Seo Tip For Business Blog

In the previous article, I mentioned that blogging is upon the most effective content marketing tactics available. Blogging brings significant SEO values, therefore, by learning how to optimize a business blog correctly, we can maximize its full potential. I have already explained the importance of long tail keywords and described how to implement them into your content wisely, listed a few optimization rules for your visual content, and provided you with some tips for linking. Today, I am going to focus on other impactful components of your blog structure in terms of SEO.

 SEO-friendly pagination boosts your usability

When it comes to SEO and usability, pagination should be of your concern. Keeping all of your articles on a single, infinite page is not user-friendly; good pagination is. Pagination is a proper system for numbering pages and it helps to organize your posts, minimizes crawling depth, positively influences page load time and, finally, make your content more accessible for visitors. Additionally, correct pagination helps Googlebot crawl and index all of your content more effectively. Google itself serves the best example of SEO friendly pagination:

Sort your content into categories

Leverage the usability of your site by dividing your content into categories. Sorting your content into topic-themed pages improves the findability and creates extra opportunities for ranking in search engines. Besides, a category changes your particular permalink structure. It is wise to select only one category per post to avoid the risk of having duplicate content. In general, you should keep a limited number of categories on your blog. Choose a few broad topics and refresh them frequently, just like we, at Positionly, do:
Categories-Positionly-Blog

Suggest related, previous and next posts

Suggesting other related, previous, and next posts at the end of each article will quickly define your blog architecture. This will help the SEO juice circulate throughout multiple pages of your blog and strengthen the value of linked websites. Moreover, related posts indicate other relevant topics to your readers as well as to search engines. They also create a tight-knit network of pages which positively affects the navigation of your blog. As a result, you will gain additional visits to suggested content, increase quality indicators (average time on site), improve user engagement and, of course, reduce the bounce rate.

Add social sharing buttons

It is highly recommended to add social sharing buttons to your blog that enable quick content distribution across your social platforms. It can expose your content to new audiences. Moreover, there are SEO benefits of adding social sharing buttons due to the correlation between social sharing and following mentions or backlinks. Make sure that you provide visible and smooth sharing on your blog. You can add social sharing buttons throughout your post or use plugins like, for instance, Flare.
The most common placement options for social media buttons applied by popular websites are:

Positionly-Social-Shares-Bar-Placement

Worth noticing is a growing trend of tweetable links. By having tweetable links, your users can quickly tweet multiple ideas from the article. There are many free plugins available for WordPress, for example ClickToTweet, which seems to be one of the most popular at the moment. The bottom line is to make sharing your content extremely easy.

#9 Take advantage of a sidebar 

A sidebar is an important piece of your well-optimized blog. It is the area next to your article which you can use to promote yourself and your products or services. It is necessary to link to your most popular guides or posts from the sidebar because it helps distribute SEO juice to those pages and influences their search ranking. In order to build a loyal community and get repeat visits, add an email subscription box, your social links, and a short description of your company. The correct placement for a sidebar is at the right side of  each single blog post page because it won’t draw attention away from your text. Take a look at

 Comments add significant value to your SEO campaign

User-generated Content (UGC), which is created by comments on your blog, is a very valuable asset that can help you rank your long tail keywords. Letting your readers leave comments below your blog post gives you a clear overview of how your company is perceived on the market and what your customers say about your product or service. The language and wording your users use, especially the repeating phrases across different comments and pages, can be identified as new long tail keywords and add a significant value to your on-page optimization. Moreover, your quick feedback can build brand loyalty and display the fact that you provide  valuable customer service. Keep an active dialogue with the target audience because regular user interactions can become a steady source of unique content and improve the performance of your website on SERPs.

 Content is the king

Above all the structural tips, it is content that matters most. Sure, people scan the content, which is why you should shape it in a scannable way, but they also read it, and your task is to craft it to the best possible standard. Keep it useful, concise and simple. However, the longer your content becomes, the more gets indexed by Google spiders. Google prefers comprehensive articles and this is why extensive blog posts are usually better ranked. Just take a look at the picture below presenting the average content length of the top 10 results and evaluate the correlation:

Average Content Length of Top 10 Results

Refresh your content regularly and show Google that your website is alive. Search engines crawl active websites more often and they are more appealing to place in the search results. That is why you should make sure to publish fresh content on a regular basis.
Conclusion

Positionly’s On-Page Optimization Grader is a very useful tool for checking if your blog post page is well-structured from the SEO point of view. All you need to do is insert the page address and type in the targeted keyword(s) (optional), and you will be provided with the results and given advice on what should be fixed. Test this and the many other tools in our collection and start your free 14-day trial today!
optimization-check

The knowledge I have provided in the last two articles is absolutely essential for any business blog. User-friendly pagination, the suggesting of other posts, sorting your content into categories, adding social sharing buttons, sidebar implementation, enabling user-generated content and other content rules, combined with the SEO tips given last Thursday, are necessary pieces of a whole which can ultimately bring you a step closer in becoming a SEO master.

If you have any questions concerning this topic, feel free to comment and I’d be happy to help you out.

How to Super Boost your Blog Search Engine Ranking

1. Keyword Research

The first step of an SEO process is a keyword research. With keyword research you try to determine which keywords or phrases people are using to search your blog or competitor’s blog as well as then make a decision which ones to target.

    Focus on High Volume with Low Competition:

    Perfectly, the keywords with the higher potential are the ones with a high search volume, however with a low competition. Unluckily, as generally also the competitors are doing a like research, these keywords are limited as well as there are not sufficient to maintain a full SEO campaign.

    Add Long Tail Keywords:

    In such cases, it is suggested to target the “long tail” of keywords. At the present time, most searches are not 1-keyword long, but 2, 3 or even 4 keywords long. All individual searches may have a low search volume, but generally the competition is lower, therefore it is easier to rank along with the first positions.

    Do a Competitive Analysis:

    It is also essential to analyze the blogs of your competitors, in order to determine new keywords to target.

