All you need to know about 'how to create a blog'.This blog also helps you to prepare well in terms of digital marketing basics and other important terms related to it like SEO,SEM etc.
Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag. However, not all title tags are created equally!
From an SEO perspective, a good title tag should:
Be no more than 70 characters (including spaces)
Include both product- or service-related keywords and your company’s brand name
Be both intriguing and informative enough to prompt search engine users to click through to your page (as title tags are typically used in the snipped displayed in the natural search results)
To see what this all looks like in real life, let’s look at a hypothetical example of how this and the following SEO techniques could be put into practice…
Suppose you run an auto body shop in San Francisco, CA. You’ve recently launched a new website which includes a page on your current specials. After conducting your keyword research, you’ve decided to target the phrase “auto body coupon,” along with location modifiers that put your website in front of consumers in your city.
In this case, a good title tag could be:
“Auto Body Coupons and Discounts | Frank's Auto - San Francisco, CA”
In addition, as you’re crafting your title tags, avoid “keyword stuffing” these important fields. Title tags that are no more than a string of all your website’s target keywords (in this example, something like “Auto Body Coupons, Auto Body Discounts, Auto Body Savings”) frustrate visitors and can lead to over-optimization penalties by the search engines.
Technique #2 – Create compelling meta descriptions
Along with your title tags, the section of every page on your website should contain a customized meta description. These brief page summaries should be no more than 150-160 characters long and should include at least one mention of your page’s target keyword phrase.
Following our previous example, your meta description could read something like this:
“Need quality auto body repair work done at a discount price? Check out the latest auto body coupon codes from Frank's Auto of San Francisco, CA.”
While meta descriptions don’t hold nearly the SEO weight that they used to, their presence in the snippets found on search engine results pages plays an important role in your site’s overall click-through rate (CTR). By writing your meta descriptions in a way that captures search users’ attention, you’ll increase the number of visitors who choose to click on your listing compared to your competitors’.
Technique #3 – Utilize keyword-rich headings
Both the title tag and meta description should be included in the section of every page on your website – but what about the rest of your page’s content?
When it comes to your pages’ body text, one of the best things you can do to improve your overall SEO value is to include <h2> and heading tags containing your target keyword phrases in your content. Not only do the search engines place added weight on the words found in these particular tags, the visual relief they provide to your website’s readers will help them to move more efficiently through your site’s content.
Technique #4 – Add ALT tags to your images
If you choose to add images to your web pages, make sure to add ALT tags to them as well.
ALT tags originally came about to provide visually impaired website visitors using text-to-speech devises with additional information about the content on their screens. And though this initial purpose is still valid, the content found in these fields is also important when it comes to SEO.
Again, you shouldn’t “stuff” your ALT tag full of target keywords and keyword variations. Instead, use your ALT tags to clearly and accurately describe your website’s images, working in keyword phrases as they occur naturally.
Technique #5 – Create a sitemap
In the world of SEO, the search engines’ indexing programs – commonly referred to as “spiders” – play the important role of analyzing new websites (or new content added to existing websites) and adding their content to the lists of pages that can be displayed in response to user queries.
As a result, facilitating the easy movement of these spider programs throughout your own site is an important part of optimizing your content for natural search traffic.
One of the best things you can do to help the spiders index your website is to create a sitemap – a page listing links to all the other pages on your site. There are plenty of different automated tools that can generate these important pages for you, though you can always create a sitemap by hand if your site is small.
Technique #6 – Build internal links between pages
Another way to help the search engine spiders to catalogue all of your site’s pages is to create internal links that connect your different pieces of content.
As an example, instead of simply linking to your “Contact” or “About Us” page from your navigation bar, consider adding text links to these pages from within the body content found on your home page. Doing so is a great way to help your visitors find the information they’re looking for, in addition to providing a major SEO boost to your site’s content.
Technique #7 – Update your site regularly
One final SEO technique you’ll want to implement is to update your site periodically. Because the search engines’ top priority is serving up the results that will best meet their users’ needs, they prefer to share websites that contain the latest, most up-to-date information. In addition, the more content you post to your site, the more keywords your website will include – increasing your odds of generating search engine traffic.
