How to Guide for Excellent Blogging

Since last few years, blogging is proved to be a good communication medium to share your thoughts, opinions, knowledge and experiences to those who can be benefited by such sharing. Blogging is widely used by all generations to reach maximum people and become popular among them. Blog is the ultimate way to express your knowledge and give opinion about the current affairs. There are some blogs that are not becoming widely accepted or not followed by as many people as expected due to lack of knowledge about blogging. Here are some tips which if followed can deliver a good blog post and can attract many of the followers as expected.

How to Guide for Excellent Blogging

• Use your own Content: For posting in a blog, use your own content in the topic. Don’t go for any copy paste material about the topic. Posting ready made content will decrease your following. Also do try to research more and more in the topic to provide some more detailed information about the topic. As a result of which your topic will be more widely used by the others or followers for reference.
  
• Don’t Post Fake or Controversial: Don’t post any irrelevant or incorrect information in your blog post. It will make your blog controversial. Avoid talking about the topics which will hurt the feelings of some group or community. Also don’t post any illegal content in your blog. It will cause rejection of your blog by many followers.
  
• Use of Examples: Try to explain your point with the example. A suitable example about the topic helps in convenient explanation of the topic. So try to give simple but proper example about the topic which you wish to explain.
• Post Regularly: As a good blogger, you are supposed to post regularly in your blog. It will help you making the discussion live and you can interact with many followers.
• Respect Suggestions: One more positive quality of a positive blogger is he or she always respects the suggestions received by comments. It is not expected that you must be agree with the comment. But rather than arguing you can explain your point of view to the follower silently or calmly with your explanation. It will help you increase your followers and many other people will also find themselves comfortable to comment on your topic.
• Use Simple Theme: To explain or support your topic, you can use a simple theme of explanation to reach maximum people with convenient explanation. Somewhat complex theme will prove to be not interesting in the follower’s perspective. From the past few years, mobile traffic has gain the no. of visitors so when you pick up any theme make sure it is mobile friendly (responsive theme).
  
  You may also like, add responsive images, embed YouTube Videos and add PDF, Doc & XLS files responsively in blogs.
• Don't Over Optimization: Don't stuffed your article with the keywords as it will look irony and nobody want to read as well as search engines also hate it. Do SEO that favors to your blog and search engines. For a post, you can make a unique description, title and h1, h2 tags.
  
  If you're a Blogger user you may like, on page SEO optimization, create unique meta descriptions and swap Blogger post title for SEO.
• Enjoy Blogging: One more important tip is not to make your blog with some serious note. Always keep your blog funny up to what you can. It will lead many other followers to participate in that blog and comment on it. Many serious issues can be explained in funny ways to reach to the group. It will lead to positive discussion during the blogging.

So following these simple tips, you can be any time good blogger and can attract the followers and make some popular blogs with many interesting topic.

10 Web Site Design Mistakes that Reduce your Traffic from Google

When we talk about getting traffic from Google, most of us will know about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO or short. Most folks who have some knowledge about SEO will know that content and links are two primary factors that influence how much traffic your site can get from Google.  However, website design also plays an important role. Indeed, most forget that the codes which the website design are written in are also crawled and indexed by Google. If your code is not properly structure to maximize the SEO effects, you will missing out on potential a lot more traffic than you currently have.
Here are the 10 most common website design mistakes with regards to SEO.

Mistake 1: Too much Flash/Ajax effects

Some website designers tend to go overboard with Ajax or Flash to create lots of  effects. While they might interesting to view, they tend to:

• slow down your website’s loading time, which is a factor in your Google ranking
• reduce the amount of text that Google can index and therefore rank you for

So, if you like using these effects in your website design, don’t overdo it. Replace some of these effects with text and you will soon see a rise in your Google traffic.

Mistake 2: No labels for your images

Image search is now a huge source of traffic for many websites. These traffic is especially important for businesses who rely on images to sell such as restaurants, interior design, real estate etc. Hence, it is important for us to use a file name that uses the right keywords to describe the image. Don’t label them as picture1 etc. Use proper terms that people will search for such as Gourmet Hamburgers, Washington real estate, or bamboo flooring. By doing this simple change, you will see an increase in the traffic from Google image.