2. Technical Optimization

Search engines use special software called crawlers, in order to observe your blog’s text as well as code. If your blog is not precisely perfect, it may be complicated for a crawler to examine as well as understand all of your blog content and it may have as a result that your blog pages will rank lower in the search engines results pages, or even worst, not at all. It is significant though that the following technical points are checked.

    URL Structure:

    Good SEO perform for URLs is to maintain them under 100 characters long, to use dashes instead of underscore as well as to keep away from special characters.
    Title Tags:

    Every blog page should have a unique Title Tag, 65-75 characters long. It is also significant that the basic keywords be present in the beginning of the title.

    Meta Description Tags:

    A Meta Description Tag should be unique for each page, up to 160 characters long as well as contain 1-2 sentences that explain the page.

    Heading Tags:

    Headings are part of the HTML of a page and they are noticeable to the blog visitors. There are 6 different headings, from H1 to H6. Each page should have only one, distinctive H1 heading tag.

    Duplicate Content:

    Duplicate content problem arise when the exact same content be present in your blog under 2 or more different URLs. This can have a harmful effect for blog ranking, as search engines do not know which version to comprise in their index. 
It is though suggested to solve any duplicate content problem in your blog, by removing the duplicate content or create redirections among the multiple versions.

    Structured Data:

    With structured data, you can add unique markup to your article, so that search engines can without difficulty understand its type. This can potentially help to get higher rankings. It can also suggest rich snippets for your blog pages in the search results pages. Rich Snippets give a small sample of the page’s article in the results pages of search engines, building it more famous.
In http://www.schema.org, you can find out different schemas for different types of article, like articles, movies, products, events, persons of organizations as well as use them in your blog.

    Sitemaps:

    Search engines exploit the XML sitemap protocol, so it is significant that your blog contains an XML sitemap. After its making, it has to be submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, so that all of the blog’s article its crawled. It also has to be updated as well as re-submitted every time new article is added in the blog.

    Rich Media:

    Every image should have an associated tag. This is an HTML tag that let to briefly describing the article of the image, so that search images can easily understand it. It is also supportive to use related keywords for the filename, instead of random letters also numbers.
For videos you can add the transcription text and add a video sitemap in your blog.

3. Usability

Search engines try to provide to their user’s results that are helpful as well as assure them. For this basis they take into account the engagement metrics of a blog. As Google recommends “In general, webmasters can increase the rank of their blogs by creating high-quality blogs that users will want to use as well as share”. You should maintain the following usability tips in mind:

    Overall Appeal:
    Usability includes things like visibly labeling different parts of the blog so visitors can easily find their way around, building important areas of the page easy to spot or making it easy to find contact information.

    Navigation:

    Search engines may rank a huge number of a blog’s pages at the same time, which means that people will be able to access a blog from pages other than the home page. Lacking of good navigation that covers the whole blog, visitors could acquire stuck on a page and not be able to move on to explore more of a blog.

    Information Architecture:

    Information Architecture is the frame of your blog from which all other aspects are built – including form, function, navigation as well as interface, communication, and visual design.

    Content Quality:

    For usability reasons, no page should ever be longer than 800 words with the exception of blog posts. This article needs to include the relevant keywords for the page. Having unique and keyword rich text on a page can help to increase search engine rankings extensively.

4. Content Marketing

As Google always updates and optimizes its algorithm in regulate to provide the best results to users, it gives more and more significance to useful, fresh as well as engaging content. Nowadays, quality content is the base of a successful SEO campaign. It is significant thought for every blog to invest in the making of fresh, appealing and quality content, like the following:

    Blog:

    Fresh as well as useful content can rank high in search engines. It can also be a method to get new links and boost the authority of the whole blog, when people are sharing it.
    Guides, Ebooks, or other Useful Content:
    These are parts of content that require more effort, but if they are promoted properly they can help to bring new links for several months after their establishment.
    Infographics, Charts, or other Visual Content:
    Again, this is a kind of content that can attract new links to a blog. It is best method to Boost your Blog Search Engine Ranking.

5. Social Media Strategy

According to current studies social signals are among the most significant ranking factors. That means the social media are at this time a strong influencer for SEO as well as it should be part of an SEO campaign. The steps of a booming social media tactic are the following:

    Setup your target for Social Media:

    These could be for instance increasing the size of the group of people and gain more publicity for your content.
    Understand your Audience:

    Before start being active in social media, you should research as well as understand the users that are paying attention in your market.

    Choose your Social Media Channels:

    There are so many different social media channels accessible, that it’s impossible for a blog to be successful on all of them. For the beginning, choose 3 to 4 channels where your target viewer is active.

    Connect with Influencers:

    People with a lot of followers in social media can be helpful, for the reason that they can spread your message to more people. Find them as well as try to connect with them.

    Make a Social Media Posting Plan:
    For each channel, make a decision how often you will post and what kind of article you are going to use.

6. Link Building

Even if now Google tries to be relevant stricter rules to links, they still continue a very significant ranking factor. Links boost the authority and trustworthiness of a blog. The total number of links is essential, but it is similarly important to get links from a multiplicity of popular and reliable domains. Just bear in mind that the most significant search engines have strict rules against unnatural or paid links, so the link building method consists generally from actions that attract links from reliable sources in a natural method. There are dozens of method for link building; here are the most basic ones:

    Guest Blogging:

    This is a great method to create useful links. It is essential though to avoid performing high volume as well as low quality guest blogging, for the reason that Google may think about these links unnatural. High excellence guest blogging using original article is the one that works most excellent and can bring best results.

    Contests or Giveaways:

    A contest or a giveaway is a great method to bring traffic as well as increase responsiveness for a blog, but also to make new links.

    Broken Link Building:

    With this method, you find recourse pages connected to your blog and you check the links on this page, locating any broken ones. After that, you contact the blog’s owner, informing him about the broken link as well as asking him to replace it with a link to your blog.

