How to do Off Page Optimization in SEO

Off Page Optimization is the hardest thing to do in SEO, unlike On Page Optimization which I discuss in my previous article you have the control in everything on your page but in Off Page Optimization you're not. Off Page Optimization means building authority of your blog through your backlinks, these include Guest Posting, Blog Commenting, Social Media, Bookmarking, Press Releases and many more. Google divided the backlinks in two parts the good backlinks and bad backlinks. Bad backlinks refer to any spammy backlinks that you've made in order to trick some web users and to pass juice back to your blog, it can also lead your blog to drop down in the Google ranking. As you read this article you are able to know the different techniques in doing the right Off Page Optimization on your blog.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is the best way to have a strong backlink to your blog way back in the year 2013 and below. It is also the best way to gain credibility as a blogger and authority to your blog. But if you are still using guest posting to gain dofollow backlink in 2014 you should stop it, because Google started to treat this as a kind of spammy practice.

Many bloggers still continuing this kind of practice to drive only a traffic without passing the link juice on the other site which is OK. To start guest posting you must check first whether the site having a huge amount of traffic per day which is very important. Also, you must do guest posting only on every site that is related to your topics to avoid getting high bounce rate. If you are linking your blog do not forget to use nofollow attribute.

Blog Commenting

This is type getting a backlink to your Co blogger blog. This is also one of the hardest parts of getting backlink, it's because you will need to read the post of other people in order for you to give quality comments on their article. Dropping a quality comment is the main reason why the admin allows your comment to appear on their blog. So the best way to get backlink through blog commenting is by participating in discussion, adding some value to the article and by answering questions of other people, that is the simplest things you must know about blog commenting.

Social Media

Using the Social Media is the best way to promote our blog, most of the people is spending their time on Social Media, so it's the best place to promote a blog. One thing that most webmasters observe is that all articles that has more likes, shares, tweets and have more +1 in Google plus have a good effect in ranking a site in Google Search Engine. This means Social Media is not only where to promote our blog, but it has also room in Google ranking.

Bookmarking Site

This is one way to promote your article, although many bookmarking sites are nofollow it can still help to generate huge traffic to your blog. Having a huge follower in a bookmarking site like Pinterest and Stumbleupon is one technique in getting traffic to them. Keep it mind that the key to have huge followers is by providing them a great article to read and great images for Pinterest.

Forum Profile Signature

If you want to generate traffic through forum site, try to include your blog in your signature and try to make an interesting post and quality comment to have a huge impression of your signature. As my observation, commenting on a fresh post on the forum really helps to generate traffic through my signature. The easiest way to avoid being banned or be in spam list is to read the policy of the forum, this thing is a must.

Press Release

Like guest posting, press release is also one way to build a strong backlink and to reach new visitors. News blog has a great advantage to generate more traffic through press release and the stunning title of your article is a way to catch the attention of more people.

Conclusion

Off Page Optimization is more on driving traffic to your blog. Google has a lot of updates that might remove the passing of juice near in the future. So it is better to do On Page Optimization specially making a quality article on your blog if you want to rank your articles in the search engine.

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Understanding Dofollow and Nofollow Link in SEO: For Blogger

Understanding the Dofollow and Nofollow links is important in building a blog. There are two reasons why I say it is important, one because it may lead your blog to rank more in Google search engine and two it may lead your blog to drop down its ranking in Google search engine.

Dofollow and Nofollow Link

Dofollow link is a type of link that can pass page rank or reputation of a website back to the destination of link while Nofollow link is not. For example, you have a link of another website on your article or on your blog's template; if you don’t set the link to Nofollow then you are passing your page rank or reputation to a page you are pointing. According to Matt Cutts (head of Google's Webspam team) unnatural Dofollow link on your blog like advertiser links and links to your widgets can affect your ranking in Google and also the site that you are pointing to. If you are not aware of having many Dofollow links on your site I’m sure you have a tough road in earning a reputation or making your site rank better in Google search engine.