Mistake 3:  Too many sidebar links

One of the most important concept in SEO is pagerank or PR for short. PR determines how often Google crawls your website and how much content will be indexed. You cannot see PR but every website will have its own score. In terms of control we cannot hoardPR but we can channel them, using links, to the page where we want the most traffic. If your sidebar has too many links, you are effectively spreading your PR across too many web pages. This resultd in a large of pages that don’t get much search traffic, in contrast to a few strong pages that get lots of traffic.

Mistake 4: Keywords missing in navigation menu

Love it or hate it, SEO is about using the right keywords in your website. Most website designers don’t suggest good keywords in the navigaton menu, which is wasting another opportunity for the website to get more traffic related to these keywords. It is an art to choosing the right terms for your navigation. If you picked terms that are too competitive, the traffic from Google for these terms will be minimal. However, if you picked terms that have search volume but are not competitive, there is a chance for you to get more traffic from Google.
For example, if you create a website for a restaurant owner, using competitive keywords such as steak or hamburgers in the navigation menu might not lead to any increase in website traffic. However, if you used less competitive terms such as best burger new york etc, you will see more traffic from people searching for burgers in new york.

Mistake 5: Too little text

Google is a text machine, period. If your website design does not include sufficient space for lots of words to be included, you are missing your chance of getting more traffic from Google. I have seen some websites where there is literally no space for words. For example, portfolio wordpress themes tend to focus too much on the picture and have little space for words, especially on the homepage.

Mistake 6: Orphan your pages

I have seen some website design whereby it is almost impossible to locate a particular page because the website design has orphan the page by not linking it from any other pages. A common way of making this mistake is with a wordpress page. Unlike article posts, which tend to automatically appear on the front page of the blog section, a wordpress page will not be automatically linked to, unless there is a section in your website (such as your navigation) which automatically displays any new pages created. Once a page is orphaned, it will be difficult for Google to crawl and indexed that page.

Mistake 7: Flat architecture design

A flat architecture design means that all your links can be accessed via a central place like your home place. This runs into similar problems as mistake 3 i.e. too many links on one page. What your should do is to create navigational pages and then link to these pages through the homepage. Navigation pages are nothing more than a listing of all similar articles in one page. Such a solution is more elegant than trying to cramp every link into the homepage.

Mistake 8: Ineffective site description

Site description is the line of words that will appear beside your website in the search results. An ineffective copy will lead to less people wanting to click on that link and visit your website. I have seen cases where websites which are ranked second getting more traffic than websites ranking number one. This is simply because the site description of the number one site does not convey anything that draws people in.  When designing a website, pay attention to how you describe your site so that it is appealing for others to want to check it out.

Mistake 9:  Keyword stuff your pages

This is the opposite of mistake 4. Instead of using too little keywords, you keyword stuff your pages to the point where they appear everywhere i.e. navigation, sidebar, footer. Worst of all, your navigation links read like a spam list such as the example below

• real estate in Washinton
• real estate in New York City
• real estate in Portland
• real estate n XX city number

If you do this, there is a strong chance that the website will receive a penalty from Google that will reduce the amount of search traffic you will get from them.

Mistake 10: Updating your website design

This is a mistake made by many including myself. We tend to stick with the initial design because there is little incentive to change anything. However, it is important to note that as a site growing in both traffic and content, there is a need to update our website to improve its navigation and/or to update content and links. Failure to do so can result in Google giving your site a lower score.
For example, many sites that you were linking to in the past might no longer be around. Keeping these links alive is not only bad for your visitor’s experience, it is also bad for Google because their crawlers will end up with dead ends. If your website does this enough times, I believe the quality score of your website will be downgraded.

Many of the mistakes mentioned here can be removed with a little bit of effort. So, if you think your traffic from Google is not growing, go through this checklist to see if things can be improved.

15 SEO Tools to Improve Your Site

In discussing website marketing, there are several number of search engine optimization tools can be used, which are very helpful in this undertaking.
This is one of the most important undertakings that you can do to get online visibility, especially with the major search engines changing their algorithms all the time. Here are the SEO tools to improve your site and take it steps higher in SERP rankings.

1. Your Eyes

While this is not one of the most popular SEO software today, your eyes can do a lot in helping you gain insights on the best tools to use. Look around a site and see why it ranks higher in the page ranking by going through its flows and how it works. Look for possible improvements that you can implement for your site and veer away from things that do not look good as well.