The easiest way to make regular updating a part of your SEO strategy is to create a company blog or news section. Either one of these tools will help you to connect with your readers, while also appeasing the search engines’ desire for fresh content.
Unfortunately, implementing these seven basic SEO techniques on your website alone isn’t enough to guarantee that your site will reach the coveted top spot in the search engine results pages for your chosen keyword phrases overnight. Realistically, SEO is a process that takes time to deliver results – though many new webmasters find this frustrating.
Instead of getting overwhelmed by the number of different SEO techniques out there, start with these seven basics. Over time and with continued commitment to pleasing both your readers and the search engines, you will start to see results!
Marketing budgets are usually tight. To maximize profitability, every dollar must be allocated effectively. Here are five strategies that can be implemented instantly to get the most out of marketing budgets.
1. Focus on what works best.
Set up goals in Google Analytics to effectively measure the source and quantity of leads or sales. By comparing sources such as paid campaigns, organic traffic and social media channels, you can apply the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule.
You are going to find out what sources generate the majority of sales to later tune up your budget allocation. Use the Pareto Principle and identify the top 20 percent of your traffic sources that generate 80 percent of good results. Focus your budget on that. Especially for smaller budgets, it is often times more effective to allocate it on the 10 percent that is generating 90 percent of results.
Not all marketing solutions allow for full control of how much is spent and who is targeted. Instead of spreading your budget thin on a large variety of platforms, focus on the ones where you are in full control of both targeting and cost. Examples are the online advertising giants, Google, Bing and Facebook.
The more control you have on what you can spend your budget on, the more you will be able to get rid of what does not work and focus your limited resources on.
3. Don’t scale until it’s profitable.
Any marketing campaign, online or offline, should be started on a small scale with narrow targeting. Once it is profitable, the campaign can be scaled. Scaling can mean experimenting with different campaign types on the same platform as well as adding other platforms.
The reasoning behind starting small and waiting for the ROI to come in is two-fold: First of all, the profit from the initial campaign creates a buffer for potentially unprofitable additional campaigns or platforms. Secondly, business owners know now exactly what works well. They can base other marketing efforts on that, or simply put more budget into the initial campaign, without significantly increasing the risk of missing out on a return.
You should also consider the importance of having a statistical relevance in results before deciding on whether to scale up your investment or not. Always support your decision with enough data insights.
Every dollar and every minute spent on marketing should communicate the same message. That includes accounts that have never been used for paid campaigns such as Instagram or, in some cases, Pinterest and Twitter. In business time is money. Therefore, social media accounts and similar branding efforts are never free and should be seen similarly to paid marketing solutions, such as print collateral and paid online advertising campaigns.
5. Cross-channel remarketing.
Remarketing or retargeting means that you target website visitors who did not convert yet on the same platform they were targeted to begin with. For example, potential clients who clicked on an ad in Google but did not convert are targeted again on Google with the same or different ads. Cross-channel remarketing takes it up a notch by retargeting users on a different platform. For instance, potential clients who clicked on an ad in Google but did not convert are now seeing ads on Facebook and Twitter that are tailored to the pages they visited. Cross-channel remarketing will boost the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.
You just launched a startup and need to get your brand in front of as many eyes as possible. The problem is you are not just competing in your industry, you are competing with the millions of other marketing messages that consumers are bombarded with every day. Not only that, your bootstrapped startup does not have the funds to invest heavily into digital marketing. What's an entrepreneur to do?
Fortunately, here are eight affordable (and invaluable) digital marketing tips for startups:
Social media is one of the most cost effective ways to market your startup. In addition to providing a platform for growing your brand, it offers an easy medium for promotion and customer service opportunities.
1. Be frequent and consistent: Social media is a way for you to build your brand’s voice. You should not only post regularly, but there should be a uniformed identity to your posts. Additionally, do not over post or deviate from your brand’s message. Buffer App reports that the optimal number of posts to Facebook is between five and 10 times a week, Twitter is five tweets a day and LinkedIn and Google+ tied for one time a day.
2. It’s not about you, it’s about your customer: Most brands use their social media accounts only for promotional purposes. This is a failed strategy, as it provides no value to their followers.