How to Customize the Facebook Page Plugin for Websites

The other difference that you can now only display a single row of fan pictures inside the Page Plugin. Why does this matter? The pile shows profile pictures of mutual friends who have liked your Facebook Page and thus, when a casual visitor sees a familiar face inside that pile, it is likely to increase their interest in your website.

What you see here are a list of customization options now available inside the Facebook Page plugin. You can choose to have a simple Like box with just your logo and like button or you can have a complete box with cover photos as well.

Customizing this Facebook Page plugin is simple as detailed in the official documentation. For instance, if you would not like to show a cover photo, set the HTML5 data attribute data-hide-cover to false in the DIV tag. Setting data-show-facepile to false will hide the row of pictures.
Similarly, you can attach styles to the .fb-page class to customize the outer of the Facebook Plugin. For instance, if you like the steps style I use here with the Facebook box at Immortal Technologies this is the underlying CSS code

Best 5 Methods to Optimize Google Adsense for Increase Income

Think About the Position & Style of your Ads

    Look at the Style of Ads Existing- Some Blog report enhanced income potential from skyscraper ads determine 160 x 600 pixel, as of large rectangle ads among 336 x 280 pixels or from an inline rectangle among 300 x 250 pixels.

Note- A skyscraper is a particular type of advertisement that place ads vertically along the side to your blog.

    Select the Style of Ad you want to use and Analysis it – If you feel like you are not getting the result after a month, think about that switching to a different style.

You Can Also Read-

    How To Get Google Adsense Approval with a New Blog

Optimize Adsense with your article

1. Plan your Blog Article with Adsense in Mind- Google provides many tools to help its users improve their income. One of these tools provides details on keyword and the average amount you can earn from those Keywords.

2. Write SEO Content with Higher Paying Keywords

    This has the prospective to enhance traffic to your blog and to get higher paid advertisement for the ads displaying on your blog page.

    SEO content can embrace factors not seen on the blog page, as well as the use of Meta tags, robots.txt files and Blog maps.

3. Things You’re Writing to your Audience & not to Adsense – In order to keep your traffic on your blog, you need to offer high quality information to your users or visitors. This will drive traffic back to your blog, which can increase your income through increased experience.

You Can Also Read-

    Top 10 Most Profitable High Paying Niche in Google Adsense

Utilize Research for Ad Design

1. Make your Ads Appealing to your Visitor- When you can’t control every factor the ads, there are some Factors you can do….

    When the most popular link color is blue, you may get that more people click on the ads if you use a link color so as to matches the other links on your blog.

2. Think About the Impact of Border for your Ads

    Some Adsense users suggest using no Border around ads when you use a light Colored background. While you make use of darker Background, the consensus is to border your ads.

    As well, using border for in-text ads can divert users or visitors, when bordering ads on the sides of your blog page can draw positive awareness to the ads.

Disable Onsite Advertiser Sign Up

    Evaluate Whether or not You feel this needs to be done- Some Blogger prefer to disable it because it makes a negative impact on the advertising. Others don’t make out it as a problem.

    Sign in to your Google Account for Google Adsense.

    Go to “My Account”- This Must is in the Control Panel.

    Find the “Onsite Adversisen Sign Up “and Disable it- In most cases, you will need to uncheck the box next to it.

Add a Search Box

    Increase Income From Ads that Display when people search for something from your blog- In Most cases, the ads displayed add up as part of your income program.

    Log In at Google Adsense.

    Find the Adsense Setup and Go to Adsense for Search

    Customize your Search Box among Design features like your Blog Logo or Company Picture.

    Incorporate the Offer Code into your HTML page- you can do this by cutting and pasting into your Html and after that uploading it to your Server

Google Ranking Factor

On-Page factors:

The way your page is optimised has the most profound effect on its rankings. Here are the page optimization factors that can affect its search visibility:

Keyword in title tag.

 The title meta tag is one of the strongest relevancy signals for a search engine. The tag itself is meant to give the accurate description of the pages content. Search engines use it to display the main title of a search result. Including a keyword in it will indicate to search engine what to rank the page for.
Ideally, the keyword should be placed at the start of the title tag. Pages optimized this way will rank better than those with keyword closer to the title’s tag end.

Keyword in description tag.

The importance of the meta description tag today is often discussed in SEO circles. It is nonetheless still a relevancy signal. It is also crucial for gaining user clicks from search results pages. Including keyword in it makes it more relevant to a search engine and a searcher.
Keyword in H1 tag. H1 tag is yet another relevance factor, serving as a description of the pages content. In spite of an ongoing discussion about its importance, it is still a good practice to include your keyword in a unique H1 tag on a page.

Using keywords in the pages copy.

 Up until not long ago, stuffing your page with keywords was a surefire way to increase its rankings for a particular keyword. That’s not the case anymore. Using the keyword in the copy still sends a relevancy signal of what the content is about. How you place it however has changed drastically.

Length of the content.

These days searchers want to be educated and won’t satisfy with basic information. Google therefore looks for authoritative and informative content to rank first. And it’s a common sense that the longer your content is, the greater the chance that you can cover more aspects of your topic. Don’t be shy of writing long but highly useful copy then.

Duplicate content.

Not all factors can influence your rankings in a positive way. Having similar content across various pages of your site can actually hurt your rankings. Avoid duplicating content and write original copy for each page.
Canonical tag. Sometimes however having two URLs with similar content is unavoidable. One of the ways from preventing this from becoming a duplicate content issue is by using a canonical tag on your site. This tag does one simple thing, it tells Google that one URL is equivalent of another, clearly stating that in spite of two pages having the same content, they are in fact one.

Image Optimization.

