Tuesday 17 February 2015

6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic

Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.

The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.

1. Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts

If your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs without further improving them through off-page optimization or link building.
Blog posts can naturally rank on their own basing on its topical relevance as seen by search engines, and taking advantage of low competition keywords will make your pages rank on the top page of SERPs in no time, which means more organic traffic to your site.

2. Targeting 3 -5 keywords for each page on your site

Creating your pages or blog posts with the intent of ranking for more than 2 keywords is always a smart move, since it will allow your site to draw more relevant traffic along the process. Say, if your site has 15 blog posts or pages on its first month, and each page are targeting 3 different keywords. Doing the math will give you a result of 45 keywords giving you constant traffic within a month.
Doing this strategy is very simple, wherein you just have to use or combine your targeted keywords on your page or post’s title, URL and on the body copy (eg. Top 10 advanced on-page SEO strategies). With the given example of a post title you are able to target 7 keywords that you can use within the body of the content, including:
  • Advanced on-page SEO strategies
  • On-page SEO strategies
  • On-page SEO
  • Advanced SEO
  • Advanced SEO strategies
  • Advanced on-page SEO
  • On-page optimization strategies
  • On-page SEO techniques
3. Dofollow blog commenting

Commenting on blogs with the same theme as your site – particularly blogs that allow dofollow attributed links on their comment section – is one of the most effective ways to promoting your site as well as in improving your keywords’ search rankings. This technique has a lot of advantages and can certainly take your campaign a long way, given that this method allows you to acquire relevant backlinks and can possibly build relationships with other bloggers related to your niche.

Networking with other bloggers is extremely beneficial, especially with higher value link placements such as special mentions, in-content links (used as a resource), guest blogging opportunities and sponsored reviews. Anyway, leaving comments on blogs with the use of your keywords as anchor texts can help improve its search rankings in just weeks, particularly if the links that you’ve built are from topically relevant pages and are dofollow attributed.

4. Guest blog posting

Guest blogging has been known to be a link building method that’s really advantageous in terms of driving relevant traffic, acquiring high quality links, passing through Pagerank and in improving SERP rankings. It’s best to choose blogs that are relevant to your site, have high page ranks and receives a lot of traffic on their site (can be based through Alexa traffic rank).

In choosing the topic to write for guest postings, writing topics that are strictly about the keywords you are aiming at is the most effective way to get most out of this technique, since the link that you’ll be able to build through your author bio will have higher scores basing on its relevance as well as in targeting the audience that will be able to read it.

5. Forum participation

Forum posting is a good start for any campaign, especially if you choose to participate on high PR and high traffic forum sites. The best way to benefit from this method is to establish an expert or knowledgeable image through this channel, and not just focusing on building links through your signature.

Establishing yourself through forum sites and being genuinely active in participating with the community can bring you targeted visitors and interested clients within a month, so spending 30 minutes a day on 1 or 2 authority forums around your site’s industry is certainly worth it.

6. Article submission and converting your articles

This link building method has proven its worth over the past decade and is still known to be one of the most effective ways in generating consistent traffic as well as highly relevant links that can boost your search rankings.  The best thing about article marketing is that it’s capable of building solid links as it gets syndicated naturally, particularly if you have written a solid and informative article. Submitting an exceptionally written article to several highly trusted article directories (such as Ezinearticles, Articlesbase, Goarticles, Amazines, and many more) can enhance its chances of getting scraped or used by other sites that are seeking for quality content to be posted, which gives you more extra links and of course, more traffic.


But there’s more to this method than just the traditional article marketing, you can as well convert your articles to other formats for more exposure and external links pointing to your site. Converting your articles to PDF, podcasts, slide/powerpoint presentation and videos, and then submitting them to their respective directories can extremely amplify your site’s traffic in a short period of time, given that these formats have higher chances of ranking high on search engine result pages.

Blog Commenting Strategy to Improve Search Engine Ranking

A blog commenting strategy focuses on getting constant backlinks from other blogs and websites. This post is concentrated on giving you specific instructions and detailed strategies that you can instantly apply to your daily method in any given niche. You have to know from which sources and also HOW MANY backlinks you require to achieve HIGH rankings with a particular keyword. This is the very first point that a person has to know before he or she can even move on to building these highly targeted backlinks from other people’s websites.

