Important SEO terms and guide

What is a website?
It is set of hosted webpages which gets served in browser with a domain name.
Each website has its own unique name called domain name, and a hosting space on hosting server to store the webpages.

What is a keyword?
The search term/query we enter into the search engine for searching something is called a keyword.
Different keywords have different monthly search volume and competition.

What is keyword density?
Keyword density is how many times a keyword appears in a article/content .e.g. if a keyword appears 3 times in 100 word article then its density is 3%
Keyword research can be done using keyword research tools and most popular is google keyword planner. You need a gmail email id to access this tool.
https://adwords.google.co.in/KeywordPlanner
The other keyword research tools are www.wordtracker.com, http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/

Blackhat SEO is SEO practices and tactics done not as per search engine guidelines to inflate the search engine rankings. E.g. keyword stuffing, doorway pages, cloaking

The search engine result page (SERP) for any keyword/query displays list of websites, where each entry of the list consists of title, url and meta description (or a piece of content sometimes).

Onpage SEO is the changes we make on the website for the SEO purpose. Following are the changes we can make in the website for the SEO purpose.

Title tag is a html tag to be entered in the code of the webpage in the section. It can be of around 66 characters. You have to make a meaningful sentence containing keywords in the title and having brand name or business name at the end.
e.g. <title>Manufacture of plastic containers | Niranjan Plastics </title>

Meta description is a html meta tag to be entered in the section of the webpage. It can be of around 166 characters. Make meaningful sentence containing keywords for the meta description.
e.g. <META name="DESCRIPTION" content="We are dealer of calcined alumina, aluminium oxide, organoclay gallant and graphite powder in India ">

Meta keywords are html meta tag where you can enter few of your targeted keywords for the page. Search engines do not use these as a ranking factor.
e.g. <META name="KEYWORDS" content="calcined alumina, aluminum oxide, organoclay gellant, graphite powder, calcium carbonate in India ">

You can view source code of a webpage by pressing CTRL and U simultaneously while viewing a webpage in the browser.

Image optimization
1. Image file name should be relevant to the image an in lieu of space you should use hyphen (-).
e.g. plastic-container.jpg
2. Image should be given a proper and relevant alt tag in html code describing the image.
e.g.<img src="images/sewage-pump.jpg" align="center" width="170" height="255"alt="Submersible sewage pump">

URL renaming and rewriting
URL of a webpage should be SEO friendly containing keywords where ever possible.
e.g. suppose there are 3 products on the website having the webpage name as
product1.html
product2.html
product3.html
These pages/urls can be given relevant product name as
narrow-mouth-jerry-cans.html
open-top-round-drums.html
narrow-mouth-round-drums.html
Instead of space you have to use hypen(-) in the file name as shown above.

URL rewriting is creating seo friendly urls same as above at server end without actually renaming the file name of the webpages.

Anchor text
Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.
e.g. Blogging tips
In the above the phrase “Blogging tips” is anchor text and when you click on it, it will go to the website www.blogtraffictips.net

Heading tag
The <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading
e.g.
In html code heading tag looks like the following
<h1>Types of plastic containers </h1>
The text becomes bold and large in the visible content due to heading tag.

Bold and italic tag
Text in the content can be made bold and italic using html bold and italic tag
e.g.
<b> this text will appear in bold </b>
<i> this text will appear in italic </i>

What is pagerank?
Pagerank is a rank given by Google between 0 to 10 to a webpage based on quality and quantity of the inbound links to the webpage. Higher the pagerank better for its ranking in search engines.
You can check pagerank of a url by online tool or browser addon.
e.g. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Robots.txt
robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct search engine robots, how to crawl and index pages on their website.
A example of a typical robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Here first line allows all search engines to crawl the website
Second line does not disallow any url from crawling.
Disallow: /products.html
The above line will block the page products.html from crawling.

Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.
XML sitemaps are used to submit to search engines. You can submit xml sitemap using webmaster tools.
You can create and download XML sitemap at website https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

404 error
The HTTP 404 Not Found Error means that the webpage you were trying to reach could not be found on the server.
This means that the webpage is not present or you have typed url incorrectly.
When 404 errors occurs it can be redirected to some other webpage.

301/302 redirect
Status 301 means that the resource (webpage or website) is moved permanently to a new location.
Status 302 means that the resource is temporarily located somewhere else.

