BlogRitz - Make it YourSelf

Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts

Friday, September 28, 2012

Minimize the bounce rate and Keep your Readers Engaged

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page views i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the landing page without visiting any other pages. Most of the ranking systems like Google and Alexa will take it into consideration. So I am going to explain you some effective tips to reduce the bounce rate. We use Google Analytics to track the bounce rate. It can be calculated from the following formula.

Bounce Rate = single page views / total page views.

What does this metric tell us?
It decides how much pull and interest your website is generating for your visitors. Usually, Website with a high bounce rate indicates that entrance pages are not relevant to visitors and changes are necessary for improvement. Many Analytic Experts told that up to 50% is the good rate, over that is some what worrying. Moreover, it gives an idea how you can optimize your website further.

How to lower the bounce rate?

Keep the navigation simple and Make it easy to reach every page of your website.
Embed related post widget under every page. Instead of related posts you can place popular or recent posts. I suggest LinkWithin widget, if your site contains at least one image per page.
Write effective headings for your anchor text while linking.
Link your each keyword to other pages that focusing same topic.
Concentrate on the quality of content rather than writing for ranking systems. Be realistic and write killer articles.
Don’t fill your pages with unrelated ads and excess ad blocks.
Many situation proved that visitors will get frustrated from unwanted things, so give your visitors good experience by avoiding pop-ups and redirection.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Improve Website Traffic Using Google Webmaster Tools

Google Web Search is a good source for getting tons of visitors. It uses page ranking system to index the search result. In indexing, page rank plays key role in determining which pages appear first in search results. A page with a higher Page rank is deemed more important in search results and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower Page rank. Above lines conclude that - " In order to get traffic from Google, We have to improve our website Google page rank."

Now improvement plan comes here. Your website should be content rich and updated on regular basis. Also, try to follow quality content guidelines. Once you are ready with good website, go for promoting website to Google search. This can be easily done by adding your website to Google Webmaster tools. It acts like a catalog to boost up your ranking. Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages visibility on Google. Now, I am going to demonstrate adding blog and its site map to webmaster central.

Adding a Blog to Google Webmaster Tools:
01. Open google webmaster and Sign in to Webmaster Tools using your blogger User name and password (or) Google account details.
02.Click on Add site option and enter your blog URL. Then click on continue.

03.Now you have to Verify your Ownership. Here go for Alternate methods and select HTML tag. To complete verification, copy the Meta tag appeared on the page. Observe the example on screen shot for clarity.

Don't close this window until completion of all steps.

04. Log in to your Blogger account and click on your blog. Now open Template Option on left side, then click Edit HTML and later Proceed in next page.
05. Identify the <head> tag in your blog HTML. By searching (press ctrl + f), you can find that tag easily.

06. Now paste copied Meta tag just below the <head> tag. Then click Save Template.
07. Now click on the verify in webmaster site. Your ownership verified.

Adding a Site Map to Google Webmaster:
01. In webmaster home, click on your verified blog. Now expand Optimization tab in dashboard and click on Sitemaps.

02. Now click on Add/Test Sitemap. Enter following colored line in appeared pop up box as sitemap path (or) your sitemap path under your domain. Then click Submit Sitemap.

rss.xml?redirect=false&orderby=updated&start-index=1&max-results=100

03. If your blog has more than 100 posts. Add one more sitemap by changing start-index from 1 to 101. Similarly for ever 100 more posts, you have to add new sitemap with start-index followed by 201, 301,401 and so on. You have added your blog and blog site-map successfully. For any Information, Help or Guide, Add your comment.

You can also add your blog content and sitemap to:

Bing Webmaster Center

Friday, June 8, 2012

How to Choose the Right Niche or Topic for Your Blog

When you are in a thought of starting a new blog, you will face a question – “what to write about?” In general, many bloggers get struggled over deciding the topic (niche) of their blogs. So I am providing a guide to select the right topic and to analyze the factors that influencing the success rate of blogging. You should remember that measure of your success will depend on your niche and its organization. Finding a right Niche is the important and difficult task for bloggers that reflects on future steps.

Tips to select the right niche or topic for the blog:
1. Make a list of your interests that you are passionate about. List should contain the topics which suit you best. Then only you can put your potential to build up your blog.
2. Shrink out the list by analyzing the search volume at Google trends. Make some searches on Google trends for different terms involving your niche and compare them. Check whether the topic you have chosen has been growing or shrinking.