2. SEOmoz

The grandfather of best practices for SEO, and it is the professional account of SEOmoz that allows you to handle your SEO by giving recommendations as it daily analyzes your site regularly. Users can easily download a toolbar for free that will regularly displays the SEO metrics of different websites as you browse online; and provide other benefits as well including the help forum and the beginners guide to SEO.

3. IIS SEO Toolkit

The IIS SEO toolkit is a complimentary SEO instrument that lets you to examine the SEO aspects of your site from its URL, content, search engine spiders, and structure. It can clearly shows issues that you might have overlooked, for instance; when the link of a page is broken or if the title in the certain page is too long. In addition, you will see these errors with an X colored in red, so you can easily see and correct them.

4. Screaming Frog

It is another tool for SEO that comes in free and paid versions that you can download and install to your computer like MAC, it helps spiders or crawl your website’s CSS, links and pictures using from the SEO perspective. If you have other concerns like 302s, it sees that as well and share it with your developer so they will fix it. One of its good features includes exporting your Meta descriptions, page title, and links to Excel document to provide you a clear analysis to base its recommendations from.

5. Majestic SEO

Offering a tough set of connection tools, this tool allows you to evaluate and check any domain in granular point. Some of its best highlights include site explorer so you can plummet down into any link; keyword checker for you to see how many times a keyword or phrase shows and provides the search level based on organic figures; and backlink history so you can discover the amount of backlinks given to a URL, domain, and sub-domain.

6. SEO Site Checkup

This is simple SEO tool that is easy to use as provides one field to populate as you key-in the link and go. The analysis of the site is done fairly quick and easy; while helpful clarifications and recommendations come in rollover help pop ups for each section and if the analyzed results return with results flagged as red marks; it will display complete directions and reasons as well as suggestions on how to resolve them.

7. Adobe Site Catalyst

If you want to know how the traffic in your site has picked up year after year, this tool can help you do that and do other things as well such as helping you find the most lucrative channels through a site and identify where you visitors are leaving your website, so you can optimize its ‘stickiness.’

 8. Google Analytics

It is another no cost charge tool that is recommended for those who are into online marketing, Google Analytics allows you to understand what your website is doing on a daily basis. It can also let you see traffic spikes and identify    how it influenced your site before and after, as well as where is the referral traffic are coming from.

9. SEMrush

For those who are doing a research in keyword based in competition , this is the perfect tool as it gives you intuitive information on certain keywords that actually drive traffic to your website. In addition, it also provides details about your competitor’s paid search keywords, traffic data, and ranking.

10. Google Webmaster Tools

This is not only free but is also very useful if you want to know how Google perceives the site that you own and manages. It can also make you alert of site issues such as 404s, as well as if it has been virused with malware. A great tool for site owners; it was devised to notify webmasters on how the Google bot is relating with their website.

11. Bing Webmaster Tools

This is another complimentary tool that allows you to see how your website is doing from Bing’s standpoint. It is fairly easy to use with a clean interface. On its main account dashboard page, you can select whatever site you want and see a quick statistics on clicks, impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled with percentages account for net gain or loss for the week.

12. SEO Tool Set

If you are centering on redirects, this SEO tool can easily look at the header of the server and detect redirects and follows as well as points out problems significant to your site’s operation. It can also be very useful if you want to know how your contenders’ websites are doing.

13. Google Trends

It is an extra tool intended for keyword research that allows you to see the alternatives of a keyword or phrase, Google Trends can also be an enormous instrument to brainstorm content. This is also a great help if you want to generate or produce optimized content for advertising messaging and explore seasonality to find out how certain keyword phrase performs versus the other.

14. HitWise

While this is a paid tool, it gives useful details within your sphere by providing keywords in your space. It also provides daily rankings of the world’s most popular websites by monitoring the activity of the surfers, as well as the profiles, searches and charts of various websites.

15. You Get Signal

If you want to know how your competition is faring on their server, this is the best tool that allows you to see if they have place a new sub-domain before it commenced. Besides getting classified information, this will also help you investigate at their site and check their code to see how they are executing stuff, a great spy tool indeed.