Top 20 Best Free SEO Tools For Bloggers

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is a brilliant thing for Bloggers and Webmasters to drive the real unlimited traffic from search engines. There are many basic and advanced things for SEO which we learn step by step and also implement them on our blogs like optimizing template, adding meta descriptions, creating robots.txt file, submitting sitemap and many more. Previously, We've published many articles on SEO which can be found in SEO Page and now we're going to discuss about another topic of SEO. In this post, we're going to share the top 20 best free SEO tools for bloggers which can be helpful to drive more traffic and perform better in SERPs.

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit the whole sitemap of your blog/site to Google for the index in its search engine. Once the sitemap the completely indexed then you blog will be appearing in Google search and through that you can receive organic traffic. It also has advanced features by which you can track the most popular keywords from which you're getting traffic and all other information about the traffic which is coming from Google search engine. You can also calculate the backlinks with this tool.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools

Just similar as Google Webmaster Tools, Bing is another search engine which is second most popular across the world. Through this tool, you can submit sitemap to Bing search engine and easily get traffic from there. It also helps you to optimize your blog for search engine better than previous. This is almost same with the above tool just the search engine is changed.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular tool to get the accurate and real statistics data about the visitors of your blog/site. There are many features in this tool that's why it is known as best. It counts the pageviews, daily visitors, monthly visitors of your blog. Bounce rate, geographical location of visitors, trackbacks, real-time (live) visitors, information of paid and free keywords and much more things are also available in this tool just free. Install Google Analytics in your blog now!

4. Google Keyword Planner

After Google Analytics, Keyword Planner is also a useful tool for bloggers to get better ranking in SERPs. This is a keyword research tool by which you can decide better keyword for your content. Simply, with this tool, you can know that how much time a single keyword in searched in Google in the single month. You should target such keyword which may have high searches monthly and after that you can be able to get good traffic from search engines.

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights - This is another free SEO tool provided by Google which helps you to know the page speed or loading speed of your blog. Every blogger and webmaster wants to reduce the loading time of his blog/site and this tool can be helpful at the time because this doesn't only calculate the loading time but also finds and provide you some tips by which you can easily speed up your blog.

6. Google Structured Data Testing Tool

As the days are passing, Google is trying to make it's search engine more easy and useful with correct result. You guys may be noticing that slowly slowly Google is changing design or view of search results. So, this is Google structured data testing tool which helps you to know that how your blog appears in search results. After testing, it also gives you some tips to appear your blog beautiful in search results.
Recommended : How To Show Author Profile Picture in Google Search?

7. Google Trends

Google Trends can also be helpful for bloggers to do better keyword research because this tool helps to know that what's trending in the current days, which topic is most popular in the current and how much time it is search and also from where it is searched. It also gives more advanced information. We can also search the custom keywords with this tool and easily get information about these custom keywords.

8. Keyword Density Checker

Keyword Density also plays role in search engine optimization and Keyword Density Checker tool can be helpful for us bloggers. For normal and proper SEO, we should do only 2-4% keyword density in our articles which will help us to get better ranking in search engines but if we write more than limit then there is chance to be penalized by Google penguin which will decrease our organic traffic.

9. SEOquake

SEOquake is most popular free SEO tool which is a extension or plugin for our web browers like Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. After installing this tool, whenever you will open any webpage in your browser, a bar will appear which will be having SEO information for that webpage. It consists of Alexa Rank, Page Rank, Domain Authority, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Page Authority and much more.

10. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a website explorer which gives SEO information for the particular given domain. Through this tool, you can know the Domain and Page authority of any domain name, counts the backlinks and also gives more information. This tool also contains the premium version which is not free but free version also gives good result.

11. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a backlink checker and site explorer tool by which you can easily check the backlinks of your blog. The total number of backlinks, kind of backlinks such as nofollow and dofollow, the location of backlinks and much more you can get from this tool. This also has premium version which will be provide more better data but free is also fine for blogger.

12. Alexa

Alexa is a well known algorithm for SEO Analysts and Bloggers. It is owned by amazon company and Alexa gives the rank to the every website on the internet. Most of bloggers try to improve their alexa rank which shows that the blog is going better and it is better than other webs on the internet. Alexa doesn't only rank the sites but also gives the information of that site related to SEO. That information consists of global rank, specific country rank, bounce rate, pageviews and visitors percentage, organic traffic percentage, keywords, backlinks and much more.

13. CopyScape

This is also well known tool for webmaster by which we can check the plagiarism of any webpage. It is common rule in blogging that we should not copy others content because it's illegal and has no benefit but if someone copies your content without permission then you can track your content violators through this tool. In simple words, we can check duplicate content through this tool.

