Boost Your Blog's SEO - Simple Ways

Your blog is a powerful tool. Publishing blog content on a regular basis can provide an organization with a number of distinct benefits, which include:

• Brand building and awareness.
• Positioning yourself as a thought leader.
• Demonstrating your (or your organization's) expertise.
• Developing relationships within your niche.
• Fostering an engaged and active community.
• Generating leads.

Blogging is also powerful from an SEO standpoint as well. Strategic and active blogging can help you:

• Incite more crawling – the more you publish, the more your site gets crawled.
• Penetrate more keyword verticals.
• Attract links – provided you're promoting your content; passive link acquisition is difficult if not impossible for most sites.
• Generate social signals.
• Drive more organic traffic.

Despite the inherent "SEO value" of blogging, many blogs just aren't properly optimized for search, or aren't optimized to their fullest potential. As such, these blogs aren't working as hard as they could be for an organization from an SEO standpoint.

Many of the fixes and improvements you can make are really quite simple. Let's take a look at six steps every organization can take today to improve their blog's SEO.

1. Practice Good Pagination

Pagination on a blog is a system for enumerating pages so you can organize and archive content. Pagination is particularly helpful for usability because housing all your blog posts on a single page that scrolls endlessly isn't a practical or user-friendly approach. A single page with hundreds of blog entries would undoubtedly hurt load times too.

When it comes to SEO, pagination implemented correctly maximizes "crawl depth" and makes your content easier for engines to access by reducing the number of clicks needed to reach deeper, archived pages. In addition, proper pagination is a scalable way to flow more (or a larger percentage) of PageRank to your archived content.

Here are some solid examples of SEO-friendly pagination (multiple, numbered hyperlinks means fewer clicks to reach older content).

It isn't just blogs. Search engines practice good pagination practices as well, so take a page (or a post, if you will) out of Google's playbook.

If that's good pagination, then what's bad pagination?

Examples of poor pagination (or complete lack of) are pretty rampant across the Web. Some of the biggest offenders are free, off-the-shelf WordPress templates where you get a either a single hyperlink to access archived content "older entries," or two links "older entries" and "newer entries."

So why is the above example bad?

Having a single link means it can take exponentially more clicks to reach older content, which can make it harder for bots to find. Also, a single link means each subsequent archived index page (and the posts linked from it) is getting a smaller percent of a percent of PageRank. By the time you've gone five clicks deep into your archive, those pages and posts are starved for link equity.

Some of my favorite pagination plugins are:

• WP-Paginate
• Simple Pagination

2. Add Related Posts

As mentioned in the above section on pagination, it's critical that you make your blog content easy to find (both for bots and users). If your content is buried a dozen clicks deep or if it's orphaned entirely, that content can drop out of the index or won't have enough link equity to outrank competitor documents, rendering those pages useless from a SEO perspective.

So another way to improve the findability of your content is to add a list of related articles at the end of each of all your blog posts. Not only does this elicit more page views with readers, but this practice also helps flow link equity to deeper content and improves the circulation of PageRank across your blog. Finally, given there are keywords in the anchor text, related posts are an internal linking mechanism that reinforce the semantic relevance of a document they're linking to.

If you're running on WordPress, adding related posts is relatively easy, and there are a range of some very good related post plugins:

• 12 Related Post Plugins For The WordPress Beginners
• 3 "Must-Have" WordPress Related Posts Plugins

3. Add Previous and Next Posts

Similar to implementing a related posts feature on your blog, you can increase findability with "previous" and "next" post links, which can appear at the top or at the bottom of an article on your blog.

Much like adding related posts, "previous" and "next" article links effectively surfaces your content and improves link equity distribution. In addition, these types of navigational links can help increase time on site, and boost overall user-engagement and satisfaction signals via the "long click," a behavior metric Google is potentially measuring.

4. Proper Use of Categories

Categories are another component on your blog you can leverage to boost your organic search efforts. Besides making archived content easier to find (a common thread here), categories help classify and silo your content into topically themed pages, which creates additional opportunities to rank in search results.

