Big Blog Academy

Search Engine Optimization or SEO we all know is almost a never-ending job and often many people are found to get overwhelmed by SEO. But it is never so hectic experience for those who have understand the basics of SEO step by step. Instead, when SEO being learned step by step increases curiosity and developes interest among the SEO learners to reach the next extreme and watch out the results.

How to avoid overwhelming from SEO?

To be perfectionist is ok, but to overlook situation demand is nothing but foolishness. Few of my SEO students are seems to be so perfectionist in nature that they demand each and every thing to be ok for SEO before publishing any changes made by them on their blogs. Apparently it seems to be a good habit, but I must admit, this is one of the worst reason that invites fatigue within your soul and gradually will kill your SEO spirit.

The reason being quite simple – human soul expects results from their achievement, but when you are struggling hard for long without result, your soul starts loosing hopes. Similarly, SEO is a long process of making changes and getting perfect after subsequent trail and error process. So the best way to keep your enthusiasm up is to keep on changing small factors concerning SEO and publish it to get results.

Don’t wait for publishing SEO changes.

As I have mentioned earlier that many new SEO learners have the tendency to publish changes once they have finished completely. This has two disadvantage.

1. You have to wait long for complete SEO before publishing and getting the results, thus you starts loosing your faith.
2. You are loosing the attraction of Google spiders. As we know that Google loves changes, hence if you starts publishing in small chunks then Google spiders starts getting new changes in your blog and thus you are providing reasons to the spiders for visiting to your blog more often, thus helps increasing your blog visibility to Google which is considered as the most important factor of SEO.

When to publish SEO changes?

If you are doing SEO, you should know that Google loves changes or something new on the web. So, every time you have made any little changes in your blog regarding SEO, do publish it and don’t wait till another new idea of SEO comes in your mind.

1. If you have made any changes in Blog title, publish it before waiting long for another changes to get completed.
2. While working upon keyword density, you have done up to certain level have to wait for some new idea about something else about SEO, just publish it before starts waiting.
3. Publish your blog if you have done any SEO changes in meta description, meta keyword tag or whole meta section and waiting for something else.

Though it is not wise to re-publish your every minute, but it does not have any bad impact known to me if you are doing so. It has a positive impact on your blog if you have .xml site-map present in your blog. This site-map notices the frequency of changes and inform it to Google spiders to crawl your page more frequently, which is positive for SEO.

Tips for selection of URL.

Selection of URL may sound easy for those who are just planning to get into online world. But it is something which you can’t take so lightly because the SEO for any site begins from the URL.

What is site URL?

By the term site url, we mean unique address that anybody can use in the address bar of the browser to visit your site. No two site are there with same url, there must have been some or little difference between them. Some url may generally pronounced same but have difference in them with hyphens and dots.

Example – www.bigblogacademy.com and www.big-blog-academy.com

General trend of URL selection among newbies.

A general trend among newbies about selection of URL is that they prefer to name their site based on their name followed by .com.

Nobody cares who you are.

Naming the URL of your site with your name followed by .com sounds good right? It seems that your name would be branded on world wide web (www). But hold on, do you really think that any one bothers about your online presence or what you are writing on the web. Absolutely not. No body is interested in your name neither do they know that someone with your name is adding daily something interesting on the web, that worth reading.

What are being searched on the web?

The internet users are searching information about lots of stuffs every seconds that they are interested about. Starting from education, medical, movies, fashion, wallpapers, tutorials, ebooks, beauty products, services offered on various fields, online booking etc.

But do you think they are ever searching your name? No, absolutely not. Because when you are starting to make your online presence, you are not famous till then nor you have that much capital to promote your name. If you are any one of the two, then you are ok with the URL with your name otherwise you are just about to take your first wrong decision at the very beginning of registering your online existence.

So, how they are being searched?

Online visitors are always searching for new topics based on specific words known as keywords or in combination of some words that make’s sense known as key phrases or phrases. So, suppose you have a company selling someone products online and anyone searching for the product who don’t know you would type the name of the product and not the name of your site to search the product. So, its true that the whole world except few don’t know you and they would type the name of the product to search for the product you are selling online.

So, here are some tips to select the URL that are user friendly and SEO friendly.