14. Pingdom Website Loading Test

Pingdom website loading test is just alternative to Google PageSpeed Insights. We can also determine the loading speed or time through this tool. Pingdom website loading test allows us to check the loading speed from different countries of servers. After the process, it shows, how much did the webpage take to load, size of webpage and also gives tips to improve the loading speed. 

15. WordPress SEO By Yoast

This is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin which is being used by almost every WordPress user to SEO Optimize their websites and blogs. This plugin is free and is most recommended because it contains everything about SEO. It helps you to do on-page optimization like meta description, meta keywords, focus keywords, sitemaps and many more. 

16. WooRank

WooRank is another useful website review SEO tool which generates the SEO and other useful information about the given specific website. After generating review, it also gives the total score to that website by which we can know how much better we're going. The information is really brilliant which is being generated by this tool and we can easily know much about any particular website in a few clicks through this tool.

17. Drop My Link

Drop My Link is also a better tool for SEO Analyst which will help you to easily find such blogs on which you post comments and make backlinks through them. First you need to insert the keyword which can related to the top which you're linking back and choose the comment type blogs which can be CommentLuv blogs, dofollow comment blogs, .edu blogs and more. So, making backlinks through this tool is easier.

18. MozBar

This is also useful tool for Bloggers which is basically plugin and extension for browsers. This bar allows you to get known about the Domain Authority, Page Authority, Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Indexed Pages and other related to SEO things. When you'll be surfing any webpage, this bar will provide you all the above data about that current webpage in ease. You can simply analyze SEO of other webpages.

19. Buffer

Buffer is another most popular tool and application which be helpful for bloggers to drive more traffic. This is not mostly related to SEO but I would like to share them because this is awesome. This tool allows you to share the posts of your blog on different social networking sites with one click only. You can promote your blog on social networks while snoozing by scheduling posts. Simply, this tool helps you to socialize your content easily.

20. Craftkeys

Craftkeys is a useful tool for bloggers to analyze the competitor's keywords. By this tool, you can easily know that what keywords your competitor is trying to rank in Google and helps you to beat him/her. This tool gives you good information about keywords of the competitor just by giving domain, url or keyword.

Final Words

So friends, these were some best free SEO tools which can be useful for bloggers to rank their posts well in Google and drive good organic traffic. I think it is enough for today so let's end this post. I hope these tools are going to be helpful for every blogger and please share your views about this in comment and also it with your friends. Take a lot of care till the next post! Happy Search Engine Optimizing

Improve SEO with Semantic Markup

Google has made serious strides this year when it comes to learning as much as they can about websites and providing more relevant results to users.
Their latest Hummingbird update is a prime example of how Google is making an effort to better understand user intent by looking beyond just the keywords on a page when delivering search results.
However, Google can’t do this on their own. They need the help of website owners to provide them with as much information as possible.
There is a way to use the Hummingbird update to your advantage by marking up your site in a way that gives Google detailed information beyond just the on-page content.
With semantic markup you can increase the relevancy of your site and help Google deliver your site’s content to more targeted users.

What Is Semantic Markup

In the SEO world, semantic markup is often referred to as Schema markup, or structured data markup.
You may be surprised to learn it’s not new either, but with the Hummingbird update it’s more worthy of your attention than ever.
Semantic markup helps you organize data on your site in a way that allows it to be easily understood by search engines.
It was launched in 2011 as a joint effort by Google, Bing and Yahoo to develop a universal set of structured data.

What Semantic Markup Can Do For Your Site

I would love to tell you that semantic markup gives you immediate results in search rankings, but it’s impossible to predict anything will have that kind of effect.
One thing that it will almost assuredly do is to improve search traffic and conversions, even if you don’t rank number one for your desired search term.
Semantic markup will improve search traffic by drastically improving the user experience of your website. You have probably seen semantic markup in action without even knowing it, and chances are you click on the search results with structured data more often than not.
Let me give you an example.

What Semantic Markup Looks Like In Action

Since we’re in the holiday season, Christmas is on my mind a lot lately. One thing I’ve always wanted to learn how to make for Christmas dinner is candied yams with marshmallows.
Let’s see what happens when I Google: “candied yams with marshmallows recipe.”
Here is the first result:

Pretty boring right? Doesn’t give me a whole lot of info or incentive to click on it.
Let’s look a little further down the results:

Yes, that’s more like it! In that little snippet I get a picture, a star rating, the time it takes to complete the recipe and how many calories are in it.
That’s the power of semantic markup. It wasn’t the first result, not even the second or third either.
It showed up as the fifth result! However, it provides a lot more of the information I’m looking for compared to anything else on the first page.
Semantic markup is incredibly versatile and can be used to markup almost anything on your site, no matter what niche you’re in.

