Ravi Kumar Rana

Here is how to find out competitor backlinks without SEO Tools

February 19, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Check competitor backlinks with out SEO Tools

Creating high quality backlinks is most effective marketing method if you are working towards website online presence. We all know that having a good number of quality backlinks give us better ranking in SERP (Search Engine Result Page). But after reaching on certain level, you need to keep an eye on your competitors and their activities. After getting into SERP race, you need stability so that your competitors would not steal your rankings. There are thousands of methods spying on competitor but the best one is to keep an eye on their backlinks.

When it comes to finding out the competitor backlinks, most of the marketers rely on different tools. Some most commonly used tools as ahref, semrush, linminer, seo powersuit and similarweb. But what if you are not interested to purchase a paid subscription of these tools? In this situation, you have to use your brain and work manually to find out competitor backlinks. Today I am going to share some google tips and tricks which will help you to learn amazing competitor backlinks spying techniques. By the help of these tips and tricks you can easily monitor your competitor backlinks and fasten your belts to compete them.

Finding out the comment backlinks

Blog commenting is a good backlinking method. If you are using it correctly, you can get good results in SERP. We all know that generating backlinks by posting on blogs/forums always helps in a positive way. In order to find out your competitor backlinks which are built by using blog commenting method, try the following google trick.

Competitor backlinks Method 1 (Keyword/anchor text in comments)

Open browser

Open Google in an incognito tab

Type : keyword “domain” “comment” -“Comments have been disabled for this post”

Hit enter

PS: Here you need to avoid typing https or .com/.in/.edu/org and so on domain extensions. For example if your competitor has a website https://theseoguy.in and you want to spy on backlinks generated by blog commenting then use trick and remove https:// and .in just type theseoguy.

I am sharing a case study for the client where my client was dealing in education and running a computer education center. Their competitors were gaining ranks on even on my clients brand keywords. The moment I get this project, I start digging out about the competitors. And finding out their website strength is the first point to start with. I followed method 1 to find out backlinks which are generated by comments.

Refer the screenshot below.

In the above image you can see the URL’s where my client’s competitor has put their URLs and used comment box to generate backlinks. After reviewing all 10 pages with 100 results, I was able to find out the platforms which are providing backlinks to my client’s competitor.

Competitor backlinks Method 2 (Keyword in URL, Citations, Blog posts and Meta data)

Open browser

Open Google in an incognito tab

Type: inurl:domain

Hit enter

Similar to method 1, but little simple method to find out the backlinks. It is pretty common to check number of cached url’s by typing site:https.//www.domain,com/ but here in this technique, you can avoid the https and .com both to find out the url’s which have competitor name in it.

Refer the screenshot below.

In the above screenshot you can see the domains which either has the competitor name in it or has citations. Method 1 and Method 2 are relative but the only difference is, you can only find comments platform by using method 1 but method 2 will give you results or URLs which has your competitor name, citation, profile or comment.

Competitor backlinks Method 3 (Keyowrd/anchor text in social bookmarking sites)

Social bookmarking is a common and effective practice while building quality backlinks. And if you could spy on your competitor bookmarks without using any tool would be an advantage for you. In order to do that you can follow given below steps.

Open browser

Open Google in an incognito tab

Type: keyword “add to this list” site: mix.com (mix.com is written just for an example. You can change it according to your choice)

Hit enter

If you follow this practice, you can find out the bookmarks created for particular keyword. You can switch the keywords and bookmarking site according to your choice. The only flaw in this method is, you can spy within one bookmarking website at a time. You have to switch the site after finding the results. Given below is one example of this method.

In above image you can see all the bookmarks created on mix.com for particular keyword.

Finding out the platform

Apart from all the above competitor backlinks analyzing techniques, you can also monitor if any of your competitor is using particular CMS for website or blog. This method is little different and used to find out the competitor CMS rather than backlinks. By using this method you can analyze the CMS platforms such as wordpress, expressonengine, blogger, wix, penzu, strikingly, drupal, joomla and many more. Follow the steps given below to use this method.

