains information that gives bots an idea of your information architecture, the frequency at which each page is modified and the whereabouts of assets, such as images, within your domain’s file paths.

While XML sitemaps are not a necessity in any website, they’re very important to online stores due to the number of pages that a typical ecommerce site has. With a sitemap in place and submitted to tools like Google Search Console, search engines tend to find and index pages that are deep within your site’s hierarchy of URLs.

Your web developer should be able to set up an XML sitemap for your ecommerce site. More often than not, ecommerce sites already have it by the time their development cycles are finished. You can check this by going to [www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml]. If you see something like this, you already have your XML sitemap up and running:

Having an XML Sitemap isn’t a guarantee that all the URLs listed on it will be considered for indexing.

Submitting the sitemap to Google Search Console ensures that the search giant’s bot finds and reads the sitemap. To do this, simply log in to your Search Console account and find the property you want to manage. Go to Crawl>Sitemaps and click the “Add/Test New Sitemap” button on the upper right. Just enter the URL slug of your XML sitemap and click “Submit.”

You should be able to see data on your sitemap in 2-4 days. This is what it will look like:

Notice that the report tells you how many pages are submitted (listed) in the sitemap and how many Google indexed. In a lot of cases, ecommerce sites will not get every page they submit in the sitemap indexed by Google. A page may not be indexed due to one of several reasons including:

• The URL is Dead – If a page has been deliberately deleted or is afflicted with technical problems, it will likely yield 4xx or 5xx errors. If the URL is listed in the sitemap, Google will not index a page from a URL that is not working properly. Similarly, if a once-live page that’s listed in the sitemap goes down for long periods of time, it may be taken off the Google index.
• The URL is Redirected – When a URL is redirected and is yielding either a 301 or a 302 response code, there’s no sense to have it in the sitemap. The redirect’s target page should instead be listed if it’s not there already. If a redirecting URL is listed in a sitemap, there’s a good chance Google will simply ignore it and report it as not indexed.
• The URL is being Blocked – As discussed under the robots.txt section, not all pages in an ecommerce site need to be indexed. If a webpage is being blocked by robots.txt or the noindex meta tag, there’s no sense listing it on the XML sitemap. Search Console will count it as not being indexed precisely because you asked it not to be.

Checkout pages, blog tag pages and other product pages with duplicate content are examples of pages that need not be listed in the XML sitemap.

• The URL has a Canonical Link – The rel=canonical HTML tag is often used in online stores to tell search engines which page they want indexed out of several very similar pages. This often happens when a product has multiple SKUs with very small distinguishing attributes. Instead of having Google choose which one to display on the SERPs, webmasters gained the ability to tell search engines which page is the “real” one that they want featured.

If your ecommerce site has product pages that have the rel=canonical element, there’s no need to list them on your sitemap. Google will likely ignore them anyway and honor the one they’re pointing to.

• The Page has Thin Content – Google defines thin content as pages with little to no added value. Examples include pages with little to no textual content or pages that do have text but are duplicating other pages from within the site or from elsewhere in the web. When Google deems a page as being thin, it either disfavors it in the search results or ignores it outright.

If you have product pages that carry boilerplate content lifted from manufacturer sites or other pages from your site, it’s usually smart to block indexing on them until you have the time and manpower to write richer and more unique descriptions. It also follows that you should avoid listing these pages on your XML sitemap just because they’re less likely to be indexed.

• There is a Page-Level Penalty – In rare instances, search engines might take manual or algorithmic actions against sites that violate their quality guidelines. If a page is spammy, or has been hacked and infused with malware, it may be taken off the index. Naturally, you’ll want pages like these off your sitemap.
• The URL is Redundant – Duplicate URLs in the XML sitemap, as you may expect, will not be listed twice. The second one will likely be ignored and left off the index. You can solve this issue by opening your sitemap on your browser and saving it as an XML document that you can open in Excel. From there, go to the Data tab. Highlight the column where the URLs are in your sitemap and click on remove Duplicates.
• Restricted Pages – Pages that are password-protected or are only granting access to specific IPs will not be crawled by search engines and therefore not indexed.

The fewer inappropriate pages you list in your sitemap, the better your submission to indexing ratio will be. This helps search engines understand which pages within your domain hold the highest degrees of importance, allowing them to perform better for keywords they represent.

Crawl Errors

In online stores, products are routinely added and deleted depending on a lot of factors. When indexed product or category pages are deleted, it doesn’t necessarily mean that search engines automatically forget about them. Bots will continue to attempt crawls of these URLs for a few months until they’re fixed or taken off the index due to chronic unavailability.

In technical terms, crawl errors are pages that bots can’t successfully access because they return HTTP error codes. Among these codes, 404 is the most common but others in the 4xx range apply. While search engines recognize that crawl errors are a normal occurrence in any website, having too many of them can stunt search visibility. Crawl errors tend to look like loose ends on a site which can disrupt the proper flow of internal link equity between pages.

Crawl errors are usually caused by the following occurrences:

• Deliberately deleted pages
• Accidentally deleted pages
• Expired dynamic pages
• Server issues

To see how many crawl errors you have in your ecommerce site and which URLs are affected, you can access Google Search Console and go to the property concerned. At the left sidebar menu, go to Crawl>Crawl Errors. You should see a report similar to this:

Depending on the types of pages you find in your crawl error report, there are several distinct ways to tackle them, including:

• Fix Accidentally Deleted Pages – If the URL belongs to a page that was deleted unintentionally, simply re-publishing the page under the same web address will fix the issue.
• Block Dynamic Page Indexing – As recommended earlier, dynamic pages that expire and become crawl errors can be prevented by blocking bot access using robots.txt. If no dynamic page is indexed in the first place, no crawl error will be detected by search engines.
• 301 Redirect the Old Page to the New Page– If a page was deleted deliberately and a new one was published to replace it, use a 301 redirect to lead search bots and human users to the page that took its place. This not only prevents the occurrence of a crawl error, it also passes along any link equity that the deleted page once held. However, don’t assume that the fix for every crawl error is a 301 redirect. Having too many redirects can affect site speed negatively.
• Address Server Issues – If server issues are the root cause of downtime, working with your web developer and your hosting service provider is your best recourse.
• Ignore Them – When pages are deleted deliberately but they’re of no great importance and no replacement page is planned, you can simply allow search engines to flush them out of the index in a few months.

Having as few crawl errors as possible is a hallmark of responsible online store administration. A monthly check on your crawl error report should allow you to stay on top of things.

SEO Guide To Broken Links

Broken links prevent the movement of search spiders from page to page. They’re also bad for user experience because they lead visitors to dead ends on a site. Due to the volume of pages and the complex information architectures of most ecommerce sites, it’s common for broken links to occur here and there.

Broken links are usually caused either by errors in the target URLs of links or by linking to pages that are displaying 404 Not found server response codes. To check your site for crawl errors, you can use a tool called the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It has a free, limited version and a full version that costs 99GBP per year. For smaller online stores, the free version should suffice. For sites with thousands of pages, you’ll need the paid version for a thorough scan.

To check for broken links using Screaming Frog, simply set the app to function on the default Spider mode. Enter the URL of your home page and click the Start button.

Wait for the crawl to finish. Depending on the number of pages and your connection speed, the crawl could take several minutes to an hour.

When the crawl finishes, go to Bulk Export and click on “All Anchor Text.” You will then have to save the data as a CSV file and open it in Excel. It should look like this:

Go to Column F (Status Code) and sort the values from largest to smallest. You should be able to find the broken links on top. In this case, this site only has 4 broken links.

Column B (Source) refers to the page where the link can be found and edited. Column C (Destination) refers to the URL where the link is pointing to. Column E (Anchor) pertains to the text where the link on the source page is attached.

You can fix broken links through one of the following methods:

• Fix the Destination URL – If the destination URL was misspelled, correct the typo and set the link live.
• Remove the Link – If there was no clerical error on the destination URL but the page it used to link to no longer exists, simply remove the hyperlink.
• Replace the Link – If the link points to a page that has been deleted but there’s a replacement page or another page that can sub for it, replace the destination URL in your CMS.

Fixing broken links improves the circulation of link equity and gives search engines a better impression of your site’s technical health.

Duplicate Content and SEO for Your Online Store

As mentioned earlier, online stores have a higher tendency to suffer from content duplication issues due to the number of products they carry and similarities in the names of their SKUs. When Google detects enough similarities between pages, it makes decisions on which pages to show in its search results. Unfortunately, Google’s choice of pages usually aren’t consistent with yours.

To find pages in your ecommerce site that are possibly affected by duplication problems, go to Google Search Console and click on Search Appearance in the left sidebar. Click on the HTML Improvements report and you should see something like this:

The blue linked text indicates that your site has problems with a specific type of HTML issue. In this case, it’s duplicate title tags. Clicking on this allows you to see the pages concerned. You can then export the report to a CSV file and open it in Excel.

Investigate the report and the URLs involved. Analyze why title tags and meta descriptions might be duplicating. In online stores, this could be due to:

• Lazy Title Tag Writing – In some poorly optimized sites, web developers might leave all the pages with the same title tags. Usually, it’s the site’s brand name. This can be addressed by editing the title tags and appropriately naming each page according to the essence of its content.
• Very Similar Products – Some online stores have products that have very similar properties. For example, an ecommerce store that sells garments can sell a shirt that comes in 10 different colors. If each color is treated as a unique SKU and comes with its own page, the title tags and meta descriptions can be very similar.

As mentioned in a previous section, using the rel=canonical HTML element can point bots to the version of these pages that you want indexed. It will also help search engines understand that the duplication in your site is by design.

• Accidental Duplication – In some cases, ecommerce CMS platforms could be misconfigured and run amok with page duplications. If this happens, a web developer’s help in addressing the root cause is necessary. You will likely need to delete the duplicate pages and 301 redirect them to the original.

Bonus: the pages identified as having short or long title tags and meta descriptions can be dealt with simply by editing these fields and making sure length parameters are followed. More on that in the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions section of this guide.

Site Speed

Over the years, site speed has become one of the most important ranking factors in Google. For your online store to reach its full ranking potential, it has to load quickly for both mobile and desktop devices. In competitive keyword battles between rival online stores, the site that has the edge in site speed usually outperforms its slower competitors.

To test how well your site performs in the speed department, go to Google PageSpeed insights. Copy and paste the URL of the page you want to test and hit Enter.

Google will rate the page on a scale of 1-100. 85 and above are the preferred scores. In this example, the site tested was way below the ideal speed on desktop and mobile. Fortunately, Google provides technical advice on how to address the load time issues. Page compression, better caching, minifying CSS files and other techniques can greatly improve performance. Your web developer and designer will be able to help you with these improvements.

Secure URLs

A couple of years ago, Google announced that they’re making secure URLs a ranking factor. This compelled a lot of ecommerce sites to adopt the protocol in pursuit of organic traffic gains. While we observed the SEO benefits to be marginal, the true winners are end users who enjoy more secure shopping experiences where data security is harder to compromise.

You can verify if your online store uses secure URLs by checking for the padlock icon in the address bar of your web browser. If it’s not there, you might want to consider having it implemented by your dev. To date, most ecommerce sites only have secure URLs in their checkout pages. However, more and more online store owners are making the switch to the SSL protocol.