Google Trends: explores a portion of Google web searches to figure how many searches have been done for the entered keyword, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. A graph will be shown According to entered key term. Go to Google Trends Here.
3. “Competition” - Always keep it in your mind. Niche with high popularity will give you great challenge to compete on search engines to rank well. In this case you need to work hard to rectify the previously posted methods by pointing gaps and advanced methods, matters whatever it is. It is only the way to sustain the competition and you should be hot otherwise it can ruin you totally. For less popular topics competition will be less. So we can easily acquire top position for that niche. Being at the top of search result, you can turn good traffic. So it is better to select unique niche for better result.

4. If you are interested in making the blog monetize. Then you will need to estimate CPC (cost per click) and competition of ads using Adwords keyword tool, which are based on Google Adsnese statistics. Also make sample searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing and observe the density of advertisements shown in the search result. More ad density gives more profit.Do you find my data helpful? Add a comment as your feedback.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Easy ways to promote your Blog post in Effective Manner

Writing a post is an easy task for bloggers, when compared to making it popular. In general, many bloggers will just publish their articles but they won’t promote. Actually promotion techniques plays important role in the production of pillar posts. Pillar posts are the posts, which drives huge traffic and are attractive for readers. The main aim of this post is to increase volume of visitor, backlinks and to improve pagerank at search engines.

Various methods for promoting your post:

Submit your articles to Top ranked Social Bookmarking Websites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Slashdot and Technorati.
Share your post links in Top Social Networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and Twitter.
Submit your URL to Top Blog Directories.
Approach other bloggers who have same niche and comment on their posts providing your post URL with proper anchor text. Your comments should be relevant and useful for other visitors. Avoid spam links.
Actively participate in forum discussions related to your blog topics, leave helpful comments, discuss hot topics in your niche and suggest your links there.
Make use of free webmaster tools of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
You can also promote your blog in offline mode by telling to your friends and neighbors.

Note that promoting every individual post results better than promoting home page URL.
Avoid attempting to promote each and every post; go for big and interesting posts only.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Guidelines to create Quality content on your Blog

If you follow my guideline in writing posts, then I am sure that you will definitely notice a good progress. My guidelines involve the improvement of site performance, page rank on search engines, image optimization and content of post.

Post Title or Article Title: Title should be descriptive, accurate and unique and it should point the topic or central idea of particular post. It is better to express title in 5 to 10 words. Don't create titles for search engines i.e. filling title block with keyword not related to content.

Post content or Body of the post: It elaborates the theme of article in detail, so write introduction to concept of your post at the beginning and describe in your own words. You should educate visitors on your concepts by defining the concepts or keys of the article and give examples. It experience good for readers. If you add an image, then it looks perfect and gives good impression. Provide relevant description. Avoid copying content from other internet source. It does not add values to your post. Search engines detect your content as duplicate and never result your site well so make a habit of writing post in your own words. Make sure that your pages have no grammatical mistakes.

It is important to note that topic should be fresh, useful, live and information-rich and then only your site gets popular, earns backlinks and brings more traffic. Post articles on your site at least twice or thrice a week. Avoid placing unnecessary codes and scripts on your page.

Image search optimization:

File name should be informative and related to image. Suggested file names are like blogger_logo.jpg, but not IMG0058.JPG.
Make use of alt attribute to provide a small description of image.
Provide Good quality photos and compress their size.
Specify a width and height for all images in their code.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Meta tag helps your blog in Search Engine Promotion

Meta tags are important for Search Engine Optimization because Google and other search engines might use them as snippets for your pages. A page description Meta tag gives summary of what the page is about. It might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. It might help search engines to find content and to matching up with a user's search query.

Structure of Meta tags for description and keywords:

<meta name="description" content="Description of your blog"/>

<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords related to your blog"/>

Keywords should be separated by commas

Add a Meta tag in to your HTML:
1. Modify the colored text, according to your blog.
2. Open Blogger Dashboard in blogger --->> Next click your blog Design option --->> click Edit HTML.
3. Find <head/> tag and Paste Meta Tag just below it. Click Save Template.

You should remember following things:

Don't fill description with only keywords.Search engines will ban your site from their listing. So use distinct,related and informative description.
Avoid writing a description Meta tag that has no relation to the content of your blog.
Using generic descriptions like "Page about"or "This is a web page" are not recommended.
Don't Copy and paste the entire content of the posts into the description Meta tag.
Repeating keywords again and again may give negative result.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Optimize your blog images and code for search engines

This time, I 'm explaining about Image Search Optimization (ISO). It is the way to drive organic traffic from image search engines. If you observe HTML code of images, you will find "alt" attribute; other wise you can insert it to the code. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image. If the image cannot be displayed for some reason, then the text of the "alt" attribute provides information about image.

