Email Marketing to increase your blog traffic

The key to a successful blog is getting visitors.

The more traffic you generate to the site, the more awareness you create about your brand, and ultimately the more money you stand to make. The hard part for many bloggers is finding the right traffic and getting them to come back on a continual basis.

Though there are many ways to generate traffic to your blog, one method that has been proven to work wonders is email marketing.

The Power Of Email Lists

When you have a list of emails, you have a lot of power in your hands as a blogger. They are a great way to generate traffic to your site.

The trick however, is to develop a large enough list of emails to get customers to come back. There are several avenues for generating an email list including having members subscribe to your blog, sign up for updates or newsletters and more. The more emails you’re generating, the better it is for your blog.

So, what do you do with this email list?

Well, once you have a list of viable emails you can begin sending out marketing materials that will entice them to check out the newest posts to your blogs.

The great things about using emails are that since the list was compiled from subscriptions and signups, the customers are actually interested in what you have to say.

That way, as you’re sharing updates about your site, the traffic will be authentic and thus improves the chances of them coming back to your site over and over. 

Collecting Emails

Now that you know exactly how valuable email lists can be, you need to learn how to generate authentic emails without hassling your target audience. Here are some ideas that have been tried by other bloggers and marketing professionals. 

1. Sign Up Forms

One of the simplest ways to increase your email list is to create sign up forms. They can be placed on your company website and blog for easy access and completion.

Of course you want to add call to action words that sound enticing like, “sign up for future updates on the blog” or “sign up to receive tips, tricks, and discounts on the daily basis”.

2. Social Media

Social media is a major platform for gathering email lists. You'll find that one Magento development company’s tips include creating a social media campaign that advertises free materials in exchange for an email address to download.

If you’re a blogger with a wealth of information, you can try something as simple as, “sign up to receive a free e-book on making money as a blogger”. If your audience is interested in earning cash, they’re most certainly going to sign up to receive a free ebook on how to make money.

3. Traditional Methods

There are some traditional methods for collecting emails that can work to your advantage.

If you’re a brick-and-mortar location, for instance, you could have sign up forms that require an email to receive the latest discounts and coupons.

If you frequently attend networking events, having small forms for potential clients to fill out contact information would be an easy way to get their emails. 

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best seo tips for blogger

Top 10 Tips to improving your SEO

Seo tips

1. Keyword Research

It is essential when optimising your site, that the content is keyword rich. However, there is little point in writing keyword dense copy if the keywords are not commonly used in search terms.

It is advisable to keep keywords ambiguous when using any SEO tool, e.g. KeywordDiscovery or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will allow the SEO tool to return more suggestions, some of which may be surprising, and ones you had not thought of.

SEO tools will also allow you to see the levels of competition for the most popular keywords. This will allow you to optimise your campaign for the most effective keyword use.

2. Link Building

A high Google PageRank is something most sites aim for, and while the algorithm for determining page rank is constantly changing the number and quality of links into your site always features.

We suggest using reputable sites and niche directories to link back to your site. With genuine, relevant content, links back to your site can really boost your site’s PageRank.

Some SEO tools will also allow you to view the number of links your competitor sites contain, this will enable you to make sure you have more valid links therefore it is likely your page rank will increase.

3. Deep Linking

While it is important to have as many good quality relevant links as possible coming into your site, it is equality important that these go to different pages across your site. This will allow you to target more relevant links to each specific page. This will not only improve users experience more but will allow search engines to see that your site has lots of valid content, boosting PageRank. Sites that only have links going to the homepage are often viewed as shallow by search engines, or that the links are not genuine and generated by automation, reducing the sites value.

4. Sitemaps

The site map is an important tool for increasing the ease of navigation across your site. It allows web crawlers from search engines (and users) to quickly and efficiently search every page of your website. Every page of content is therefore easier to find, reducing the number of clicks, both web crawlers and users have to make before reaching the required content.

There is another version of the sitemap that is also used by search engines. XML sitemaps consist of a list of all pages and include the dates the pages were last modified. XML sitemaps are submitted to search engines to help them find and link to all of the content on your site.

5. Relevant Content

The most important part of SEO is perhaps having content relevant to your main page or site topic. The readable text on the page needs to be relevant to the targeted keywords and information in the meta tags and alt tags.