Implementing secure URLs in an ecommerce site can be a daunting task. Search engines see HTTP and HTTPS counterpart pages as two different web addresses. Therefore, you’d have to re-create every page in your site in HTTPS and 301 redirect all the old HTTP equivalents to make things work. Needless to say, this is a major decision where SEO is just one of several factors to consider.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing individual pages for greater search visibility. This mainly involves increasing content quality and making sure keywords are present in elements of each page where they count.

On-page SEO can be a huge task for big ecommerce sites but it has to be done at some point. Here are the elements of each page that you should be looking to tweak:

Canonical URL Slugs

One of the things search engines look at when gauging a page’s relevance to keywords is its URL slug. Search engines prefer URLs that contain real words over undecipherable characters. For instance, a URL like [www.clothes.com/112-656-11455] might technically work, but search engines would get a better idea on what it’s about if it looked more like [www.yourshop.com/pants]. URLs that use real words instead of alphanumeric combinations are referred to as “canonical URLs.” These are not to be confused with the earlier-mentioned rel=canonical links, which have nothing to do with URL slugs.

Most online shopping platforms make ready use of canonical URLs. However, some might not and this is something you need to look out for. Your web developer will be able to help you set up canonical URL slugs if it’s not what your CMS uses out of the box.

SEO Guide – Meta Directives

Aside from the robots.txt file, there’s another way to restrict indexing on your pages. This is by using what’s known as meta directives tags. Simply put, these are HTML instructions within the <head> part of each page’s source code which tell bots what they can and can’t do with a page. The most common ones are:

• Noindex – This tag tells search engines not to index a page. Similar to the effects of a robots.txt disallow, a page will not be listed in the SERPs if it has this tag. The difference, however, is the fact that a responsible bot will not crawl a page restricted by robots.txt while a page with noindex will still be crawled – it just won’t be indexed. In that regard, search spiders can still pass through a noindexed page’s links and link equity can still flow through those links.

The noindex tag is best used for excluding blog tag pages, unoptimized category pages and checkout pages.

• Noarchive – This meta tag allows bots to index your page but not to keep a cached version of it in their storage.
• Noodp – This tag tells bots not to list a site in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
• Nofollow – This tag tells search engines that the page may be indexed but the links in it should not be followed.

As discussed earlier, it’s best to be judicious when deciding which pages you should allow Google to index. Here are a few quick tips on how to handle indexing for common page types:

• Home Page – Allow indexing.
• Product Category Pages – Allow indexing. As much as possible, add breadth to these pages by enhancing the page’s copy. More on that under the “Unique Category and Product Copy” section.
• Product Pages – Allow indexing only if your pages have unique copy written for them. If you picked up the product descriptions from a catalog or a manufacturer’s site, disallow indexing with the “noindex,follow” meta tag.
• Blog Article Pages – If your online store has a blog, by all means allow search engines to index your articles.
• Blog Category Pages – Allow indexing only if you’ve added unique content. Otherwise, use the “noindex,follow” tag.
• Blog Tag Pages – Use the “noindex,follow” tag.
• Blog Author Archives – Use the “noindex,follow” tag.
• Blog Date Archives – Use the “noindex,follow” tag.

Popular ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento and WordPress all have built-in functionalities or plugins that allow web admins to easily manage meta directives in a page.

In cases where you’re wondering why a particular page isn’t being indexed or why a supposedly restricted page is appearing in the SERPs, you can manually check their source codes. Alternatively, you can audit your entire site’s meta directives list by running a Screaming Frog crawl.

After running a crawl, simply check the Meta Robots column. You should be able to see what meta directive tags each page has in your site. As with any Screaming Frog report, you can export this to an Excel sheet for easier data management.

Title Tags

The title tag remains the most important on-page ranking factor to most search engines. This is the text that headlines search result and its main function is to tell human searchers and bots what a page is about in 60 characters or less.

Due to the brevity and importance that title tags innately have, it’s crucial for any ecommerce SEO campaign to get these right. Well-written title tags must have the following qualities to maximize a page’s ability to rank:

• 60 characters or less including spaces
• Just give the gist of what the page is about
• Must mention the page’s primary keyword early on
• Must cater to buying intent by mentioning purchase action words
• Optionally,mention the site’s brand
• Uses separators such as “-“ and “|” to demarcate the title tag’s core and the brand name.

Here’s an example of a good title tag:

Buy Denim Jeans Online | Men’sWear.com

We see that the purchase word “Buy” is present but the product type “Denim Jeans” is still mentioned early on. The word “Online” is also mentioned to indicate that the purchase can be made over the Internet and the page won’t just tell the searcher where he or she can buy physically. The brand of the online store is also mentioned but the whole text block is still within the 60-character recommended length.

SEO Guide – Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the text blocks that you can see under the title tags in search results. Unlike title tags, these aren’t direct ranking factors. As a matter of fact, you can get away with not writing them and Google would just pick up text from the page’s content that it deems most relevant to a query.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about meta descriptions, though. When written in a well-phrased and compelling manner, these can determine whether a user clicks on your listing or goes to a competitor’s page. The meta description may not be a ranking factor but a page’s click-through rate (CTR) certainly is. CTR is an important engagement signal that Google uses to see which search results satisfy their users’ intent best.

Good meta descriptions have the following qualities:

• Roughly 160 characters in length (including spaces)
• Provides users an idea of what to expect from the page
• Mentions the page’s main keyword at least once
• Makes a short but compelling case on why the user should click on the listing

Here’s a nice sample from an online store which ranks number 1 on Google for the keyword “cheap printer inks.”

Notice how the meta description makes it clear from the start that they sell the products mentioned in the query with the phrase “Shop for ink cartridges, printer cartridges and toner cartridges.” This part also mentions the main keywords that the site targets. Meanwhile, the phrase “Find cheap printer ink for all brands at Carrotink.com. Free Shipping!” conveys additional details such as the brands covered and the value-add offer that promises free shipping. In much less than 160 characters, the listing tells shoppers looking for affordable inks that CarrotInk.com is a good destination for them.

SEO Guide – Header Text

Header text is the general term for text on a webpage that’s formatted with the H1, H2, and H3 elements. This text is used to make headline and sub-headline text stand out, giving it more visual weight to users and contextual weight to search engines.

In online stores, it’s important to format main page headlines with the H1 tag. Typically, the product or category name is automatically made the main header text like we see in the example blow. Sub-headings that indicate the page’s various sections can then be marked up as H2, H3 and so on.

If your online store publishes articles and blog posts, remember to format main headlines in H1 and sub-headings in H2 and H3 as well. Effective header text is brief, direct and indicative of the context that the text under it conveys. It preferably mentions the main keyword in the text it headlines at least once.

If you want to check whether all your pages have proper header text, you can do an audit with Screaming Frog. Simply run a crawl and filter the results to just HTML using the Filter drop-down on the top left section of the app window. You can find column headings that say “H1-1”and “H2-1” when you scroll right. The text there are the headings in the page.

You can export these to Excel for easy data management and reference when applying changes.

SEO Guide – Image Alt Text

Google and other search engines have gotten dramatically smarter these past two decades. They’re now so much better at understanding language, reading code and interpreting user behavior as engagement signals. What they haven’t refined to a science just yet is their ability to understand what a picture shows and what it means in relation to a page’s content.

Since bots read code and don’t necessarily “see” pages the way human eyes do, it’s our responsibility to help them understand visual content. With images, the most powerful relevance signal is the alt text (shorthand for alternate text). This is a string of text included in the image’s code that provides a short description of what’s being shown.

Adding accurate, descriptive and keyword-laced anchor text is very important to online stores since online shoppers tend to buy from sites with richer visual content. Adding alt text helps enhance your pages’ relevance to their target keywords and it gets you incremental traffic from Google Image Search.

To check if your site uses proper image alt text, we can use trusty Screaming Frog once more. Do a crawl of your site from the home page and wait for the session to finish. Go to the main menu and click Bulk Export>Images>All Alt Text. Name the file and save it. Open the file in Excel and you should see something like this:

Column B (Source) tells us which page the image was found on. Column C (Destination) tells us the web address of the image file. Column D (Anchor) is where we’ll find the anchor text if something has already been written. If you see a blank cell, it means no anchor text is in place and you’ll need to write it at some point.

Good image alt texts have the following qualities:

• About 50 characters long at most
• Describes what’s depicted in the image directly in one phrase
• Mentions the image’s main keyword at least once

Different CMS platforms have different means of editing image alt texts. In a lot of cases, a spreadsheet being fed into the CMS for bulk uploads can contain image alt text information.

SEO Guide – Unique Category and Product Copy

SEO has everything to do with the age-old Internet adage “content is king” and that applies even to ecommerce websites. Analyses have continually shown that Google tends to favor pages and sites with more breadth and depth in their content. While most online store owners would cringe at the idea of turning their site into “some kind of library,” smarter online retailers know that content can co-exist with their desired web design schemes to produce positive results.

One of the fundamental flaws that a lot of ecommerce sites face from an on-page SEO perspective is the proliferation of thin content on unoptimized category pages and product pages with boilerplate content. Regular category pages have little text and no fundamental reason for existence other than to link to subcategory pages or product pages. Product pages with boilerplate content, on the other hand, don’t deliver unique value to searchers. If your online store is guilty of both shortcomings, search engines won’t look at it with much favor, allowing other pages with better content to outrank yours.

Category pages are of particularly high importance due to the fact that they usually represent non-branded, short and medium-length keywords. These keywords represent query intents that correspond with the top and middle parts of sales funnels. In short, these pages are the ones that users look for when they’re in the early stages of forming their buying decisions.

Category pages can be optimized for SEO by adding one or both of the following:

• A short text blurb that states what the category is about and issues a call to action. This is usually a 2-3 sentence paragraph situated between the H1 text and the selection of subcategory product links.

• Longer copy that further discusses the category and the items listed under it. This can be one or more paragraphs and is positioned near the bottom of the page’s body, under the list of subcategories or products in the page. This text isn’t meant for human readers as much as it is for bots to consume and understand text.

For both text block types, the goal is to increase the amount of text and provide greater relevance between the page and its target keyword. The text blocks also provide opportunities for internal linking as the text can be used as anchors for links to other pages.

Product pages, on the other hand, represent query intents that are near the bottom of the sales funnel. Product pages match the intents of users who already have a good idea of what they want to buy and are just looking for the best vendor to sell it to them. The keywords that product pages represent are typically lower in search volume but higher in conversion rate.

Optimizing the copy on product pages usually isn’t too difficult as it is work intensive. Researching hundreds or even thousands of product details, then rewriting them for uniqueness can consume a ton of man hours. Typically, SEO savvy online store owners selectively do this for just their priority product lines. Product pages that are left unpopulated with unique content are typically restricted using the noindex tag to focus link equity and crawl budget on pages that have been optimized with unique copy.

When writing unique copy for product pages, focus on writing the following in your own way:

• The Benefit Statement – The part of the copy that lists 3 or 4 bullet points stating how the product solves a problem or makes life better for the target customer.
• Use Cases – A section in the copy where you mention possible uses and applications of the product.
• How-to Section – A part of the copy where you provide instructions on how the product can be used or installed.
• Customer Reviews – The part of the copy where you allow buyers to write feedback about a product. Just make sure to allow only verified customers to post. Moderating the content for quality and readability can also be helpful.

