Big Blog Academy

Keyword density and keyword stuffing has a very delicate demarkation line to differentiate between. SEO experts are in constant effort to increase the keyword density within safe limit as mentioned in Google webmaster guidelines, but still there exist some risk to cross the LOC and get penalized by monster Google. But there is always a safe strategy of using synonym keywords in the content to increase keyword density without falling trap in keyword stuffing and safely increasing content relevancy with the search terms.

What is synonym keyword for search?

For a long time Google use to search contents and decides relevancy of the content based on keyword stemming. It means that you can use keyword in phrase or individual but that should consist of a part of the primary keyword. For example if you type the keyword RUN, Google will return you with results of run, runs, running etc. Notice that the keyword has the term RUN.

The main disadvantage of this keyword stemming is that it is Google who sets this kind of algorithm for deciding the relevancy of th content for displaying them on search result. But about 75% of total net users does not know about how search engines work nor about their algorithm. So, you never know what the users would type to search the content related to your blog.
So, this problem must have to be sorted out to make the search more relevant not only in the eyes of Google but to the eyes of the end users.
This is where synonym comes into play.

Google has worked much and at last they succeed to implement synonyms in their search algorithm.

Consider this excerpt from the Google blog post on synonyms

Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don’t want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don’t even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word ‘Dr’ in the query [Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of.

How to gather idea about synonym keywords?

SEO minded people finds Google has really setup up synonym for their search algorithm in a very interesting method. Below is the screenshot taken by me on the following search – “~driving help” (I would like you to notice the synonym search displayed by Google for the term driving). First check out the pic and then read the explanation below.

In the above pic. you will notice that Google search result displays different alternative terms for search keyword driving. They are driving, drive,drivers, travel etc. This means Google search algorithm has been set to come more close to the keyword being searched by trying to understand the real intention of the user by displaying the results for the terms close to or related to or synonyms to the searched keyword. Even Google search result tries to help the user by providing the keyword suggestion at the bottom considering that user may be searching for something but s/he is not getting the proper keyword for that.

The advantage of usig synonym keyword or related terms in your content to increase keyword density is that it increases the chances to rank your content for the most related searches because you never know that what people are going to type while searching for the content related to your site and the best part is that you are always playing safe for getting trapped in the risk of crossing the LOC of keyword density into keyword stuffing for the repeated words.

Synonym keywords from SEO point of view.

SEO if broken into its simple existence will reveals its components as “RELEVANCE + IMPORTANCE”.

By the term relevance Google tends to establish relevancy of your site’s content with the search terms and if it finds your content as more relevant than others then it will display your contents on the top of search results. Now if you are trying to increasing the density of a specific keyword by repeating it several times then may be you are at risk of crossing safe limit and the other thing that is more possible is that you hardly get advantage of ranking for the search terms synonym or related to the keyword you have selected because you have not used it in your content.

When it comes to importance, then also using synonym has extra advantage. It helps others to get link to your site for those different terms present in their sites. Thus increasing your keyword’s and the site’s importance as well for the synonym keywords thus helping your blogs  to get at the top of SERP.

Since the rule of thumb about keyword density is that it should be somewhere between 3-7% on the page, it is always better to play on the safe side of increasing the keyword density avoiding keyword stuffing using synonym keywords and taking extra advantage for that.

SEO common mistakes are what lots of bloggers are found to make when it comes to adding image to their blogs.Some people avoid adding images to their blogs posts where it is really needed. But readers love to check the accompanying image graphics on the blog posts and they are much inclined to read and share. The image adds potential to the posts for attracting visitors and linking by them.

The common mistake made by Big Blog Academy blog?

This is the most common mistake, I too have made in most of the posts till now while writing posts for Big Blog Academy. My visitors may be searching through myposts for images that help them getting interest in my posts. But since last few posts I start experimenting with adding images to the posts and really gets surprised at the visitors performance on those pages. So, it works. Atleast adding image on blog post does not hurt. So, add image to each blog posts.

Images optimization for your blog.

WordPress has already most of the features integrated within to help you uploading media on the fly and do image optimization. The heavy and big size images should not be uploaded directly to blogposts as it makes your blog heavy and takes time more than expected to load which is bad for your blog. There are lots of Wp-plugins available for cropping and re-sizing images to fit nicely within the content either above or alongside. A little knowledge about photoshop helps you even more.

SEO optimization for images.

The SEO experts are very much concerned about every kind of optimization related to images. Adding images to your blog is only half the battle conquered. You should add alt tag to each image so that search engines can realize the image because search engines are image blind. The text within the images are not readable by search engines so the alt text for images helps the search engines to read the images and helps the post images to appear in the image search results thus the blog gets more exposure in front of potential image visitors to visit the blog.

Alexa Ranking is the most buzzword among new webmasters, domain owners and cheap SEO masters and  for those who really mean to fool their customers / clients / novice students who are interested in learning SEO. I am sorry if this article would hurt your believe or sentiment or SEO masters personal ego, but what is truth will always truth.

Alexa Rank is often used to fool others.

First of all I would like to vote those webmasters and SEO experts who constantly advocate the fact that Alexa ranking has nothing to do with SEO. (Learn more about what are Alexa rank gnd Google page rank). All SEO expets know that Alexa never considers the actual unique data for ranking any website. Anyone can manipulate alexa ranking with little effort. I personally believe that if something can be manipulated easily, it can’t be a parameter set for success.