Minimize Dofollow Link on your comment box

One of the major problems of a blogger is maintaining their website comments free from spammers. Maybe you encounter some people who commenting on your website including their homepage URL. This is a common thing in spamming a blog, but, as a blog owner we can minimize this one. Below are simple things to minimize spamming your blog through commenting.

• Setting the Comment Moderation in your blogger dashboard to Always. This thing will allow us to review the comment before it will appear on our site.
• You may also set the Who can comment to the Registered User to minimize dummy account to use in commenting on your website. 
• Google also include a system to avoid spamming your blog it is the CAPTCHAs. It requires people who are commenting on your website to complete the word verification before the comment will be sent. You may set this CAPTCHAs ON by setting the Show word verification to Yes. 

Below is the image of the complete setting on your blogger dashboard.

How to use Nofollow Link

All links on a blog is set to Dofollow as a default attribute unless the owner did something to make it change. Linking your blog to a Dofollow site will not guarantee that it will help your site rank better in Google search engine. Sometimes your link on another site will lead to a bad backlink that make your site rank drop down. So it is better to use Nofollow link if your purpose is to drive traffic only. Below are the list on how you can set a link to Nofollow.

• You can set a link to Nofollow by adding rel=”nofollow” attribute in the url. An example of having rel=”nofollow” attribute in a certain link; <a href="http://www.website.com" rel=”nofollow”>website</a>. By doing this you’re telling Googlebot not to follow the page or not to pass your page reputation to a certain website.
• You can also add <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” /> meta tag in the head of your template. If you do this you're telling Googlebot not pass your rank in all links on your whole page.

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How to Reduce Bounce Rate on my Website

If you are using Google analytics on your website, I’m sure you already saw the term Bounce Rate. But do you know what bounce rate is? It is an internet marketing term that is usually used in analyzing the web traffic to a specific website. Bounce rate is a percentage of one-page session of the website.

Most of the visitors get bounced after a single page as they do not find what they are looking. But sometimes a website that is excellent in providing the answer about the search queries has also a high bounce rate. That means bounce rate is nothing but only the number of visitors who left immediately on your website after viewing a single page only.

Difference Between Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

Bounce rate usually confused with an exit rate. Both are different are this difference is significant. Bounce rate defined number of people who visit only a single page within your website while the number of visitors who left your website from that page is called the exit rate.

Why is It Important To Reduce Bounce Rate?

Reducing bounce rate is important to a website even though this is not one of the ranking factors in search engine.

• It is important to reduce because if a certain website has a low bounce rate it means the website is having an interesting topic or many visitors are enjoying staying on the website.
• It is also a way to earn trust rank of our website. 
• It is also important to reduce the bounce rate of our site because if we can decrease its bounce rate then our income will increase. So this is the well-defined bounce rate is reciprocal to the revenue.

What is a Good Bounce Rate

It's really hard to determine what the good bounce rate is. A good bounce rate can only be determined if you have a large amount of visitors on your website. For example, you have only 30 unique visitors and your bounce rate is only 13%, it’s not quite impressive because you have only a low number of visitors. But if you have 1000 unique visitors and your bounce rate is 25% then you are doing a good job. The normal bounce rate of a blog site is 40-50% compared to a forum site which is lower. There are many blog site that having 50% or higher bounce rate, but they are generating huge income on their site.

Guidelines for Reducing Bounce Rate

There are many ways to reduce your bounce rate, but the most important key is to have changes to your site. Below are some tips to reduce your bounce rate.

Set Realistic Expectations: You should track your website’s bounce rate against your goals and historical background. But it’s good and wise to set your expectations in reality.

Attract the Right Visitors: Always choose the right visitors that match your content and their interest. For example, your niche is all about blogging then you promote your site to agricultural site. Maybe you can drive traffic through your anchor link. But do you think they will visit more pages on your site?

Provide Good Content: Write excellent and unique content with clear heading and subheading. Use different colors for headlines, bulleted lists, etc.