If you want to see a good example of rich, unique and useful product page copy, here’s one.

Category and product page content can also help your pages achieve position zero on Google. This is the instant answer box that’s displayed atop everything else in some queries. If the content you wrote answers a question in a clear and direct manner, uses proper header tags, and uses proper HTML tags for bulleted and numbered lists, you may just find that your content is being featured prominently in the SERPs.

Pagination

Product category pages sometimes contain so many items that it would look awful to display them all in one page. To solve that design problem, web designers make use of paginated content. This is a method that allows a category page to display a portion of the listings under it while keeping the rest hidden. If a user wants to see the rest, he or she can click on page numbers that take them to an identical page where other items in the list are displayed.

While this works great for design and usability, it can become an SEO issue if you’re not careful. Search engines aren’t great at figuring out that a series of pages can sometimes belong to a bigger whole. As such, they have the tendency to crawl and index pages in a paginated series and view them as duplicates because of the identical title tags, meta description and category page copy displayed.

To help search engines identify a paginated series in your category pages, simply have your web developer implement the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” element in paginated content. These elements tell search engines that pages belong to a series and only the first one should be indexed. You can read about these HTML elements in greater detail here.

SEO GUIDE – Aggregate Review Schema

You’ve probably seen search results for products and services with review stars affixed to listings. These stars do more than just occupy space on SERPs and catch visual attention – they also encourage better clicking behavior on the part of the searchers. For online stores, having review stars appear in product page listings can be very handy. These rich snippets can be the deciding factor on whether a user clicks on your listing or your competitor’s.

Fortunately, implementing review stars is relatively easy. All you need to do is add this string of code to your product pages and you should be all set:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>

{ “@context”: “http://schema.org”,

“@type”: “Product”,

“name”: “##PRODUCT###”,

“aggregateRating”:

{“@type”: “AggregateRating”,

“ratingValue”: “##RATING##”,

“reviewCount”: “##REVIEWS##”

}

}

</script>

You’ll have to fill in the ##PRODUCT### part with the product’s name, the ##RATING## part with the aggregated review scores of the product and the ##REVIEWS## part with the number of reviews. If you don’t feel comfortable handling code, assigning this task to a web developer will get things moving in the right direction.

Of course, adding this markup is not a guarantee that Google will actually show the review stars. The search giant has a set of algorithms to follow. To help your chances of getting aggregate review stars to show up, keep the following in mind:

• Add the markup code only to specific product pages. Adding it to the ecommerce site’s home and category pages will have no effect.
• Encourage real customer reviews and avoid fabricating your own review scores.
• Try to promote a healthy balance between reviews from within the site and from external sources.
• If you’re planning to have people assign ratings to your pages at your behest, don’t do it for every product all at once. Having every page suddenly get ratings looks unnatural and may be viewed disfavorably by Google.

Note that some CMS platforms are better than others with Schema markups. WordPress, for instance, has Schema markups built in if you’re running a Genesis-based theme.

Bonus: Link Building Strategy

While this post is about on-site SEO, it’s inevitable for ecommerce site owners to eventually think about link building if they want to dominate their search market niche. Income Diary has posted about how to build links the right way in the past, so we won’t go into detail on that. We will, however, discuss where to point those backlinks.

Generally, websites follow information architectures that are pyramid shaped. Imagine the home page as the tip of the pyramid while its main categories and subcategories make up the next few layers below it. At the base of the pyramid are the product pages. They’re the most numerous page type but they’re at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, picture the pyramid as one that has an internal water distribution system. In this case, the water is the link equity. Most of it comes from the tip (the home page) since this is where most inbound links point to. The equity flows down to the category pages that are linked from the home page, then descends and distributes throughout the product pages.

Having said that, the home page is the best page to point inbound links to if your goal is to boost the ranking power of all your pages. This helps the home page rank better for the short keywords that it represents while providing incremental boosts to category and product pages.

If you happen to have a product line that you are prioritizing over the rest, it would serve you well to build links to their respective category pages. This not only helps the category page perform better in the SERPs, it also cascades more potent link equity to your product pages.

Ultimately, good SEO for online stores is all about promoting a higher degree of crawlability and relevance to your pages. Adding the these optimization tasks to your site maintenance bucket list may look like a major task, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

Author Bio: Itamar Gero has been on the net since the days it was still in black and white. Born and raised in Israel, he now lives in the Philippines. He is the founder of SEOReseller.com and has recently launched Siteoscope.com.

Featured Posts:

=> Ray Edwards Copywriter | Podcast: How to Write Copy That Sells

=> SEO GUIDE: 10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget

The post The Ultimate On-Site SEO Guide for Your Online Store appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

It’s also the most fun.

Don’t be afraid to put a significant amount of mental energy into your headlines…

Your title is what audiences recall, even more so than the content itself.

It’s what’s displayed in the search results and their bookmarks menu – setting the stage for the entire blog post.

I invite you to create a word document with about 100 headlines for inspiration and reference it anytime you’re creating new post titles. Alternatively, you could just use the 110 headline templates in Traffic Domination.

Straight up, if your headlines sucks, your posts won’t get viewed and your site won’t keep as many visitors.

10 Post Titles Guaranteed to Get YOU Results

1. Classic How-to

A lot of popular blogs and websites have discovered formulas that deliver results every time.

One headline formula that’s been incredibly effective for more than a century is the classic how to. This is a great way to increase engagement, just be sure to deliver on your promises.

They don’t even necessarily need to start with the words “how to” to be a how to headline.

“How to Have a Healthier and More Productive Home Office”

“10 Step To Successfully Outsourcing Your Online Business”

“21 Ways to Dominate Youtube: The Ultimate Guide”

2. Identify and Solve a Problem

One of best ways to get new readers is to Identify and solve a problem with trigger words.

The top companies use emotional triggers in nearly every headline – another classic style that’s withstood the test of time.

You’ll notice major companies like Cosmopolitan, DailyMail and Yahoo using this style often:

“6 Instant Confidence Boosters”

“Parenting Guru: From Chaos to Access”

“Gene Breakthrough Restores The Sight Of People With Inherited Eye Disease And Could Save Thousands From Blindness”

3. Make A Statement

Sometimes we get writers block and can’t think of a clever headline… This is where making a direct statement is the easiest and most effective way to engage your reader.

“Twitter Goes Public: 21 Things You Should Know”

“Tips That Show Anybody How To Make Money Online – Guaranteed”

“Thousands Already Make Millions Online And So Can You”

4. Strike A Note Of Controversy

Blog posts that have controversial titles grab more attention.

Riding the wave of controversy is good for blogs that want to pull audiences in, get them emotionally involved and commenting on your site.

“Why All Guys Cheat, Fresh Insight”

“Which One Deserves To Die?”

“10 Reasons Civilization May Collapse Because Of Organic Foods…”

It’s a very effective tool for generating attention. Just try not to land on the wrong side of an issue or be disrespectful.

You don’t want to offend your primary audience unless of course you’re trying to not make money.

Remember, you want to pull readers in not push them away.

5. Shorter Titles Are Great

Concentrate on keeping your headlines to the point.

People like short and sweet and have limited attention spans – especially online!

“No Cellphones – By Law”

“Rob Banks Legally”

“Fat Makes You Thin”

Try to avoid wordy headlines as they dilute your message and distract from the point of your post.

6. Ask Questions

Using a question as a title is an excellent opportunity to get people to click through to your post.

When people spot a question in a title, they’ll automatically think of a response. It’s natural…

“Are You Too Clever For Success?”

“Want To Immediately Reverse All Your Health Issues?”

“Six Types Of Investors – Which Group Are You In?”

Increase the chance the question resonates with your audience by being certain it’s relevant to your demographic.

An easy way to do this is by installing a survey plugin like YOP Poll or FluidSurveys and asking what type of posts your readers want to see more of.

7. Use Headlines That Offer Explanations

Explanatory headlines make things instantly clear to readers by doing exactly what the name suggests, explaining something…

“How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads”

“For At Risk Youths, Learning Digital Media Is A Luxury”

“New Shampoo Leaves Your Hair Smoother – Easier to Manage”

Sometimes it pays to have breaking news in the title itself.

When you turn your news into explanations, your audience knows exactly what they’re getting into before they ever start reading.

8. Go For An “Intrigue” Style

Write a headline that makes people do kind of a double take when they read it.

Make them wonder and ask if it’s even possible.

National Enquirer is notorious for this…

“Father Goes For Kidney Treatment – Leaves Hospital As A Women”

“How Jack The Weakling SLAUGHTERED THE DANCE FLOOR HOG!”

“Wall Street Getting Kicked In The Face By Asian Techs!”

9. Try A “Finality”

Another way to generate interest is by using finality style (power) words like ultimate, best, exclusive, only, guaranteed et cetera.

If you can deliver after somebody clicks the headline, you’ll almost certainly earn a new reader.

“The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”

“Every Internet Entrepreneur Regrets Not Doing This Sooner”

“This Blog Post Will Make You More Money Guaranteed”

10. Craft A “Top List”

This is one of the simplest formats to follow, and it’s ideal for SEO and getting ranked in the search engines for the more competitive terms.

Put the topic first, ideally optimized for popular search terms, and then use a “emotion-provoking” description.

Numbers grab attention and tell your audience you’re an authority. It lets them know you have something specific, concrete and real to offer them.

“24 Rules I Follow When Creating Successful Websites”

“5 Ways to Make More Money Online – Even If You’re Just Starting Out”

“Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid”

These types of posts get us over 100,000 visitors to this website every month, click here to learn how.

Headlines are a critical element because they’re what draw the reader into the body of your post.

Recognize what posts captivate you and start a list of the headlines that compelled you to click – I bet you’ll notice something strikingly similar about each.

Identify that “something” and use it to your advantage.

If you want to learn more about how we get millions of visitors to our sites every year, I recommend you read the following posts:

• 7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic
• 101 “B.S. FREE” Ways to Drive More Traffic To Your Website
• 9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic

The post 10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Traffic to me is the simplest thing on the planet. It is so easy to get! All you have to do is provide people with a solution to their problem and they will come and read it & they will share it with their friends!

I have created over 100 ‘top list’ type posts which have been viewed by millions. They are so popular and well received that they have been featured on Reddit Homepage, New York Times, Yahoo News & one even became a Trending Topic on Twitter! The best part… I can get these types of posts created for just $25. Let me teach you how.

Why Creating Lists Will Drastically Increase Your Traffic

When you Google, think what you are typing in, lets say you are looking for a cure for a health problem. Just for example, you are going to type in Cure Acid Reflux. That’s a big search term. Same with anything else in the industry that people are trying to cure. Firstly you would be surprised how many people don’t name the article what people are searching for in Google. This blows my mind. Why are you calling your article something fancy and using words people don’t ever use, just to make yourself look smart. No one is typing that in Google, so you shouldn’t be naming your posts that.

I’m no SEO expert, there I said it. But I do get around 200,000 visitors a month from Google alone so it’s kind of a big deal for me. Here’s what I believe: Google ranks sites which are naturally awesome. Forget everything about buying links and social love. Just imagine that your posts are so cool, people spend ages on your site and people love to share your stuff. That’s what GOOGLE wants! Great content because they are in the content industry. There job is to provide users with the right content and the best possible option, if yours is not that, then you don’t rank so well.