Some category best practices are:

• Limit the number of categories you have. Categories are often misused or abused with contributors creating a new category every time they write a new post, which can lead to really thin pages of content (pages with a single post snippet). For small- to medium-sized blogs, 10 to 15 categories are really all you need.
• Select only one category per post. Contributors often abuse the category select feature and click on multiple categories before posting, which can risk duplicate content issues.
• Add original content to your categories to help make them unique. This plugin works well for adding introductory content to category pages

5. Vary Title Tags vs. Article Titles

Keywords are the foundation for your SEO efforts. Most bloggers understand this and often include keywords and keyword variations in their copy. But where many authors drop the ball is by not varying the title of the blog post and the title tag element.

Often this is due to inexperience, time constraints, or the option doesn't exist in their dashboard (which is easily remedied with the proper plugin). As such, the CMS or publishing platform duplicates the post title and the title tag with copy and paste.

Will this negatively impact SEO? No. But given the title tag is still the most important piece of content on your site (from an SEO perspective), not varying title and title tag is really more of a missed opportunity.

By varying your title and title tag and working in alternative keywords, stems, modifiers or synonyms, you make your content work even hard for you in the SERPs. And the more keyword variations in your content, the more opportunities your content has to rank in more searches.

There are a number of SEO plugins that allow you to vary post title and title tag, but my favorites are:

• WordPress SEO Plugin
• Headspace2

6. Add Sharing Buttons

Adding social buttons prompts sharing, which improves the distribution or your content across social platforms. Sharing can also help expose your content to new audiences.

From an SEO perspective, getting your content shared increases the likelihood of mentions and links. Also sharing helps your content get discovered faster; and the quicker it's found, the sooner it shows up in the index.

What's more, Google is gathering social data and this data impacts rankings. To what extent those social signals influence rankings is debatable, but Google clearly places some degree of value on social, and so should you.

To help increase distribution of your content across social channels, you need to implement frictionless sharing. Make your share buttons obvious, but not disruptive or distracting.

Sharebar is my favorite social sharing plugin for WordPress. It doesn't support Google+, but this quick snippet of code solves that.

Sharebar is good for two reasons. It shadows the reader as they move down the page, and it contains "share counts," which can help convey further trust, authority and popularity of an article for an audience.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2270685/boost-your-blogs-seo-mojo-with-these-6-simple-actionable-steps

Friday, June 05, 2015

Most of you are too busy monitoring Google's latest algorithm updates, examining web analytics, and building links and content to stay up to date on the design world.

Usually, creative people who excel at design aren't very good at the left-brain thinking required to succeed in the highly-technical search engine optimization industry. Likewise, very few people with the analytical mindset required for search engine optimization would do well in the free-spirited design industry.

Unfortunately, in the real world, you're often expected to do exactly that. And while most people understand that it would be ludicrous to expect their doctor to also troubleshoot their plumbing, they don't seem to understand why they shouldn't expect the person responsible for their SEO to also handle their design needs from time to time.

So you're often forced to design things for your clients from time to time. Or sometimes, you just need to whip up something for yourself instead of trying to find someone who can deliver what you need on Fiverr.

Since you probably won't start sporting a black turtleneck and talking about crop marks, press checks, or CMYK colors anytime soon, it seems silly to shell out thousands of dollars on software you'll only use occasionally, so I've compiled a list of design resources for non-designers.

The resources in this list are every bit as powerful as any of the professional-grade software, but they are free. (Some do offer premium versions with more options.) The only downside is that it might be a little bit tougher to find tutorials for some of these programs compared to the industry standard software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.

Image editing

We all need to edit and create images from time to time, but if you only do it occasionally, software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator works out to be pretty expensive. Fortunately, there are several feature-rich image editing programs available.