It’s not only text that can be optimized on a page but other media too. Images for instance can send the search engine relevancy signals through their alt text, caption and description for instance.
Content Updates. Google algorithm prefers freshly updated content. It does not mean that you have to edit your pages all the time. I believe that for commercial pages, such as product descriptions Google recognizes the fact that they are not as time sensitive as blog posts covering recent events. It is wise however to include some strategy to update certain types of content once every 12 months or so.
Outbound links. Linking to authoritative pages sends trust signals to the search engine. Think of it this way, the only reason why you would send a user to another site is if you wanted them to learn more of the subject. This can be a huge trust factor for Google. Too many outbound links however can greatly diminish the page’s PageRank, hurting its search visibility. Outbound links can affect your rankings but use them in moderation.

Internal links.

Interlinking pages on your site can pass their strength between them.
Keyword in URL. Including keyword in the URL slug (that’s the bit that appears after the “.com/“part of the URL) is said to send another relevancy signal to Google.
Site factors:
There are certain site wide factors that can affect your sites search visibility as well:

Sitemap.

 A sitemap helps search engine to index all pages on your site. It is the simplest and most effective way to tell Google what pages your website includes.
Domain trust. Trust matters. It’s hard no to think that sites Google trusts should rank higher. But how do you build that trust? Brian from Backlinko has a full list of trust factors here. Needless to say, building trust factors of your domain will certainly pay off.
Server location. Some SEOs believe that a servers location helps to boost rankings for that specific country or region.

Mobile optimised site.

Only a year ago, 46% of searchers used mobile exclusively to research. I believe this number increased exponentially in the last 12 months. It would be no surprise then that having a mobile optimised site would affected rankings in some way.
Google Webmasters Tools integration. Lastly, having your site verified at Google Webmasters Tools is said to help with your sites indexing. Even if that’s not the case, the tool provides valuable data you can use to better optimise your site.
Off Page factors:
When ranking your pages, Google looks at factors outside of your site as well. Here are some of the key ones:

The number of linking domains. The number of domains linking to you is one of the most important ranking factors.
The number of linking pages. There might be a number of links from a particular domain to your site, their number is a ranking factor too. However, it is still better to have more links from individual domains rather than from a single domain.

PageRank of linking page

. Not all pages are equal. Links on pages with higher PageRank will be a bigger factor than those on low PR pages. Therefore, you should strive to build links from high PR pages.
Link relevancy. Some SEOs believe that links from pages related to your pages topic carry more relevancy for search engines.

Authority of linking domain

. Similarly to a page PR, the authority of a domain may be a ranking factor too. For that reason, a link from low PR page on a high PR site will be worth more that from a lower PR one.
Links from homepage. Similarly, some SEOs believe that links from a home page of a linking domain carry more strength than those on one of its pages.
Number of dofollow vs. nofollow links. Google officially stated that they don’t count nofollow links (link with rel=nofollow attribute attached). Therefore the number of your do follow links should affect your rankings too.

Diversity of link types.

The types of links you build to your site matters too. Too many links of one type may be a spam indicator and impact your rankings negatively.
Contextual links. It is said that links within the content of the page are worth more than links in a sidebar for instance.

Link anchor.

 Anchor text of a link used to be a strong ranking factor. Today it can be used as a web spam indicator, negatively impacting your rankings.

Domain factors:
Lastly, your domain can affect your rankings as well. Some of the domain signals aren’t as strong as they used to be, there are few things worth paying attention to:

Domain registration length. Google considers domains registered for longer than a year as more trustworthy. QUOTE.

Domain history.

 You may not be the first person who registered the domain. And if your domain has been penalised in the past, its history might affect its current rankings
.
Country TLD extension. If you try to target a specific local market, it is said that having a domain with a country specific TLD (.pl, .co.uk or .ie for insance) will help to achieve better rankings for that location.

How to Optimize for App Store Search Engines

App Title

An app's title is the single most important metadata factor for rank in ASO. It's equivalent to the <title> tag in your HTML, and is a great signal to the app stores as to what your app is about. On the web, you want your title to include both a description of what you do (including keywords) as well as some branding; both elements should also exist in the app store. Be sure to include the keywords, but don't be spammy. Make sure it parses well and makes sense. Example: "Strava Run - GPS Running, Training and Cycling Workout Tracker"

Description

Patrick Haig, our VP of Customer Success, likes to break descriptions down into two sections: above the fold and below the fold (sound familiar?). He says, "Above the fold language should be 1-2 sentences describing the app and its primary use case, and below the fold should have a clear and engaging feature set and social proof." We'll dig into some of the differences about the description field across platforms below.

Keyword Field

The Keyword Field in iOS is a 100 character field which you can use to tell iTunes search for which keywords you should show up. Since you only get 100 characters, you must use them wisely. A few tips:

• When choosing your keywords, just like on the web, focus on relevancy, search volume, and difficulty.
• Don't use multiple word phrases; break out to individual words (Apple can combine them for you).
• Don't repeat keywords that are already in your title (and put the most important ones in your title, leaving the keyword field for your secondary keywords).
• Separate keywords with commas, and don't use spaces anywhere.

Icon

Consumers are finicky. They want apps which are beautiful, elegant, and simple to understand. Your icon is often their first interaction with your app, so ensure that it does a great job conveying your brand, and the elegance and usefulness of your app. Remember, in search results, an icon is one of the only ways you can convey your brand and usefulness. Think of it as part of the meta description tag you'd create in SEO. For example, SoundCloud does a great job with their icon and branding.

Screenshots

The most important rule to remember when creating your screenshots is that they should not be screenshots. They are, instead, promotional graphics. That means you can include text or other graphics to tell your app's story in an interesting, visual way.
Especially in iOS, where the card layout shows your first screenshot, it is incredibly helpful when an app displays a graphic which explains the app right up front, increasing conversions from search results to viewing the app page and, ultimately, installing the app.

Off-Metadata

Outside of your direct control, you'll also want to focus on a few things to ensure the best performance in ASO.

Ratings

Every app has a rating. Your job as a marketer is to ensure that your app gets a great overall rating. Rating is directly tied to performance in app store search, which leads us to believe that rating is a factor in app store search rankings.