Open browser

Open Google in an incognito tab

Type: keyword “powered by expressionengine” (Expressionengine is just an example. You can switch to another CMS according to your choice.)

Hit enter

You can use this method to find out third level domains and blogs as well.

Hope these tips and tricks would help you to find out competitor backlinkss without SEO Tools. If you can add more information or have suggestions/feedback for this information then do comment below. Share the information with people who are looking for such tips and tricks.

Advance SEO techniques 2019 and Marketing Strategies

February 13, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Business growth depends on your marketing ideas and strategies. It is the strongest ladder to climb high in market and get better results. There are thousands of creative marketing techniques by which company owners generate business but after achieving certain level, they look forward to take their marketing to next level. Same goes with search engine optimization. If you are a business owner or marketing strategists who Aims to take their marketing to next level then today is the right time to land on TheSEOGuy. Today I am going to share some amazing ideas and coolest Advance SEO techniques along with some tips and tricks which can help you to design your marketing strategies and achieve your marketing goals.

Before getting into advance SEO techniques, first understand what it is and how it works.

Advance SEO Techniques

Advance SEO techniques are nothing but few creative and advance website marketing tricks which we apply on internet platforms such as website, social media pages and sub domains such as blogs. As we all know that 80% of searches to the business are driven by search engines in the form of search queries related to business. Every search query contains Keywords (phrases) related to business and search engines provide results according to it. For example if you search for any particular product such as “Red Shoes in (Location) then you might get results of certain e-commerce companies according to their SEO score. In order to boost SEO scores, every company owner design creative SEO strategies. Given below are few.

Target location

We all know about targeting location while defining audience type is must for all the marketing strategies but if you use location wisely, you can drive more benefits to your business. For this you can try simple method of creating location bases pages.

For example, if you are a service provider who can provide services within a certain radius then you can add pages in your website with the action “Fetch Location” and name “Nearby”. Let’s assume you are running an institute which provides educational services and have multiple branches of your institution. Now you are looking to reach out local audience because the searches for “Institute near me or (location)” is having a good conversion rate.

In order to get into SERP for this location based keyword, you can create pages within your main domain and generate content related to services.

Let’s take the case study for an education institute. Given below is the search analysis and proposed design for location based pages.

Advance SEO Techniques 2019 and Marketing Strategies (Search Analysis)

You can that I did a research on keyword based on location searches and collected the best performing keywords. It’s not possible to use all of them but we can use the best keywords while performing on page SEO. We can use those keywords in URL’s, Meta Data and in content.

In Above image you can see the proposed design for location pages so that institute could list all of its branches and target nearby locations.

Just after using this method for 15 days, Google listing for institute got a boost and ranked on targeted keyword. It bring a lot of local traffic and direct leads for the business.

Curiosity Pages/Campaigns

Sounds strange but the impact of this technique is very high. Creating curiosity between people gives maximum results. Because the number of visits are higher than regular offers, discount and attractive offers. A user could avoid an attractive discount offer but he/she might not miss to visit the website if he/she is curious to know. For example when apple launched its first TV commercial in 1984. Company designed a TV advertisement of duration 45 seconds and out of 45 seconds they talk about brand for 5 seconds and showed their logo for just 3 seconds at the end. It was a huge marketing risk because the found of company Mr. Steve Jobs put more than 80% of his money on this campaign but he knew that it is going to work. Curiosity creates more impressions and brand awareness than any other campaign.

It is a good practice in SEO as well. You can drive more traffic by creating curiosity in audience. For this you can follow given below steps.

Dive into public forums

First step is to get into public forums and start a conversation. Share your product/services and let people talk about it. You can also question services and encourage people to take part in conversation and share their feedback. Create polls and provoke positively to generate curiosity.

Merge your marketing idea with current trend

We all have already heard about following the trend but it’s hard to follow this in SEO practices. In order to follow this technique, we have to create the best marketing strategies. The best option to do this is to create a subdomain or use existing subdomains. On these domains you can create pages and generate content related to trend and divert traffic to main domain. Using MEME Templates, Current affairs, Using controversial stories and creative info-graphics are part of this.