How can you start with your own blog commenting strategy and from where and which sources can you get links fast? It is all about the search parameter you use to find niche targeted, relevant and trusted blogs in Google. Here are some sites where you can leave a comment. Make sure to look at the search strategy that is effective for both sites and keywords.



  • site:flickr.com “your keyword”
  • site:blogspot.com “your keyword”
  • site:hubpages.com “your keyword”
  • “powered by wordpress” your keyword
These are just four sites from which you can get immediate links within a few seconds or minutes. The first thing you have to write into Google’s search is the site, then your keyword or the niche you want to target. You can do this for any keyword in any area and you don’t have to limit yourself to sticking to just a few concepts.

How do you leave a comment on one of these sites? Simply scroll down to the end of each post or page, see if the admin allows readers and visitors to leave a personal comment. Not all of them will have the comment section enabled, but some will. Then you want to mix things up as often and as naturally and humanly possible. Link back to different pages of your blog and use different keywords in the “name” section. For instance, if your niche should be “English Courses”, you want to use “English Courses” in the name section to around 60%, maybe “Online English Courses” to 10 %, “Courses” to 10%, and the other 20% you can use names such as “Gerald”, “Peter”, “Marina” etc. You have to make it appear natural and this is why we want to use different keywords and pages for relevant blogs.

Now we’ve told you how you can develop your own blog commenting strategy, but how many of these links do you need to get on the first page of Google for a chosen website or keyword? It depends on your competition, how many backlinks your competitors have, and from which sites and sources. This is important. You can also add other strategies to your daily SEO practice. Blog commenting is just one of many different methods that you can use to enhance search engine rankings so use this technique together with other search engine optimization techniques to get a good result.


You will need to create a weekly backlinking plan that you will follow through for the next 4, 8, 12, 16 or even 30 weeks if your keywords are very competitive. You are your own boss and have to be consistent with blog commenting. This post was focused on giving you the information to develop your own plan with blog commenting strategy.

Disavow Links Tool: Are Your Back-links Negatively Affecting Your Ranking?

Many sites recently suffered a big demotion in terms of Google ranking, and consequently the amount of organic traffic they receive, due to one of the Google Panda updates.

Was your site one of them? Well if it was it was probably due to a few reasons, one of which may have been due to excessive number of unnatural and low quality (spammy) back links.

In the past couple of years there has been quite a concerted crackdown by Google on sites deemed to be of low quality or those seen as “spammy” in nature from the viewpoint of Google.

This includes sites which have an “unnatural” collection of back links. As you may already know, back links are only one of the many indicators which Google uses to calculate the page rank of a website or web-page.

Over the years, the number of back links pointing to a website was one indicator which was quickly learned by most webmasters to make a significant difference to rankings, and as a result, many website owners poured a huge amount of effort in building as many back links to their site with the aim of catapulting their way to a higher page rank.

Unfortunately things got out of hand and a lot of people resorted to back-link-building techniques which most people (especially Google) considered to be a disreputable practice and a form of cheating.

Even more importantly, the quality of search results was being affected because Google was finding itself displaying poor quality sites on the first few pages of search results on account of the sheer amount of back links these sites had pointing to them.

Website owners were going crazy trying to SEO their sites using strategies which resulted in a massive number of unnatural back links being pointed to their site in a very short amount of time.
Perhaps you undertook something similar with your site and built back links by commenting (or spamming) other blogs or forums. Or maybe you hired some so-called “SEO expert” to optimize your website.

But as we all know, the people at Google are a very smart bunch and they have been working quite hard to combat this cancerous practice by penalizing those sites which they considered were cheating the system with unnatural SEO practices.

Google is always trying to make it harder for those attempting to game the system and the most  public demonstration of this is their release of several search engine algorithm updates in the past couple of years, some of which were given the names of Penguin and Panda.

Now we all make mistakes in our lives, innocent or otherwise, and the good thing is that Google is giving people the opportunity to somewhat redeem themselves by voluntarily giving them the ability to remove the spammy back links pointing to their site.

This is in the hope that it will wipe most of the slate clean and give people the opportunity to improve the rankings of their penalized website over time in a fair manner.