Back to my health post, I will call it :

10 Ways To Cure Acid Reflux

Somewhere I heard that odd numbers work better for open rates and marketing so I often will change the 10 for 7, 11, 13, 17 basically any odd number that looks good. I will decide how many I want before I even create the post.

But lets look at those silly people I love that make my life easy when I try to out rank their articles because they name their articles something stupid, for example:

Surefire Ways To Eradicate Acid Reflux

Are you freaking kidding me. I’m sure some idiot will type in Eradicate Acid Reflux every month or two but Surefire Ways? No Way!

You think this is an extreme example? Heck no, this is a nice example.

Tip 1. Name Your Posts Something People Search For!

Here’s where top lists dominate:

• Firstly, they are quite long so people tend to spend a while reading them.
• Each part is in section, for example, our Cure Acid Reflux post, its 7 cures, so we have 7 headlines with each option. Because of this, people can quickly decide YES, there’s something here I am willing to do, so I will read it all. I think a lot of articles don’t do well because people are not prepared to commit time to read a page if they don’t think it’s going to help them.
• The title says exactly what you get, so you know what you are getting into.
• When shared on social media, again, people know what they are about to get. I swear, people will retweet and share stuff just because of the title, not even knowing if the article is good or not.

Step 1. To Dominating Any Industry

Post a crap load of top posts. That’s what I do, I show up in dozens of industry’s and just do the same old top list posts but for different industry’s. Here’s some examples:

Blogging/Make Money Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Blogger
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Internet Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Cure Bloggers Block
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

Photography Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Photography
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To be a Photographer
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Photographers
• 17 Tips To Fix Bad Photos
• 20 Photographers To Follow on Facebook

Health Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People in Natural Health
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be Healthy
• 10 Christmas Gifts for Super Healthy People
• 17 Tips To Cure Acid Reflux
• 20 Health Experts To Follow on Facebook

Young Entrepreneur Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential Young Entrepreneurs
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Young Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Young Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Stop People Treating You Different Because Of Your Age
• 20 Young Entrepreneurs To Follow On Facebook

Are you getting the gist yet?

And it doesn’t stop there. Each post can be done in so many other ways. For example:

10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Photographer… you could flip this on it’s head and do 10 Reasons Why It Sucks….

Tip 2. Turn One Top List Into a Series of Top Lists

Remember our post suggestion: 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

How about doing that with every social network:

• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Twitter
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Youtube
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Pinterest
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Google+

Instead of doing a post such as “20 Ways To Improve Your Website” – you could split it into a series and niche each one down, so for example:

• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Load Time
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Usability
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Blog Layout
• 10 Ways To Improve your Websites Conversion Rate

Step 2. Getting Articles Created (20 at a time)

So in order to achieve great success with my blogs, I need a crap load of content…. by doing basically no actual work. Want to know how I get articles written for $25 with a 24 hour turn around period, 20 at a time.

Just to confirm. I pay $25 for each article, I often buy 20 at a time and each article only takes 24 hours and can be written by thousands of different authors. The best thing is, if I don’t like it, I either get them to edit it or I can refuse to pay for it. Incredible?!?!!

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Love what you have read so far?

Get the rest inside Traffic Domination – online training that will teach you exactly how we get over 100,000 visitors every month to multiple sites, year after year.

You will also get access to a new bonus, 110 copy and paste blog post headlines that have got me 10,000,000 visitors!

The post How I Get Over 100,000 Visitors a Month With Top List Articles appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

We are firm believers in natural linking – in other words, we never ask for links and we regularly place external links on our website that takes our visitors to valuable content related to our subject. (These external links are not requested and we give them freely).

It is not rocket science – but the more valuable and helpful your content is, the more links you will get!

SEO at it’s best is working with the search engines to deliver your content to them in a format that makes their task of indexing your website easier. That said, just about everyone agrees that the more natural links you receive – the better your search engine ranking. So follow Glen’s guide to develop a safe and effective strategy for getting more links.

Building Links That Drive SEO without the Risks – By Glen Dimaandal

Link building is an integral part of every successful SEO strategy. To modern search engines, backlinks are more than just the conduits that interconnect pages around the web. They’re also viewed as votes of confidence that help search engines decide which sites to trust and prioritize. The more links you have and the higher the quality of the sources, the greater your site’s ranking power becomes.

Of course, talking about the value of links is a lot easier than actually building them. Finding relevant and reputable sites that will make good link sources is one thing – convincing the webmasters that control them to link to your site is quite another.

And while gaining links generally does good things to your site, there’s SEO Risks associated with over-optimization. Google and other search engines have algorithmic and manual measures in place to flag webmasters who try to game their systems. Sites caught amassing unnatural links from low-quality sites can find their search rankings abruptly dropping, leading to sharp declines in organic traffic.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how you can find, qualify and obtain links that help your SEO without creating SEO Risks that result in penalties. We’ll also talk about ways to quantify the impact of your link acquisition so you can justify the time and effort spent in pursuing link acquisition opportunities.

Taking the Risk Out Of SEO – What Factors that Make a Link Good or Bad?

Modern search engines favor sites that have good amounts of natural back links emanating from trustworthy sites. Conversely, they look at sites with suspicion when they detect abnormally high numbers of links pointing to them from shady websites.

Knowing how to tell one from the other can spell the difference between a successful SEO campaign and an outright failure. Here are the things you have to consider when looking at a potential link source for your site:

• Type of Link – There are a few different reasons why webmasters link. It could be for navigational purposes to help users find their ways through a site. It could also be commercially motivated, as seen in banner ads and affiliate links. As far as SEO is concerned, though, the best links are those of the editorial variety. These are links that webmasters use to reference information sources in other pages or websites. The target pages are usually topically related to the linking page and are good sources of data on a subject matter.

Editorial links are given and not paid for. They’re usually mentioned within a page’s HTML body and are contextually suggestive of what the reader will find in the pages they point to. Search engines usually place more weight on these links compared to those that are in the header, sidebar and footer areas which are usually used to display links to advertisers.

• Trust and Authority – A site’s trustworthiness and perceived authority on a subject is an important factor in how much Google and other search engines feature it on search results. Primarily a function of inbound links and brand mentions, the classic way of gauging a site’s authority was through Google’s PageRank metric. PageRank assigns a value to sites on a scale of 0-10. The higher the PageRank, the greater the site’s ranking power.

PageRank information was once readily available through Google’s own PageRank Checker tool. Several years ago, you could just pop a URL into the tool and it will give you the page’s PageRank rating. A couple of years ago, Google stopped updating results that the tool generated, forcing SEO practitioners to rely more on similar metrics such as Moz’s domain authority and Majestic’s Citation Flow. These KPIs allow link builders to see which sites are likely to pass the most potent kind of link equity.

Aside from raw link-based authority metrics, the type of root domain that a site is built on also matters. Google and other search engines are also biased towards government, educational institution and big brand sites. Anytime you can get editorial links from .gov, .edu and major commercial sites, it’s a great day for your SEO campaign.

Conversely, links that come from low-authority sites will barely matter in your quest to gain better rankings. While it’s normal to have some low-quality sites linking to your site’s pages is normal, having too many of them in your link profile could end up harming your rankings. Make sure that your time, energy and resources are spent on acquiring links from mid to high-authority sites.

• Topical Relevance – Links that help your search visibility can’t just be from sites with good levels of authority – they also have to come from sites that talk about topics related to your own content’s theme. Getting a link from Apple’s main site might carry a lot of authority, but if your site represents a local fruit stand in the Midwest, the link won’t help as much as a link from WHFoods.com, which genuinely talks about apple the fruit, not Apple the company.

• Geographic Proximity – Search engines don’t just consider content relationships and authority – geographic proximity is also a factor in what makes a good link. It’s only natural for a shoe retailer in the UK to get most of its links from the country. If it gets too many links from China or Russia, search engines may get suspicious and conduct a manual review of the site’s link profile to see how these links are being acquired.

When building links, start by looking at sites within your own city, state and country. These links will matter more in helping you rank for search results within the area where your target market lives.

• Audience and Clickability – The days of links just being bridges for users and conduits of link equity is done. These days, engagement also matters much in how valuable a link is perceived to be. The more that a link is used by a site’s readers, the more its placement is justified and the stronger the signals it sends to search engines.

Take advantage of this by pursuing link opportunities from sites with legitimate user bases. This allows you to channel not just ranking power to your site, but to drive valuable referral traffic as well. The higher the linking site’s engagement metrics are and the more the link to your site serves a purpose, the greater its contribution to your SEO campaign.

Conversely, avoid sites that seem to have been built just for farming content and linking to other sites. These sites usually don’t have active readers who’ll click on the links on its pages. They’re pretty easy to spot as you’ll see a low comment, social sharing and Alexa ranking stats from them. Over time, these links are the types whose values would fade and weaken.

• Position on the Page – Links on pages don’t carry the same ranking power even when they’re all in the body section. The position of a link in the body also affects how potent it is. Links that are placed above the fold (the area of the page immediately visible when the page loads) yield the most SEO value while links near the bottom of the body pass the least equity. Here’s an example of an above-the-fold link:

When you’re building links, see whether the articles on a potential partner site contain links that are above the fold. Ask the webmaster if it’s okay for you to get a link to your site in these parts of his pages or better yet, read their site guidelines to see if they have existing policies on the matter.

• The Nofollow Attribute – In 2005, the rel=nofollow link attribute was introduced to allow webmasters to link to pages they didn’t want to pass link equity to. Cases when this attribute can be legitimately used include banner ads and affiliate links. When pursuing links, be aware that getting a nofollow link will not directly help improve your site’s search visibility. The only thing the link will do for you is pass along some referral traffic and introduce your site to new users.

As much as possible, try and get links from sites that allow links without nofollow tags. However, if you don’t mind missing out on link equity and exposure is good enough for you, don’t let this stop you.

• Anchor Text – A link’s anchor text helps search engines understand what type of content that the link is referencing. If the anchor text is suggestive of what the user will find at the destination page, the link becomes more potent for SEO. Therefore, it’s generally accepted that a string of words that includes your target keyword makes for the most SEO traction.

However, don’t overdo your optimization of anchor text. Using exact match anchor text is an invitation to Google’s Penguin penalty. You can include keywords in your anchor text as long as you mix it with other words and make sure it’s within the contextual flow of the content’s discussion.

• IP Uniqueness – A potent link profile needs links to come from a diverse array of websites. Therefore, links shouldn’t mainly come from sites that share the same IP addresses. This is a dead giveaway that a site’s links are coming from just one true source – a sign that may be interpreted as an attempt to fool its algorithms through participation in link schemes.

You can check your prospect sites’ IP addresses easily with this tool.

Ethical Link Building Strategies Without The SEO Risks

Link building can be done in a variety of ways. It’s an aspect of SEO where you can get really creative. In theory, the best way to gain links is through the merit of your content. Websites with compelling content attract natural links from relevant sites. This route is by far the safest and most natural way to gain links.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the skills, patience and luck to make it work this way.

In practice, getting links by virtue of a strong content library can be very tough. Unless you have truly unique content assets that are far more compelling than anyone else’s. the chances of standing out are slim to none. In cases like this, you can consider taking a more proactive approach towards link building while still abiding by the search engines’ rules. In this post, we’ll focus on two of the most reliable white hat link building methods: guest posting and resource page link building.