How to register a site/domain name and host.
You can book domain name through a domain registrar company/website.

You need to search for the domain name you want and can book it for one year or more
You can book hosting webspace as per your requirement through hosting provider companies

Alexa report
The free alexa report about a website gives you its popularity, its alexa rank based on traffic, audience geography, visitors engagement, top keywords from search engines, its inbound links, audience demographics and more. Paid version will give more details.

Acronyms related to website, internet marketing, technology and ecommerce

Following are the commonly used acronyms for internet marketing(digital marketing), internet, online advertising, technology, websites and e-commerce.

Digital Marketing related
1) SEO - search engine optimization
2) SMO- social media optimization
3) SMM - Social media marketing
4) SEM - Search engine marketing


Online Advertising related
5) PPC - pay per click
6) CPC - cost per click
7) CPM - cost per thousand
8) CPA - cost per acquisition
9) CTR - click through rate
10) ROI - return on investment
10a) CPV - cost per view
10b) CTA - call to action

Software/Business related
11) CRM - customer relationship management
12) MIS - management information system
13) GUI - graphical user interface

Technology related
14) SMAC - social, mobile, analytics, cloud
15) SaaS - Software as a service
16) IaaS - Infrasturcture as a service
17) PaaS - Platform as a service
18) WAP - wireless application protocol

Website/ Blog related
19) WWW - world wide web
20) URL - Uniform Resource Locator
21) ISP - internet service provider
22) CMS - content management system 
23) JSP - java server pages
24) TLD – top level domain
25) RSS- really simple syndication - (used for web feed or blog feed)
26) UI - user interface
27) UX - user experience
28) CSS - cascading style sheet
29) ASP – active server pages
30) HTML - HyperText Markup Language
31) XML - Extensible Markup Language (blogger.com/blogspot blogs are in XML)

Hosting related
32) SSD - solid state drive (new technology used in hosting servers and computers)
33) VPS - virtual private server
34) SSL- secure sockets layer (ssl certificate used for websites for security)
35) FTP- file transfer protocol
36) DNS - domain name system/server
36a) CNAME - canonical Name record

SEO related
37) PR - page rank ( another meaning of PR is public relations)
38) OBL - outbound link
39) IBL - inbound link
40) PBN – private blog network
41) SERP - Search Engine Result Page
42) LSI - Latent semantic indexing

E-commerce related
43) B2B - business to business
44) B2C - business to consumer
45) B2E - business to employee
46) C2C – consumer to consumer
47) C2B – consumer to business
48) COD - cash on delivery
49) CVV – card verification value (a 3-4 digit number at back of credit card/debit card)

General
50) TOS - terms of service
51) FAQ - frequently asked questions
52) T&C – terms and conditions
53) OS – operating system
54) ORM - online reputation management


If I am missing any acronyms please let me know through comments!

Increase blog traffic

How to increase blog traffic is the most important thing every blogger is looking for. For increasing blog traffic, bloggers try hard looking for information and ways and spending lot of time on socializing sites, directories, discussion forums etc.

I find lot of sites have come up giving paid services for SEO, SMO, link building etc. Moreover they advertise openly with proofs, testimonials and google search engine policy is against buying and selling of links, buying paid traffic etc. So only google knows what is legitimate and what is not.

As google search engine algorithm has become more smart nowadays, it is not easy to trick the search engine for top ranking. So it is better to follow google webmaster guidelines
and google search engine optimization starter guide.

To increase blog traffic there are already two posts on my blog related to Search engine optimization and building blog traffic published in 2007, so you can go through these articles to begin with.

As in last two years things have changed. There are now more ways to increase blog traffic using different methods and resources.

So I would like to mention few more tips to increase blog traffic.

1) For search engine traffic, do not depend only on google search engine. Please confirm that all your posts / pages are listed in major search engines like search.yahoo.com, bing.com, ask.com, aol.com.

2) You should know basics of SEO to get top ranking in these search engines. Different search engines give different weightage to factors like meta tags, title, etc. You should also know how to get all your posts / pages indexed in bing.com

3) Keep your template SEO friendly. I have seen some templates with missing h1 tag and missing basics of  SEO.

4) Facebook traffic is now almost equal to google so you must use facebook efficiently to drive traffic to your blog or site. You might be having facebook profile and group but creating facebook page and using facebook application is must for this.