How To Use Semantic Markup

Don’t worry if you feel intimidated by the idea of semantic markup.
I’m far from being a web developer so I get easily intimidated by the idea of any kind of coding, but I’ve used semantic markup on many client sites with great success. If I can do it, so can you!
Here are some great resources to help you learn more about how to do it. These are the exact resources I used when learning how to do it. These resources come directly from Google, and who better to explain it than them:

• Structured Data Markup Helper: This tool helps you determine what kind of semantic markup needs to be added to a page. Simply select a data type and enter the corresponding URL for the page you would like to markup.
• Structured Data Testing Tool: This tool allows you to test your semantic markup after it has been implemented. Simple enter a URL and immediately find out if the code has been entered correctly, or what you may need to do to fix it.

Additionally, Schema.org has plenty of information to help you learn more about semantic markup.
For WordPress site owners there’s a way to make this even easier. If you’re familiar with the All In One SEO plugin, you’ll be happy to know they’ve also developed an All In One Schema.org plugin that you can download here. All you have to do is fill in the appropriate fields and the plugin does all the coding for you.

Semantic Markup And Hummingbird Is A Perfect Match

With the Hummingbird update, we know that the old format of displaying search results is on its way out. Google has advanced beyond providing search results as a list of sites according to how well they match the terms entered in the search box.
Google now takes into account a variety of factors like intent, sentiment, freshness, personalization, localization, and many more. Semantic markup helps Google provide more relevant results to users based on the overall meaning behind their search.
Through using semantic markup you can help Google and other search engines understand how the content on your site is a solution, or a complete answer, to what the user is looking for.

Finishing Up

My hope after reading this post is that you will strongly consider adopting semantic markup as part of your SEO strategy for 2014, if you’re not doing so already.
I would be happy to help if you need more information or clarification on anything related to semantic markup. Please let me know in the comments section if you have any questions and I will do my best to respond to everyone.

SEO for 2014: Easy on-page optimization tips

Search engine optimization is a never-ending headache for many ecommerce entrepreneurs. Regular algorithmic changes with Google, Bing, and Yahoo can mean that the efforts you make today could be undone tomorrow, particularly if your SEO strategy is gimmicky and based on trying to “trick” the engines to liking you. Plus it seems that no matter what you do to improve your content and design, there is always something left that could still be done to make things more effective.
With the start of a new year right around the corner, though, it is a good time to sit down once again and take a look at your SEO strategy, particularly if you’re a solo entrepreneur that manages his or her own SEO efforts in-house.
The Holy Grail of SEO is high PageRank backlinks (i.e. inbound links from other websites to yours), but they are hard to get, are driven by quality content, and take months or years to culture. Creating quality, user-valued, brand-centered content should always be the cornerstone of your SEO efforts, but there are simple, easy on-page things that you can do to make your website’s pages more attractive to search engines.

Revisit Keyword Research

You’re likely already well aware of the important search keywords on which you would really like to rank strongly. Still, it never hurts to do a bit of fresh keyword research to insure that your list of target keywords is up to date.
It’s unrealistic to think that the vast majority of relatively small websites are going to rank well on thousands of keywords. It isn’t unrealistic, however, to rank well on several dozen keywords, particularly if many of them are not too competitive to start with. And just because a particular keyword isn’t all that competitive doesn’t mean that it isn’t lucrative.
For the longest time, Google offered a great, free keyword research tool – called (unsurprisingly) the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You could use this tool even if you didn’t use AdWords. The replacement for this tool is the Google Keyword Planner, which is available under “Tools and Analysis” in your Google AdWords account.
Even a few minutes with a keyword research tool might be of value in focusing your attention on new opportunities for keyword “strategy,” whatever that might be.
The goal is to get together a list of anywhere from 100 to 300 keywords and key phrases that you believe are directly related to the products that you sell and that are descriptive of the sorts of things in your web store. Some of these will no doubt be “short tail” and generic (e.g. you sell garden hoses but want to rank on “gardening”) but most will be “longer tail” and more specific and oriented to particular products and categories (e.g. “expandable lightweight garden hoses”).