Google recently introduced a handy new tool called the Disavow links tool which falls under the umbrella of the “Webmaster Tools” and which is designed to help site owners “disavow” or clean up unnatural or spammy back links which are pointing to their site.

To use this tool you will obviously need a Google account and also you have to be signed up for the Webmaster Tools.

How to Use the Disavow Links Tool

Attention: Google warns that the disavow tool should be used with caution because removing the wrong links may potentially harm your site’s traffic and ranking.

The disavow links tool is fairly straight forward to use. Below are some basic steps to get you started.

Step 1: Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and select your website.

Step 2: To get a list of the back links to your site go to the “Links to Your Site” menu item as shown below.
You can then download all links to a CSV file for easy manipulation and copying.

Step 3: Prepare a text file containing the back links you want removed and save it on your computer. See the screenshot below for an example:
You’ll note that Google has allowed for the ability to remove back links using two ways.
One is via the use of the “domain:” prefix followed by the domain name (see first example in figure above). This will remove all back links from the domain without you having to specify each individual link.

Alternatively you can remove links individually from any domain by specifying the link URL as shown in the second example above.

Note that you can also add comments in your file using a “#” symbol.

Step 4: Now go to the Disavow Links Tool page and choose the URL of your site and click the “DISAVOW LINKS” button as shown below:

After clicking the button you will be presented with a warning before using the tool as shown below. To proceed simply click the “Disavow Links” button.

Step 5: Now you will prompted to upload the text file you prepared in Step 3.
Upload the file and then click the Submit button.

That’s all there is to it.

Google says that it may take several weeks for the link removal to fully show its effects because your site will need to be re-indexed.


It must be re-stated that you should only use this tool if you know what you are doing because it could have negative effects if not used correctly!

6 Simple Strategies to Get Blog Posts Indexed by Google Quickly

In this article I offer some tips for writing blog posts that are geared up for search engine traffic, and that are written to be shared in the social web. For the example, I will be walking through how I create a real post for a high authority health web site.

I will also be creating a video to embed into the blog post, so I will explain how I created the video, came up with the title for it, and armed it for top results in the search engines.

If following along, be sure that when you create a video and article that they are able to stand alone as you never know how someone will be absorbing your content. It might be that they aren’t watching the video embedded within your post at all, but stand alone on YouTube or wherever it is that you decide to host it.

Video

Watch over my shoulder as I perform the steps that I use to get blog posts and videos indexed by Google quickly

Let’s Use Google Suggest To Find A Good Topic For Our Blog Post

We’ll use the long tail we find within our post title

By default I head to Google.com to start, but if you are writing content for a specific geographic audience like Canada for example, you might want to go to the correct engine (Google.ca) because there will be some differences in the results, even if they are just subtle.

Also, you may want to disable the saving of search history for your Google Account, or log out of Google completely, because the search results may differ for you otherwise. We’ll be looking at top results to do a quick glance at the competition. It’s not a huge deal but it’ll help our testing to be a little more precise, but the truth is we are not dealing with exacts anyway. In case you didn’t know, Google will tailor your results (when search history is being saved), to show sites that you frequent most in the top results.

1) First, let’s decide on roughly what we want to talk about in our post.

In this example I am going to be providing a list and summary of Facebook pages in the “raw food” niche. I’m not sure how many just yet, maybe around 50, but I can work that part out later.

2) Next, let’s head to Google to see what people might be searching for that would like to see that list. There might be some deliberate searches for such a thing, but somehow I don’t think there will be much. Let’s look anyway.

Well, there wasn’t a whole lot.
I did find:

“raw food facebook pages”
“raw food diet facebook”
“raw food health facebook”
“raw food on facebook”

I also discoverd that commonly people might look for Facebook pages in this way:
“{topic-name} related facebook page”
So, even though “raw food related facebook pages” isn’t rolling up, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t get traffic in the long or short term.

3) Finally, let’s assess the results that come up for each phrase.

For the search “raw food facebook pages” Google lists exactly what you may (or may not) expect. It lists pages on Facebook related to “raw food.”

You might think this removes the need for the content developer but I wouldn’t agree. I think that a nice list with that title will still climb above those results. It would be human edited instead of machine selected after all.

I looked through some of the other terms, and I decided to go for the first one.

