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Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts

SEO Best Practices For Brand-New Websites


It’s no secret that SEO can take a while to establish and this is even more notable when it comes to brand-new websites. The fact is, Google isn’t going to instantly award a brand-new website with wide-ranging visibility before it has had enough time to properly suss it out. In any case, we’re going to share some SEO best practices for brand-new websites so you can gain more visibility as quickly as possible!
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5 Ways to Improve Your Website with an SEO Agency

5 seo tips for website

As we have stepped into an era of technological advancements where information and data are put online and digitized, it will be better for websites and pages to step up their game. And for websites and pages, the best thing you can do is collaborate with search optimization engines to improve your page’s traffic and visibility further and gather more leads.  

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Building a Brand: The Importance of SEO in Modern Marketing Efforts

Building a Brand: The Importance of SEO in Modern Marketing Efforts
If you look at modern marketing efforts today, you may notice that there are many moving parts that comprise a marketing program. But perhaps one of the most critical and the most effective marketing tactics you can use involves search engine optimization (SEO).  SEO gets you noticed. And if you’re starting your own business, or if you’re an SEO professional, a deeper understanding of SEO dynamics and how they’re constantly changing with the implementation of complex algorithms is essential for marketing success. 
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8 Tips to Creating an SEO-Friendly Website and Generating Organic Traffic

tips to create seo friendly website

The best way to increase online visibility is by utilizing SEO. Google accounts for almost 90% of organic traffic, so an SEO-optimized website is bound to rank higher on Google SERPs.
If you are serious about expanding your online business, SEO should be your first priority when developing a website. Focusing on SEO also allows you to post better content. 

You might have the most thought-provoking content, but if they are not optimized, no one is going to find them.
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4 SEO Strategies To Outrank The Competition

4 SEO Strategies To Outrank The Competition

Competition amongst businesses on the Internet is said to be very intense. At present, there are hundreds of thousands of websites out there vying for attention from the same group of people you may be eyeing as well. Hence, it’s no longer just enough to float and hope that you make it.

Above anything else, your site has to stand out, and better yet, outrank the competition. It’s through that achievement that you can confidently say your webpage’s increasing its market share, and therefore also heightening your profit-earning potential.

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The 4 SEO Tips for Lawyers that Will Get Your Website to Rank


If you’re a lawyer, you know you have to get people to visit your website. If you’re not able to do that, you’re not going to attract the new business that will keep you afloat. Also, if you can’t attract locals who might need your services, then you’re going to allow your competitors to surge ahead and dominate your area, and as a matter of pride, you don’t want to allow that.
That’s where local SEO comes into play. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one way for you to rank at the top of the search results when someone looks for lawyers in your geographic area. We’ll give you some lawyer-specific SEO tips in this article, so pay attention and get ready to implement these strategies for maximum success.
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Digital Marketing Strategies For Growing a Business With SEO

digital marketing strategies and seo


SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and if you aren’t using it already to grow your business, then it’s high time you tried. SEO banks on some general, as well as, some more niched principles of online growth and good business management, and if we’re being perfectly honest, it’s something every business (no matter how big or small) needs.

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Safeguarding Wordpress: Protect Your Site From Hacking Using These 10 Tips

Being an open source platform, Wordpress remains to be a target for hackers. You know all too well how annoying and disappointing hackers can be. Bearing that in mind, you might as well equip yourself with some tips on how best to safeguard your site from hackers. Follow the following tips and keep hackers at bay:

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How Unique Content May Influence The SEO of a Website and Decrease Internet Marketing Expenses?

Regardless of its purpose, every website wants to have a better position in search ranking results. This is how the internet audience is finding your website, and how you are building your brand and getting more and more traffic. Providing unique content for your website is one way to improve your ranking. It is not an easy task, but it is a very grateful one because Google likes unique content.

Websites with unique content are highly valued and that can reflect on your search engine rankings. Consequently, your SEO will improve, and you will see a spike in organic visitors count, without investing a lot of money into internet marketing.

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How To Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post?

How To Write An SEO-Friendly Blog Post

Writing good blog posts is a specific skill. There are plenty of good writers who have no idea how to construct a blog post, let alone an SEO-focused blog post. The good news is that anyone can learn to compose their blog posts with SEO in mind, here’s what you need to know to get started. 
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How to Use a Competitor Analysis To Increase Your Blogs Popularity?