Instead, find and share information that your customers want to see and occasionally mix in your promoted content.
3. Engage with your followers: Social media is a way for your startup to interact with current and future customers. Leverage your followers and make them feel like valuable members of your brand.
Also do not be afraid of social confrontation, approach any complaint as an opportunity to show your brand’s customer-service capabilities.
Lastly, do not hide from failures, you are a startup and are bound to face some hurdles along the way. Strategically approach these as opportunities to win over customers with good customer service and express your brand’s long-term vision as frequently as possible.
4. Try small investments into the platforms: There are a number of different social opportunities that you can invest in -- all of which have merit depending on the industry and your unique selling proposition. Experiment with the below options and see what warrants the best ROI for your startup.
Pay-to-play on Facebook: Facebook is steadily becoming a pay-to-play platform, and if you want to see any engagement you will need to invest into promoting your Facebook posts.
Sponsored tweets: While Twitter still provides a good amount of organic engagement, the microblogging platform also has paid solutions for businesses, with one being sponsored tweet. By providing a sponsored tweet, higher engagement will most likely occur with followers (and others).
LinkedIn’s premium services: LinkedIn has a number of extremely valuable paid features, including a Sales Navigator that makes finding leads and contacts seamless. Best of all, you can try the service free for a month.
Content is still king
Content marketing is one of the most overlooked investments in launching a startup.
Why is content so important? It is the vehicle for conveying your brand’s message. If your content is not clear and message not well-formulated, you will undoubtedly struggle to succeed.
5. Critically think about your message: Content marketing should not be a process of throwing messages against the wall and seeing what sticks. To effectively brand your startup, you should engage in industry research and formulate a unique selling propositions. Your message then needs to keep these USPs as the focal point. Avoid focusing on your features and instead sell the benefits.
6. Find cheap and creative content: Creative content does not have to be expensive. You can find affordable and high-quality content on sites like Elance, Craigslist or Fiverr.
For instance, on Fiverr you can have an animated explainer video made from a top seller for a fraction of an agency’s price. Explainer videos are perfect for startups, because they can quickly and effectively convey your new product or service to potential customers.
There are several other affordable ways to approach content creation and even small investment into content will go a long way in building your startups brand.
7. Optimize internal pages for conversions: What do you want visitors to do when they land on your site? Your entire content strategy should be built with this question in mind. Once you know the action you want users to do then you can find affordable tools for perpetuating those actions.
Find free plugins for capturing emails and then leverage affordable services like MailChimp or Constant Contact for drip campaigns.
Use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor visitor’s paths to the website and once they are on it, find opportunities to create a more user-friendly experience.
Find cheap and reliable cart services to sell products directly through your site.
Whatever your objective, there is a cheap and often free solution.
8. Do outreach yourself: One of the most important steps to an effective content marketing strategy is the content promotion. After you produce an incredible piece of branded content you need to amplify that piece of content as much as possible. Leverage your social media profiles, email industry experts, reach out to LinkedIn groups or industry forums, and contribute to other popular sites that your consumers might visit. Invest a few hours a week to outreach or off-site writing and your startup will begin to gain traction.
Running a startup on a shoestring budget is hard enough. If you can keep marketing costs down while capitalizing on successful digital opportunities, you will be able to improve your brands visibility without sacrificing a large budget.
Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they've determined are the most relevant.
Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.
Each stop is a unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG, or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available—links.
Crawling and Indexing
Crawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web.
Providing Answers
Providing answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages that they've retrieved and ranked for relevancy.
The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.
Links allow the search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers" or "spiders," to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web.
Once the engines find these pages, they decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engine companies have constructed datacenters all over the world.
These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information very quickly. When a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand results instantaneously; even a one- or two-second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.
Search engines are answer machines. When a person performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query; second, it ranks those results according to the popularity of the websites serving the information. It is bothrelevance and popularity that the process of SEO is meant to influence.
How do search engines determine relevance and popularity?
To a search engine, relevance means more than finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and search results were of limited value. Over the years, smart engineers have devised better ways to match results to searchers’ queries. Today, hundreds of factors influence relevance, and we’ll discuss the most important of these in this guide.