• Gimp - Anything you can do with Photoshop can be done with Gimp, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The learning curve can be steep, but it's worth the time.
• Pixlr - If you're used to Photoshop, this program has a very similar interface, and it even opens native .psd files with the original layers intact.
• Canva - The drag-and-drop interface of this web-based design program make graphic design quick and simple, plus it comes with a library of over one million professional stock images.
• Inkscape - Easily create illustrations, logos, technical drawings, and vector images with this free alternative to Illustrator.
• SVG Editor - If you're obsessed about website speed, you probably love SVGs (scalable vector graphics) and this handy tool from Google make it easy to create and edit them.

3D

OK, so you're not going to compete with Pixar anytime soon, but 3D capabilities do come in handy for designing mockups of books and DVDs, creating characters, and even complete photorealistic animations.

• Online 3d Package - This tool lets you quickly and easily create photorealistic mockups of books, boxes, DVDs, and CDs.
• Blender - If you occasionally need to create 3D renderings but can't justify spending big bucks for professional-grade software that you'll only use a few times, Blender is the perfect (and free) alternative.

Web design

Designing a website requires a blend of creative and technical skills. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools available to efficiently complete both. From the pretty parts, to the nuts and bolts, to the little details, here is everything you'll need:

Palette generator - Upload an image and this tool will generate the perfect color palette to compliment it that you can download as a CSS file.

Subtle Paterns - Creating seamless backgrounds can be a pain, so instead of starting from scratch, just download from over 400 high-quality seamless background images, including textures and patterns.

Web page editors

Whether you're building a website from scratch with a WYSIWYG editor or fine-tuning the code on an existing website with an HTML editor, web design software will probably get a lot of use in your hands. If you have the technical chops to hand code your websites, that's ideal, but if not, or if you just don't want to, here are several options:

• Kompozer - With a WYSIWYG editor in one tab and raw HTML in the other, on-the-fly editing with built-in FTP, Kompozer will make creating and editing web page a breeze.
• Google Webdesigner - Build HTML5-based designs and motion graphics that can run on any device without writing any code! (If you want to get your hands dirty, you can edit all HTML and CSS by hand.
• Expression Web - Microsoft offers another free web page editor which has made significant improvements since that abomination called Frontpage.

Favicon Generator - A truly polished website needs consistent branding throughout, and that means all the little details, including a favicon—that tiny little image that sits in the tab or bookmarks. Just upload an image file, such as your logo, and this handy tool will spit out the .ico files you need.

Web Developer Toolbar - This browser toolbar is available for Firefox and Chrome, and helps you troubleshoot your website and even test it at various screen sizes.

Infographics

Infographics are still an effective method to earn social shares and links, and they are a great way to present a lot of data-rich information, but they can be a pain to create. Here are several tools to simplify the process that might even be better (and easier) than traditional design software.

• Infogram - Build beautiful data-driven infographics in just three steps with this free tool.
• Piktochart - With a simple point and click editor and over 4,000 graphics, icons, and template files, Piktochart makes it easy to create infographics that look exactly the way you want.
• Easel.ly - Loaded with tons of creative templates and an east-to-use interface, this is another powerful tool to create your own stunning infographics.
• Venngage - This drag and drop interface provides all the charts, maps, icons and templates you'll need to design attention-grabbing infographics.
• Vizualize.me - Turn your boring resume into a unique visual expression of your skills and experience to stand out from the crowd.

If you are in a saturated market or have a great idea you are certain will be a success then it may make sense to splash out for a custom designed graphic, but in less competitive market some of the above quick-n-easy tools can still be remarkably effective.

Data visualization

Google Charts is a great way to create all sorts of charts, and the best part is that you can create them on the fly by passing variables in the URL.

Typography

Today you have plenty of options when it comes to font choices, so please stop using Arial, and for the love of all that is good, never use Comic Sans or I will hunt you down. You can choose from thousands of free fonts, so it's easy to pick one that fits your project perfectly.