Reviews

Similar to ratings, you want to ensure that the reviews your users write about your app are positive. These reviews will help increase your conversion rate from app page views to downloads.
For a great product to help you increase your rating and reviews, check out Apptentive.

Link-building

This is discussed further below, but suffice it to say, link building to your app's page in the app store matters for Google Play apps. Given you all are SEOs, you know all about how to rock this!

How Do iOS and Google Play Differ In App Store Search?

The differences in the platforms mean that there are different levers to pull depending on the platform. Google Play and iOS act completely independently, and often, quite differently. The differences are wide-ranging, but what are a couple of the main differences?
In general, the way to think about the differences is that Google is Google and Apple is Apple. Duh, right?

Description versus Keywords

In iOS, there's a keywords field. It's easy to see where this came from, especially when you think of iTunes' background in music: a song has a title (app title), musician (developer name), and then needs a few keywords to describe the song ("motown," "reggae," etc.). When Apple launched their app store, they used the same technology that was already built for music, which meant that the app title, developer name, and keywords were the only fields used to understand search for an app. Note that description isn't taken into account in iOS (but I expect this to change soon).

Leveraging PageRank in Google Play

Another big difference in iOS and Google Play is that Google has access to PageRank and the link graph of the web, while Apple does not. Thus, Google will take into account the inbound links to your app's detail page (for example, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.symantec.mobilesecurity) as a factor in Google Play search, while Apple has no such factor.

Social Media Tools For Business

If you have a website or a blog then it’s highly likely that you already have Google Analytics installed, and if not- you should!
Google Analytics was launched back in November 2005 and is a completely free enterprise analytics product. That means it doesn’t just tell you how many hits you have to your website- it tells you how many actual visitors you have, where they’re from, how long they stay on the website, where they come from and much more!
GA was radically overhauled back in 2011 to include custom dashboards and real time statistics and it also has a very powerful social media analytics report built in. If you don’t track your visits and visitors on your website then how can you tell if your social media presence is actually making a difference? Whatever business you are in, Google Analytics is a must. Sure there are other analytics tools that you can add in addition that can do some cool things like Crazy Egg, but I think for the majority of websites GA is the tool to use.

Buffer allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn profiles and groups (currently not company pages) and the niche social network app.net. The only big omission is Google+ but I’ll come on to that later. Whenever you add a post to Buffer you choose which network or networks you want to post it to (for example you might want to post to your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn profile and a LinkedIn group) and it gets added to each network’s queue.

Google+ is actually the 2nd biggest social network after Facebook! As well as that, Google is taking into account who you are (i.e. authorship) much more seriously in search results and will be using AuthorRank as one of the factors in ranking your web pages. It might still be early days for Google+, but my advice is to start now- even if you only share one or two posts a week.

If you are only posting about yourself then you’re missing the point of social network- it’s about sharing other peoples’ content too. People are more likely to invest in you if you invest in others- especially if you are sharing their content. But, how do you find and keep an eye on that content? I’ve been building up a list of websites and blogs that I want to keep on top of. There are some websites that consistently produce great content- interesting articles that I learn from and want to share with others.

MailChimp is an email marketing and newsletter service with a long and proven track record. When doing research for this article, I couldn’t quite believe that they have been going since 2001- that’s not long after I first started building my own websites!

ManageFlitter (which used to be called Manage Twitter years ago before Twitter asked them to change their name) is a Twitter follower tool. On a basic level it allows you to quickly see who isn’t following you and then having the option of unfollowing these people in bulk. As well as that you can find try and weed out spam followers or irrelevant followers that just clog things up. My favourite feature is the white list- and it’s one that I couldn’t do without. 

Ways to Grow Your LinkedIn Connections

#1: Post Status Updates Daily

It’s important to be active on LinkedIn, and that starts with posting status updates every day. Think of your LinkedIn updates the same way as any social media post. Make sure they add value, talk about your business and include a call to action.

When you consistently stay in the feeds of your connections, there’s more opportunity for them to comment, like and share your posts. This interaction gets you introduced to their connections and gives you one more way to grow your network. When people are sharing and commenting on your stuff, it’s social proof that you’re an expert in your field.

#2: Engage With Your Connections’ Updates

Review your wall regularly and share, comment on and like other people’s updates and long-form posts.

 

 

Start relationships with new connections by commenting on their updates. Build an audience by joining the conversation on popular posts in your niche. This interaction lets people know you exist and gives you more visibility. Some of these people are likely to want to know more about you, leading to new connections.

#3: Personalize Connection Requests

Review LinkedIn’s suggested connections at least a few times a week. Make it a goal to find people in your industry or niche and personally connect with them. Try to connect with two or three people each time.
When you send a connection request, personalize it in some way for that person. How did you meet? How do you know him or her? Why do you want to connect? Here’s an example of a simple but personal connection request you can tweak and reuse.

 #4: Add Your LinkedIn URL to Your Email Signature

Your LinkedIn profile works for you in a number of ways: as a resume, a testimonial, social proof, a portfolio of projects and clients and proof of expert value, all in one convenient place. In your email signature, rather than send prospects to your Facebook account (or nowhere at all), send people to your LinkedIn profile.

First, you need to grab your LinkedIn vanity URL, a clickable link that’s easy to recognize and easy to remember. In the Contact Info section of your profile, click the gear icon next to your LinkedIn URL. Then on the next page, look for the Your Public Profile URL section, where you can make changes.

Once you have your vanity URL, add it to your email signature to make it easy for people to connect with you.

 #5: Join and Participate in Groups

Commit to searching for a few new LinkedIn groups to join each month. And then make sure you engage with each group often (daily if you can) by commenting, asking questions and liking other people’s comments.

A group is a great opportunity to do market research, post links to your updates to get more views and engage with others in your niche, as well as those who aren’t. When people see you in groups and interact with you over time, they’ll be more likely to connect. You might even find a new client or business partner through a group.

 

 #6: Add Keywords to Your Profile

To make it easy for people to find you, add keywords to your LinkedIn profile. The three main areas to focus on are your headline and Summary and Experience sections. All of these sections are searchable. Adding keywords will lead to more views and make you more searchable, increasing the potential for new connections.