As the name suggests, guest posting involves the contribution of articles or Infographics to blogs that cover topics directly or closely related to your niche. If the webmaster accepts and publishes a writer’s work. The writer is rewarded with a link to his own site along with an author bio that talks about him and his business.

Resource page link building, on the other hand, involves finding webpages that list information resources relevant to their content themes. The link builder then contacts the webmaster and suggests his site for inclusion by pointing to linkworthy content in it.

Both methods are ethical, scalable and highly effective when done right. The first crucial step is finding sites that are both topically relevant and are showing signs that they’ll be willing to link to sites like yours. The next one is convincing them that they should give your link a place within their pages.

We’ll cover both these steps in the succeeding sections but something else to emphasis here is that you are not looking for Unnatural Links. An unnatural link according to Google is “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

We shall assume for the purpose of this article that you only want to attract Natural Links – but for more clarity on unnatural links this article is excellent.

Avoiding SEO Risks In Your Link Prospecting Process

Prospecting is one of the most work-intensive parts of link building. Several years ago, link builders had to manually scour the web for viable link sources. These days, a combination of powerful tools and specialized techniques allows link builders to find, analyze and qualify websites by the bulk. Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Google’s Chrome browser
• The SEOQuake plugin
• Microsoft Excel
• NetPeak Checker (optional)

Step 1: Adjust Your Google Search Settings

The first thing you need to do is go to your browser and tweak your Google search settings. Under Google Instant predictions, select the option to never display Google Instant results.

Under results Per Page, move the cursor to the extreme right and set it at 100.

These tweaks allow you to display 100 search results on Google at a time. More on why that’s important later.

Step 2: Run Special Queries Using Search Operators

The next step is to run some searches that will yield just the kind of sites that make good link prospects. To laser-focus our searches, we need to use special commands called search operators. These strings of text limit search results displayed to just the listings that contain words which indicate topical relevance and willingness to link. Below are some popular search operators for finding guest blogging and forum link building targets:

For Finding Guest blog Guest Blogging Opportunities

• “Keyword” + “guest post”
• “keyword” + “write for us”
• Intitle:keyword “write for us”
• Intitle:keyword “guest article”
• Intitle:keyword “write for us”

Let’s see how these queries work. Suppose you’re building links for a site that sells used car parts. You can insert that keyword into any of these queries and get a lot of possible link prospects. In this example, let’s use the search operator “keyword” + “write for us.”

These are just three of the 60+ pages that we saw with this keyword and search operator combination. The query seems to be on point as we inspected the first few ones more closely:

++++++++

For Finding Resource Page Linking Opportunities

• “Keyword” “resources”
• “Keyword” “related resources”
• “Keyword” “related links”
• “Keyword” + inurl:resources
• Keyword + intitle:resources
• Keyword + inurl:links
• Keyword + intitle:links

Using some of these operators, we found several possible linking opportunities in the resource pages/related links sections of automotive sites:

++++++++++

Step 3: Use SEOQuake to scrape the SERPs.

SEOQuake is a great tool for one very simple reason: it allows you to export the search results to a CSV file that can be opened in Excel. After entering the queries and getting narrowed-down search results, all you need to do is click on the Export as CSV link to the left:

Open the file with Excel and you’ll find the data, albeit unstructured at the moment:

To make the data more presentable, go to the Data ribbon and click Text to Column. In the first step, choose Delimited.

Next, choose Semicolon as the separator.

The data will now be arranged nicely in columns, but you only really need the URLs of the pages, which are in column B.

Step 4: Pre-qualify the URL List

Since we now have a list of URLs that are relevant to the target keyword and are open to linking to sites like yours, it’s time to refine the list further by eliminating sites that don’t have substantial authority metrics.

For the most part, SEOs like to use Moz’s domain authority (DA) metric to gauge the potency of a prospect’s links. For our agency, a DA of at least 25 is acceptable. We discard sites that are lower than that unless they’re very new and are showing good potential with a strong following.

If you have a Moz subscription, you can check site Das one by one either with the Open Site Explorer tool or the Moz toolbar. However, doing that can take a lot of time and work. To save lots of time, sweat and electricity, I recommend using a nice little desktop called Netpeak Checker. Basically, you can grant the tool access to your Moz account and it lets you check DAs by the bulk. Simply copy and paste a bunch of URLs from your spreadsheet and watch the magic happen. It’s also great for bulk-checking other stats such as Majestic’s Trust Flow and Alexa rank.

If you don’t have a Moz subscription, you can still semi-bulk check URL DAs. SEO Review Tools has a browser-based bulk DA checker that can check DAs for you by batches of 10. It’s not much, but it’s free, so you can’t complain about that.

Once you’ve decided on a minimum DA, it’s time to cut away the non-qualified sites from your list.

Step 5: Review the Sites Manually

Just because Google Search says a site is relevant to yours and just because Moz’s DA metric suggests the site has a significant amount of authority doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a great link prospect. The final assessment of a site’s qualification is the eye test. You need to manually review the shortlist of sites you’ve prospected to make sure it’ll help move the needle on your SEO campaign.

Below is a list of questions you need to ask yourself that might disqualify a site from your shortlist:

• Is the site a competitor or one that’s controlled by a competing organization?
• Does the site have a decent web design scheme?
• Does the site have mostly unique content?
• Does the site have good grammar and spelling in its writing?
• Is it an affiliate site?
• Does the site have a unique IP address?
• Does the site’s content get shared on social media?
• Does the site’s blog get comments from readers?

If the site gets a favorable answer for most or all of the items above, it’s probably worth reaching out to.

To keep things nice and organized, create a tracker in Excel or with Google Sheets. Beside each URL, I suggest you also have columns for the following information:

• Domain Authority
• Email address/contact us page
• Article idea (for guest blogging prospects)
• URL of published content (when content and link/s are published)
• Date published
• Linking to (page on your site that received a link)
• Anchor text

Keeping a constantly updated database allows you to keep track of which sites granted you links and which ones declined or ignored your outreach attempt. This helps you avoid reaching out to the same sites repeatedly and it helps you establish possible patterns in attempts that succeeded and failed.

Reaching Out to Fellow Webmasters

Having a solid link prospecting process is great, but it means nothing if it isn’t backed up by an effective outreach approach. Outreach is the part where you send a message to a webmaster in hopes of persuading them to give you a linking opportunity. However, it’s never as simple as emailing someone and begging for a favor. You need to craft just the right string of words to make an impression, start a conversation and ultimately make a strong case on why the site’s admin should move a finger to help you out.

If you found a prospect site through the process in the previous section, it’s highly unlikely that you’re the first one to send that site an email with link acquisition as the primary motive. The challenge is to rise above all the noise and make your message stand out. Here are some tips on how you can do that:

• Start the email with a brief greeting. It’s good to be courteous but don’t overdo it to the point that you look like you’re sucking up to the webmaster.
• Introduce yourself. It’s part of regular courtesy to let the person know who’s writing to them. A sentence or two about you and what you do is more than enough. Personally, I like introducing myself in relation to what I am to the prospect site: a reader. Don’t write an entire paragraph about your position and your accomplishments. An outreach email isn’t really about you: it’s about the value proposition to the person you’re writing to.
• Keep the message straight to the point. Most site administrators will have an idea of your intentions when you send them a message, so avoid dancing around it. State your purpose and be done with it in a sentence or two.
• Read the Guidelines. Most blogs that accept guest posts will have a set of rules to follow. Don’t just barge into the site and start blasting with a message. Read the guest posting guidelines very carefully and let it show in your email. If the guidelines say that you need to suggest some article ideas, by all means do so. If the site requires an article to be submitted right off the bat, don’t just send the webmaster an article idea or an outline.
• Review the Site’s Content. If you’re trying to land a guest blogging opportunity, it’s a good idea to check the site’s existing content library to make sure your article idea hasn’t been written about yet. Browse through the site’s categories and tags or use the search operator site:<target site’s root domain> “keyword” to see what pages in the site Google thinks are most relevant to the keyword you searched. This allows you to get a feel of what topics still haven’t been exhausted on the prospect site.
• Let Them Know You’ll Appreciate a Response – After wrapping up the email with some pleasantries, make a statement that you’re looking forward to a response whether it’s positive or negative. Even if you get turned down, feedback from the webmaster will give you some insights on how you can improve your next messages.

There’s really no single best way to do outreach. Testing a few variants of a message to see which one works best is the way to go.

Writing custom outreach messages to each site you approach will work best because it gives the webmaster the feeling that you wrote particularly to him or her. Using templates heavily runs the risk of having a low response rate because generic messages can make webmasters feel they’re being spammed.

If you want a general idea of what a typical outreach message looks like, here’s a sample:

Hi,

I’ve been a reader of <target site’s name> for a while now and it’s my first time to volunteer to contribute. I’m hoping you’d be interested in a post titled <article idea’s title>. I checked your articles and saw that there hasn’t been much written about the subject.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. More power!

Thanks,

<Your name>

If you’re targeting sites for resource page links, a message like this would be fine:

Hi,

I just saw your Related Links page on <keyword/industry> and I thought there were some great listings there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to suggest the inclusion of <your site’s URL>. It’s a site that has excellent insights on <keyword> and I’m sure your users would find it useful.

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Sincerely,

<Your Name>

Again, these templates are just to give you an idea of what an actual message looks like. I highly encourage you to customize these and make it sound like the email was written just for its recipients.

If you get positive responses, thank the webmasters and put together your content asset as best as you could. If the webmaster sets a hard deadline, be sure to be prompt with your submissions. Some sites run very strict editorial calendars and you have to respect that.

If you’ve submitted an article but don’t receive a response, it’s generally a good idea to follow up in a few days to check on the submission’s status. However, avoid sending more than one follow-up message – the last thing you want to make the partner site feel is harassed. Keep in mind that they have all the rights to publish or not publish your work. You’re merely asking for a favor.

Measuring the Impact of Link Building

The analytics behind link building is a very expansive topic that would warrant a separate post. However, it’s important to know what to look at when justifying your campaign. These are the most fundamental indicators that your efforts are paying off:

• Search rankings – You can track these with a lot of different tools. We prefer SEMRush and Siteoscope, but other services can do equally competent jobs at it.
• Organic search traffic – This can be measured by filtering traffic reports on Google Analytics and leaving just organic search data. You can also see organic traffic stats under the Acquisition>Overview report in GA.
• Referral traffic – As mentioned earlier, the best kind of links are the ones that people actually click on. The Referral traffic on your site can give you clues as to which of the sites you acquired links from have readerships that are engaged enough to click on your links. You can find this report on GA as well. Simply go to the Acquisition>Overview report and click on Referral traffic.
• Organic search conversions – At the end of the day, rankings and traffic are just means to an end. That end is the conversion or the fulfillment of your site’s business goals whether you’re after sales, leads, downloads, etc. A successful link building campaign should correlate to an increase in the volume of conversions driven by organic search. You can observe this in Google Analytics’ Conversions>Attribution report.

Remember to set the baselines for these metrics before you start the campaign so you can show your client or boss what kind of progress is being made.

In Closing

Link building is one of the trickiest and most tedious parts of SEO but in most cases, it’s necessary. The good thing is that tools and processes are there to make the work easier and more scalable. The two types we discussed here are just a couple of many different ways to acquire links ethically. I’ll leave it to you to choose and use other methods.