Formulate a Landing Page Strategy

From there, the next step is to build a simple spreadsheet with your targeted keywords in the first column, one keyword per row of the spreadsheet.
In the next column of the spreadsheet, go ahead and list the page on your website that should be the preferred landing page for someone who searches on that term.
Imagine that you sell birdhouses, for example. An important keyword for you might be “brass birdhouses,” in which the landing page for that term might be your category page for brass birdhouses. The term “cedar birdhouses,” by contrast, would be targeted to your category page for cedar birdhouses.
A more particular search like “small barn wood birdhouse” might target a particular product page that closely fits that description. Likewise, a branded search for a particular product (“Dunwood Classic Redwood Birdhouse”) should target that particular product page.
One implication of this exercise might be the discovery that a term that you think is important doesn’t have an appropriate landing page on your site. For example, imagine that your birdhouse web store currently only categorizes products by the materials from which they are made.
Nonetheless, imagine that you’re interested in targeting visitors who search according to the size of birdhouses (e.g. “large birdhouse,” or “small birdhouse”). In that case, you should consider creating a new set of product categories that correspond to the keywords that you care about. In addition to the value in terms of SEO, presenting your products in terms of the categories that consumers are considering can really influence conversion rates and time-on-site.
Another possible outcome of building this spreadsheet that might surprise you is that you find that you’re almost always targeting the home page of the site. Although it is tempting to want visitors to always come through the front door, the truth is that landing on a relevant interior page on the site is going to be more effective as a selling tool for many, many searches.
It’s also easier to optimize an interior page for a particular longer-tail search term compared to trying to optimize the home page for every term you care about. And optimizing interior pages on various related long-term search terms will have the added benefit of potentially raising the overall visibility of higher-level pages on broader term searches.

Optimizing Page Titles

Now it’s time to add a third column to your spreadsheet. Go ahead and type out the current page title for each website page that you have listed in your spreadsheet.
Page titles are important to search engines, and they are relatively easy to optimize. The question at this point is simple: Is the current page title adequate to your SEO goals, given that you’re trying to rank for that particular keyword?
Minimally the page title should be descriptive of the content of the page, and include usage of the exact keyword you’re targeting. For example, if you’re trying to get a category page to rank on the term “brass birdhouses” then the title of that page should include the term “brass birdhouses.”
Ideally, the term should also appear early in the title. “Brass Birdhouses for Your Feathered Friends” is going to be more effective than “Birds Love Brass Birdhouses” – though I doubt either of those page titles are all that great.
Lastly, take a look at the length of the page title. It’s tempting to use lots of words in the page title, but hold the length to 70 characters. Search engines will use your page titles in the search engine results page when they serve your page up as a result. But the engines will truncate the result if it goes more than 70 characters.
Good titles will be keyword-rich, but not keyword-stuffed, descriptive of the content on that page, under 70 characters, and encourage a user to click on that result, if it showed up on a search engine results page. Do yours?

Optimizing URLs

What goes for the page title often goes equally for the page’s URL. Although there is a debate about what impact dynamic URLs have on search engine results, the fact is that most web stores can control their URLs, and product and category pages that have simple static URLs are easier to optimize.
As with page titles, use of your critical keywords in the URL can have benefits. In fact, you can make a good case for using your page titles as, essentially, your URLs. For example, if your category page title is “Brass Birdhouses” because you’re targeting that keyword, you can make a case for the URL being www.thebirdhousestore.com/brass-birdhouses.html.
But don’t just go changing all your URLs on a whim. Unless you are developing a brand new website, those pages are likely already indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines, and just changing the URL will be disastrous for your existing search engine rank on those pages (searchers clicking on search results will get “Error 404″ page not found errors).
You can change your URLs, but for every change you’re going to have to create a 301 redirect. Almost all web store builders have an easy built-in menu for doing this. This is a time-consuming process, but vital.
Furthermore, consider the fact that the value that a well-written URL brings is actually rather marginal, overall. If a page is ranking poorly and you’re trying to make it better, then this is a trick worth trying. But if a page already ranks well with the existing URL, it might be best to just leave it alone.

Optimizing Meta Data

Next comes the page meta data. From an SEO standpoint, the “easy fix” meta tag to be concerned about is the “description” tag.
In the next column on your spreadsheet, paste your existing description meta tags for each page on your website that you’re targeting.
You might be surprised to discover that pages that are critical to your SEO strategy are actually missing this meta tag completely. It’s easy to overlook adding that bit of meta data when you’re building out a site.
There isn’t a “trick” to writing good description tags that isn’t part of writing good page titles. Look at the descriptions as they are today. Do they use the keywords that you’re targeting for that page? Are those keywords used early in the description itself? Are the page descriptions actually descriptive of the content of the pages to which they are attached?
As with page titles, there are limits to what the search engines will display in terms of the search results snippets. Hold the complete meta description to no more than 156 characters, ideally, and get those keywords featured early in the description, as this can enhance click-through rate as well.
Lastly, just as page titles should be unique, so should page descriptions. Don’t use the same page descriptions for more than one page on the site. That should actually follow naturally from your overall strategy, as the keywords you’re targeting should also be different for different pages.