What I am mainly looking for when assessing the results is if anyone has used that exact phrase in the title of their content.

While I will be using “raw food facebook pages” for the article, I will probably be using “raw food diet facebook” for the video.

Creating A Blog Post Title Using Our Chosen Google Suggest Keyphrase

Make a title worth clicking and sharing

OK, now with our chosen keyphrase in hand, let’s come up with a title.

The title is arguably the most important part of the content when it comes to getting clicks, SEO, and sharing.

It becomes the starting point, or the “advertisement” for the content piece when the snippet is viewed in the SERPS or after being shared on social sites like Facebook. The title also often determines what is included in other key SEO elements, which include the H1 tag and the URL.

List posts are great, and they are often shared without hesitation.

Knowing that, let’s create a “list post” style title from our chosen keyword.

Let’s go with:

“50 Impactful Raw Food Facebook Pages Worth Liking”

And for the video:

Top 10 SEO Tools and Add-ons for Your Online Business

The phrase SEO tool is an umbrella term that includes any piece of software or service which can:
  • help you improve your website’s visibility
  • build a credible online brand
  • garner strategic and competitive intelligence
  • research keywords and links
  • track social media performance
  • create better content and
  • grow your website
Because of this, SEO tools are an important part of any online entrepreneur’s resource arsenal. Luckily, the internet abounds with dozens upon dozens of SEO tools, covering a wide range of functions.

Below there is a list of 10 of the most popular SEO tools out there, with explanations of how they can assist in your online business.

1. MozBar

mozbar

If you are interested in link building, then this is one of the most convenient browser extensions you can get. MozBar lists important SEO metrics for each web page you visit, including domain authority, page authority, on-site HTML elements, and number of backlinks. It also allows you to highlight the types of links you’re interested in (dofollow, nofollow, internal, and external), as well as determine the website’s location, based on its IP address.

All of these features are available with the free version of MozBar. For $99 per month, you can create a standard Moz PRO account, which unlocks access to additional MozBar analytics features, but also to the entire Moz toolkit, including a mentions tool, a rank tracking tool, on-page keyword optimization, a keyword difficulty and SERP analysis tool, and more.

2. Google Analytics

google analytics banneran

Currently, Google Analytics is the Internet’s top rated web analytics and reporting service. For online marketers, it is an invaluable tool that can be used to obtain detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and its sources. This essentially helps publishers understand how visitors are interacting with their website.

Google Analytics can identify where visitors come from, how long they stay on a page, and what country they access the website from. Thanks to its integration with Google AdWords, it can also track conversions; and it’s e-commerce reports can track sales activity.

Blogs and websites may share Google Analytics data with potential advertisers to show how their website is performing and what kind of audience it reaches.

Basic functionality is free, while the premium version can be accessed for an annual fee. Google Analytics Premium offers the chance to work directly with Google and obtain “enterprise-level data.”

3. Copyscape

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CopyScape is an online plagiarism checker and duplicate content detection service that can be quite helpful if your content is being distributed across the web.

Content owners and publishers can use this service to check whether their content has been stolen and republished elsewhere on the web, or whether old content is being repackaged and presented to them as something unique and original. Copyscape functions by matching original content with pages on the internet that contain similar text.

Copyscape also offers two premium services. Starting from $4.95 per month, the Copysentry service monitors your pages and automatically checks for copies once a week, while Copyscape Premium can perform comprehensive plagiarism checkups for only 5c per search.

4. SEER’s SEO Toolbox

seer banner
A free, all-in-one toolbox based on SEER’s own in-house tools and designed to satisfy most SEO needs, SEER Toolbox targets online marketers who lack the technical know-how of seasoned programmers. Consequently, it works with spreadsheets, not programming code, boasting that if you can use the SUM () function, then you’ve got all the knowledge you need to excel (pun intended).

With SEER toolbox, you can easily create mashups, get quick access to relevant data ready for analysis, and better coordinate with your SEO team, since everyone would be using the same tools. The “all-in-one” function allows SEER toolbox to swiftly pull data from varied sources (like Google Analytics, Twitter, SEOMoz, Majestic SEO and more).