• Typegenius - Choosing the perfect font combo can be tough, but Typegenious makes it easy. Just pick a starter font from the drop down list and the site will recommend fonts that pair well with it.
• Google Fonts - I recommend embedding Google fonts instead hosting them on your own server because they load more quickly and there is a chance they're already cached on visitors' computers.
• Font Awesome - This is an awesome (hence the name) way to add all sorts of scalable icons without a load of extra http requests. Simply load one font for access to 519 icons that colored, scaled, and styled with CSS.
• DaFont - Download and instal these fonts (.ttf or .otf formats) for designing documents or images on your computer.
• What the Font - If you've ever experienced the rage-inducing task of figuring out what font was used when your client only has a 72dpi jpg and no idea how to track down their previous designer, then this is the tool for you. Just upload your image and it goes to work figuring what font it is.

Social media

Social media can multiply your website's exposure exponentially, but it takes a lot of work. From branding profiles on each network to crafting engaging visual content your fans will share, you'll have to create a lot of graphics to feed the beast. Doing that manually, the old-fashioned way is tedious and slow, so I recommend these tools to speed up your workflow.

Easy Cover Maker - Stop wasting time trying to position your cover and profile photo for your Facebook and Google+ page. This tool lets you drag everything into position in one handy interactive window, then download the image files.

Quote creators

• Quotes Cover - Just select a quote or enter your own text, apply various effects for your own unique style, and download eye catching pictures perfect for social media. It even creates the perfect dimensions based on how you intend to use it.
• Chisel - This tool has the most user-friendly interface and tons of great images and fonts to create the exact message you want to share.
• Recite This - There are plenty of images and fonts available, but the downside is you have to scroll through images one at a time, and fonts are selected randomly.

Jing - From the makers of Camtasia, this free program gives you the ability to capture images or video (up to 5 minutes long) of your computer screen, then share it with the click of a button.

Social Kit - Create cover images, profile pictures, and ad banners for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube with this free, up-to-date Photoshop plugin.

Social media image size guide - The folks over at Sprout Social created (and maintain) this handy and comprehensive Google doc listing the image sizes for all major social media networks, and since it's a shared document, you can have Google notify you anytime it's updated!

Meme creators

Instead of wasting time searching for the perfect meme, why not just create your own?

• Meme Generator
• Meme Builder
• Quick Meme

Stock photos

Powerful photos can mean the difference between a dry post that visitors ignore and one that entices them to read more. The good news is you don't have to take your own spend a fortune on stock photos because there are several free and low-cost options available.

• Unsplash - These are not your typical cheesy stock photos; they lean more towards the artistic side. New photos are uploaded every day and they're all 100% free.
• StockVault - With over 54 thousand free images available, both artistic and corporate-style, you should be able to find the perfect photo for just about any project.
• Dreamstime & iStockPhoto - Both of these sites give you the option of a subscription model or a pay-as-you-go credits. Many images on one are available on the other, but I've found great images that were only on one of the two sites, so it's worthwhile to check both.

Inspiration

Even the best designers hit a wall, creatively speaking, so it helps to look for inspiration. These sites curate the best designs around and are updated regularly, so you'll find plenty of fresh ideas for your project.

• Awwwards
• Web Creme
• Logo Pond

Tutorials

Since you're days are filled with keyword research, content development, link building, and other SEO-related tasks, you probably don't have time to stay up-to-date on the latest design trends and techniques. No worries—with these websites, you'll be able to find a tutorial to walk you through just about any design challenge.

• CSS-Tricks - Whenever I have a CSS question, I always slap “css tricks” on the end of my search because Chris Coyer has the most detailed, yet easy-to-understand tutorials on damn near every scenario you could imagine.
• Tuts+ - Learn everything about graphic design, web design, programming, and more with a growing library of articles and tutorials.
• Smashing Magazine - This is probably one of the most comprehensive web design resources you'll find anywhere, going wide and deep on every aspect of web design.

Source : http://www.seobook.com/design-resources-non-designers

Friday, June 05, 2015

With Google making 10 algorithm changes in the last four months and keyword data getting harder to come by, it may be ideal for marketers to take a step back and get back to SEO basics.

Despite the revolving door of new algorithms and search engine policies, the fundamentals of getting your content found have remained pretty consistent.

So, let's save the hand-wringing and future-predicting for another day and keep it simple. Here’s what you need to know to optimize your blog posts for search.