1. Always select your URL after you have done selection of your niche.
2. Find a name for your URL that best matches the niche (topic) of your site.
3. Avoid using your own name or any non relevant name for your site URL.
4. If possible search for .com as people are very much used to with dot com extension.
5. Search short name URL for best result.
6. The URL name should be catchy and memorable.
7. If possible avoid using hyphen or dot in the url as people often makes mistake in typing these and bounces off your site.
8. You can use synonyms in URL in you are not getting the desired name. Search engines are getting smarter these days to understand the semantics of URL and correlates with the search keywords to display them in the search results.
9. Combo abbreviation of two terms also made a good URL name.
10. URL in phrases are also SEO friendly as search engines find them more friendly to set the relevancy of the site with the key phrase or keyword used in the URL.

So, it is your site’s URL which comes first when search engines searches for something most relevant to display in the search result and when it comes to setting up relevancy the naming that matches your niche would work best for your site. So, be careful about selection of URL for your website or blog.

Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank are the two parameter sets that put forward the competitive analysis of your websites in comparison to others present on the web. Google Page rank measures the importance of a website in terms of relevancy with the searched terms and Alexa Rank measures the site’s popularity in terms of the traffic arriving on the website. You should understand these parameters in more better way. Afterall, when you are online, your main motto should be to gain high Google page rank and low Alexa rank. Let me help you by explain these little more.

Google Page Rank.

Google Page rank is the numeric assignment of the degree of importance of a web page in comparison to other websites. The scale ranges from 0 to 10. Google Ranks a page in ascending order starting from 0 and max up to 10. The higher page rank is all about getting quality voting from other already ranked sites. Though the actual calculation of how it is measured is kept well secret by Google itself, which often gets modified in the algorithm to make search result better but many speculations have been made about it by webmasters based on the actual trend of page ranking.

While assigning Google Page rank, a page with higher importance is considered as more relevant and given better rank. The importance and relevancy is determined by the number of websites linking to the said site, it is considered as a vote by the linking site towards the linked site and hence considered important. If the sites linking to it are already been assigned importance by Google, then the importance of the said site increase all the more. The importance increases even more with the gathering of quality links from the quality websites belonging to the same niche.

Google link weight and link juice in Page Rank.

Now when you have understand the basics of Page Rank, it is wise to know little more about link weight and link juice.

Link weight is what influences the page rank your website will receive. When a website linked to your site have higher page rank, then your site is considered as more important in comparison to when a low page rank site links to yours. This is because your site is being referred by a site which is already trusted highly by Google, thus providing your site a more importance.

Link Juice is another influencing factor of page rank that your site will acquire when some website votes for your site by linking to your site. It is the amount of juice that is being driven to your website either shared or un-shared. For example, when you acquire backlink from a site of higher page rank 9 and that external site has only linked to your site, then you will enjoy the whole link juice and your site will have the chance of getting higher page rank for that. Whereas if the external site with PR 9 has backlinked to 3 sites including yours, then the link juice will be shared among the three and your page will not get as higher PR as in the early case.

Alexa Rank.

Alexa rank measures the site popularity and rank the website in descending order starting from billions towards 0. The lower the number your site represents, the better the stand your site has.

How Alexa rank works?

Alexa ranking is based on a simple algorithm. It displays collective traffic data being recorded over a period of 3 months from the visitors of your site who already have Alexa toolbar installed.

The Alexa traffic is based on the parameters like reach, page views etc. The reach refers to the number of visitors visiting your site in a single day with Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. It is not the exact data of the number of people irrespective of having Alexa toolbar installed or not. However if a particular user visits your site several times a day, then it is considered as single visit.

Alexa ranking benefits.

Though lots of people prefer to improve Alexa ranking but lots other consider Alexa ranking of no importance, as it does not shows the actual data due to above said reasons. But still Alexa ranking has many benefits.

1. Alexa ranking is mainly used to show the competitive excellence of your website in comparison to others.
2. Personal pages and blogs are being ranked by Alexa in the same way as websites.

Alexa ranking disadvantages.

1. Alexa rank does not shows separate ranking for sub-pages and sub domains, thus you does not get the exact idea about popularity of any specific section of your site.
2. Alexa does not consider those visitors, who does not have Alexa toolbar or other plugins, widgets installed, thus provide related data not absolute data.

Conclusion.

Google page rank is the best parameter set for the quality of your site irrespective of its traffic, but Alexa rank helps you counting your page popularity in compare to your competitors. Though Alexa does not worth much but Alexa rank together with Google page rank gives better information about your site.