5. SEOQuake

seoquake banner

Similar to the MozBar, SEOQuake is a free analytics browser extension with over 2 million downloads. Versions exist for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Praised for the massive amounts of “raw data” it can deliver (more than any other SEO toolbar available), SEOQuake keeps track of all manner of relevant parameters, including Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Search information, Google Links (plus similar data for other popular search engines), Alexa rank, keyword density, domain IP and page source, but it also allows users to easily create their own parameters.

With so many features and things to track, SEOQuake is great tool to help you get a sense of how popular or useful a website is, often in a single glance. If you’re a beginner, this toolbar is a great place to start teaching yourself some SEO basics.

6. Klout

klout banner

This quirky app resorts to social media analytics to evaluate its users and measure their online social influence. The app then assigns a numerical value to that influence, called a “Klout score.”

Klout draws data from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Wikipedia and Instagram to measure the size of a user’s social media circle, as well as their ability to drive action via the content they create.

It takes into account metrics such as retweets, follower counts, likes, subscriptions and memberships, and uses them to calculate social “outreach.” As a SEO tool, Klout can be used to measure your social media presence, and to better understand how your audience is responding to your content.

Although it is growing in popularity, Klout has also been criticized for producing “Klout scores” which can’t accurately represent one’s social influence. A famous example shows that according to Klout, US president Barrack Obama is less influential than a number of bloggers.

7. Ahrefs

ahref banner

Primarily useful for link research and link building, Ahrefs comes with a large index of links, detailed anchor text distribution charts, and a user friendly interface to boot. The tool updates every 15 minutes, and can show backlinks, domains, and the best pages of a domain.

Ahrefs can generate SEO reports that can help you spot mistakes in titles, headers, meta descriptions or meta keywords; or find broken pages and duplicate content. A mentions tracker allows you to keep an eye on mentions of your brand or other relevant terms.

While this is mostly a paid tool, some limited functionality is offered for free (mostly as a free trial). Three paid subscription levels are available: for a monthly fee of $79, the Professional package can check up to 5000 backlinks per request; for $179, the Elite package ramps that number up to 15,000; and for $499 per month, users can gain access to an enterprise-tier package which displays a whopping 30,000 links per request.

8. Majestic SEO

majestic seo banner

Majestic SEO is known for having one of the largest link intelligence databases on the web, which makes it a great option for anyone interested in online marketing and PR.

It offers a suite of useful competitive intelligence tools: a Site Explorer which provides URL/domain summary data, a keyword checker, a backlink history tool that shows the number of backlinks for a URL or domain, webmaster tools to verify the ownership of your domain, a wide range of standard and advanced reports, and much more.

Free services are offered to individual users who want to get data for the sites they own. Silver, Gold, and Platinum subscription levels are marketed toward SEO professionals and SEO agencies, starting from $29.99 per month, or $299.90 per year.

9. Social Crawlytics

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This is a nice competitive research web-based tool that can help you keep track of your competitors’ most shared content. It can quickly scan URLs to show you where your competitors’ content is being shared and promoted, and then compile useful social sharing metrics. Its intuitive dashboard makes it very easy to monitor, schedule and analyze those metrics.

Since this tool is free, you can jump right into using it if you have a Twitter handle and a URL to search. After you’ve tweaked the parameters of your search, all you have to do is provide an email address and Social Crawlytics will send you the report once it is compiled.

One of the most interesting features of the Social Crawlytics report is the Sunburst data graph, which “gives you a great visual view of how your shares are split up when approaching from a search engine’s point of view.”

10. Raven Tools

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This popular suite offers a classic lineup of SEO, content and research tools. Raven addresses four main areas of interest for online entrepreneurs, namely SEO, social media management, content marketing, and PPC management.

If you’re confused about the myriad of SEO toolkits out there, Raven is a great place to start because it offers a lot of features in one place. Its SEO toolset alone contains over a dozen great resources.
For example, it features two time-saving tools: Site Finder – which uses Bing data to quickly identify the best linking opportunities, and Backlink Explorer – which pulls out all the backlinks for a URL or domain (including nofollow links) and compiles a comprehensive report.

But this is just a fraction of what the Raven software can do. However, quality comes at a cost. While a 30-day trial is offered for free, for $99 per month, you get unlimited access to the entire Raven tools suite. A nice perk about this offer is that the price covers up to four users, each with unique login credentials, which makes Raven a good choice for a small SEO team.