Optimizing Page Content

What goes for the other elements in your on-page SEO strategy, go equally for the actual page content on your site.
This likely will not end up as a column on your spreadsheet, but look at the pages that you’re targeting and ask yourself the same old question: Do your targeted keywords for each page actually show up on the pages themselves?
There are useful easy-to-implement strategies for calling a search engine’s attention to particular keywords on a given landing page. Simply using a keyword more than once is a strategy, though you should avoid “keyword stuffing” — the practice of using a particular keyword too much or in awkward ways that are clearly designed to “trick” a search engine but provide no user value.
Another strategy is to use the keyword on the page within the context of your H1 (header) tags, in essence, noting to the search engine that the keyword is in the page headline. As with page titles, use the keyword early in the headline, and don’t use more than one set of H1 tags on the page (that’s what H2 through H6 are for).
Beyond that, keep in mind that retail websites often suffer from the problem that category pages and product pages are image-heavy and text-light. This is good for the user, actually, but the search engines can’t do anything with a picture directly. The best that they can do is to rely on the images ALT tag, which should go with every picture.
Because you want your use of keywords to be proportional to the rest of the text on the page, this probably means that you’re going to want to do some writing. Try to craft at least 50 to 100 words worth of good, descriptive written content on every page of your site, including category pages. By doing this, you’re adding enough content overall that the keyword usage will be statistically proportional.
As an aside, but an important one, it’s tempting to rely on manufacturer’s product copy when considering what to put on a product page. From an SEO standpoint, however, this is almost always a mistake as that same copy will be used often across the web, leading Google and other search engines to regard your store as offering nothing particularly novel to the user in terms of content.
Beyond that, another strategy is to add some highlighting — such as bold or italics — to keywords. Don’t expect this to have much of a dramatic impact, but every little bit helps.

Google Launches Hashtag Search, Shows Google+ Posts On Search Results Page

Google announced that Google search will now support #Hashtags which would fetch Google+ posts on search results pages. When comparing the recent Google updates, you will know that it is an uncluttered fact that Google is synchronizing Google+ with all its assets. After the Authorship markup, there came a new era and now Google+ posts on results pages will get Google+ a massive hike.

The integration of Google+ across Google properties continues in a big way today with the launch of hashtag search. Simply put, if you search Google for a hashtag, you might see Google+ posts using that hashtag to the right of the regular search results. Google’s Zaheed Sabur announced the new feature this morning on Google+, saying that it’s available initially for English language searches on both Google.com and Google.ca. The only posts that will show up on Google searches are those that were shared publicly, or shared with you (if you’re a Google+ user). Clicking on one of the Google+ posts leads you to Google+ where the search is reproduced. By pure coincidence, a Google.com search just now for the #googleglass hashtag showed a Google+ post last night from our founding editor, Danny Sullivan, in the right column. (You can click for a larger version.) The Google+ posts...

Just mobilize your SEO with latest tricks

Mobile SEO could be called as the lasted buzzword in the world of internet marketing. This has become more important especially when you see Google claiming that the mobile online traffic is soon going to surpass the PC web based traffic by the next year. At such junctures, the mobile internet marketing strategies are difficult to neglect. 

With the mobile marketing quickly becoming the part and parcel of the online marketing strategy, customizing your SEO practices with some of the latest tricks has become the modern day mantra of successful marketing. Hence if you fail to have a tangible kind of SEO strategy for your online marketing, you are more likely to lose your potential revenues to a great extent. Hence it’s high time you mobilize you search engine optimization with some latest tips and tricks, with few of these given below.

Try fundamental SEO best strategies
Website optimization is vital both for your mobile and computer based sites. Both follow the same types of rules especially when you deal with keywords, content, links and accessibility. As long as you are sticking to all these practices is concerned, adapting these to fit over the market of mobile shouldn’t be a big problem. 

If you are seen struggling hard with your desktop optimization efforts, you are more likely required to allocate more time in fixing them first followed by using it like a template for all your mobile optimization best techniques. Working over these strategies separately is simply going to waste your valuable time, which you invest while getting clients.