About the Author

Glen Dimaandal is the founder, CEO and sole author of GDI Online Marketing, a Philippine-based SEO company.

The post Link Building – Without The SERP Risks appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I am often asked: ‘If you had to start over online, from scratch – what would you do to promote your blog and build up your traffic again as quickly as possible’

A very good question and one I have been giving quite a bit of thought to recently.

I think most people over-complicate traffic. They’re reading too much into all these techniques and spending all their time making sure their blog looks good.

There’s nothing wrong with having a great blog design or doing SEO the right way. But it is a problem when you’re spending so much time on the technical stuff that you forget your site’s purpose: to provide immense value for your visitors.

Extraordinary content is the key to extraordinary traffic.

So assuming you are starting from scratch or your funds are limited here is my Kick Start Strategy For Bloggers:

How To Get 1000 Visitors To You Blog Every Day

Step 1) Create Great Content For Your Blog

The number 1 thing you should focus on to get traffic is, great content. Why? because that’s what attracts people to your website.

When I’m writing an article, I have two things in mind. Firstly, I want to make it as simple for someone to understand as possible. Secondly, I want to make it as beneficial to the reader as possible.

So, with that in mind, how much great content do you need to get 1000 visitors a day.

10 articles getting 100 visitors a day.

20 articles getting 50 visitors a day.

100 articles getting 10 visitors a day.

Looking at these numbers, I would say you were best of focusing on less articles, that bring more traffic.

So how do you go about creating content so good that you can get 1000 visitors a day? Here is step by step what I would do:

Brainstorm and research high traffic keywords.

Great content gets linked to a lot, on both social media and blogs, but only if people can find it in the first place.

Links help you rank high in Google.

But none of this matters if you don’t target your blog post for something people are actually searching for in Google.

That’s where keyword research comes in.

Keyword research is all about finding keywords that get the most searches in Google.

To do this, we use Ahrefs. This has to be my favorite tool that I have found this year. It’s far better and more user friendly than any other tool similar to it.

Once you signup for an account (they have a free trial), go to their Keywords Explorer tool and type in the topic you want to write a blog post about. You want to find keywords that have a lot of searches but are not so competitive that you can’t rank for them.

Ahrefs will tell you how much traffic a search term is getting and how many backlinks you are likely to need to rank for this search term. It will also tell you who is already ranking for it, how much traffic they are getting and what other keywords they rank for on that page.

This is an important point to remember. Your blog posts won’t just rank for 1 keyword, but perhaps 100’s and in some cases, 1000’s of different keywords.

Write a headline to sell people on your article.

A headline is what attracts people to your blog post.

When we write headlines for our posts, we try to include what they will learn, the benefit from learning it and also why they should learn it from us.

A good example of this is: 10 Headlines Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers

They will learn the best headlines, to get lots of traffic and they should listen to us because we have been successful at it.

Another example could be: 18 Website Optimization Tips For More Traffic and Higher Conversions

They learn website optimization tips, the benefit being more traffic and higher conversions.

Create a top list article around keywords.

Our readers seem to prefer top list articles much more than any other type of post. I think this is because you know exactly what you are going to get.

Not only do you know what you are going to get but you also know how the content is going to be laid out.

I think this is key to their success because people want to skim content. They don’t want to invest time into reading long posts if they don’t know it’s going to be worth it.

One recommendation I would make is, link out to other websites in your blog posts. When we write articles such as 50 Most Influential People In Blogging, we link to each blogger. When they see the post, they often share it and link to it somewhere on their blog.

As mentioned earlier in this post, the more links a website has pointing to it, the higher it ranks in Google.

Make Sure Your Blog Post Looks Amazing

Optimize readability and proof read your blog posts.

We like to write content in a way that people can come to our site and quickly skim an article and figure out if it’s an article they want to read. I think this is a big part of why so many people read our posts.

Think about it this way, if you go to one of our blog posts and it’s just 2000 words, no paragraphs, no headlines, no images, are you going to invest your time reading it? It’s unlikely you would.

When we create a blog post, we make sure we use images, not just to promote our posts, but to split up the content.

Here is an outline of how we display our blog posts on IncomeDiary:

Main Headline
Introduction
Headline 2 (h2 tag)
Headline 3 (h3 tag)
Text
Image
Headline 4 (h3 tag)
Text
Image

And so on…

Sometimes we include sub-headlines for sub-headlines. It’s important to break up content to make it easy to read.

Step 2) Search Engine Optimization

Now that you have found a good keyword and written a blog post, you need to optimize your post for that keyword.

Optimizing Your Blog Post For a Keyword

Go and download a free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin will ask you what search term you want your blog post to rank for. Then it will tell you everything you need to do to best rank for it.

Such as:

• Including keyword in headline
• Including keyword is meta description
• Including keyword in first paragraph of post
• Including internal and external links
• Including an image with the name of your keyword
• Add alt attributes with the focus keyword to your images
• Mentioning the keyword enough times

Once you have done this, you should be ready to publish your post.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

A big part of how Google decides on where your blog post will rank in it’s search engine is based on how much it likes your website.

Google wants to link to websites that are up to date, user friendly, trustworthy and popular.

Here is a list of ways to achieve this:

• Have a contact page with address and phone number
• Get HTTPS in your website URL
• Add a sitemap to your website
• Always fix broken links
• Improve your page speed
• Make sure you have no duplicated content

Remember, you can optimize your blog posts as much as you like, but if the content isn’t amazing, it’s not going to get linked to, which means it’s not going to rank well in Google.

Step 3) Optimize Your Blog Marketing

Now that your blog post is published and it’s optimized for Google, the next important thing I recommend you do, is to make it easy for people to find your content.

You want as many people as possible, all coming to your website at the same time to view your new post. Not just because you want lot’s of traffic but because it gives you a better chance of getting even more traffic.

Think about it this way, if someone sees one person share your article, they often won’t look at it. But if they see 10 people sharing your article, they start to think, WOW, this must be good.

If you’re creating great content, you’re bound to eventually get some big spikes in traffic.

The only problem with spikes in traffic is that they can be gone as quickly as they come. The spike of a successful article goes down after two or three days.

But a good website is designed to turn one-time traffic into recurring traffic. After jumping from 400 visitors a day to 4,000 visitors a day, it goes back down to 600 or 700. That’s a big increase from where it was before.

We turn traffic spikes into long-term traffic by asking people to subscribe to our email list. You’ll notice we have a popup and an opt-in box in the footer of this web page which offer exclusive content for people who subscribe by email. Email is the most direct way to let people know that you’ve published a great new article.

Another way to get first-time visitors to come back to your site is through social media. These communities bring a consistent social buzz to each new post.

Here are my top tips for getting lots of traffic to a brand new blog post:

Email Your Subscribers

Like I just mentioned, one of the best way to instantly get a lot of people to visit your website is to email subscribers.

Every time we email our list about a new post, 1000’s of people visit our site. Some of them share it on social media, some link to it on their blog.

This gets us backlinks to our blog post and gives our search engine optimization a good boost.

This is an important part to the success of any post.

But how do you get email subscribers if your blog is new? Read this post about 10 ways to get email subscribers.

Mention It On Social Media

Similar to having an email list, you can Tweet/Facebook your article and a whole load of people will visit it. If the article is amazing, people will share it.

We don’t put a lot of effort into building our social media accounts because we know if we write great posts, our readers will do the sharing for us. Having said this, social media has been one of our best traffic sources. One of the reasons for our success with social media is we signed up and started using it way earlier then the majority of other people.

When I launched IncomeSup, something that was going really well right then was Twitter. Twitter was the in-thing. Everyone was jumping on board.

Since Twitter was new, the make money online niche wasn’t yet saturated.

I was getting huge amounts of traffic — literally 100,000 visitors in a month from Twitter. And I could take advantage of it so easily by just following thousands of Twitter users a day. Thousands of people would come to my profile to see who has followed them and follow me back, click my profile link, my updates, and so on.

Then when Pinterest launched, we were able to do the same thing.

We have found that often in business, we are able to achieve huge amounts of success by acting quickly and not waiting to see how things work out. Some bloggers may of looked at Twitter and thought it won’t last and decided not to join until a lot later.

Getting People On Your Blog To Read Your New Posts

This is also an important step in your blog promotion. One of the easiest way to keep website traffic high, is to keep people visiting page after page and coming back to your website. A few ways you can do this:

• Add a link to your top navigation bar. If people enjoy your content, they will want to look for more.
• Add a link to the top of your sidebar.
• Make sure the post is featured on the home and category pages.
• Make sure the post is featured in related/popular posts.

Ask Friends to Comment and Share (read why)

When I first started blogging, I would often ask friends in the industry to comment and share my posts. Most of them didn’t have any traffic, but that wasn’t important.

What was important, was if I was getting lots of comments and shares, other people coming to the site would be a lot more likely to comment and share.

Remember, it’s about momentum.

The Last Word:

Traffic is a Marathon, Not a Sprint.

Even if you’re doing everything right, it’s unrealistic to expect to have a ton of traffic and income right away. These things need time.

My brother didn’t make any money with Expert Photography the first few months. But he kept at it because he’d seen exactly how long it had taken me to grow my websites in the past. Eventually, he was making $100 per month, then $1000 per month, now he makes $1000’s a day.

Read more: ‘10 Best WordPress Plugins For Getting More Traffic To Your Website’

The post How To Promote Your Blog – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Well, you are not the only one. When you read about people getting millions of visits on their website and thousands of leads through their blogs it is only natural you will want to try it yourself. But after 5 or 6 months you realize that it is not working for you. Why? Where have you gone wrong? What blogging mistakes did you make in the process?

Blogging Mistake #1: Using a Weak Headline

People are judgmental. They will judge your entire article with your headline as that is the first thing they read. If you go by the numbers provided by copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 will proceed to read the entire article. So if you have some amazing content in your blog and want people to read it and share it, then make sure to write an equally amazing headline if not better.

How to write amazing headlines?

=> Try adding a number or some data in your headline.

Number headlines work the best among people. Don’t believe me? Below is the proof.

Address the reader by using ‘YOU’ in your headline.

When you use the word ‘you’ in your headline, it will make your post conversational, which will make the reader feel important and everyone loves to be important. Not just in the headline, use the conversational tone throughout your blog.

Add that emotional quotient.

Humans are driven by emotions, so make sure that your headline has some emotional quotient. You can use the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer that will help you to know the emotional value score of your headline. It is a free tool that is very easy to use and will help you avoid this blogging mistake.

Blogging Mistake #2 – Writing only for search engines

Decide who is your target audience? Whether it is humans or robots? Writing only for Google will take your blog nowhere, in fact you just might be penalized by them, so stop stuffing those keywords in your blog post. Yes, it is important to have content that is SEO friendly but it shouldn’t be at the cost of creativity.

How to write content that is both reader and SEO friendly.

=> Think about the writing good content first and then about SEO.

=> Make sure that your content has the ‘share value’ i.e. people would want to share that content after reading.

=> Create content that will help the user in some or the other way.

=> After writing awesome content you can use Yoast SEO plugin which is very helpful for WordPress bloggers. Through this plugin, you can check the number of times a keyword was used, check the length of SEO title and meta description etc.

=> Add social sharing buttons, and include open graph and knowledge graph meta data to make sure that your article looks good when shared.

