5 SEO Secrets for Bloggers - DailyBlogTips

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5 SEO Secrets for Bloggers Posted: 06 Jun 2015 11:18 AM PDT High search engine rankings are something that every blogger craves for. Even in this world of social media, nothing can beat the quality of organic traffic. It is much targeted and the visitors have a definite requirement in mind, which makes it easy to convert such traffic. That is why it is so important to optimize your blogs from a search engine perspective. But wait! There are around 200 factors controlling the search engine rankings in Google. Are you paying full attention to them? I am sure that know about basic on-page SEO and linkbuilding. There are plenty of tools to help you in linkbuilding (I use Ahrefs regularly). But is that all? Aren?t you missing out on a lot of other factors? I think so. In fact, there are plenty of factors that we overlook. While it is not possible to control all 200 factors, there are some that we are simply unaware of. As a result of this lack of knowledge, we miss out on some easy to apply tactics that can be of great help to a blog?s SEO. In this post, I am going to explain (and reinforce) some of these lesser known ideas and tell you how to derive full SEO benefit using these tactics. Ready? Write attractive headlines to get higher click through rates Idea: Higher click through rates in SERPs (Search engine result pages) provide boost to your rankings. The reverse is also true. How a particular result performs in the SERPs has an important effect on its subsequent rankings. Suppose you are ranking in #1 for your target keyword. But still, people are not clicking on your link. This sends a wrong message to the search engines. The algorithm will interpret that your blog is not relevant enough. As a result, your rankings will go down. On the other hand, if your blog is ranked low, but still, more people are clicking on it, then the algorithm will attach more value to you blog and your rankings will rise. So you must improve your click through rates. The easiest way to get more clicks is to write attractive headlines. In fact, most people read the headlines only. Your headline should persuades the user in clicking it (to reach your blog post). Use power words, use numbers, stir controversies, make claims: these are a few of the many things you can do to make your links more clickable. Next time, make sure you write an attractive title rather than a bland one. Also write a meaningful meta description. This description often appears in the SERPs and will potentially play a role in attracting the user. Doing these things will boost your CTR, and in turn, your rankings. You can check the CTRs from Google Analytics. Start writing clickable headlines and monitor the change. Find out which type of headlines work best in your niche. Use images links to improve SERPs Idea: Alt tags of images provide keyword benefits and also add to backlink diversity Everyone knows about text links. Anchor text used in the text links affect the rankings for that keyword as well as related ones. But did you ever consider that image links can also boost your rankings for your chosen keywords? Yes they can. Images use alt tags, which tells the search engine bots about the content of that image. When you use an image to link to a particular post, the alt tag of that image will serve as the keyword. So, start building image backlinks. Images are a nice way to interlink your posts. Moreover, image based links add diversity to your backlinks repertoire. One easy way to get image based backlinks is to offer a free infographic for others to use on their blogs. Simply ask them to provide an image backlink (through the infographic) to your original post. Link out to trustworthy blogs Idea: High quality articles are supposed to link to high quality sources Backlinks are, in essence, a form of voting. If your blog is good, it is expected to get lots of votes. At the same time, a good blog is expected to vote for other good blogs! That is why outbound links are so important. By linking out to useful and credible sources, you not only ensure the satisfaction of your readers, but also the favor of the search engines. Do not link out to crappy, low quality resources. Provide backlinks to high quality and helpful resources only. It is easy to do and will raise your blog?s value in the eyes of the search engine. Maintain healthy dofollow to nofollow ratio Idea: Excess nofollow backlinks suggest that your blog is not trustworthy. A nofollow tag is basically used to indicate that a certain backlink is not towards a trusted source. As such, getting too many nofollow backlinks can be a bad thing. In the initial days of a blog, nofollow backlinks will be predominant. Most of your links will be from nofollow blog comments. But as a blog ages, it is expected to gain more dofollow links. You can easily check the number of dofollow and nofollow backlinks using Ahref. At the time of writing, my blog is few months old and has 20% dofollow backlinks. A couple of months back it was only 5%. On the other hand, an established blog like Problogger has 91% dofollow backlinks. My suggestion is to avoid getting excessive nofollow backlinks. Major culprits are forum profile backlinks, nofollowed footer and blogroll links, and crappy Web 2.0 backlinks. Do not acquire such links as they do no good. Some bloggers cannot resist the urge of buying thousands of cheap automated backlinks. Avoid this at all cost. Such backlinks provide zero value. They unnecessarily inflate the nofollow backlinks count, which can only harm your rankings. Instead, concentrate on getting dofollow backlinks. Writing guest posts (like this one) is one great way to do it. Stretch your contents longer Idea: High quality contents are usually comprehensive in nature Various studies have shown that longer contents rank better in Google. You may argue that you can provide high quality content in a concise manner, but the algorithms won?t listen. So, it is a good idea to write longer posts. Unique content (the post and comments) to repeat content (header, sidebar and footer text) ratio should be high. Try to write in depth content. If you feel that you are ending up adding fluff to your content, there are alternatives. One great way to ensure more unique content is to get more comments on you blog posts. Comments not only increase content length but they also introduce new long tail keywords, which can further help in getting organic traffic. These are the simple tips that I urge every blogger to follow. These tips are very easy to follow. But sadly, these are often overlooked due to the hype around things. Be smart. Try out these tips and see your rankings improve. If you have any questions or want to discuss anything, feel free to leave a comment. Neil is making a comeback to blogging after 5 years and he writes at Blogician.com. He shares super useful tips including this blogging tips for beginners guide. Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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ProBlogger: 8 Ways to Stop Your Blog Crashing as Soon as it Gets Popular