Alexa rank has nothing to do with SEO.

Alexa rank is only a measure of popularity of your site. But it is completely im-perfect in counting global online visitors. It is only biased to calculate the visitors from the browsers that have any of alexa product/ tools installed. Thus what you are getting a completely wrong perception about any website.

SEO is completely different thing and has nothing to do with Alexa ranking.Because SEO is about inducing quality, relevancy and getting at the top of all search result in any search engine resulting pages and getting the most awaited Google Page rank reward from Google itself.

So, when you are doing SEO, it is only Google page rank and your position in search engine resulting pages for certain keywords that measures your success of SEO and not Alexa rank. The most attractive thing that I like about Google page rank is that it is being measured by the number of quality links from other websites that point to your websites voting for your website as being trust-worthy and relevant.
Whereas Alexa ranking can be self manipulated in several ways that I am going to discuss in the last section of this article. So, its obvious that anything that can be self-manipulated by anyone can never be trust worthy parameter for SEO

Why everyone is running after Alexa ranking?  The Alexa ranking myth.

Not everyone is running after Alexa ranking. I am not saying that Alexa is completely wrong. But it is mere a measure of your site’s popularity only among  Alexa users. This is even not sure whether that Alexa ranking is being achieved by self manipulation of real measure of popularity among Alexa users.

It is quite obvious that a website with millions of visitor’s who are not using Alexa product will rank less in compare to a site with only few hundreds of visitors, most of whom are using Alexa product. So, whats you think about this type of result.

A genuine SEO expert never runs after alexa ranking. Some webmasters and advertisers use to fool their clients by showing their high alexa ranking, mostly manipulated and use to claim their site to be very popular and ranking well to get sponsors for the website. The sponsors fall easy trap in such ranking results as 90% of people hardly knows how easy it is to manipulate this ranking to make easy money.

Disclaimer: I never advocate the below mention manipulation ways of increasing Alexa ranking, so I have not illustrated any point in this post but it worth memtioning here to show you the ways that alexa ranking is easily manipulated. But those who are really interested in it, they don’t have to get frustrated as i am going to illustrate it in some other post.

Easy ways to increase your alexa ranking.

1. Install the alexa toolbar and frequently visit your site yourself.
2. Install alexa rank widget to get counted for every visit including who doesnot have alexa tool install in your browser.
3. Encourage others to install alexa toolbar and visit your website.
4. Install alexa toolbar in different IP of your office and access your site from all the IPs.
5. Asians are fond of Alexa, so posting your URL in Asian forums will help increasing your website alexa raanking.
6. Post your links in webmaster forum as most of them have alexa toolbars installed in your browser.
7. Pay cybercafe owners to install alexa tool and promoting your site visit.

There are lots of other ways most of which only gaurantees the increase of alexa ranking but has nothing to do with SEO nor indicates about the quality of your website. So, trying for increasing Alexa ranking is not a sin but if you are talking about SEO then don’t proof yourself as idiot SEO expert by talking to others about alexa rank in comparison to Google page rank.

Keyword research or selection is the only secret skill that can help you win the online existence. But, this is very unfortunate that this secret is not hidden and everyone is running after the same. Consequently when everyone is running after keywords, the competition for the keyword gets stiffer. But you can win this battle with little more intelligence.  Below I have mentioned the strategy that I follow for keyword selection.

I always avoid any keyword research software for keyword selection but I always use them whenever I have to do research for keyword. Now you may be getting puzzeled. Don’t worry, everything is being clearly mentioned here.

Disclaimer: I never claim to be the best keyword selector and all my keywords get 100% hits, but I often find my keyword works for 1st page of search result.

Why I avoid any keyword research tool?

The main reason of avoiding keyword research tool for selecting keywords is nothing but its popularity. To me, it appears that sometimes your strength is so much visible that it becomes your most appearing weakness. Whenever anybody starts searching the for how to do keyword research, then any search engine you consider gets flooded with various software tools available for keyword research. Though each and every software tool performs different way but I never rely on just click and pick method from their result, because it is obvious that what I am using is being used by lakhs or crores of blogger. So, what is special you are trying? its just something better than nothing.

Solution: Defenitely don’t avoid these keyword selection tools but try your own brain or take advice of SEO experts to select the best keyword for you.

So, How do I select key?

Its nothing special way, but a simple tricky way. I generally use to follow the below mentioned steps.

1. Never use any specific keyword tool except Google Adword Tool. But never just open Google tool and pick from it.
2. Analyse each and every synonyms available from keyword selection tool.
3. Take considerable to put each and every available keyword suggestion in Google Adword Tool.
4. Since I cares about AdSense, I use to analyse Advertiser Competition and Search Volume.
5. I try to select the medium advertiser competition competition with medium to high search volume depending upon the topic to write upon. But this is not the end.
6. Now selects few of them that I think will work out for me, now put each of them in the most wanted Google Search Engine.
7. Now I use to check out the medium competitive keywords in search results among them and start working on them.

May be you find this is the most non-sense way of selection but one thing I would like to say you that no software can take place of human brain and human instinct. You should agree that better ideas may emerge in seconds but it takes time to reach towards the best cumulative ideas to choose from.

But do stick to the ideas that work for you.

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.