5) Learn how to use twitter to get more followers and how to write tweets.

6) Keep commenting on do follow blogs related to your category with genuine comment given after reading their post.

7) There are other high traffic sites, also giving search facility. You should enter your blog information and create a page for your blog on these sites.

8) Write articles related to your subject and submit to good article directory sites which has high traffic and allows you to give link to your blog. Find the list of few article directories here. Do not worry about whether the links given are do follow or no follow. Please read their submission guidelines before submitting the article.

ezinearticles.com - PR 6
articlesbase.com - PR 6
isnare.com - PR 6 (needs 500 words article)
buzzle.com - PR 6
articlesnatch.com - PR 5
sooperarticles.com - PR 5
approvedarticles.com PR 5
goarticles.com - PR 4
abcearticledirectory.com- PR 4
internetwebportal.com - PR 4 (needs original unpublished article)
articledashboard.com - PR 3
articlesss.com - PR 3
amzines.com - PR 3
articlewarehouse.com - PR 3

9) Everybody knows submitting to bookmarking and socializing sites like delicious.com, stumbleupon.com, digg.com etc. But you also need to know efficiently using these services, type of link they give to your blog, how it is indexed in search engines, etc. You also need to find better bookmarking and socializing sites which work better for subject of your blog because some subjects / niche has limited target audience. e.g. for a pregnancy related blog you can find directories and socializing sites specific for mothers.

Please send your comments and share any new traffic source or methods you find out !

Optimizing google adsense to make more money from blogging

Google adsense is one of the most popular programs used to make money from blogging. Billions of bloggers publishing adsense on their blog always wanted to know how to increase their earnings from adsense. Usually the CTR(click through ratio) of adsense is from 0.5% to 2.5% for blogs having 1000 or more page views per day. But if we can increase CTR we can earn more from same no. of page views.

So here I would like to share my ideas and tips on optimizing google adsense i.e. how to increase CTR. Please note that these ideas and tips are based on my own experiments carried out on 20 blogs.

Let us have a look at the tips one by one. (Some of you might be knowing few of these but please read all the tips)

1) The placement of the ad unit – Should be within the post and ideally below the post title and above the post content. Please note that it should be properly aligned in middle of post body. Use <div style='margin: auto 10% auto 10 %'> your adsense code </div> to align the ad unit. (% value can be changed)
In some cases you have to display the ad unit beside the post content i.e. on right hand side of post content.
Also note that whether the ads are in post or sidebar the right half of the blog screen will get more clicks because most of the people use the mouse with their right hand.
Hence 3 column template with post column in between the right and left side bar is better.

2) The colors of the ad unit - The background and border color should match the background color of the post body. The title color can be blue or matching to the blog text color. Other colors you can choose matching to blog theme and for white background, google default palette is fine. You can also try option of selecting Multiple Palettes which keeps on rotating colors, for 48 hours and check whether CTR is increased or not.

3) The size of the ad unit within the post can be 336X280 or 300X250. In some cases where you are displaying the ad unit on right hand side of the post content, the size can be 250x250 or smaller which ever suits your blog. In case of only picture blog, I have used 120x240 size ad unit on right hand side of the posts.

4) The font size of the ad unit should be medium or large and font family should be Arial or Verdana. You can change this by going to Manage Ads>Edit ad settings.

5) There is option of choosing what to display if no relevant ads are available. Out of the three options, you can choose second option and enter URL of your another blog, so that this blog will be displayed within ad units. You should take care that there should be no google ads in top left of this URL. This is a good way of displaying ads of your low traffic blog on a high traffic blog. Or display your affiliate products page or site.


6) The maximum no. of ad units that can be displayed on a page are three but the total no. of ads displayed depends on the size of the ad unit i.e. in 336X280 ad unit, four text ads can be displayed, so three such ad units will display 4x3=12 ads per page. Some of the ad units can display 2 or 3 ads per unit, making total no. of ads 6 or 9 per page. What I have observed is (not always) less the no. of ads per page, more is the CPC (cost per click). So keep watch on no. of ads per page. CPC of ads also depends on other factors, but discussing that will be off the topic.