• Insert some stylish images. 
• Central message should be obvious and link to the content or topic.
• Involve some case of studies to implement your layout.

Use Good Design: You should always consider an arrangement that has quick navigation and unique content written in sections. And most important it is easy to search.

Speed Up Page Load: You should also consider to optimize your template for faster load of your pages. If there are any loading content set external links to open in a new window. Avoid using annoying popups window.

Add useful widgets: You should also use widgets like popular posts, recent posts and related post to show what other pages you are offering to your visitors.

Conclusion

Having low or high bounce rate has no effect in search engine ranking so it’s ok not to do the simple tips above. The important thing is you are generating income through your website. If you want to lower your bounce rate and increase your page views just do the guidelines above.

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How to add Google Analytics to Blogger Blog

In launching a blog, the template is not the only one we should consider to setup. We should also consider verifying our blog on different third party sites offering SEO tools like Google Webmaster tool and Google Analytics. This two SEO tools provided by Google will give you insight about your blog. The Webmaster tool is more on Google Search Engine, it will give you the data what's happening on your blog before your visitors enter through your links. While the Google Analytics will give you the data on what happened after your visitors visit your blog.

According to Netcraft's survey on March 2012 there are over 644 million active websites on the internet, and surely majority of them are using Google Analytics. We know this statistic will increase yearly. As the result of growing business in the internet the stage of competition to rank a website on the search engine is now difficult race.

To know what’s happening on your blog or if your blog is achieving what you expected, you must need to have a Google Analytics. This tool is the leading web analytics on the internet and it can give you the accurate data you need. It will also give you the strength and weaknesses of individual pages of your site.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free SEO tool provided by Google to all webmasters to easily check the accurate real time traffic and stats on a website. You can also check your Bounce Rate, Goal conversion rate, unique visitor per day and many more free services. Big or small website is using this tool to track what their visitors doing on their website.

You know now what benefits you can get if you add this Google analytics on your blogger blog, so let’s start verifying your blogger blog.

Step 1
Go to Google Analytics main site.

Step 2
Sign in with your Blogger Gmail account.

Step 3
Click on Sign Up button from right side part of the page.


Step 4
Select Website to track our blogger blog.

Step 5
Setting up your account (Just fill up the required details).


Step 6
Click Get Tracking ID button at the bottom of the page.

Step 7
Click I Accept Button (To accept Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement).

Step 8
Get the Google Analytics Tracking ID and Tracking Code.


Step 9
Open Blogger dashboard on a new tab ->>  Settings and Click Other.

Step 10
Enter the Tracking ID in Analytics Web Property ID’s text field.


Step 11
Click Save Settings on the upper right side of the page.

Step 12
Go to Template Tab and click Edit HTML, then find this code </head> (Press CTRL+F to find </head>).

Step 13
Just above the code, paste the Tracking Code.
Save your template.

You have now completely setup your Google Analytics on your blogger website. But it took 24 hours for Google Analytics to show a data about your site’s traffic.

More about → How to add Google Analytics to Blogger Blog

How to add Structured Data to Blogger

On January 15, 2015 Google updated the Structured Data testing tool to help webmasters to fix and improved their website markup. Google also said on their site that having Structured Data on your website helps your articles/posts appear on search result. So today I would like to teach you on how to put a complete Structured Data markup on your blogger website.

You need to check first your website here to see if your website already had a Structured Data markup.

Reminder: You should backup first your template before making any changes.

To put a Structured Data markup, we should edit our template.
Go to your blogger dashboard->>Template->>Edit HTML.

Adding root class name hentry

In order for us to implement the complete Structured Data hatom on our blogger website the first thing we need to do is to implement first the root class name hentry on our template. Do the things below to add it.

Find this code <div class='post'>, just add hentry after the text post. After that it will look something like this <div class='post hentry'>. In some cases you will find multiple <div class='post'> on your blogger template, just do the same thing, add hentry to all <div class='post'> codes.