How to Use a Competitor Analysis To Increase Your Blogs Popularity
Search engine optimization does not happen in a vacuum. Much like in a traditional business setting, you need to take your competition into consideration when evaluating ways you can improve your blog and get more traffic. This article will give you some tips and tricks for how to perform a SWOT analysis, use the information to drive visitors to your blog, and get yourself on that coveted first page—maybe even in the top spot—on the search results.
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How to Optimize Your PDF Files to Get a Featured Snippet

How to Optimize Your PDF Files to Get a Featured Snippet

A while back, Google only used content from websites to get a featured snippet. At the time, most of the web owners and managers solely focused on creating the appropriate HTML files. Today, however, Google has embraced diversity because PDF files can now get featured snippets. As a result, digital marketers who rely on PDFs to create content can now employ the best practices to helps optimize their PDFs to receive featured snippets.

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AMP Blogger Templates - Advantages Vs. Disadvantages

amp-blogger-template-advantages-disadvantages

Do you want to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Blogger? Or you would like to know the advantages and serious disadvantages of creating an AMP Blogger Template? If your answer is yes, then you have landed on the right page. Before making your site ready for AMP, please read why major companies have not yet adopted AMP.

IMPORTANT: All AMP Blogger Templates that you find online are not AMP at all!

What are Mobile Accelerated Pages (AMP)?

AMP HTML is an open source project by Google to provide mobile-optimized content that can load instantly everywhere. In short AMP makes your site load faster like a speeding bullet on smart phones but by sacrificing major portion of your advertisement revenue and third-party JavaScript.

Google started this project as competition to Apple News App and Facebook Instant articles.

FB instant articles is platform dependent, meaning your website get traffic from Facebook users alone and you can't provide the same bullet speed to your website visitors coming from search engines.

Same is the disadvantage with Apple News App where you can't publish your own content.

But AMP is platform independent, providing publishers to optimize content for mobile and make it accessible for all devices through a web browser. It has some advantages but several cons, which are worth noting before you opt-for AMP.

Following are some of AMP restrictions

  • Allow only asynchronous scripts
  • Size all resources statically
  • Don’t let extension mechanisms block rendering
  • Keep all third-party JavaScript out of the critical path
  • All CSS must be inline and size-bound less than 50,000 bytes
  • Font triggering must be efficient
  • Minimize style recalculations
  • Prioritize resource loading

Can you Implement AMP in Blogger?

Yes you can but partially!

Blogger team has officially not implemented AMP in Blogger blogs. Blogger XHTML templates currently do not support AMP HTML tags.

Designers who are implementing AMP in blogspot are forcibly removing important XML tags from the template which is not recommended and will seriously effect your blog in the long run.

This forcible action of making a blogger template AMP, is same as if you place a Mercedes engine inside a low budget car and expect it to drive fast. Yes the car could be forced to run the Mercedes engine but with no support to its best features. Thus wasting your entire effort!

You can surely create an AMP Blogger Template for your blogspot blog but by sacrificing several important features of Blogger and look of the template. AMP in short will convert your blog into an ugly Flat CSS/HTML design without allowing third-party fancy jQuery and JS effects.

amp-icon-in-search-results

AMP uses just some custom HTML tags that needs to be inserted inside your blogger theme to make it AMP validated. Once validated, Google will add the AMP icon next to your blogspot blog in search results. You can expect better traffic but by sacrificing ad revenue and blog look.

Difference Between AMP and Responsive Templates

AMP = Responsive Template + Custom HTML Tags

Before converting your template to AMP, it must be first made mobile responsive by adding CSS media queries and several breakpoints.

AMP is basically a much simplified/optimized version of your responsive template with addition of some custom HTML tags.

Just like your have a diet Pepsi Cola, you have a Diet HTML page today named as AMP.

Are AMP Templates Faster Than Responsive Templates?

Theoretically AMP Page must load faster than a normal responsive page but if a page is not coded properly than the same AMP page could load slower compared to a mobile responsive page.

Responsive Templates displays both the sidebar, footer and run all third-party JavaScript. Responsive blogger theme is simply a mobile compatible version of your desktop theme with almost the same features, widgets, plugins and other web elements.

In AMP Templates, you can't use a stylesheet greater than 50,000 bytes, you also can not use third-party widgets such as add-to-cart buttons or social media sharing buttons of your choice. AMP will convert your professional looking desktop look into a flat design with just the Logo, Menu, Post Body and footer.