Search engines typically assume that the more popular a site, page, or document, the more valuable the information it contains must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in terms of user satisfaction with search results.
Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines employ mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort the wheat from the chaff (relevance), and then to rank the wheat in order of quality (popularity).
These algorithms often comprise hundreds of variables. In the search marketing field, we refer to them as “ranking factors.” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject: Search Engine Ranking Factors.
You can surmise that search engines believe that Ohio State is the mostrelevant and popular page for the query “Universities” while the page for Harvard is less relevant/popular.
How Do I Get Some Success Rolling In?
Or, "how search marketers succeed"
The complicated algorithms of search engines may seem impenetrable. Indeed, the engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results or garner more traffic. What they do provide us about optimization and best practices is described below:
SEO INFORMATION FROM GOOGLE WEBMASTER GUIDELINES
Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine:
Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as "cloaking."
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLs. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document, using 301 redirects or the rel="canonical" attribute to address duplicate content.
SEO INFORMATION FROM BING WEBMASTER GUIDELINES
Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:
Ensure a clean, keyword rich URL structure is in place.
Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide links from crawlers.
Create keyword-rich content and match keywords to what users are searching for. Produce fresh content regularly.
Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.
Have No Fear, Fellow Search Marketer!
In addition to this freely-given advice, over the 15+ years that web search has existed, search marketers have found methods to extract information about how the search engines rank pages. SEOs and marketers use that data to help their sites and their clients achieve better positioning.
Surprisingly, the engines support many of these efforts, though the public visibility is frequently low. Conferences on search marketing, such as the Search Marketing Expo,Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, Distilled, and Moz’s own MozCon attract engineers and representatives from all of the major engines. Search representatives also assist webmasters by occasionally participating online in blogs, forums, and groups.
There is perhaps no greater tool available to webmasters researching the activities of the engines than the freedom to use the search engines themselves to perform experiments, test hypotheses, and form opinions. It is through this iterative—sometimes painstaking—process that a considerable amount of knowledge about the functions of the engines has been gleaned. Some of the experiments we’ve tried go something like this:
Register a new website with nonsense keywords (e.g., ishkabibbell.com).
Create multiple pages on that website, all targeting a similarly ludicrous term (e.g., yoogewgally).
Make the pages as close to identical as possible, then alter one variable at a time, experimenting with placement of text, formatting, use of keywords, link structures, etc.
Point links at the domain from indexed, well-crawled pages on other domains.
Record the rankings of the pages in search engines.
Now make small alterations to the pages and assess their impact on search results to determine what factors might push a result up or down against its peers.
Record any results that appear to be effective, and re-test them on other domains or with other terms. If several tests consistently return the same results, chances are you’ve discovered a pattern that is used by the search engines.
An Example Test We Performed
In our test, we started with the hypothesis that a link earlier (higher up) on a page carries more weight than a link lower down on the page. We tested this by creating a nonsense domain with a home page with links to three remote pages that all have the same nonsense word appearing exactly once on the page. After the search engines crawled the pages, we found that the page with the earliest link on the home page ranked first.
This process is useful, but is not alone in helping to educate search marketers.
In addition to this kind of testing, search marketers can also glean competitive intelligence about how the search engines work through patent applications made by the major engines to the United States Patent Office. Perhaps the most famous among these is the system that gave rise to Google in the Stanford dormitories during the late 1990s, PageRank, documented as Patent #6285999: "Method for node ranking in a linked database." The original paper on the subject – Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – has also been the subject of considerable study. But don't worry; you don't have to go back and take remedial calculus in order to practice SEO!
Through methods like patent analysis, experiments, and live testing, search marketers as a community have come to understand many of the basic operations of search engines and the critical components of creating websites and pages that earn high rankings and significant traffic.
Link building is very crucial to rank your sites on search engines. For example Google loves sites with a high number of relevant pages linked to them and so ranks such a site higher than the others. But link building or getting quality backlinks is much crucial to survive a Google update like Penguin. So it is therefore essential to have a natural or organic backlink profile to stay on the safe side.