The content needs to read well, in addition to being keyword dense, in order to be useful to a reader. All information needs to be explained fully so it makes sense to the reader. The site content needs to be relevant in order for the search engine to link it to the search term. However some keyword stuffed copy can appear to be spam and put potential users off.

6. Optimise Meta Tags

The Meta tags are in the code of the site. The two most important meta tags are the description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about and are still have a role in the search rankings.

The description tag is what users will read when your page comes up in search listings and can make the difference between them clicking on your site or not. The recommended length for the description meta tag is 150 – 200 characters. The description tag should have a few keywords within it but should not be stuffed with keywords, this should read like a sentence, not a list.

Many search engines hold little importance to the keyword meta tags due to “keyword overstuffing”. However all search engines still recommend adding them. When putting your list together, you need to think of the terms people are likely to be searching for (see Keyword Research), so they are led to your site with relevant content. It is not useful to add too many duplicates to your site (e.g. SEO agency, SEO agencies, London SEO agency, etc) as these are essentially the same, it is better to pick one or two variations of each keyword.

 7. Use Alt Tags for Images

The alt tags will help SEO as a brief, descriptive alt tag can add relevant text to your source code, which search engines can see when indexing your site. A higher search ranking can be obtained with more relevant content, making these tags valuable.

The use of alt tags also helps the visually impaired who asses the site using screen reader. Whilst they cannot see the image, the alt tag describes what the image was off, so they do not miss any content from the site.

8. Social media

Not technically SEO, Social Media is a fast growing factor in getting your website noticed, and is an important element to include in plans.

Social Media is a term used to describe a variety of Web-based platforms, applications and technologies that enable people to socially interact with one another online. Some examples of social media sites and applications include Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, blogs and other sites that have content based on user participation and user-generated content (UGC).

To achieve the most form social media it is important to have a give and take relationship. Helping members out with retreats, or digs or giving helpful advice will increase the effectiveness of this media.

9. Ensure Domain Name Contains keywords

You do not need to pack lots of keywords into your domain name, but a few carefully chosen keywords to highlight the topic of the website are useful. Too many keywords in the domain name can make a site look like it is spam based. Avoiding the overuse of hyphens is also a key element in getting the domain name right.

10. Use Headings

The page title will be the first thing a search engine will look at when determining what the page is about. It is also the first thing visitors to your site will see when they get to your page. Therefore it is important that heading contain one or two keywords, they are relevant to the content on the page and provide appropriate targeting.

Headings have an important role in the organisation of information on a website, they are also able to provide aesthetically pleasing aspects to a site. It is recommended to use the appropriate page heading tags through out the site as these enable webcrawlers to access the site easily.

- See more at: http://www.alchemyinteractive.co.uk/resources/top-10-tips-to-improving-your-seo

7 best seo tips for new blogger

Seo tips and tricks to promote website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important thing to learn for best blogging experience. Without proper blog optimization, we can’t even dream to get impressive traffic from search engines. From past few days, I am getting too much request of newbie bloggers to share some On-Page SEO Tips. That’s why today I plan to mention all those On Page SEO tips which I already shared on my blog in my earlier posts. I’m sorry if you have read those posts before, but I need to grab attention of newbie bloggers who just start learning SEO for their blog. All those tips are must to know by every blogger.

So, let’s take a look on best On-page SEO Tips for Blogspot Blogs and if you have read them before then don’t ignore this post. May be you learn something new which you missed before because of any reason.

On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips For Blogspot

Below are the tips and tricks that will be beneficial for you to optimize your blog for Google and other search engines. Read them carefully and apply all of them on your blog to make your blog lovable and trust worthy for search engines.

#1 Custom Robots Header Tags

There are some settings for bloggers that they can personally do for their blogs to make their blogs for SEO friendly. Custom Robots Header Tags setting in one of them. It’ll be beneficial for you to use custom robots headers tags correctly. It’s easy to manage these settings.

#2 Custom Robots.txt

Search engine bots like Googlebot (Web Crawling Robot of Google) needs some guidelines on how they have to crawl and index our blog. We can prevent some non-important pages labels pages from indexing in Google to protect our blog from duplicate content issues.

#3 Optimize Blog Post Titles

If you just started your blog on blogger’s default template, then definitely you’ll not be aware with this fact that your post titles are not properly optimized for search engines. You need to do some editing in your blog template to make your post titles properly optimized. You will see a noticeable change in organic traffic of your blog after making this change.