When you sacrifice so much for load time, then of course, such a light weight AMP page will perform and load much faster compared to a responsive page.

Pros and Cons of AMP Blogger Templates

Following are important advantages and disadvantages of using AMP Blogger Templates:

Advantages Disadvantages
1. AMP templates load Faster

AMP pages load much faster compared to a responsive blogger template.
1. AMP Badly Effects Your Ad Revenue.

You won't make as much money as you were making with a full mobile website.
2. AMP templates Improves Ranking

AMP improved SERPs ranking and organic traffic The Washington Post by 23%
2. You Can Not Use JavaScript at all!

All those interactive widgets and plugins that make your blog look cool are not allowed. You have to use an off-the-shelf JavaScript library that Google provides you with.
You can however use the AMP iframe but it will be loaded slowly with a condition that the iframe must be at least 600px or 75% of the first viewport away from the top.
3. Your Blog pageviews would increase.

Blog Pages will load instantly thus providing a better user experience as far as speed is concerned.
3. You Can't use Blogger Comment Form.

You can however use either Facebook/Disqus/Google+ comment plugins instead but since the official comment form by Blogger uses iframe which can't be edited so it's not allowed.
4. AMP templates are best suited for news blogs. 4. You Can't Use Blogger Template Editor

You can't customize your template in Template Editor. <b:skin> tags and <b:template-skin> tags are removed or comment-out.
  5. All Images Posted Must Be Edited

You will need to edit <img> tags of all images inside your blog posts one by one with amp supported tag of <amp-img>. Which of course is time consuming in blogger if you have over 100 posts.
  6. You can't use Widgets in Sidebar

AMP does not allow third-party JavaScript. If you wish to use a widget that runs on JavaScript then you can't use it.
Some widgets available in layout section that uses text+image are supported only after their code is edited inside template section to make it compatible.
  7. You Can't Sell items on your Blog

The Add-to-Cart button is not allowed
  8. All Videos and Audios embedded inside Posts Must Be Edited

You will need to edit all your YouTube/Facebook/Vimeo videos, all your soundcloud audio clips through different embed tags as mentioned on this page.
  9. All iframe tags used inside Posts must be edited

You can display an iframe on your page only through the amp-iframe element.
  10. Email Subscription Form Can't Be Used

onclick, action, onsubmit, onfocus, onblur attributes are not allowed in AMP without which you can't possible create a subscription form for your blog readers unless you use an iframe.
  11. AMP supports limited Ad Networks.

BuySellAds does not currently support AMP. You will suffer greatly in BSA revenue if you go for AMP. At present only AdSense ads are properly supported.
  12. XMLNS attributes must be removed

xmlns attribute are added inside the opening <html> tag if your blog that gives important information to web browser about the web technology being used by your blog.

AMP asks you to remove all such attributes and add only the amp="amp" attribute.
Your blog will not be validated by http://w3.org if the xmlns attribute which specifies the xml namespace for a document is missing.

Do We Recommend AMP?

Honestly speaking AMP is not the best choice of all publishers. Even corporate news blogs like Washington Post and CNN who were using AMP previously and openly supported last year, seems reluctant to support it in 2017. You can clearly see AMP tags removed by these two sites and they no more support it.

AMP does speed up your site but on the expense of your Ad revenue and less freedom on customization. Without freedom of UI customization, no technology can survive.

An article by Wall Street Journal expressed serious concerns of publishers who did not find AMP very helpful in improving their ad revenue. Some even complained that an AMP page view currently generates around half as much revenue as a page view on their full mobile responsive websites.

Some publishers aren’t generating as much ad revenue as they had hoped - The Wall Street Journal

AMP is not a good option for Blogger platform at present because there is no official support present for it currently. Forcibly converting a templates code to AMP will only make it a headache for people not quite well versed with code tweaking.

I will recommend that you wait and let Blogger team provide a CMS support to implement AMP in Blogger themes. Just like Blogger provided support for https when we raised questions on how Blogger blogs will solve absolute image urls issue in https. 

MBT is currently mobile responsive and we won't opt for AMP unless a proper support is given officially by Blogger.

For Wordpress users, there is a plugin called AMP For Wordpress that you can use to convert your WP site into an AMP site, but as I mentioned, yes you will get a fast load time but at the expense of ad revenue and less freedom.

Please share your precious thoughts on this trending topic and let us know whether you like AMP or you would expect more improvement on it. If you are already using an AMP supported blogger theme, please share your experience with us. Peace buddies! =)

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How to Optimize and Use PDFs as Online Content?