Basically organic backlinks are the ones that are naturally created by the sites, social profiles and blogs that refer to your site just because it has great and complete content on a topic and include a link back to your site as a reference or citation. One of the greatest examples of a site with huge natural or organic backlinks isWikipedia which enjoys huge love from search engines like Google and Bing. Wikipedia has content that the general world refers to and enjoys a domain authority of 100 (a rare feat) by open site explorer.
Advantage of organic backlinks:
Organic backlinks help you to get thumbs up by search engines.
This is a good way to getting known to the audience of a site that you have no access to.
Eventually it will increase your credibility in your niche and help you in getting known as an authority figure (just remember it doesn’t happen overnight).
I couldn’t figure out who first said that, but it is absolutely true. No one will give you links without you earning them. To earn them, you will need to do something remarkable. When you receive inbound links it’s like getting paid. This may be literal if you have ads or products, but if not you are being rewarded with new readers.
How to Get Natural / Organic Backlinks:
Getting natural or organic backlink is something you earn so your efforts have to be phenomenal and so luring that linking back is achieved without having to pay or ask someone. Here are the methods to get quality organic backlinks.
1) Write great and epic content:
Remember Wikipedia above, the single reason for people and sites including blogs linking to it is that, it has content that is rare to find elsewhere. Similarly your blog’s content has to be detailed and complete. We have to also keep in mind that detailed and complete posts need not be lengthy always.
Great content can be done with the following ways:
a) Stir a controversy:
Controversial topics tend to grab the eye balls faster than others and you can easily get so many backlinks to your site based on the number of people interested in the topic. Having said this, I would suggest you to stay away from the legal side of things.
b) Write a great case study:
Case studies are your observation or log of something that you have been concentrating on since a specific time. Now you write a case study about it on the site. This type of content enjoys the attention of sites that want to include those details on a project of theirs. This is the safest and the easiest way to get organic backlinks. The backlinks can be obtained by this strategy for years in the future too.
c) Provide facts and figures on a finding:
This is yet a great step to earn backlinks because your facts and figures on a particular topic will be linked by people writing or researching on the topic at the bibliography (the sources found at the end of a book) or footnotes. One man who has earned a huge status as a social media examiner is Dan Zarella, and people never mind paying him a link.
d) vlogging or video blogging:
Videos are great tools of expressing your ideas and views and are a magnificent way of back linking. The two most popular video sites hosting millions of videos are YouTube (of course) and Vimeo. These sites have tremendous views and subscriber list and it is easy for people getting back to your site by the links you provide at the description section.
You don’t have to be a camera specialist nor do you have to buy costly equipment’s for getting your videos picked up. A simple PowerPoint presentation converted to video format or a tutorial recorded by you through a screen casting software like Camtasia would be enough. Remember the content should be quality in the videos too and essentially related to your niche. For example, you can check my Tech niche YouTube channel over here.
2) Get a “Link to us page” or section:
If you have content worth linking to, there is no harm in making an appeal to your readers to link to your content. This can be done with CTA or call to action buttons or mere providing with banners and HTML codes that when a reader uses on his site automatically links back to yours.
3) By networking and getting seen in places with potential readers (read linkers).
a) Conferences, live events and press events:
These are the best places to hangout in if you want to get noticed. Remember blogging is all about exposure. Building connections can help you in getting more friends and eventually they will introduce you to their audiences. This way you are sure to create some real meaty organic links.
b) Forums:
Forums had been the go to places for all sorts of building connections and link backs to your sites pretty some time back. But after the advent of social media forums have been in the backstage though forum marketing still works if you do it smart.
How to get started with forums: Conduct a Google search with “your keyword or niche” + “forum” or you can use boardreader too. Once you have access to a community check if they allow signatures or not (because these are the places you will put your links on). If they provide join them. Write some quality topics and contribute before attaching a signature right away.
c) Q & A based sites:
Sites like yahoo answers have great value when building quality and free backlinks are concerned, provided you give quality service to their reader community. Quora is another one that has achieved great success.
4) Social media sites:
Social media sites also allow you to put links in your BIO section and have a great value as far as SERPs are concerned.
Twitter: Twitter offers to add a number of links in your BIO section provided they are limited to 140 characters. Try not adding more than three or else it might appear spammy.
Facebook: Facebook personal profile as well as pages has a huge potential for adding links to sites that you own.