Mobilize your existing website
Though you could think of doing a couple of changes to make your current site a mobile friendly website, however, considering the need and impact about mobile marketing, having a new dedicated mobile site is always a good idea to bank with. Before you put your time and energy in creating a new dedicated mobile site, make sure you use a mobile version of your current website just to get a fair idea about its ease of use. 

With smartphones gradually replacing the old cell phones, you would like to custom your website to fit into the smartphone users’ basket. As the mobile users are more likely to see the sites, which they used previously over the desktop browser you could choose between making some changes in your current site or by having a full time mobile site. Regardless of the option you go with, better ensure a fact that your customers should be able to access your site in the same way they did over their desktop computers.

Making the keywords more mobile friendly
The keywords over the mobile environment are often 25 percent shorter than the usual desktop searches and most of the search engines usually give the mobile users the filtering choice, while they do not entirely rely on that. Yet, you need to trim the number of keywords usage simply to fit over your mobile criteria just to avoid losing out people via random search engine option.

Making your mobile content richer
As the mobile site requires fewer words and smaller spaces, hence you are supposed to convert all your 400 words descriptions into 150 word content, which speak the same thing in a more effective way to impress the mobile users. 

The mobile users always are in hurry as they check different things while being in the red light signal or during few free moments in their meetings, hence the content you produce for such people should be straight, simple and to the point. But at the same time, make sure you do not compromise on the quality of the content. Though this may pose as a challenge, but it happens to be the most vital aspects of mobilizing your website.

Updating your design layouts
Your mobile site has to be designed in such a way that the users should be able to view it should be able to fulfill their purposes. As these are smaller views, hence when you put too much stuff over the mobile designed paged, it simply makes the navigation part difficult for the users. Hence you are supposed to add better writing to express your information in a much smaller amount of words. But at the same time, you are supposed to retain the meaning unlike the desktop version.

Final word
With constant rise of mobile users accessing the web, it is important to convert your site into this new format. Adding a couple of mobilizing SEO tips as discussed above could help you in remaining in this new arena of internet marketing.

seo tips and tricks of august 2013

Facebook has succeeded in maintaining a good reputation as a social networking platform since it went viral for the first time.  Billions of people connect with one another at this social network and share their videos, photos and thoughts. On seeing this, many opportunist businessmen have already started to use Facebook for advertisement. This social network has many powerful tools and features that support in advertising your products and services to the target audience. However, do you know that you can drive huge traffic to your business websites from Facebook without even spending a penny?

If your answer is no,Web Design, Mobile Application and Content Writing firms in order to get traffic. These are our tried and tested methods that have always shown superb results in tapping traffic from Facebook.

Get a solid presence on Facebook

You should start with building a strong Facebook profile. Write a powerful description of your business and use precise words to describe yourself. Select a dominant profile picture and choose a very motivating profile cover photo. While selecting content for sharing, concentrate on videos, photos and messages that mostly get an automatic response from readers.

Improve Your Visibility To Search Engines

We have already discussed that a powerful description of your business is highly essential if your aim is to look like professionals. This description can provide you many new fans if you put it into words what most people use in search to find the related pages. 

Send Requests To Facebook Users To Like Your Page

Facebook administration has been improving the search capabilities ofthis social network. However, you cannot leave everything to the searchengine. You should try to find the right type of users on your own as well. Most people already know this, but there is a big mistake what they do that they send a message to different people along with a link to their page requesting them to like it.

Well, even if the person may be willing to know about you, he will rarely visit your page for he does not know anything about what he is going to see on the page. That’s why you should explain what is on your page in a professional’s way in the message.

What To Do Next?

You have built a powerful Facebook profile and got many likes of your fan page. Now, you can think about promoting activity on your business website. These are the most effective ways for this purpose.

1. You should regularly update your blog in the first step. You can focus on important news of industry. You can even pass your opinion about the latest events. The fans should be told about everything that happens at your blog. This can motivate them to read the blog, and thus they will visit your website.

2. Although it is a bit expensive and complicated task, but if your budget permits you can think about launching contests on Facebook. You will do an even better job if a decent prize for the winner is also announced. You need to ask the fans for visiting the website in order to get complete details.

3. You should deliver what you promise for the contest winners. You should award them with prizes in special ceremonies and update fans through your Facebook status. In this way, more people will know about you, and they will think about participating in your next contest.

Social Media Marketing Trends In 2014

Social media will continue to play a central role in marketers´ day-to-day work over the course of this year. But many of them are pondering over the development of social marketing over the next months. Kristin Brewe, the IAB´s director of marketing and communications and chair of the Social Media Council, is just the right person to offer an insight into the matter.