Backlinks are the main point of attraction or parameter of success set for any website or blog. But there is mis-conception about backlinks, specially among new website owners or bloggers. I never claimed myself as an expert in setting up quality backlinks but the newbies should have clear conception about it, so that they should not ran after link farming, instead spend their valuable time in gathering quality backlinks in effective way.

Backlinks are links from another websites that points towards your website. It is important as it is considered as a vote by other website towards your website, which increases the authenticity of your website. The more the backlink you have, the higher the pagerank that your website will get. I have already written in my previous posts about backlinks. You can read about it following the link below.

What are backlinks? Why they are so important?

But gathering a lots of backlinks is not enough to help winning the race of getting higher page rank. It is the quality backlinks that help your website to get more authentication and higher page rank.

What are quality backlinks?

Quality backlinks are the links pointing towards your website from another websites which have higher page rank and belongs to your own niche. Just collecting lots of links from different websites which does’nt belongs to your niche may help only increasing the number of links but does not helps increasing your page rank, even you may be suspected of doing link farming and may get Google penalty for that. So, try to gather backlinks from quality sites belong to your niche as these links are more relevant to your niche.

Why relevant backlinks are quality backlinks?

Google is always trying to make their search performance better by serving the most relevant information for the searched words. Now when it starts searching web for any search term and gets your website, then it also looks for, the types of websites that are pointing towards your websites. If it founds that your site has ben referred by other sites belong to your niche, then this puts extra weight to your website, because both the websites work on the same niche and it is only if the quality of your website is good then others belong to your niche will backlinks towards your website.

Let me clarify this with a simple example -

Suppose you are a patient and you are asking others for some hospital that can treat your disease. Now on the way you meet two persons an internet expert and a doctor. Both of them suggest you about 2 different hospitals, then it is obvious that you would put extra weightage on the hospital that the doctor is referring because he belongs to the profession of medical and know better about the place where you can get right treatment.

How to get quality backlinks?

Quality backlinks can be achieved by commenting on blogs about same niche as yours, posting on similar niche forum along with your signature and exchanging links with websites and blogs of same niche. But avoid nofollow backlinks as Google or other search engines does not follow these links.

So, running after gathering links from other website is good, but you should spend valuable time in gathering quality links that helps increasing your page rank.

Google Penalty is a common term for SEO experts but often few type of Google penalties gets overlooked  when working on SEO factors. We mostly think that whitehat SEO can save us from such penalties but reverse can also strike your site right when you are just finished and relaxed about your site SEO. So, we will discuss here what are the types of Google Penalty and factors that may trigger Google Penalty.

Types of Google Penalty.

Google disciplinary body use to enforce a wide range of penalty setup, whose intensity would vary from minor to major causing drop in page rank to drop in search result ranking or permanent banning from search engine depending upon the factors triggering the penalty. Let us have a look about the types of penalties issued by Google and their intensity.

Disclaimer: Below mentioned are either my personal observations or based upon collection of experiences from various forums. It may differ from your experience but it worth reading as it can aware you about possible penalties by Google to your site.

1. Drop in Page Rank – A drop in Page rank always sting a serious website owner with already higher page rank.  It may not sting to webmasters having lower PR because Google Page Rank scale is not linear but works exponentially. It needs more quality backlinks to get a hike from PR 5 – PR 6 in compare to getting PR 2 – PR 3. This drop generally cause due to getting linked with non quality backlinks, broken links, though rare sudden drop in content updating frequency, some duplicate content or few other related minor issues.You can learn to know more about
   • how to get higher page rank
   • how to get page rank from internal link
   • Back links and its importance in page rank.
2. Google Search ranking drop – You may find that your webpage ranks high in search engine results for some specific sets of keywords. But after a certain period you may notice drop in search result ranking. This may be due to Google penalty, but may not be so. A higher Google search engine ranking depends upon several factors, one of which is keyword density, keyword relevancy, meta tag factors, content quality and so on never disclosed by Google itself. This penalty may be imposed due to some malpractices done for manipulating Google algorithm for keyword stuffing, non relevant content, non relevant keywords etc which gradually gets detected by search engines and penalized.
   But it is not always so, the drop may be due to the fact that some other websites have updated their content which shows higher relevancy for the searched keyword than your webpage.
3. Google sandbox Penalty – Google sandbox penalty will be generally implemented on new websites who tends to acquire backlinks in rapid pace in order to get higher page rank. This is an effort from Google to prevent crossing the tipping point of ethical SEO. In sandbox penalty the consequences are drastic drop in search ranking but not instantly de-indexing.
   You can know more about Google sandbox penalty from my previous post.
4. De-indexing – De-indexing from search result is the worst thing that you can expect about Google Penalty. This can be for few days, months or permanent removal/ banned from indexing in Google. This penalty is imposed when the site has over done any severe offence by breaking the TOS of Google by Black Hat SEO techniques, hyper spamming or creation of complete duplication of any site or any other mal practice to manipulate Google algorithm.