When filling out these sections, tell stories and be creative, use every character allowed and work in relevant keywords that people will search for. For example, if you run your own business, you might be called president or CEO, but how many people will actually search for those terms? Instead, use keywords that describe what you do, as in the headline below.

 #7: Leverage Local Networking Groups

If you belong to a local networking group, look through your membership directory and send LinkedIn connection requests to individual members. Even if you don’t remember meeting someone in person, use your shared real-world connection to personalize your connection request and start to get to know that person online.

For example, you could say something like “We’re both members of (local group name), and I would love to connect here, too.” Then head to your next networking meeting newly armed with great networking info.

Search for local group members in LinkedIn groups. You may find them there, too.

#8: Post Content to LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform

LinkedIn has a publishing platform that makes it easy to publish attractive posts, look like an expert (three posts are displayed with images at the top of your profile page) and showcase more of what you know and do in a professional format

How to Get Google Sitelinks

What are Google Sitelinks?

Google sitelinks are a delux listing format that presents a main search result, followed by two or more indented Sitelink results. Most web site operators view Sitelinks as a reputation enhancer, and also a way to control a greater area of the search results page. For these reasons Sitelinks are valuable.

 Google Doesn't Say How to Get Sitelinks

Google advises webmasters to build sites with clear navigation and a well-planned heirarchy of pages. These features may make a site more amenable to Google's Sitelink analysis algorithms.
The precise workings of many Google algorithms, including Sitelinks, are kept secret to discourage people from manipulating the rankings, but we can still look at examples and try to understand where Sitelinks come from. I've worked on many sites with Sitelinks, and these sites are similar in the following ways:

• Site ranks first for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing
• Easily spiderable, structured navigation.
• High natural search traffic.
• Strong click through rates from the search results page.
• Popular internal pages appear as Sitelinks.
• Unique titles and meta descriptions on internal pages.

These factors may, or may not, be exactly what Google uses to trigger Sitelinks. Nevertheless, everything on this list is desirable for a web marketing program, so using the list to guide our strategy will probably help our sites become more effective in any case.
I've also seen problem sites that did not get Sitelinks. Some characteristics of a site that could hinder Sitelinks include:

• Few choice pages: the vast majority of traffic is directed to just one page.
• Pages all have the same title and meta description.
• Pages have thin content, either very little text or else text that is uninformative or redundant with other pages.

Signals Used By Google's Sitelinks Algorithm?

Again, we do not know for sure, but we can deduce some of the signals by looking at Google's Webmaster Guidelines and by studying the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Google's say, in the first item under design and content guidelines, "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links." That's good advice for several reasons. A clear navigation hierarchy is good for visitors and helps search engines understand the topic of each page. Google can't create sitelinks if it can't fix the meaning of the sub-pages, either by analysis or by observing visitor behavior.

We know that Google search results pages (SERPs) contain links with tracking info, and that many users have Google accounts, so Google can watch their behavior over time. Google provides webmasters with Google Analytics free of charge. Google isn't expending resources to do all this tracking without reason. We can safely assume that Google will somehow use all that data to improve their search results, with features like Sitelinks.

If I were Google, I'd be very interested to know which search results have above-average click through rates for particular keywords. I'd also like to know if searchers were happy with my search results. If too many searchers choose a listing and then return to the SERP, that could indicate a poor quality search result. All this information is collected automatically, providing a scalable way to identify search spam, and the opposite, search "gems." A search gem with significant search volume would be the ideal candidates for a Sitelinks listing.

How to Improve the Odds of Getting Sitelinks

While we can only make educated guesses, we may as well do things that are also good for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and user experience. Even if our guesses are off, we won't be wasting effort with these recommendations:

• Create structured navigation using the HTML 5 <nav> tag, or HTML features like unordered lists (UL) and text links, or . Use CSS to style menus with the desired appearance. Lists can be displayed horizontally or vertically, and be any size or color. We can add background images, colors and border to create the appearance of a box or button. All this can be done with text links.

• Organize navigation to present a smaller number of logical destinations that visitors will choose frequently. Don't overwhelm the visitor with too many choices on the main navigation. Make sure the main navigation items are the things that users want. To get Sitelinks you want to present visitors with a reasonable number of pages that they will actually choose to visit.

• Brand the web site with a unique name. If the name is too generic, no matter what we do, the click through rates on natural search may not be very good, because the user will have too many choices on the search results for similarly named sites. Google probably won't give Sitelinks to a site that is just average for a particular search term.

• Craft unqiue and informative titles and META descriptions, especially for the home page and pages linked from the main navigation, to improve click through rates from the search results. Make sure the meta information is accurate to avoid misleading searchers. We don't want people to bounce off the site because it fails to meet their expectations.

• Make the site really useful. Even if the site's information is not exactly what the visitor wants, if we provide useful outbound links throughout the site, the visitor may browse to another site rather than returning to the search results. Remember, Google can tell if a searcher bounces back to the search results, and if that happens too often, it's probably not helping a site's reputation. 

Actionable Analytics Reports for Internal Site Search

Prepping your analytics account

Before I get into the details, make sure you have the following set up in your GA account:

    Exclude internal traffic (filter). You wouldn’t believe how many organizations don’t do this. This simple filter makes all the difference when it comes to data quality. Make sure your website is excluding all internal traffic (step-by-step directions: how to set up internal filters in GA.)
    Goals, events and conversions. In order to discover user intent, we need to be able to segment reports by conversions. Make sure that your website has clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) that are represented by goals in GA (step by step directions: how to set up goals in GA.)

Setting up GA site search reporting

Standard GA implementation doesn’t have internal search reporting configured. In order to get the data, we need to input some information into GA manually.

Follow these steps to get it up and running:

    Navigate to the “Admin” tab

    Click “View Settings”

    Go to the bottom, where you’ll find “Site Search Settings”

    Click the button so that its setting is “On”

In order to complete the tracking, you’ll need to locate your site’s query parameter.