Writing in a blog post on IAB´s website, Brewe noted a few key trends that social media marketing is likely to follow in 2013. Measurement will remain a key focus for businesses, as many have so far found performance and ROI measurement quite elusive. A recent poll from the IAB showed that more than a quarter of respondents had no clue how their organisations measured social performance, with only 17% of those interviewed measuring ROI on social sites activity.

As news and messages in general travel at the speed of sound on social media, it is becoming nearly impossible to hide the truth. Brands need to be more truthful than ever because social media makes their business transparent and exposed like never before. Communicating honestly with customers and being open to criticism is the right approach, Brewe claimed.

While the majority of brands are playing it safe by creating brand pages on big, well-established platforms, the alternative is also worth giving it a thought. Brands willing to take a risk might venture into creating their own platforms, with their own community, as this will undoubtedly make them stand out from the crowd.

The bottom line is that the social media outlook is very good despite the challenges brands face. It gives unrivalled opportunities for creating valuable relationships between brands and consumers, Brewe concluded.

SEO Industry Trends: A Look at What’s Ahead for SEO in 2014

Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0, what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come? It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both site quality and link relevancy are going to be big players in the next twelve months. But comments from Google and forecasting from a number of different SEO experts suggest that other changes are on the horizon.
Here’s my best guess of where we can expect SEO to go for the rest of 2013 and throughout 2014 – and my top tips on how to prepare. Just to add a standard disclaimer: prediction posts are at best guesses. I’ll be updating this post periodically as more information becomes available, and look forward to your thoughts and insights as well.

1. Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail
The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of 1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly valuable.
It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas, your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate value to the reader.

2. Different kinds of content help you get traction
Whether you’re looking at creating video, developing infographics, or launching interactive quizzes, thinking beyond blog posts and free reports will give you a distinct advantage. As buzzwords like guest posting and content strategy become more and more ubiquitous, it’s important that you do whatever you can to rise above the noise. In addition to committing to do what it takes to write sticky, authoritative content, another strategy will be diversifying the type of content that you publish.
Of course, this connects to your ability to disseminate content in creative ways. There’s only so many ways to share a blog post. But a video can be syndicated to dozens of different sites, added to a branded channel on YouTube, embedded on Pinterest, and more.
Another important factor is your ability to appear in different verticals of search — for example, videos or images — as overall search architecture moves in that direction. A more diverse content base will help you rank more effectively for your target terms.

3. Author authority matters
It’s not just the quality of a single piece of content that matters, but rather your entire body of work. By using Google Authorship and other behind-the-scenes techniques, Google is developing better mechanisms for learning about everything you write. This develops an overall picture of what you’ve accomplished, and what subjects you’re qualified to speak on.
The overall number of social signals your content is generating, how frequently you’re posting, and the quality of sites you’re connected to, this will impact the rankings of the content that you post going forward. To establish your authority, make sure you’re leveraging Google Authorship not only with your regular core content, but also with guest posts that you contribute to other sites in your industry.

4. Links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up
In a video in May, Matt Cutts suggested that Google’s continuing to develop more sophisticated adjustments to the algorithm to measure link quality and thwart link spammers. This evokes the idea of link wheels – creating networks of hub and spoke sites, along with many levels of intermediary sites, in order to build links. The idea is that if they’re dispersed and deep enough, that the connections between them will be masked. It a nutshell, these approaches aren’t effective anymore and will become less so moving forward.
While Google’s already focused on this, ever more sophisticated versions of this approach – from paid advertorials to private blog networks – will continue to be important targets in the war of spam. Not only will we all be taking a retrospective look at our link profiles, but strategizing how to build links in the future will require more ingenuity and planning. Link building is moving in the direction of a relationship-based process.

5. Diversifying link text is ongoing
One of the areas t hit by Penguin 2.0 was sites where anchor text was too optimized. Experts estimated that if more than 30% of your anchor text was identical, it was easy to see that you were actively building links in a way that might be manipulative. Instead, now and going forward, it’s more important to think about linking from an organic perspective.
For example, say your site is currently focused on the topic of Twitter marketing. People discussing your site and linking to it are likely to use a variety of terms: Twitter marketing, marketing on Twitter, Twitter for business, social media marketing on Twitter, and more. There are a number of terms that are all within the realm of a reasonable anchor text choice.
It’s important to develop campaigns that help you post links with a range of different anchor text. Diversifying your link text takes time, especially if you have a significant body of links to your site. I anticipate that we’ll see many website owners working on this in the year ahead.  For an overview on proper anchor text strategy in a post-Penguin 2.0 environment,