Alt content helps your pictures to index in image search results. Proper alt text and file-name makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand and search bots can easily crawl your images. Effect of alt text was showed in below image.

Image was not displayed to the user for some reason, but text was there.

Optimizing tips to be followed:

File names and alt text should be brief, short and descriptive. Don't give generic file names like "img.jpg", "pic1.gif", "1.jpg. Avoid writing extremely lengthy file names and pasting entire sentences.
Use commonly supported file types like JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats.
Reduce your images size because images of low size can load fast. Use Image optimization tool to compress your image size without affecting image quality or use any photo-shop software.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Drive more traffic using Bing Webmaster Center Tools

Microsoft is offering free Bing Webmaster Tools to improve your website. It can help your blog in getting indexed by Bing search engine and Drives more organic traffic. By Submitting a site map, It gives detailed reports about websites link to your site or blog (back links). Bing webmaster center provides statistics about your sites. Here you can identify any issues that Bing encountered while crawling your site or blog.

Submit your website to Bing:

1. Open Bing Webmaster page here.
2. Sign in to Webmaster Tools using Windows Live ID like hotmail.
3. Click on Add a Site and enter required details like blog address and sitemap address. Now click on submit.

4. Authenticate your ownership of your blog by inserting a Meta Tag into HTML. For this copy the Meta tag and follow below mentioned procedure.

5. Now open Dashboard in Blogger --->> Next click your blog Design option --->> then click Edit HTML.
6. Find <head> tag (click ctrl+f to search it) and Paste Meta Tag just below it. Click Save Template.

7. Now click on Return to Site List. You have added your blog and wait for improvement.

You can also make use of Google Webmaster Tools that helps you in bringing more organic traffic from Google search.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Improve Your Blog Visibility on Yahoo Search - Site Explorer

Yahoo! - Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo Search Engine. It also improves your pages Visibility on yahoo search results. It will give an idea about the most popular pages from your site. By submitting a Site Map or feed URL, You can find pages that link to your site and out linked from your Site. It is Similar to Google Webmaster Tools

Add a Site or Blog to Yahoo! - Site Explorer:

1. Sign in to Yahoo! using your existing Yahoo! ID details or Sign up for new account.
2. Now open Yahoo! - Site Explorer and enter your Site or Blog URL in appeared box. Then click Add My Site.

3. You have to authenticate your site. For this, you go for 2nd procedure By adding a META tag to my home page. Copy the Meta tag and add a backslash ' / ' before ' > '. Don't close this page. Have a look on Screen shot.

Don't forget to add slash, Otherwise it shows XML error.

Example Tag: <META name="y_key" content="ebc9d2f7530798e8"/>
4. Now open Blogger Dashboard in your blogger account --->> Next click your blog Design option --->> then click Edit HTML.
5. Find <head> tag and Paste Meta Tag just below it. Click Save Template.

6. Now come to Yahoo! - Site Explorer and click Ready to Authenticate.

Add a Site feed or Site map to Yahoo! - Site Explorer:

7. In Yahoo! - Site Explorer, open Feeds under your site and enter your feed URL path as rss.xml. For better understanding, see screen-shot guide. Now click on Add Feed

8. You have done it. Effects don't appear in one day. It takes several days to get good results.

Note: Yahoo - Site Explorer was permanently merged with Bing webmaster tools.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Increase Traffic - Optimize Blog and Post Title in Blogger

In default style, Blog Title appears first in search results. Post Title appears after blog title. For lengthy Blog Title you won't find post title in search results and appeared title may not be related to search keywords. So visitors don't like to click your link. All search engines first looks for the title and page link and then it looks for the content. By Optimizing the Blog and Post Titles, you get post title first and then blog title. This trick helps your blog to get good search rank and makes your blog to appear in first page of search result. It drives more traffic from search engines like Google, yahoo, MSN Bing.

Optimize Blog Title and Post Title - search engine optimization:

1. Go to the Design section in Blogger Dashboard then --->> Edit Html.
2. Backup your template by clicking Download Full Template.
3. Find the following code - Press (ctrl+f ) and enter below code into search box.
It shows below code in your Html.

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

4. Replace above code by the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

5. Now Save Template. You have done successfully.