Turn Keyword Research Into Blog Topics

No company can rank for everything (believe me, we’ve tried). Therefore, the best SEO strategy is to focus on a few key phrases or topics that are critical to your company.

Start with a topic you really want to rank well for -- in our case, it might be “inbound marketing." Then, put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers (or better yet, interview a few). What would they search for that would bring them to your doorstep? What questions or challenges do they have that you can help address? 

People are increasingly using full sentences or long phrases to find the content they need. With the proliferation of content, a simple search for “cars,” for example, is not going to get searchers the results they need. Thus, searches have become far more detailed and specific -- “what to know before buying a car,” “most trustworthy Volvo dealerships near Boston,” and so forth.

As a result of these more complex searches, Google has actually changed its algorithm to better fit conversational questions from searchers. This is good news for blogs, which are designed by nature to be educational, answer questions, and provide background info. It’s also good news because identifying these questions can give you a veritable hit list of search-friendly posts to write. 

Optimize Blog Post Headlines and URLs

Once you have your list of blog posts, you’ll want to make sure you’ve optimized the headlines. Keywords do best when they’re at the front of the headline. So, for example, if we’re trying to rank our content to appear for searches about inbound marketing: "Inbound Marketing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started" will do better than "Everything You Need to Know to Get Started With Inbound Marketing."

Keywords are important, but you also want to write the sort of headline that is likely to get clicked and shared frequently. The frequency with which a piece of content gets shared can positively impact its ranking on search engine result pages. In fact, in recent years, social elements have been increasingly important to search. We’ll touch upon that more below in the Social Search section.

You might want to test different headlines to see what style or format generates the most activity for you. One of the reasons list headlines, like “10 Reasons You Should Have Your Cake and Eat it Too,” are so common online is that they tend to attract more clicks.

Don’t force your content to fit a common practice, though. Instead, try out different headline structures. You may find that questions or humor work best for generating clicks and shares on social media. Additionally, keep your headlines short -- ideally, under 65 characters -- so that they don't get truncated in search engine results.

In addition to the title, search engines use the words in a page’s URL to determine if it's relevant to the search at-hand. So if you are able to edit the structure of your URLs, it’s imperative to make sure that you’re including keywords there too.

The URL serves as a nice backup for your headline in optimizing for keywords. You may decide that you want to be a bit more creative with your headline to generate more interest as the post gets promoted across your marketing channel. If you do that, a good URL structure can help.

The same rules apply for positioning the keywords in your URL. Keep keywords early and separate them by dashes. The URL hubspot.com/inbound-marketing is more effective than hubspot.com/inboundmarketing.

Create SEO-Friendly Links and Anchor Text

When search engine spiders crawl your blog, they don’t read every word. Instead, they scan for certain parts of your post: the headline, subheaders, alt-text of images, and anchor text. Anchor text is the word or phrase you highlight when you insert a hyperlink. Choosing the right words to hyperlink can help add some important SEO value.

In addition to choosing the right words, you want to think about the placement of those words.  If you link to the same internal page multiple times in a single blog post, make sure you optimize the first occurrence of that link. Typically, search engines will rely more heavily on the first instance of anchor text for a given link than subsequent instances. 

SEO and analytics company Moz has a great post and illustration that explains this practice. So whenever you use your blog to link to other content on your site, make sure that the first reference point includes the best keywords.  

You also want to ensure you're linking to the right pages. Instead of dispersing your links and anchor text to a number of different pages, It may be better to point all of your traffic and internal links to a page that is already ranking so you can further advance its SEO weight.

(Tip for HubSpot Users: If you use HubSpot to blog, you'll see a real-time update of how many important keywords you've included in your post. Clicking on one of those keywords will show a listing of pages on your site that already rank for it. This means you can use your anchor text to drive traffic and hopefully improve where your rank in search results.)

Below is a list of pages on our website that rank for the phrase "keyword data." One page currently ranks fifth on Google for that keyword phrase. The other two pages rank much lower. We could drive traffic to the second and third pages on that list, but it probably would be a waste.