Google Plus: Google Plus has an unlimited capacity of accumulating your links the only condition being NOT to make it spammy.
Pinterest: Pinterest gives one high value backlink to your site that you have chosen to be displayed at your BIO section.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn provides an option of three backlinks to your favorite sites along with customized anchor text (though it has little or no value as far as SEO is concerned, using a wise anchor text will provide a great influx of traffic to your site).
5. Relationship Blogging,
Building relationship among fellow bloggers and with authority bloggers in your niche can have surprising benefits in creating natural backlinks. Try hanging out with them on their blog, and on their favorite social media site too. You can grab their attention by commenting on their posts, asking for a help and thanking them for a certain idea that they shared.
When it comes to thanking them, you should always approach a personal way by emailing them. The email should not be long and should be formal, saying them that their post has helped you and would love to read more topics like this.
This way you can come under their radar and you can soon build a relationship that can result in an exchange of links. I have many good blogging friends among whom is Ana Hoffman of Trafficgenerationcafe.com and this led me harvest a link on the much looked up to blog.
6. Release your earning report:
Releasing your earning report might not get along well with many but if you are one of them who would proudly show up the result of your hard work you can have an added benefit as well. Yes, many blogs and magazines show up reports based on top bloggers who earned the highest (can be yearly or monthly) and chances are you might get featured in those articles thus making sure a link back to your site or a post.
7. Organize a link carnival:
Many bloggers and pro bloggers conduct a weekly or monthly link carnival or thankful posts in which they place an excerpt of famous bloggers’ (or their friends) posts that has been written within that time period. This is an exceptional way to show your love and build connection with an additional advantage of building high quality backlinks too. You can refer to what engagement superstar Adrienne Smith does here.
8. By giving Interviews and conducting them too
Interviews are the best way to build relationship with pro bloggers. Interview posts generate huge readership, especially if the interviewee is someone very authoritative in the field. For taking interviews of such personalities you have to first build a rapport with them (check the previous two points for knowing how). If you succeed to entice a figure well known in the niche you are not only getting a chance of hijacking some of his readers, but also ensuring a link back from his blog.
And if you want yourself to be interviewed you have to first build a solid track record and then help your fellow bloggers and juniors selflessly. This way they will come to know you and might get interested in publishing your interview. You can easily ask for two three do follow backlinks as you might seem right.
9. Create a unique and helpful tool that comes handy for your industry
If you are good at technical aspect of something or may be simply the skills like HTML or programming knowledge why not leverages that into something that would earn you tremendous organic backlinks that are Google safe.
See here the page findmyfacebookid.com. It’s a single page website offering a great tool and has 20K+ visitors and alexa rank 26K. This type of tolls in your website (although as a PAGE) can help them get linked when users write a topic related to them or on resource pages of websites like mine.
10. Conduct a Massive blogger outreach and a post on what they say on a topic.
Conduct a post on the opinion of a number of influential bloggers on a topic and put up that post. After making the post live don’t hesitate to forward the post link to the members included in the post. Most will feel happy to share them across their audience and chances are some might even link them to their posts.
My post about How To Promote Blog Posts is based on the same strategy where I compiled the views of 8 influential bloggers in the industry. Check out that post and see the content quality, social shares and number of comments.
11. Broken Link checking:
Over the years, many sites come and go and it is potentially impossible to keep a record of all the pages that you have linked. So, find out the broken links of any website and send them a simple formal email saying you have detected a broken link on their website and would replace it with a great resource of yours that has similar content.
Mostly you will hear an approval answer from them. This time, make the reply a bit personal and you can include the link detected along with the link you want it to be replaced with (obviously from your blog!). Also include some additional details that would make a good opinion about your site on them and they wouldn’t deny.
You must check this post of Kristi Hines on Search Engine Journal to learn “How to Use the Broken Link Building Strategy to Get Links”.
12. Benefit from content scrapers
Potential content thieves make it literally impossible to protect content. However you can make use of this opportunity by linking to your own posts within the article (also known as interlinking). These content scrappers are lazy enough to check the internal links and will not remove your links thus you at least enjoy a free backlink.
Secondly, you can use the WordPress plugin called RSS footer to add a link to your blog after every post.