7) Link units – can be placed 1) below the header 2) in the side bar with the labels (categories) 3) below the post content.
With the colors matching to the blog colors, they also look like links/labels of the blog, creating higher chances of click. Please note that link unit requires two clicks to generate earnings. In ‘Advance report’ option you can find out how many link clicks got converted to earning clicks.
So even after proper color and placement, if they are not giving higher CTR, please remove them.

8) Adsense for search can be placed in header or upper area of blog. Please note that it requires two clicks to earn from this search unit. So one good option is selecting ‘Search type’ as ‘only sites I select’ while generating code for search unit. Enter all your blogs and websites there, so search results will be from those sites only. Check statistics of search unit in advance reports and decide whether to keep it or not. It has not generated much earnings for me.

9) Always create channel for your ad unit and give relevant name to ad unit as well as the channel so that you can view the performance and statistics in ‘Advance Reports’ and find out which ad unit is performing better.
Also add description with better keywords in custom channels and select proper ad location because this will be seen by advertisers as available place to place their ads.

10) Try to increase your blog rss subscribers and use google adsense for feed. Normally CPC is higher for ads in feed than ads on the blog.

11) Download and install google adsense preview tool
You can visit your blog using IE and right click and select google adsense preview tool and find out which ads will get displayed in which country .You can note down the URL and if you do not want them to get displayed on your blog you can block them by going to Adsense Setup> Competitive Ad Filter . Please read google adsense help for this.

12) Go to Adsense Setup>Ad Review Center > Filtered Categories .You will get % of recent earnings and recent impressions. If earnings are less for a particular category (with respect to impressions) please tick mark and filter them so that next time ads of these categories will not get displayed.

13) Visitor tend to exit from your blog using different links so try to study exit links from your visitors statistics and try to remove unwanted outgoing links from your blog. E.g. I removed a link to statcounter.com in visitors counter and created a counter without link.

14) Check whether all your posts are there in major search engines. One of my blog has 650 posts and search engine has indexed only 360 posts. So this will give me less traffic and less clicks. You can use sitemap and google webmaster tools to solve this problem.

15) I have read that one should write on higher paying keywords but this can not be a tip because say higher paying keywords are Lawyer, Insurance….Now if my blog is on Blog traffic tips, how can I write on these topics? So it is true only for few blogs which are writing on any subject. Only thing you can do is try using better keywords related to your post subject, in post title and content.
Another tip I have read is increase blog traffic but this is a different topic and it is not relevant to optimizing google adsense as it does not increase CTR.

16) From visitors statistics you can find from which country you are getting maximum clicks ( generally it is U.S.) so if you are using paid advertising to advertise your blog, select geographical locations from which you are getting more clicks.

Some times there is sudden peak up or drop in CTR which is due to type of ads getting displayed on our blog and we can not control it so I am not discussing it here.

Please try above tips one at a time and apply it for 48 to 72 hours and then check whether CTR has increased or not. Please share your experience and any new tip you find out!

How to change blogger template - update

I receive many visitors on this blog for 'How to change blogger template' post. This post was written in January 2009 i.e. one year back.

Recently the blogger.com as come up with many new and updated features. They have also updated the feature of changing to third party template.

Earlier when we were uploading the third party template the widgets were getting lost , so we need to take backup of this widgets i.e. saving code of each widget.

Now after uploading the new template from PC when we try to save it , it asks whether we want to 'Keep widgets' or 'Delete widgets' as shown in picture below.


So you need to click on 'Keep widgets' and then view your blog. Sometimes it is found that the widgets are not at proper place i.e. sidebar widgets can be in header. So go to 'Layout> Page elements' and drag your widget at appropriate place and then click save. Now again check your blog . It is ready with your new template !

Do not forget to take backup of your original template before going for this template change process by clicking on 'Download Full Template' option as shown in image above and save it on your hard disk. And read my earlier post 'How to change blogger template ' for all other steps.

Blog traffic from Youtube

How to get blog traffic from youtube? Uploading video to youtube is easy but what can we do to generate traffic to our blog from the video?

Here are important ideas and steps which helps to bring traffic from youtube video.

First I will list three basic steps and then will discuss each step in detail.

1) Create your own video
2) Register with youtube and Upload your video with correct title.
3) Incorporate and mention your blog url at appropriate places on youtube.