Adding an entry-title

Find this code class='post-title. Similar we did on top, just add entry-title after the text title. Now it will look like this class='post-title entry-title'. The same on top you will find two or more class='post-title on your template just do the same thing we did.

Adding an entry-content

Find this code <div class='post-body then add entry-content right after the text body. Again you will find it multiple times so just do what we did previously.

Fixing errors on updated and author

Fixing Updated: To fix error on updated find first this code <data:post.timestamp/>. Just before that code you will find span class if none just copy the codes below for your refference.

<span class='updated'><data:post.timestamp/></span>

The important keyword on top codes is the updated. It will tell to Google crawler the date you update your post. You may also tell to Google crawler when you published your blog posts. Below is the complete codes for these.

<span class='updated'><abbr class='published' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601'><data:post.timestamp/></abbr></span>

Fixing Author: Find this code class='post-author, after the text author you must insert this text "vcard". After that it will look some thing like this class="post-author vcard". After that find this code <data:post.author/> then replace it with the codes given below.

<span class='fn author'><data:post.author/></span>

I know sometimes you can’t find the codes you need to edit because you have a different template. You are free to ask help on comment box, but make it sure you will add nofollow attribute if ever you need to put a link.

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The Complete On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger Blogs

Many people saying that for a better SEO result, a blogger must use Wordpress instead of using free hosted server like Blogger platform. Actually, it's not Blogger or WordPress platform that can make our blog get a better ranking in Google Search Result, It's the right SEO techniques we are doing. However, in Blogger blog doing an on-page SEO is more on the template editing while in Wordpress, installing different plugins makes on-page SEO easier.

There are over 200 algorithms that Google used in ranking a specific page on the search engine and every year Google is doing minor to major updates to these algorithms, but most of them are minor. So there is no reason that Wordpress blogs can outrank Blogger blogs because of its limitation in on-page SEO.

The idea of doing on-page SEO is not only to boost the ranking of individual pages of our blog on the Search Engines but also to avoid some possible problems that might happen on our Blogger blog. So here I want to share the complete on-page SEO tips for all newbies who are using Blogger blog.

Custom Domain Name

Custom domain name is really important in SEO, It’s the basic things we need to have in order to build brand in the web. In choosing a custom domain name of our blog we should consider the relevancy of the domain to our blog niche and if possible the domain name should be shorter. People will easily recognize the title of a blog if it has a short domain name.

Custom robots.txt

Setting the right custom robots.txt on our Blogger blog will guide the Google web Crawlers on how they index and crawl our blog. Duplicate issue is one common problem that most newbie bloggers is facing; this problem might be the effect of not setting the right custom robots.txt on a Blogger blog.

Adding Custom robots.txt on a Blogger blog

Go to Blogger dashboard->>Settings->>Search preferences->>Custom robots.txt and add the following text below.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.internetsmash.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google: This line of code is for Google Adsense crawlers. It can help them to serve better ads to display on your blog. Whether you are using Google Adsense ads on your Blogger blog or not you may put it on your Custom robots.txt.
User-agent: *: This code will allow all web crawlers to crawl our site, including Bing and many other search engines.
Disallow: /search: This code will disallow crawlers to crawl and index all pages having the keyword search after the domain name of our blog. See the example below.

http://www.internetsmash.com/search/label/SEO

Sitemap: http://www.internetsmash.com/sitemap.xml: This code will simply say that all blog posts links to be index on our blog are on this link.

Optimizing Blog Post Title

Having the keywords in your post title is a good practice for on-page SEO and it is better to focus on long tail keywords rather than short tail keywords only. Why? Long tail keywords have a less competition in the search engines than short tail keywords, the less competition the greater the chance to have your blog post on the first page of search engines. However, creating a sharable title or clickbait title is also a must. Below is a great video by MOZ on how to make a blog post's title for search engine without disregarding the idea of clickbait or title that attract people to click the specific posts.