=> If you have taken references from somewhere then link the sources as it will improve the trustworthiness of your article for Google.

=> Keep in mind all the On page Optimization steps and follow them correctly.

Blogging Mistake #3: Not marketing your blog

Around 2 million blogposts are written everyday and if you want to stand out among them then it is only possible through marketing. Your blog post may be very good but if it is not reaching out to the right people then it is not serving its purpose. You cannot expect traffic through blogs if you don’t promote them.

How to market the blog?

Social Media: Share your blog on all the major social media platforms.

Content Submission Sites: Submit your content on content submission sites like BizSugar, Growth hackers, Inbound.org, Hackernews, StumbleUpon, etc.

Emailer: Start an email subscription for your blog and send out an email every time you publish a new blog.

Contact Sources: If you have used any sources in blog then make sure you can contact them and let them know about it. It may result in sharing and linking. You can reach them out through Email, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Contact influencers: Try contacting people who have previously shared similar kind of content and who have strong following. You can do this with the help of BuzzSumo. You can enter the topic in the search bar and you shall get a list of similar topics and their shares. Click on view sharers and you can find the people who shared the content. You can contact them via Twitter and see if they are interested in sharing your piece as well.

Content Marketing Tools: There are so many content marketing tools available in the market. Some of them are free – so use them and see what works best for you. If the tool is a paid one, check if free trial is available and see if that is working for you.

Blogging Mistake #4: Not using images & infographics

A picture speaks a thousand words and, if it is an infographic then even more. If you don’t have visuals in your article then it gets too boring to read and the reader might just leave the page. So make sure you use relevant images in your article and also give alt tags to them.

If your Infographic is good enough, then the chances of it getting linked on other sites is much higher which in turn will also increase the traffic of your site.

Source – Zabisco

How to create good images and inforgraphics?

=>Hire a graphic designer

=>Hire someone from Fiverr

If you are low on budget then you can use the tools mentioned below:
=>Canva

=>Picktochart

Blogging Mistake #5: Not Monitoring and Measuring Results

You wrote a decent article, you promoted it well, now what? Now comes the most important part which many of you ignore and that is monitoring and measuring results.

=>Which of your blogs performed the best?
=>What was the traffic source of that blog?
=>How long people stayed on that page?
=>How did they navigate through your website?
=>What were the demographics of the people who visited your page?

You won’t get answers to any of these questions if you don’t monitor your results and thus, you can’t make any conclusions about your blog or any improvements.

How to Monitor and Measure Results?

Well, this one is quite simple. Install Google Analytics and spend some of your precious time reading guides about it.

Blogging Mistake #6: Blogging only about yourself/your brand

Being too self centered while blogging is not advisable. The reader did not open your article to read about your success stories and benefits of your products. As a blogger, it is your job to help the reader find some useful information, guide them in some decisions or just inspire them. If your blog does not help them in that then trust me you have lost your audience.

While selecting any topic to write on, always ask the question “How will my reader benefit from this?”

What type of articles you should write about?

The types of articles usually depend upon your target audience. Some of the things that you can try are:

How-to articles: People always depend on Google when they are doing something new or when they are stuck in a problem. So you can always provide them solution with a ‘How to’ article with step by step explanation.

Lists: Competition is a great thing and everyone is always curious to know who is ahead of whom so make a Top 10 list or Top 20 list and see the results.

Case Studies: Case studies work really well as it covers somebody’s success or their failures and people are always looking for reference that they can follow or avoid.

Blogging Mistake #7: Not formatting your blog properly

A poorly formatted blog = people leaving your site in less than 10 seconds. Formation of your blog plays an important role in deciding whether your audience will read your entire article or if they leave. Make sure your article has properly formed paragraphs, if you are mentioning pointers then use bullets, see that there is enough white space between two points, make sure that you use simple fonts, if it is a heading then bold it. Overall make it a point that your blog is pleasing to the eye.

Along with these factors, you should also keep in mind the formatting options that affect On Page Optimization.

Which On Page optimization factors you should keep in mind?

=>Use H1, H2 and H3 tags for your headlines.
=>Add title tag for all the links.
=>Add alt tags for all the images.
=>See if any of your previous article can be linked with present one, if yes the add them.
=>Check if there is any room for adding keywords.

Blogging Mistake #8: Not having a mobile optimized blog page

Even after the Google’s Mobilegeddon Update, if your blog page is not optimized for mobile then no one can you help with the traffic. In 2014, mobile overtook the desktop internet usage so the probability of people viewing your blog on their mobile screens is much higher than on desktop.

So make sure that your blog is mobile friendly and if there are any links to other landing pages, see to it that they are mobile friendly too.

Blogging Mistake #9: Ignoring Comments

If you allow comments on your Blog – do not ignore them.

If you are ignoring the comments then it means that you are ignoring your audience. You must have taken a lot of time and effort in writing and promoting your blog so spare some more time to reply to your audiences. Let them know that their views matter to you.

Even something as small as Thank you can go a long way. If someone has a problem, then try to give them the best possible solution. Even if it is a negative comment, don’t just avoid or delete it, just try to answer it tactfully.

Why you should start replying to the comments?

=>Because it makes your audience feel important.
=>Because it builds your own credibility and helps you to come out as a though leader.
=>Because more comments means more popularity.
=>Because comments can give you an idea for your next blogpost.

Blogging Mistake #10: Expecting early results

Look, early results sometimes happens – but patience is the key to success, both in life as well as blogging. I have come across many instances where a person or brand comes to a conclusion that blogging is not working for them within only 2-3 months of starting.

Expecting early results is one of the biggest mistake one can do while blogging. Sure, some people are lucky and hit bog traffic quickly (because they had something unique and timely for the market) but the truth is that success with blogging takes consistency.

Plan to write regularly – set aside a certain time every day to write is a good plan. As we said earlier – constantly be asking yourself “How will my reader benefit from this?”

Always think about the reader – what is their interest? what do they need help with? Combine that with creative and engaging headlines for success!

About: Jinal Shah
Jinal works as a Digital Marketer at EduPristine. She is passionate about learning, sharing and developing her knowledge in the field of Digital Marketing.

The post 10 Blogging Mistakes That Are Costing You Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Irina Weber from SERanking.com is here today, to enlighten us as to which tools are the most productive and best organized to help you succeed as a blogger.

Irina and her team have tested many tools of top productivity and blogging experts and have a good idea of what top performers in the blogging world are using to get through the day in a highly productive manner.

Here’s an awesome list of SEO tools that can simplify and supercharge your blogging efforts…

25 SEO Tools For Better Search Engine Rankings

#25. BuzzSumo

Content Curator

BuzzSumo is a fantastic tool that allows you to search widely shared content through social networks, gather all data about the content, define top influential content curators in your niche and collect statistics about all of them into Excel spreadsheets. It’s easy to use: just type a word and it will show you all the most popular posts on the web based on that particular keyword.

buzzsumo.com

#24. SEMRush

SERP Tracking

SEMRush is a great tool that tells you a lot about not only your own website but your competitors search engine rankings too. The most interesting information they share is what keywords a website ranks for. This information is useful because, you can see what posts don’t rank at all and which rank well but could be improved.

Semrush.com

#23. SE Ranking

Website Rank Checker

SE Ranking allows you to monitor website rank in search engines and any target regions. It provides advanced keyword analysis, website audits, competitors’ website checking, online marketing plans with an easy way to get White Label reports.

seranking.com

#22. Portent

Content Idea Generator

If you’re looking for good ideas and titles to write epic content, just enter a keyword and you’ll get a list of catchy potential titles for your next article.

portent.com

#21. Google Docs

Content Creation & Editing

This is a great tool where you can write and store content and check for any grammar and spelling mistakes. For more advanced features, you can easily change the HTML or CSS of the document and even collaborate with other people, in case you need some help.

docs.google.com

#20. Piktochart

Infographic Design App

Nowadays infographics are the best way to cover visual and interesting information on your site and attract your target audience. It is quite expensive to order infographics, but Piktochart will help you to create your own for free. Pie charts and graphs can also be pretty to attract user’s attention.

We’ve found it to be a great addition to the professional looking landing pages that you can create with OptimizePress.

piktochart.com

#19. ScreenPresso

Screen Capture Tool

Screenpresso can improve your screen capture experience. Right now with ScreenPresso, screenshots can look natural and eye-catching. Their powerful built-in editor allows you to grab an image or video of what you see on your computer screen, add effects, and share with anyone.

screenpresso.com

#18. Doodle

Task Scheduler

Doodle makes your blogging simple and more organized. Using a content calendar will help you to figure out how often and when you should schedule your blog posts. The tool facilitates the content process and gets rid of excess distractions.

doodle.com

#17. Dropbox

Filesharing

It is one of the most popular tools to store things like images, pdf files, and Word Docs between mobile devices and computers. You can keep your files secure wherever you go. Dropbox is easy to use; Simply save your files, add them to the tool and sync them with a supported app.

dropbox.com

#16. Windows Live Writer

Blog Editor

The tool simplifies the writing and editing of all blog posts. It is one of the most famous blog editors on the Windows platform. You can easily edit blog posts, images, videos, etc. You can also add additional features with lots of useful plugins.

windows.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows-live

#15. Ping-O-Matic

Pinging Service

It is one of the best pinging services to let search engines know about your new posts. You can choose different services that you want to ping. All services are regularly updated, so make sure you take advantage of the most useful ones.

pingomatic.com

#14. Keyword Planner

Keyword Research

Keyword Planner is the best tool to find and discover keywords in order to optimize your content, build up successful marketing campaigns, gather metrics about websites and get an estimate of search queries for target keywords. You can monitor and export your competitor’s keywords for better website performance. A lot of useful tools are built-in so the Keyword Planner can help you to create paid Ad words campaigns easily.

adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

#13. Toggl

Time Tracking Tool

A super simple time tracking tool, that helps you stay on track. It lets you create tasks, click the Start/Stop button, check out how the task is going and how much time you spent on it. It works online and offline and easily syncs to the cloud when you’ve reached the internet. It is quite an indispensible tool for bloggers who need to keep track of writing, editing and researching tasks.

toggl.com

#12. Grammarly

Grammar Checker

The tool makes your writing better by finding and fixing grammar mistakes. It checks different mistakes for sentence structure, style, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. It is a perfect match for a newbie and you don’t need to have any special editing skills.

grammarly.com

#11. Canva

Simple Graphic Design

It is the most-used image software and it’s because Canva allows you to create fancy and awesome images with a wide range of different templates for social media, website interface, fonts and more.

canva.com

#10. Mention

Media Monitor

It is a great real-time media monitoring tool. Mention is a great alternative to Google Alerts. It lets you track the keywords and mentions about your website, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral content. Using Mention you can also collaborate with your employees; share alerts, assign tasks, get them involved in the discussion and keep track of your competitor’s actions.

en.mention.com

#9. MailChimp

Email Marketing Solution

MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that helps send emails to a list of your users, create great email campaigns, manage all of your subscribers, share them on social media and integrate with any web services you use. It is easy to get automated campaigns every day that deliver all new posts you write. It is integrated with Google Analytics for better business insight.

mailchimp.com

#8. Buffer

Social Media Manager

When you publish a blog post, you can easily set up a schedule with Buffer. It will help you share different posts via social networks with custom images and titles. This is the greatest social media app, and it really makes it easy to update all of your social statuses.