As you probably know, PDFs are a very popular document format – mostly due to the fact that they can be viewed on any platform while preserving the document layout and formatting. Because of this universal compatibility they are often used for distributing or printing documents.

optimize PDF documents as online content

The one area where PDFs have traditionally not been very popular is as online content on websites. Although most web browsers can view PDF documents, the misconception that search engines could not index PDF files meant that many people avoided them for quite some time.

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Google will Penalize all sites Sharing widgets, Plugins and Templates


Latest Google Back-linking Policies

Google keeps on changing its algorithms and policies regarding link building and link exchange. This time around, in their updated link schemes document under the Webmaster guidelines, Google has included large-scale guest posting, advertorials, and links in distributed articles/press releases/products to be in violation of their policies. This new development is among the stream of other changes Google has made so far this year, and seems to be an alarming one. Because not only will it apply to large scale guest posting and press releases, it will also apply to sites sharing free widgets, plugins, and templates, and then linking to themselves in those products.
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Fix Structured Data hatom Errors in Blogger

structured data errors

Last year we wrote a comprehensive post on understanding what Structured Data is and how it is used to better display your site on major search engine result pages. Today you will find the first tutorial of its kind for Blogger blogs where you will learn how to fix Structured Data errors in BlogSpot templates. In your webmaster tools' Search Appearance tab or while using Google rich snippets tool, you must have come across two or all of these famous microformat markup errors:

  1. Warning: Missing required field “entry-title”
  2. Warning: Missing required field “updated”
  3. Warning: Missing required hCard “author”


Both wordpress and Blogger users are facing this trouble. We will be covering blogger troubleshoot guide today and will cover wordpress Genesis platform as soon as possible.

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10 Best Desktop SEO Software to Optimize Your Site

10 Best Desktop SEO Software
Whoever said you need to go to online services each time you want to look over at the Search Engine Optimization of your website? SEO is not a one-time process. Rather, it's an on-going one, which might make going repeatedly online to different sites a drudging work. To make it easier, there are certain desktop SEO software that you can install right to your computer, and they will work in the background when you're not interacting with them, hence making ordinary tasks SEO tasks easier for you. Here are the 10 best desktop SEO software to optimize your website.
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Top 5 SEO Skills You must Learn in 2018

Top SEO Skills To Learn in 2018
The basics and fundamentals of SEO change periodically over the years. These ever-changing circumstances lead most of us to learn some new things every year - and let of some things old. You see, there are new SEO skills needed each year (or every so often) to keep up with the change and keep surviving. 2018 is no exception. A lot has changed since last year, and there's a lot of new stuff to be learned.
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Up to 90% Massive Drop in Google Search Traffic Worldwide [Case Study]

Case Study on recent Google OutageLooks like Google is acting Cowboy again! Forums are getting crowded daily with questions related to a massive Organic Search traffic drop on sites world wide. Almost all sites are effected be it entertainment based, IT orientated, ecommerce or blogs ran on Wordpress and Blogger. All www domains have been seriously effected by Google with a 50%-90% Cruel Traffic penalty without any prior notice or announcement. Matt Cutts blog and his twitter profile are both deserted and there appears to be no updates on what exactly is happening. Webmasters around the world have been terribly hit by this biggest algorithmic change far bigger than Panda or Penguin. The interesting part to note is, Google blogs, forums and the company employees wont utter a word on what just happened on August 16 and August 21?  
Around half of our clients complained recently about a major drop in their traffic. Since we offer SEO consultancy, its our job to keep these sites well optimized. I was shocked with the figures I received from their Analytics reports. Far bigger surprise was when we noticed all blogs of STC Network being terribly effected with a tremendous loss in traffic for the past few weeks starting from August 16th. Based on the free available tools we have online, following are some reports presented as a brief Case Study that would prove that a major algorithmic change has surely occurred on Google's side which the company is neglecting to answer so far.
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Should You Use Article Directories To Build Links in 2017?

Should You Use Article Directories For Link Building?
Building links from various different sources to get a higher search engine ranking has always been one of the most popular SEO techniques. People have forever been using archives, blog listing, article directories, and so on to build links. But that was then. And this is now. Google has ruffled up more than a few feathers in the past couple years, and SEO as we knew it is no longer the same. So what about resources like article directories? Are they still relevant today in 2017?
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