6. Great design matters
Great design is a key piece of the user experience. Top-quality design helps overcome the trust barrier that comes up when people first visit your site. If your site looks professional, they’re more likely to believe that your business is legitimate and give you the time and money you’re working hard to earn. Another key factor is driving conversions. Good design helps drive users in whatever direction you want them to go – signing up for your email list, buying your products, or reading and sharing your content.
Design is also a very effective tool for helping build both your authority and your epic content backlog. Is your picture on your website? Do people associate your name and face with high quality content? If so, you’re on the right track. Is design supporting the quality of your tutorials? You can instantly upgrade people’s perceptions of your work by integrating screen shots, videos, and more. It’s a simple way to increase the value of your content.

7. Guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny
One of the most popular means of building links right now is guest posting. It’s a great way to build links, cultivate relationships with other thinkers in your field, and get your material in front of new audiences. The challenge with guest posting is when it’s treated as the “new method of article marketing.” I think we can expect increasing scrutiny from Google on guest posts.
What this means for writers and website owners is that it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the sites where you post. PageRank and Domain authority are two metrics to measure quality. Another is to look and see if these sites have the kind of human signals that make a reputable site – an engaged audience, social shares, and links from other high quality sites. When you do guest post, it’ll be important to put an extra emphasis on developing valuable contributions that really resonate with the target audience.

8. Social continues to exert a powerful influence
Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s gaining a great deal of traction. With the introduction of Google Plus two years ago, it was easy to see that social signals were becoming more important to search. As one expert said, “human rank is hard to game.” By increasing the influence of social media signals, the search engines are essentially outsourcing the manual evaluation process of content to a large extent.
For companies working to rank their content, it’ll be important to ensure they have branded accounts for their sites. Plugins or other mechanisms need to be used in order to make content easily sharable, and to measure social shares. Social media promotion needs to be a front-line priority in your individual content promotion plans, and overall innovative approaches (for example, experimenting with exclusive social content or competitions) used to increase your social reach and influence.

9. Mobile performance and compatibility matter
During an interview with Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts noted the importance of having a lean mobile site that loaded quickly. Building on that, mobile is no longer optional. Half of all people in the U.S. own a smartphone; one third of internet users own a tablet. Soon, more people will routinely access the Internet via a mobile device than the number of people who do so via a desktop computer.
Having a mobile compatible site is the new minimum threshold. Important aspects include cross-device compatibility and optimizing your designs for mobile conversions. Thinking about mobile productively requires a mindset shift. Mobile isn’t just about making sales. Instead, it’s about a broader set of potential conversions – visits, gathering information for in-store visits, signing up for more information – that require you to focus on the mobile channel.
Besides mobile-ready design, website speed is becoming more important. As the average internet user expects faster speeds, they have less patience. Frustration over slow-loading websites leads to a poorer user experience, which is why website load speed is one of the growing factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Cloud CDN (content delivery network) hosting solutions are seeing a rise in popularity due to this trend, and for good reason.

10. SEO is less tactics, more strategy
It’s fair to say that this has been the direction of SEO for a long time now, but it’s becoming increasingly true. Tactics – specific ways to build links or to write code – are becoming less and less valuable. Instead, the focus is shifting to your long-term strategy. What’s your content strategy? What’s your link building strategy? What’s your authority strategy? What’s your social strategy? These individual pieces all link together to create the foundation a successful site presence is built on.
It doesn’t mean that tactics don’t matter. After all, tactical moves are how you implement a strategy. Your choices between different kinds of tactics, such as white hat link building or black hat link building, can make all the difference. But if tactics aren’t driven by an overall strategy that’s implementing multiple approaches at the same time, they’re less likely to work. Approaches to SEO need to be cohesive.

Conclusion
I’m sure that there are critical trends that I’ve missed. I’d love to hear from you. What’s working for you right now, and where are you focusing your efforts in the next year? Let me know in the comments below!

Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2014

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.
We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture in 2013? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips for 2013.
Excellent SEO Tips To Follow in 2013
I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.
It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com, www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List The Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend to try out tools like Traffictravis first.
Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools delivers the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The WordPress beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstands this concepts which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderetly to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.
Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques.  I will explain you in detail  how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes (Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that keyword.
This can get a red flag and can get  penalty because if that is a genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ?  … Yes, that is not at all possible because they may link to that via various anchor texts like

• diabetes signs and symptoms in children
• diabetes in children
• children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
• what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
• type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults

People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are interested in knowing them then you can contact me

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website.( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you a clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of all your keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend to use “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.
Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2013. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.