    In a new browser tab, open your website

    In your website's internal search bar, type the word "seo" and click "search"

    You will be redirected to your website's internal search landing page

    Look at the URL on the landing page (see screenshot below)

    You will see your search term, along with these characters: "?", "random letter", and "="

    The letter before the equal sign ("=") is your website’s query parameter

    Enter this value into the appropriate box in GA

    Click save

Analyzing the site search data

To access your site search data, navigate to Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search in GA.

There are five reports under Site Search:

    Overview

    Usage

    Search Terms

    Pages

    Any/All Reports (Segments)

Report #1: Overview

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Overview

What the report tells us: Lists the high-level metrics related to your site’s internal search

Potential insights:

    Visits With Site Search, % Search Exits, and % Search Refinements: When looked at together, these metrics can tell you a lot about how visitors are finding content. If all three numbers are high, it likely means users can’t find what they‘re looking for.

    Time after Search and Average Search Depth: Conversely, if these two metrics are high, it probably means users find a lot of value in your site search.

    Overview (graph): Pay close attention to spikes and surges in internal searches. Were you running campaigns during this time? Use traffic segments to dig into causation.

Usage:

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Usage

What the report tells us: User journeys that used site search vs. those who didn’t

Potential insights:

    Pages/Session, Average Session Duration: If the pages viewed and session duration is higher with visitors using site search, this indicates your website has the right content (i.e., users are finding the content they are searching for). Keep a close eye on these metrics and test widgets, sidebars and "suggested article" plugins to help you figure out how to improve navigation.

    Goal Completions: These are important metrics. Plain and simple, this tells us whether or not site search helps drive goal completions. If so, you may want to consider making your site search more prominent, or make it stand out with specific calls to action.

    Secondary dimension: You can add a number of dimensions to this report to get deeper insight. I like to add "Medium"—it gives you a breakdown of each traffic medium, segmented by Visits With Site Search and Visits Without Site Search.

Pages

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Pages

What the report tells us: The pages users made their queries on

Potential insights:

 Overall: Looking at the overall picture of the data will show you where users are having problems finding content. Take a closer look at how your top pages are structured—can users find what they need

Secondary dimension: I like to layer on the “Previous Page Path” dimension. This helps create a greater context for the problems users are have navigating your site.

Segments

How to get there: Behavior > Behavior Flow > Site Search > Any/All Reports

What the report tells us: Segments add additional depth and value. I often use the following segments to drive more insights:

    Mobile traffic: Segmenting by mobile allows you to see visitors are using site search more from mobile. This can yield insights into mobile design and layout.

    Converters or Made a purchase: Is site search driving conversions or adding roadblocks?

    Organic traffic: What percentage of users that find your website through search engines need to refine their searches? The internal keyword searches are the keywords that users are really looking for when they find your site.

    Returning users: Returning users are loyal—they enjoy your content enough to return for more. Use the internal search data to find out what content you need to best serve them.

How to Perform a SEO Audit

Why Do You Need a SEO Audit?
When you think how much time SEO takes, you might frown at the very idea to spend more time on it. While this could be true for many SEO activities, like getting thousands of low quality backlinks that are not just a waste of time but they could really hurt your rankings, the case with SEO audits is different. SEO audits are not a waste of time for sure. Yes, a thorough audit of a big site could take days or even weeks but without it you are left in the dark.

Basically, the main purpose of a SEO audit is to give you an idea where your SEO efforts have got you to so far. Without this knowledge, it makes no sense to perform any SEO activities, since you don't know what the return from them is. This is why a SEO professional can't do without occasional (but preferably regular) SEO audits.

Crawl Your Site
Before you start with the analysis steps of a SEO audit, you need to perform some prep steps. The first one is to crawl your site. This will tell you if you have sections of your site that are not accessible to search engines. If you there are such pages/sections, you know right away why they don't rank well ‐ actually, they don't rank at all because they are not included in the databases of search engines.

To perform a crawl of your site, you need a tool. The choice of tools here is pretty rich but we can whole-heartedly recommend the Search Engine Spider Simulator tool. It's a straightforward tool that tells you what is indexable from your site and what isn't.

Check What Search Engines Say about Your Site
A crawler gives you a rough idea about what from your site is indexable and what isn't but this is not all the data we need. The fact that a page is crawlable doesn't always mean it's included in search engines' databases. Therefore, we need to check what of our crawlable pages made it there and what didn't.

Unfortunately, in order to do so, we need to hack the databases of Google, Bing, and the other search engines and this certainly isn't a viable option. The next best thing is to use the sets of Webmaster tools these search engines offer for free. If you are not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools, it's high time to correct this and start using these tools regularly. The data you will get from them is not everything you need but for a start, they are enough to perform a SEO audit.

Time for the Actual SEO Audit
After you prepared yourself by checking what's crawlable from your site and what webmaster tools report, now we can start the SEO audit itself.

1 Analyze Accessibility and Indexability
The first step in the accessibility and indexability analysis is to make sure you haven't by accident blocked crawlers from your site.

A. Analyze Robots.txt

To check if you haven't blocked crawlers, have a look at your Robots.txt file to see if there are no user agents banned, or sections of your site that should be indexed put by mistake in the banned area. You can check this in the file itself or use Google Webmaster Tools to see which URLs it lists as banned.

B. Check 404 Errors and Redirects

Another common area of problems are 404 errors and redirects. While you crawl your site, pay attention to these errors and if you find any, correct them immediately. As for redirects, as you know, there are good redirects and bad ones. Therefore, make sure you use good ones only (i.e. 301 redirects) and not bad redirects, such as 302, meta refresh redirects, JavaScript-based or anything similar.

C. Examine the XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are way too important to neglect. This is why, no SEO audit is complete without a check if your XML sitemap is up-to-date, readable, and functioning. Your XML sitemap must contain only pages that are really on your site and all your pages you want indexed must be included in the sitemap. Any deviation from this rule is a potential problem, so you need to find it and solve it now.