Solving Problems with Unique Content

This is the most important thing that a blogger should know. Google announced that their updates on their algorithm also focus on their search engine users to provide them a better Google search result. That means that when a user search a keywords in search engine Google is picking an article only which it thinks it can give not only accurate ideas but also a good article to read. Keep in mind also that Google is very smart to determine whether your article is original or not. Providing quality content to your visitor is also the main reason why your visitor keeps coming back to your site.

Keywords Density

This is one of the important things we must know about On Page Optimization. Keywords density is all about how many times you used your keywords in your article or page. Let's say you have 500 words in your article and you write your keywords 10 times, your keywords density is 2%. The average keywords density used by most blogger is 1.5% - 3% only to avoid keywords stuffing or spamming the Search Engine.

Optimizing Images

Optimizing images in every post on your blog help your images to appear in Google image result and it will lead traffic to your blog. To optimize your images the first thing you do is to make it sure you are using only the type of images that Google can index, these include JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, SVG and WebP. The next step is to have title text and alt text to your images. Obviously, in the title text you will put the title of the image you have and in the alt text is the description of the image you're going to use. If possible, try to include your keywords in the alt text of your images.

Meta Description

Having meta description in every post has an effect on SEO, it is a short a paragraph that describes what your articles all about. It might also increase the visitors of your website if you provide accurate meta description in your post in order for searchers know if your article is what they're looking for. Although Google provides a meta description automatically according to user search queries it's better to provide it manually. Make it sure you have a different meta description in every post you have to avoid hurting your blog. The average character you can put in your meta description is 150-200 characters only, because Google shows only 160 characters including space in the rich snippet.

Optimizing Your Blog Post URL

Providing your URL with keywords is not only for Google ranking but also to provide more details to search engine users, it is also a factor why people want to click to your site. Now a day people are very smart in using the web, they are trying to see the link of a website to determine if it's a spam site or scam site. Also, it is better to make your URL shorter and human-readable with descriptive keywords.

Mobile Friendly Blog

Mobilegeddon the new Ranking factor that affect mobile search queries. Don’t forget this stuff; it is a must to all blogs out there. We have already shared an article that talks about the importance of responsive template. Many bloggers found it useful so you must visit and read it also.

Make your Blog Load Faster

If your blog takes time to load your visitors might leave your blog to find another search result which has a great user experience. This problem will also give your blog a high bounce rate which is risky in SEO. Increasing the user experience is one of the priorities of most search engines. That’s why making our Blogger blog load faster is always a must.

Use the Schema Markup

One way to boost the ranking of our blog posts in search engines is by applying the schema markup. Schema markup is simply helping the web crawlers to understand what the page on your blog is all about or simply feeding them the data in a structured manner. We can use Schema markup to tell the crawlers that some of the information on our article is not just a text. For example: You include your name on top of your post, by using schema we can tell that your name there is not only a text but it is the author of the article.



The SEO is like a never ending road so we must keep ourselves always on track on every update happens.

I already shared some tips to boost your blogger blog rankings on search engines. I hope this could be helpful. You are free to ask something using the comment below.

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How to Redirect 404 Error Page to Homepage in Blogger

When browsing the web you might encounter a page that says “Sorry, the Page you were looking for in this blog does not exist”. This error is called “404 error page”, this page will appear when a visitor of a blog/site will try to visit a particular page that was already deleted or its URL was changed. When the Google crawler detects that there was a 404 error page on our blog it will try to delete it on Google search engine, assuming that the page was indexed. You may also use the Search Console if you try to look all the list of detected 404 error pages on your blog.

There is a big possibility that our visitors will leave our blog after seeing this kind of error, so one way to avoid to lose a potential visitors is by redirecting a 404 error page to the homepage, where visitors can see and read the latest posts of our blog before they leave.

Redirect 404 Error Page using JavaScript in Blogger

1. Go to your Blogger dashboard ->> Settings ->> Search preferences, then edit Custom Page Not Found.
2. Copy and paste the given codes below into empty text box and click Save Changes.