Twitter is a buzz word. Every one seems to be twittering. But to those who are still new to internet and just heard the buzz Twitter, here is a handful of information about Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking or micro-blogging service available on net. It is also used as SMS or short message service with a character limitation to 140. It allows to send quick message to friends – family about any updates or your status.

How to use Twitter efficiently?

Like everything, twitter also has its etiquettes to use. Unfortunately like any other new service available on net Twitter is being exploited much than proper use. Here are few tips to use it efficiently to get the max out put from it.

1. Don’t get in hurry for posting something no sooner you have completed registration. Complete your profile page entry. Upload a proper theme / template picture that not only suits your personality but should attract twitter users to stop at your profile page.
2. Be selective while you are about to follow some one. Following some one having same interest as you will help you much to get most out of twitter. Just following any one will help you nothing but meshing up your tweets.
3. Be patient to update something. High frequency of updating your status or links from you will let your profile at the risk of being removed by your followers thinking as if you are spamming.
4. Be regular to tweet something but in limited frequency in a day to show that you are an active twitter user, otherwise you will be removed by your follower thinking as if your profile is dead one.
5. Don’t use twitter only to post links frequently which proves you as spammer there.
6. Do follow others and their tweets to attract them to follow you and your tweets.
7. If you have some updates, check out first whether that already has been tweeted by someone else or not. Sending same tweets to your followers which has been updated earlier will create a bad image about your updates and your followers will gradually start ignoring you.

A new better Twitter (Geo Chrip twitter) is also available which allows you to join people use twitter from specific geo target area based on your area of interest.

What is Xml Sitemap? How sitemap helps the site?

Sitemap are of same importance to all the blogs or websites whether it is old or new. Sitemap helps the search engines to get inform about the new or undiscovered content present in your blog or website. Hence sitemap creation for WordPress and blogger has same importance.

Sitemap are specially importance for the new contents to inform search engines about the new URL and the meta data about it available for crawling. Thus it helps the search bots to crawl over the new updated pages, old modified pages without any problem and getting indexed quickly.

Sitemap is generally kept or uploaded in the root directory of the blog / site.

Is sitemap compulsory for crawling?

No, sitemap is not compulsory and your site can be easily crawled by search bots even if your site does not have search engines. Generally search engines like to crawl any site using external links. If your site is linked with already indexed or crawled external sites or any new updated page being linked with already indexed external or internal pages, then search engines will easily access your site from those sites or pages while crawling those sites. But if your site is completely new or have lots of pages yet not crawled by search engines or not having well linked internal pages, then it is advisible to submit sitemap to search engines to get indexed soon.

Create xml sitemap for WordPress blogs.

Creating .xml sitemap for your WordPress blog has got quite simpler with the Google Sitemap generator plugin. You can download this plugin by clicking on the link Google sitemap generator plugin download. Simply upload it in your WordPress plugins directory. Now go your WordPress dashboard, go to plugins, click on activate link to activate this sitemap generator plugin.
With the activation of this plugin, a new xml sitemap file gets created in the root directory of your blog. You can go to settings to change the priority of crawling by search engines.

You can also download the plugin from Google Sitemap generator site.

Create xml sitemal for blogger blogs.

Creating xml sitemap for blogger blogs is even more easy than WordPress blogs. The all you need to do is to login in to Google webmaster tools with your gmail username and password. Then you will be prompted to add your site URL and verify it. Follow the instructions there to verify your site. Now after verification, go to dashboard of your site in webmaster tools.

Now click on sitemap link under site configuration navigation link present on left hand column. After clicking the link, click on submit a sitemap button. Now you will be provided a box to write the file name. The Atom feed of your blog is your sitemap. Paste the link of the atom feed.

Just write down “atom.xml?orderby=updated” . Within few hours, your feed will be accepted.

You may also use “rss.xml?orderby=updated“