P.S. Although this method might seem lucrative I wouldn’t recommend this method as a free backlink generator as this would include you amongst the known of potentially penalized sites (content scrappers never have a quality blog) and might put you as a thorn in the eyes of Google, doing more harm than good.
13. Creating graphics, media that can be reused:
You can also create awesome memes, images, video tutorials and infographics that would go viral in the blogosphere. Try adding a humor quotient or make them a GO-TO complete guide. This way it will attract sites that would like them to be included in their posts, now make a condition that your products if used should be attributed a designed backlink. Voila and you are done. Many sites like quicksprout, whoishostingthis.com earn HUGE number of backlinks through infographics. My infographic about Genesis Framework Review helped me to get good number of natural backlinks without much efforts. Give it a try and surely it will work like a charm for you.
14. Alexa ranking
Although alexa ranking have more benefit to your own site than link building, decreasing your alexa ranking to a record low will attract fellow bloggers to include your site in list posts like Top 10 bloggers based on alexa etc., and will give you a genuine backlink. I have earned many quality backlinks for this site from sites like BloggersPassion, SocialSamosa etc. by this awesome trick.
15. Profile links:
Many membership sites and forums have option to include your website link in your BIO thus enabling you to get a backlink worth feeling proud of (well, not all sites provide quality backlinks). But if a site does, that should never be missed.
You can also get awesome backlinks (though Nofollow) from social media sites mentioned above on point four.
Strange as it may sound, this method is potentially proven (read it here). Sending an email or approaching as a woman in order to link exchanges or guest post request has great results as compared to doing the same as a man (P.S. I don’t patron gender based discrimination here, it is the statistically proven data).
17. Guest Posting:
While Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam head, has said that guest posting as a source of link building is severely a crime in the eyes of Google, still genuine guest posts (Not all) including a link (Not always) that is relevant to the context, inside the post can be tried.
The reverse guest posting tactic works wonders when done the correct way. By reverse guest posting I mean contacting potential guest poster (people in your niche who know their stuff well), and asking them to write an article on your blog on a topic that is relevant. This way you get free content from a highly qualified person, save your time and also get a link in the person’s portfolio. Eventually the guest writer might link to his, this post on his other subsequent posts, elsewhere. You can use the tool Followerwonk to find potential people to network in your niche.
19. Republishing the social posts that are already viral:
Sites like Facebook and tumblr are great places to find creative shareable stuff that can potentially go viral. You can compile a blog post based on a number of such posts, relevant to your niche. Remember, social republishing is ethical and legal provided you link back to the original sources of those articles.
Once you do this, such posts tend to go viral because of their visual attributes and many other blogs will possibly link back to your blog while citing them.
20. Be Newsworthy:
Being the eye candy of press releases and other top rated media events and producing news worthy articles pretty quick will often add a great chance of getting prestigious and high quality backlinks. For this, you need to have an eye of potential happenings in your niche and publish posts as and when the event happens. Live blogging is also a part of being news worthy. This will help you earn links from other sites on your niche that write a post on the event later. Sometimes, big sites can also be your source of getting free backlinks
From an SEO perspective, a good title tag should:
Along with your title tags, the section of every page on your website should contain a customized meta description. These brief page summaries should be no more than 150-160 characters long and should include at least one mention of your page’s target keyword phrase.
When it comes to your pages’ body text, one of the best things you can do to improve your overall SEO value is to include <h2> and heading tags containing your target keyword phrases in your content. Not only do the search engines place added weight on the words found in these particular tags, the visual relief they provide to your website’s readers will help them to move more efficiently through your site’s content.
If you choose to add images to your web pages, make sure to add ALT tags to them as well.
In the world of SEO, the search engines’ indexing programs – commonly referred to as “spiders” – play the important role of analyzing new websites (or new content added to existing websites) and adding their content to the lists of pages that can be displayed in response to user queries.
One final SEO technique you’ll want to implement is to update your site periodically. Because the search engines’ top priority is serving up the results that will best meet their users’ needs, they prefer to share websites that contain the latest, most up-to-date information. In addition, the more content you post to your site, the more keywords your website will include – increasing your odds of generating search engine traffic.