Sorry, the Page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.
</br>
You will redirected to homepage shortly.
<script type="text/javascript">
BSPNF_redirect = setTimeout(function() {
location.pathname= "/"
}, 5000);
</script>

You may also change the text that will appear on a 404 error page. If you created a 404 error page you may redirect onto that rather than redirecting to your homepage, just replace the pathname to href and / to the URL of the page. The redirection to the homepage will execute after 5 seconds and it is set on the above codes as 5000 milliseconds, you may change this according to your desired number. After setting anything you can now test by putting a non-existing url of your blog.

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Controlling Googlebot to Index your Blogger Blog Effectively

Some of us are concerned about the proper way to index every page of our blog to avoid duplication and to disable indexation to some of our blog posts. By controlling the Googlebot in crawling our blog we can properly index every page of our blog in Google. Crawling our blog is the process by which Googlebot (Google Search Engine Crawler) crawls URLs on our blog to get to our blog’s content so that it will be able to refresh and index on Google. Keep in mind that Googlebot can crawl up to 10mb per page so if one of your page is more than 10mb, make sure that the content on that page is crawled.

I hope most us are aware that Google is taking an action against duplicate content, but did you know that sometimes duplication happens inside our blog? Although labels and archives are very useful to our audience, it can still cause duplicate issue, but we can avoid it by controlling the Googlebot in accessing those particular pages. On this page we will talk about robot.txt and Meta Robots and how to use them to control Googlebot.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is used when we are restricting Googlebot to crawl a particular page on our blog, however we are not telling it not to index the pages on Google. Sometimes Robots.txt is not respected by Google especially when we are trying to restrict Googlebot in crawling a huge amount of URL on our blog, like all pages having a /search after the domain name. Search engine sometimes they think that we made a mistake in disallowing them to access our content, especially when lots of URLs and people are pointing and visiting to that content. It is good to use Robots.txt when we are saving crawl bandwidth. Bandwidth is not free, Google is paying money to crawl and index our blog.

Meta Robots

Unlike the robots.txt, Meta Robots are respected by the Search Engine crawlers. Meta Robots is placed at the top of individual pages, by using it we are controlling a single page of our blog to tell Google whether to index the page or not. Keep in mind that by using the Meta Robots we are not restricting Search Engine Crawlers to crawl our blog, in other words, we allow them to visit our pages but they are restricted to index it.

Remove Specific Page from Being Indexed

Let’s say you want to remove one of your content from being indexed on Google. In order to completely remove it on Google make sure that the page is able to crawl, and then we must add Meta Robots with noindex on the head of the page. It is better than disallowing it on robots.txt, as I’ve said earlier disallowing URL using robots.txt will just restrict crawler in crawling the URL.
To set the robots.txt on your blog, just go to Blogger Dashboard ->>Settings->>preferences->>Robots.txt.

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow:

The codes above, simply say that all user agents are allowed to crawl every page on our blog.
After setting your Robots.txt you can prevent Search Engine crawlers in indexing the page by using a Meta Robots. To set the Meta Robots just go to your Blogger Dashboard->>Template->>Edit Template, just below to this code <head> put the following code provided below.

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == "http://www.internetsmash.com/p/about-us.html"'/>
<meta content='noindex,follow' name='robots'/>
<b:else/>

The codes, simply say that if the page’s URL is http://www.internetsmash.com/p/about-us.html then it should not be indexed on Google.

How to Index Post and Static Page Only

There are several ways to do it. We can edit our template like as shown on top, just use the code provided below. The code simply says that if the current page is NOT a post, static page and homepage, then it should not be indexed on Google else Googlebot should index it.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot; and data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot; and data:blog.url != data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content='noindex,nofollow' name='robots'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='index, follow' name='robots'/>
</b:if>

Conclusion

Using the robots.txt and meta robots is very helpful in SEO but it can create a serious problem when we use it in a wrong way. We can use them to prevent Googlebot in crawling and indexing some pages on our blog, especially pages that we think it can affect our rankings.

More about → Controlling Googlebot to Index your Blogger Blog Effectively