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8 Ways to Stop Your Blog Crashing as Soon as it Gets Popular Posted: 02 Jun 2015 07:00 AM PDT In this guest post, Andrew Maybin, managing director of web hosting and digital infrastructure company Tibus, gives tips on how to avoid the hosting pitfalls associated with high-traffic blogs. It's the nightmare scenario for any blogger. All the hours and effort you've invested in writing, promoting and developing your site, only for it to go down as soon as you hit the jackpot. An article that goes viral, a retweet from a high-profile influencer or a link from a top-tier website: it's what you've been working towards, but is your blog ready to cope with the resulting traffic? If you're yet to find out the hard way, your web hosting and server setup can play a hugely important role in making your blog a success. Pieces of content – in the form of blog posts and social media output – are often described in terms of being building blocks. Your hosting is the foundations on which your content is built. Get that wrong and it all comes tumbling down pretty quickly. How important is it that your blog is available? That is the first – and perhaps the most important – question to ask yourself. It is something you need to repeatedly come back to when making decisions about your hosting arrangements. National broadcasters, popular tech websites and high-traffic niche blogs are make up a huge portion of web hosting clients. Even within that relatively close demographic, people have different budgets, hosting requirements and answers to that all-important question. In the 'jackpot' examples we mentioned, how much would it cost you – or maybe pain you – for your website to crash? Act according to your answer when weighing up which of these hosting tips for high-traffic blogs is right for your website. 1. Choose the right hosting package The most fundamental aspect of website hosting is getting the right sort of package to begin with. As with anything in life, you tend to get what you pay for so don't expect an entry level package to serve enterprise ambition. Be realistic and choose a package with enough CPU and RAM to give the raw power your website needs. As a rule of thumb, websites that attract flashes of traffic, like blogs, are well-suited to private cloud hosting supported by a content delivery network (CDN). This option gives the efficiency and scalability of the cloud, but with extra control and security. The CDN takes the strain off the main server by hosting photos and other static assets that might otherwise drain your resources. 2. Pick something scalable As alluded to in the previous point, the way to deal with surges of traffic without breaking the bank is to opt for a hosting package that's flexible enough to scale-up when the crowds arrive and scale back down to something that's a bit more affordable when they've gone. 3. Use web server caching A cache takes pages or assets within your blog and creates static versions of them which load much more quickly. This can result in 20x better performance from exactly the same server. The impact on user experience is limited and the improvement in site speed dramatic. We tend to use caching tools such as NGINX and Varnish. Any blog that uses WordPress will benefit hugely from caching. In fact it's a must for maintaining decent performance levels. 4. Use servers close to your readers Where is your traffic coming from? It is a good idea to have versions of your website hosted in data centres close to your main geographic hot-spots.So, if you’re big in Brazil, hot in Hungary or in-demand in India, move your content closer to the audience. The result will be a better user experience and a more efficient use of your resources. 5. Tune your database A tidy database can go a long way towards stopping your website crashing during busy periods. Slow queries, inefficient calls and multiple table joins – all of which can occur naturally as your website evolves over time – can cause slow performance on high-traffic websites 6. Use a database cache Database queries are very often the cause of performance problems for high traffic websites, even if you’ve tuned your database as outlined above. Using a tool like Memcache or Redis will improve performance when large numbers of visitors are concurrently dipping in and out of articles, photos and other pieces of content. 7. Use lateral scaling and load balancing Even the most powerful servers and their software have a ‘hard limit' at which point their resources hit a wall. You can circumvent this by using more than one server and balancing the load across them. This is the web hosting embodiment of the old adage, 'a problem shared is a problem halved'. It can achieve greater capacity and better performance while retaining cost-effectiveness. 8. Pay attention to your network This starts at home by making sure you've got the basics right. In the past we've seen people tick the wrong box with usage limits or firewall settings and inadvertently limit their server resources. Further afield, your hosting company will be using internet exchanges as part of their network. Check that there are no bottlenecks with their infrastructure and that sufficient bandwidth is being made available to your website. The tips in this guest post have been kept as simple as possible. You can find a bit more technical detail at tibus.com. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 8 Ways to Stop Your Blog Crashing as Soon as it Gets Popular

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