Also, double check if your XML map is submitted to search engines. You might have the perfect XML sitemap but if it isn't used by search engines, this makes it pointless.

D. Web Design/Development Audit

When we discuss availability, we can't skip such very important factors, such as site architecture, speed of loading, uptime, use of Flash/JavaScript. Your site architecture is directly related to availability ‐ the more menus and submenus you have, the harder to access it (and all equal, the more broken links).

If your site takes ages to load and/or is frequently down, this is also a turnoff to both human users and search engine spiders, so these issues also need to be corrected asap. Just find a good host and your problems are over!

Flash and JavaScript are two of the major nightmares of any SEO professional. While very often their use can't be avoided completely, if there is Flash- or JavaScript-based navigation, this spells huge SEO problems and a SEO audit should spot these as severe issues that need to be fixed.

In addition to accessibility, site indexibility is also something you need to check, when you perform a SEO audit. Here are some quick ways to do it.

E. Check the Number of Pages Indexed by Search Engines

The simplest way to check the number of pages indexed by a particular search engine is to type this in the search bar:

site:yoursite.com

where you replace yoursite.com with the actual name of your site.

This command gives you the number of pages from your site indexed by the search engine. If the number of pages indexed by search engines is close to the actual number of pages on your site, this is the best because it shows that your site is indexed successfully.

If the number of pages indexed by search engines is much smaller than the actual number of pages on your site, this shows that many pages are inaccessible and you need to check why this happens.

If the number of pages indexed by search engines is much bigger than the actual number of pages on your site, this suggests you have lots of duplicate content you need to clear as fast as you can. Just use site:yoursite.com&start=990 to see if Google will report duplicate content.

If you find nothing when you issue the site:yoursite.com command, you can scream with pain because (unless this is a new site) this usually means one thing ‐ you have been excluded from the search engine's index. This is the most severe penalty a site can get! If this happens to you, check here how to proceed.

2 Analyze On-Page Ranking Factors
The group of on-page ranking factors is huge and so is its importance. We could add some more on-page factors but here are the basic ones you shouldn't skip:

A. Site URLs

Site URLs need to be user friendly (i.e. no dynamic URLs, if possible), with the relevant keywords in them, and have no overlap (i.e. no two URLs should point to the same page, unless you use redirects because for search engines this is duplicate content).

B. Page Content

Page content is a topic on its own because you can devote lots of time to SEO auditing your content. The points to consider are numerous but the main ones include:

Is your content thin - i.e. do you have pages with just a few words/sentences of content?

Is your content unique ‐ i.e. do other sites in your niche have similar stuff or not?

Is your content keyword-rich ‐ i.e. do you have a good keyword density for your target keywords (without going in the keyword spamming direction, though)?

Do your keywords appear in the right places ‐ i.e. headings and the first paragraph?

Do you have duplicate content on page and/or sitewise ‐ i.e. if you use the same footer/sidebar on each page, this is also duplicate content, though it certainly is less severe than having the same articles two or more times on the site.

C. Outbound Links

The quantity and quality of outbound links is of vital importance. This is why you need to double check that you have no more than 1 outbound link per 500-1,000 words of text and that this link points to a reputable site. Of course, you can use nofollow for outbound links but still this isn't a guarantee because not all search engines (even Google itself) honor it at all times.

D. Meta Tags

Meta tags are frequently underestimated but they do matter for good rankings. For instance, you might want to make sure that each page has a unique meta description. You should also check that the <title> tag is properly filled with the name of the page it refers to.

E. Images, JavaScript, etc.

In addition to the text on a page, you also need to check non-text elements, such as images, videos, Flash, JavaScript or anything else you might use to enhance your pages. Images and videos must have a good description in the alt tag, and JavaScript and Flash must be indexable.

3 Analyze Off-Page Ranking Factors
On-page factors are important and their analysis certainly takes a lot of time. However, off-page ranking factors are also important but the good news is that their analysis isn't that time-consuming. Here are some of these off-page ranking factors you need to consider.

A. Number and Quality of Backlinks

The number and quality of backlinks is very, very important. This is why, when you are performing a SEO audit, you should check these:

Do your backlinks come from reputable sites in your niche?

Do you have many unique backlinking domains or do your links come from just a couple of unique domains?

Do you have toxic backlinks (i.e. links from bad/spammy sites)?

Do you have nofollow backlinks (you should because if you don't, this is very suspicious)

Do your backlinks have keywords in the anchor text and are these keywords different from one another?

If you have a huge amount of backlinks, you might need a lot of time to analyze them. To make your job easier, you need a good backlink checking tool, for instance this one.

B. Position with Recognized Ranking Services

Even if your site has a good backlink profile this doesn't mean it is a good ranking site. In addition to your rankings with Google and the other search engines, one more factor to consider about your position on the Web is how reputable ranking services, such as Alexa, PR, Page Authority, Domain Authority, etc. rank you. For more information about ranking services, check this article.

C. Presence on Social Media

Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, Pinterest, and the other social networking (and some social bookmarking) sites are a good indicator about your site's popularity. If you have a large following on these sites and a good number of reposts, this is a huge plus.

4 Compare Yourself to the Competition
Finally, the last step in the SEO audit process is to see how you fare compared to your competitors. This is also a time-consuming step, especially if you have lots of competitors but you shouldn't skip it. To learn how to analyze your competition, check this article.

This SEO audit surely took a lot of time and effort but this wasn't in vain. You got valuable information that can save you long hours of meaningless work. Now, put all the conclusions of the audit in writing, save the file(s) somewhere safe, so that when you decide to perform another audit sometimes in the future, you have what to compare with. SEO audits can be very time consuming but it is best if you perform them regularly, i.e. once a month or once in three months because this way you will know how you are doing and will save yourself the trouble to do SEO activities that have no (positive) effect on your rankings.