Moving a page from a rank of 100+ to a rank of 99 doesn't help much, since most clicks on search engine results pages go to the first few. Choosing to point our internal links to that high-ranking page and possibly moving it from fifth-highest to fourth-highest, however, would have a huge impact.

What About Tags? Are They Good for SEO?

Tags are good when applied judiciously, but they can actually be harmful if overused. As Joost de Valk of Yoast explains:

"One of the most common issues we encounter on sites in our website reviews is the overuse of tags. Note that a tag in and of itself does not improve your SEO. The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and, more specifically, a group of posts to each other."

Because each tag creates a separate aggregative page, some SEO experts argue that having too many similar tags on your content -- for example, having “email," “email marketing," and “emailing" -- can come across to search engines as duplicate content and end up getting you penalized.

Due to this, be smart about your blog tags. Don’t create a tag for something you don’t need to rank for and don’t introduce synonym tags for the same content.

To start, choose a set of keywords for which your blog should rank -- roughly 15-25 keywords should be good. Then, make it clear what those tags are to anyone who blogs for you. Advise them not to introduce new tags unless you commonly write on the topic and it’s not addressed in your initial list.

If you have an existing blog and you’ve already discovered you have way too many similar tags, you can improve your SEO by starting to organize and clean them out.

HubSpot’s blogging software allows you to easily group or re-categorize tags whenever you need to. If you use WordPress, there is a collection of plugins that can help you with that too. (Note: I haven’t tried any of the WordPress plugins, so I can’t speak to their effectiveness.)

Learn About Social Search

Social search is an evolving term for the way in which search engines factor a user's social network into how results are displayed after a search query.

In social search, content that has a social connection to you in some way is prioritized. A social connection could mean someone you are linked to via Facebook, Twitter, or any other major social network. Alternately, some forms of social search prioritize content that has been shared by social media influencers, even if those experts aren't directly tied to you.

Further, content that is shared more on social media does better on search rankings because it naturally increases the number of inbound links and traffic to your pages. The best way to optimize your blog posts for social search is to make sure that you are integrating social elements to it. 

Social sharing icons have become standard on most blogs. They make it easy for a reader to quickly share your content across their network.

If you've got a particularly salient point in the body of your post, you can add a link after that encourages your readers to Tweet it out with a link back to your post. We did so in this post with each data point and saw great results in terms of the virality of the content. Click to Tweet is a great free service that makes this easy.

Also, if you have author bios for your bloggers, encourage them to link up their individual social media accounts, particularly their Google+ accounts. Doing so will improve how your posts look on search engine ranking pages by adding an image from Google+ to the listing.

In the example below, the HubSpot post is listed with an author picture, whereas the Mashable post is just text. Even though the HubSpot post is lower in the rankings, the addition of the author picture can help grab attention and generate clicks. 

Focus on Mobile Optimization

A stat some marketers may not know: 15 percent of all internet search traffic is driven by mobile devices today. Because of this, Google has actually begun to deprioritize websites and blogs that aren't mobile optimized in search rankings when a search is conducted on a mobile device.

That's important.

It means that even if you've done everything right to optimize your content, you still may not be findable for the growing number of people who search and read content online. That's a shame, as mobile users have been shown to be more action-oriented than their desktop counterparts.

You can take a preview of how your blog currently looks on multiple mobile devices over in HubSpot Device Labs. This tool will show you an emulation of your site on different iPhone, Android, and tablet devices. You'll also get an estimate of the average amount of traffic driven by those devices.

Google recommends optimizing your website using some form of responsive design. (HubSpot's blogging software uses Twitter Bootstrap for responsive design). Any mobile-optimized website will fare better on mobile search results than non-optimized versions.

The strategy of search engine optimization changes frequently, but some things will always come naturally to it. Create content that provides value and answers search queries that people need addressed. Be relevant, shareable, and useful and the search rank will follow.

Source : http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-seo-modern-marketer-optimize-your-posts-ht

Friday, June 05, 2015