bufferapp.com

#7. KeePass

Password Management

KeePass is a free and easy-to use password management tool. All passwords are stored in your own database with a master password to lock/unlock the database. The tool is available for iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Linux.

keepass.info

#6. Moz Toolbar

On Page SEO Metrics

Moz Toolbar is a great and powerful tool that provides access to all important SEO metrics, allows you to explore page elements, displays PR and domain rank, shows social metrics, and analyzes page overplay.

moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

#5. Screaming Frog

SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software

Screaming Frog allows you to explore all onsite SEO. It is a good tool to use when reviewing medium and large websites. All key on page SEO elements (headline, meta tags, URL, interlinking, duplicate pages, redirect, etc) are exported to Excel. It is useful to check out all SEO recommendations that you use for better onsite SEO optimization.

screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

#4. Rapportive

Displays Email Contact Information

Rapportive is a free Gmail add-on that displays everything about your contact’s (Twitter, FB, LinkedIn) on your inbox. It is easy to contact them without leaving gmail. You can follow them on Twitter and even friend them on Facebook. You can stay in one place, grow your social network and establish good relationships with people all the while, staying on top of emails.

rapportive.com

#3. Copyscape

Plagiarism Detection

Copyscape is the best plagiarism detection software that lets you find out who used your content and create an auto RSS blog with an RSS feed. You can try it free or use the premium version of this service.

copyscape.com

#2. WorkExaminer

Online Employee Monitoring

If you run a lot of projects, you probably need to hire workers to complete certain tasks. In order to increase employees’ productivity, you should always control their daily activities, working hours, etc. WorkExaminer is an excellent employee monitoring tool for effective website performance.

workexaminer.com

#1. Ahrefs

Site Explorer & Backlink Checker

Ahrefs is a powerful online backlink checker and site explorer tool that is very easy to understand at a glance. Ahrefs has a suite of useful tools like keyword analysis, domain comparison, batch analysis and competition analysis. It is perfectly designed for web masters and website owners that want to save money and get the most out of their business. Due to its rich functionality and a wide range of toolsets, it is poised to be a large player on the market.

ahrefs.com

We’ve had the privilege to check out many of these tools. As you’ve already figured out, blogging is a hard world to break in. With the right tools, you are sure to improve your chances of success on your blogging journey.

As of now, you’ve got a good arsenal of tools to make your blog ready for best of times.

Now it’s your turn to share your favorite blogging tools. We’re always happy to discover more about the tools that are out of there and currently working for you!

Read more: ‘9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic’

The post 25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

In 2010, Google confirmed that site speed is one of over 200 indicators that impacts search rankings. Their data shows that when pages load slowly, people spend less time. Yet most of us put little focus into making our websites faster.

Maybe fine-tuning the inner speed triggers of your WordPress website is too daunting.

To shed light on cutting your load time in half, we invited Stavros Papadakis to lay out his process for speeding up client websites.

If your load time is more than 3 seconds or your page size is over 2MB, that can be a big problem that’s costing you money, both in lost sales and server fees.

There are many free online tools such as WebPageTest, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom that can help you identify issues that cause slow loading times and bad user experience for your site.

Here’s how to take charge of your website’s performance.

1. Enable compression

Compressing your CSS and Javascript files will help browsers download them faster.

Gzip compression can easily reduce file sizes from 200+KB (non-compressed) to less than 40KB (compressed). As long as your server has compression enabled, take advantage of it.

You can be sure that your users will experience a drastic speed up of your site for both desktops and mobiles by enabling compression at your server.

Add the following snippet of code at your .htaccess file in order to enable compression for static files.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php text/php text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript text/x-js

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

2. Optimize your images

Images are the main culprit for slowing a website. Always optimize your images (especially those above 50KB) before uploading them to your website.

The optimal way of optimizing them is to use Photoshop or any other image manipulation software. Save images for web with image quality up to 60%.

You should also use progressive images for JPG files because progressive rendering of images provides a smoother user experience.

Please check the following two images, they look the same but the left one is non-optimized and is 80KB and the one to the right is optimized and it is only 18KB, 4 times smaller.

Non-Optimized Image

Optimized Image

3. Move Javascript files to the footer

Although Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools and Prototype are awesome because they extend your website’s functionality, they can also block the rendering of your pages.

Browsers don’t start loading the content until all the Javascript files in the header of the page have been downloaded.

An easy way to solve this problem is to move your Javascript files, those which are not required during the initial page rendering, from the header to the footer of the page.

If you use WordPress, you can move script calls from header.php to footer.php at your theme and use true as the fourth parameter whenever you use the wp_enqueue_script function.

Move JS scripts to the footer of the page

4. Make sure that you have KeepAlive enabled

Apache (the most commonly used server for shared hosting plans at low-cost hosting companies) has a great “feature” called KeepAlive which keeps connections open for more than one HTTP request.

Make sure KeepAlive is activated at your hosting company.

If you have access to your httpd.conf file, enable KeepAlive by making sure that you have “KeepAlive On” in it, otherwise just add the following piece of code at your .htaccess file.

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
 Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

Enable KeepAlive for your site

5. Merge CSS files – Inline small CSS files

Browsers only handle so many HTTP requests at the same time. When this limit is reached, some files wait while others are downloaded.

By merging all your CSS files into one CSS file only, the page renders much faster.

If you have CSS files which are less than 2KB, then you should inline them instead of making an extra HTTP request.

WordPress has a few great plugins such as Autoptimize and Better WordPress Minify that can be help you merge or even inline your CSS stylesheets.

Merge CSS files and Inline them

6. Enable caching

Caching drastically improves the load time of pages that do not change that often.

By enabling caching at your site, your code doesn’t keep generating the same page over and over again. This way the user experience is much better and your server can handle more traffic.

W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache are just a short selection of free WordPress plugins that provide different kind of caching e.g. page caching, database caching and object caching among others.

W3 Total Cache plugin provides page, DB and object caching

7. Use a Content Delivery Network

Whether you use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal or a custom-made PHP or HTML site, I highly recommend configuring a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

A CDN is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the internet.
When a client visits your site, static content like images and CSS files are served from the server that is geographically closest them so they are rendered much faster.

By the way, the load on your server is also drastically reduced thanks to a CDN.

CloudFlare is a free CDN and DNS provider among others. MaxCDN is also a great and affordable option to optimize the loading time of your site. They are both as good as they can get.

CloudFlare is a free Content Delivery Network

8. Minimize the number of HTTP requests

The more HTTP requests you have, the slower the loading time of your site will be.

Combine your CSS files, merge Javascript files, and combine images in data sprites among others to make as few HTTP requests as possible.

When I work on a client’s site, one of my major goals is to minimize the number of HTTP requests loaded per page.

Merge CSS files, use data sprites or data URIs in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests

9. Choose the correct file type for your images

Use JPG as your default. It’s the smallest and fastest loading file type.

Use PNG only for images with text (JPG rasterizes text which makes it blurry) or if you need a transparent background.

Minimize or even eliminate any heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down the loading time of your site.

Although the following two images look the same, there is a huge difference between them. The one to the left is saved as a png file and weighs 102KB and the other one is a JPG file with a size of 18KB, that’s right, 6 times lighter!

Image saved as PNG

Image saved as JPG

10. Fix your 404 errors

Believe it or not, any missing file generates a 404 HTTP error and will definitely slow down the loading time of your site.

Always check for any 404 errors during the rendering of your pages to achieve the fastest loading time.

If your “waterfall” (the way the browser renders your site) looks like that (watch out for any red rows), then 404 errors are ruining the loading time of your site.

404 Errors Can Ruin the Loading Time of your Site

11. Take care of your page size

Although it is tempting to display a lot of content in each page, you should try to keep your page size to the minimum.

This is even more crucial for mobiles. Having to load a 2MB site via mobile in a 3G connection is a recipe for disaster. Take into account that users do not like to wait for more than 2-3 seconds for a page to render.

Does a new image add value to the site? If not, then you should not add it to your site. Simple like that.

Reduce the Page Size

12. Scale images

Never scale images on the fly in HTML. Create a thumbnail of the image that you need at the exact dimensions that it will be used in your pages.

For instance, if you have an image that it is 1200px x 675px and you want to use a “scaled” version at 480px x 270px, create a new resized version of the original image and use that instead.

This image links to a “big” version of the image using a scaled thumbnail instead of changing the dimensions of the image in HTML.

Thumbnail (Scaled Image) Links to Large-Size Image

13. Leverage Browser Caching

Google recommends a minimum cache time of one week and preferably up to one year for assets that change infrequently.

Set a caching policy for all server responses to static files (images, CSS and Javascript) so the browser can determine whether it can reuse a previously loaded file or not.

This is usually done by adding this snippet of code at the .htaccess file for shared hosting plans

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 7200 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 864000 seconds”
</ifmodule>

14. Optimize your database

As long as you have a database-driven site (which includes WordPress and all other CMS-based sites), then be sure to optimize your database.

Monitor your code for slow queries. If you are on a VPS or dedicated server, enable query caching and optimize your database server configuration.

Although full database optimization can be a really tricky and time-consuming process, phpMyAdmin offers you a few basic optimization options by “optimizing your tables”.

Optimize your Database via phpMyAdmin

15. Select your hosting company wisely

Choose a hosting plan that meets your site needs.

Most hosting companies apply limitations to their shared hosting plans and host hundreds of sites per server to keep the fees to the minimum.

You get what you pay for. If you have an Ecommerce site, a heavy CMS, a lot of traffic or traffic spikes, avoid shared hosting plans.

I highly recommend WPEngine managed WordPress hosting company for any eCommerce WordPress site or any WordPress site with traffic spikes.

16. Hire an expert

My goal is to give you enough information to get started optimizing your website speed.

But as you know, it’s best to hire an expert when it’s important to get it right.

One of my clients contacted me in order to optimize the loading time of his website. The website pages were taking a long time to load and visitors were complaining because the user experience was bad.

I updated WordPress to its latest version, migrated the website to a reliable hosting company and applied speed optimization tweaks to achieve the best feasible loading time.

The loading time went from 8.2 to 2.6 seconds. The first byte and start rendering time was optimized down to 0.147 and 0.384 seconds respectively and the number of HTTP requests was reduced from 96 to 78. Google PageSpeed Insights was also optimized to 88%.

Bounce rate decreased by about 10% within a few weeks. The client and more importantly the website users were happy and maintaining the site became a great experience.

To sum it up, optimizing the loading time of your site is a win-win situation for you and your potential clients.

Imagine how happy your users will be to see super fast loading times!

If you want to hire me, I’m happy to help. See my portfolio and contact me on AwesomeWeb today!

Conclusion

Everything improves when your site loads faster.

Google ranks you higher. Users are happier. Bounce rates decrease. Conversion rates increase. And you make more sales.

Stop losing traffic and money. Start optimizing the loading time of your site today.

Today I’m offering a $497 package special for IncomeDiary readers. This is half my normal rate. If your site meets my minimum qualifications, I’ll take care of everything listed in this post. Mention IncomeDiary in your message and I’ll be in touch with you shortly. Start off 2015 with the fastest website you can possibly have!

Hire me here or find other speed optimization freelancers on AwesomeWeb here.

The post 16 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website Today! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.