1) Now we will look at first step as what kind of video can be prepared?
You need something related to your blog subject. Website owners use youtube for marketing and selling their products with sales video but I am not talking of that.
We need video related to our blog subject. In general humorous video, how to video, some catchy dance and music video, amazing and interesting facts video, educational video etc. will catch attention and will get many views.
e.g. I can prepare video related to some of the posts on this blog as How to shift to custom domain,How to get blog traffic or How to make money from blog.
Many bloggers have personal blogs so they can have video on making some recipe, how to swim or some kitchen tips and tricks, funny video of their animal or pet, video of the places they have visited, video of sports they play or teaching or giving tips on some sports, video on party they have organized etc.

You can capture video using webcam, cellphone or handy cam or whichever is most suitable. Youtube accepts many file formats for video uploading so file format is not big issue but if you go for high quality video then file size is too large. So normal resolution is ok. Also read youtube help regarding this. Video file size also increases with the time so as far as possible keep video length from 5 minutes to 15 minutes.(for few subjects it can be longer). Picture and sound quality should be clear and if you know little of video editing it helps you to edit the video.

2) If you are not already registered, you need to register at youtube.com. After login you will find a yellow color Upload button on right hand corner. Then click on Upload video file. Then clicking on Upload video gives you a browse window to choose video from your computer hard disk and upload it. You also have to enter title, description,tags and category. And then click save. It takes some time for your video to go live. Since your video will appear in youtube search result based on video title and description, it is very important to choose correct post title and description. Hence do some research on youtube by searching related videos and enter the keywords you are looking for in your video title and description. Also enter your blog url in description.

3) Now you need to add your blog url in the video. Go to my video and then Annotations then click on Add note (see the image below) it gives you a window on the video asking "Enter your text here". Type your blog url here then you can change color if required , then holding mouse cursor you can drag it from center to one of the corner so that it does not come in the way of watching video.

Now you have to choose time period for which this will appear on video so you can select full time starting from 0.0 to full length of video. Now you have to click on save and publish.
Check your blog url is appearing on video or not.
You also need to enter your blog url in your profile. You need to go to Account > Profile setup > website. See the picture below.

Now logout and search youtube with keyword you have mentioned in video title and see where you can find it in search results and watch the video. You can fine tune the video title and description if required for better ranking. Send emails to your friends giving url of video and asking them to watch the video and rate it. Getting few higher ratings creates good impression on visitors.

Your account at youtube also has insight and statistics option under My account where you can come to know from where visitors has come to watch your video.
So what are you waiting for ? Shoot a video and fire!

Blogging tips for beginners - Part 2

These blogging tips are update on my last post on Blogging tips for beginners. These are mainly using some blogger.com features which are actually useful but rarely used by bloggers.

Blogging tip #26 - Scheduling

Please write regularly for your post because search engine likes blogs which are updated regularly.
Many times due to lack of time or other reason we do not get time to write for the blog so when ever you have some thoughts or ideas to write something straight a way write into new post and do not publish but save as draft. Later on add and edit into it as you get time.
Also there is one feature on blogspot blogs called scheduling. So when ever you are writing more than one post do not publish them at a time. Rather than this , publish one post and schedule the publishing of more posts on future dates. You can do this by clicking post options below the post editor window and then change date , time under Post date and time and then click publish. See the picture below (click to enlarge).

Wordpress blogger can do this by entering future date and time located at Publish window on right hand sidebar. See the picture below.


This helps you to take vacation from blogging , search engine benefit and good impression on visitors.

Blogging tip #27 - Adding free content

The other important feature of blogger.com is you can have free relevant and interesting content for your blog with add video bar and newsreel option. You need to go to Layout > Add a gadget > then select Video bar or Newsreel . You can enter keywords related to your blog subject and save. This will display related content on sidebar of your blog. This content gets updated automatically.
e.g. check news on right hand sidebar of Vegetarian Bloggers.

Blogging tip # 28 - Adding special gadget

When we click on Add a gadget a list of basic 20 gadgets is shown.But if you look at left side you can find categories as new, tools, communication, fun and games, finance, sports, life style and technology. There are thousands of gadgets for each category so you can find gadget suitable to your blog subject.
e.g.I have added a domain check gadget on right hand side bar of this blog from technology category.
Check sidebar of Urja's Paintings blog for fish game.



I will keep more blogging tips posting . Please leave your comments.