#4 Image Optimization

You may definitely notice relevant images between the posts on many blogs. Images not only enhance the look of our content, but it also plays an important role to optimize our blog posts. If we make effective use of images in our blog posts, then we can attain extra traffic from search engines.

#5 Internal Linking SEO

Many bloggers fail to optimize their internal links or even they don’t link their posts to each other internally. This is really a big mistake that we must avoid. Internal linking not only increases our blog page views but also help our posts to rank well in search engines. If you are also doing the same mistake, then you must need some tips to optimize your internal links.

#6 Search Engine Submission

When we are ready with our blog optimization, then we need to submit our blog in Google’s webmaster tool. Verifying and submitting our blog in Google webmaster tool helps it to get indexed in Google super fast. It also tells about our blog issues like broken links, HTML improvements etc that we must try to resolve. We just need to verify our blog ownership and submit a sitemap. That’s it. If you have not added your blog GWT, then I recommend you to read below tutorial.

#7 Improve Your Blog Load Time

If your blog takes lot of time, then visitors will go back and never come back again. It will increase bounce rate of your blog and you’ll lose your valuable traffic. Search engines give more value to fast loading blogs because they want to build best user experience. That’s why it’s very important to optimize blog loading time. I have shared some best tips that can help you to enhance your blog’s loading speed.

http://www.bloggertipstricks.com/on-page-seo-tips-blogspot.html

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

This tutorial explains simple SEO techniques to improve the visibility of your web pages for different search engines, especially for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for beginners to help them understand the simple but effective SEO characteristics.

Prerequisites

We assume you are aware of simple web technologies such as HTML, XHTML, Style Sheet, etc. If you already have developed any website, then it is an added advantage and it will help you understand the concepts of SEO explained in this tutorial.

SEO - What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is a technique for:

designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.

improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human visitors might search.

SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with text.

If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).

Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else outside of your control.

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO Copywriting is the technique of writing viewable text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.

Along with viewable text, SEO copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include the Title, Description, Keywords tags, headings, and alternative text.

The idea behind SEO copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not additional pages often called "doorway pages" that are created for the sole purpose of achieving high rankings.

What is Search Engine Rank?

When you search any keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If a search engine is putting your web page on the first position, then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as the page with the highest rank.

SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine results.

What is On-Page and Off-page SEO?

Conceptually, there are two ways of optimization:

On-Page SEO - It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.

Off-Page SEO - It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.

SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:

White Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.

Black Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.

White Hat SEO

An SEO tactic is considered as White Hat if it has the following features:

It conforms to the search engine's guidelines.

It does not involve in any deception.

It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.

It ensures that a web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.

It ensures good quality of the web pages.

It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.

Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you will definitely get something more.

Black Hat or Spamdexing

An SEO tactic, is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:

Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search engines and/or involve deception.

Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.

Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.

Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.

Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections.

Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.

Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword stuffing.

Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages.

Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites - all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.

Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.

Always stay away from any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.

When you start thinking of doing a business through internet, the first thing that you think about is your website domain name. Before you choose a domain name, you should consider the following:

Who would be your target audience?

What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or just text content?

What will make your business idea unique or different from everything else that is already avilable in the market?

Many people think it is important to have keywords in a domain. Keywords in the domain name are usually important, but it usually can be done while keeping the domain name short, memorable, and free of hyphens.

Using keywords in your domain name gives you a strong competitive advantage over your competitors. Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through-rates on search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to use your keywords in get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.

Avoid buying long and confusing domain names. Many people separate the words in their domain names using either dashes or hyphens. In the past, the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor but now search engines have advanced features and it is not a very significant factor anymore.

Keep two to three words in your domain name that will be easy to memorize. Some of the most notable websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word. Few examples are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google, etc.

You should be able to say it over the telephone once, and the other person should know how to spell it, and they should be able to guess what you sell.

Guru Mantra

Finally, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Why do you want to build your website?

Why should people buy off your site and not from other site?

What makes you different from others?

Who are your target audience and what do you intend to sell?

List 5 to 10 websites that you think are amazing. Now think why they are amazing.

Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them funny. Tell them to half a dozen people and see which ones are the most memorable. You will get more honest feedback if the people do not know you well.

Buy your domain name that is catchy, memorable, and relevant to your business.