Given below are few examples of merging marketing strategies with current trend.

Challenging audience

Throwing a challenge on your existing audience will give your website an amazing hike in website engagement. You can try creating a promotional temporary page in subdomain where people could come and take part in it. Throw challenge like “You can’t solve it”, “Nobody can solve this”, “Only I can solve it”, “Hey do you have brain more than MR. ABC (Any fictional character name)”, “Do you want to know?” and “ I know you can but it’s hard for you”.

These are few challenges which can be used to encourage audience to take part in challenge and visit your website. These campaigns drive the best engagement.

Tip: It is always recommended to run challenges on subdomains and direct traffic to main domain. For this create temporary promotional pages which can be edit or removed later.

Hope these advance SEO suggestions would help you to design or adjust your marketing strategies and get the best results. However, if you have more suggestions then do comment below. Make your contribution to make it a perfect place where everyone could find accurate SEO Answers.

Leverage Browser Caching: Importance and SEO benefits

February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Leverage browser caching is a common term between digital marketers and developers who work for website performance. Enabling leverage browser caching for better SEO results is common practice but today I am going to share some more insights on this. I am going to share what is the meaning of leverage browser caching and how it works. Also what the SEO benefits of using this on your website. So let’s start and learn more about this technique.

Leverage Browser Caching

It is a method of enabling browsers to save website data such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Images and other files to improve the re-visit site performance. Re-visit site performance is when a user open a website in mobile or desktop device and re-open it after some time after closing it. You should know that every time you open a website, your device browser downloads web files to show proper results. Sometimes page contains limited files and contains less data. But when you open a heavy content website which has images or big file size, videos and content in several megabytes then the server response rate of website is usually slow.

At the time of loading a website, each file make a separate request to server which makes it very busy and causes slow responses.

How leverage browser caching works?

It is a method of making certain website pages or some parts of pages as being needed to be updated at different intervals. For example, if you have a static page which has some heavy images in it which you don’t change every day. By enabling leverage browser caching, you can tell visitors browser to only download images once in a month or week or so on. If the users visit website again within defined time period such as a month, week or so on, they will find previous image while navigating website.

You can also take the example of your website logo. Generally it’s pretty common that websites uses the same logo so you can use this method for your website/blog logo image.

Importance and SEO benefits of leverage browser caching

Having a great page speed and serving more visits on website is the AIM of every digital marketer and website owners. By using this method you can solve the problem of website load time and meet the user expectations. It helps to improve site performance by reducing the bounce rate and giving better page speed. You can also visit How to reduce bounce rate for more information. Another major benefit of having using this method is reducing load from web servers which is the main reason of providing better website load response.

How to enable Leverage Browser Caching for website

In order to enable this, you need to edit your website HTTP headers to set expiry times for certain types of files.

Enabling Leverage Browser Caching by using .htaccess file

Locate the .htaccess file in your root domain by using ftp clients such as core or filezilla. Use notepad or notepad ++ to edit .htaccess file. Now set the given below parameters to tell user’s browser what types of files to cache.

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/javascript “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 month”

ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”

</IfModule>

**NOTE** Please adjust the 1 Month into your specified time period. It is just an example but you can adjust the time period according to your website content.

You can also try given below method

Pro Tip

Keep in mind that if you set up too long parameters on files, then website visitors might not get the fresh version of your website or blog even after an update or complete layout change. So be careful while using leverage browser caching.

Analytical meaning of unique visitors – Web Analytics

February 8, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Identifying unique visitors for a website is a good web analytics practice. It helps you in many ways. Website owners or marketers could use the data to design or adjust marketing strategies based on provided results. By analyzing unique visitors, website owners could understand the user flow, behavior, web content response/engagement, sales-attrition and product performances. It is also the best way of measuring the popularity of website. But the real questions is what is the best way to identify unique visitors for a website? I am going to share some steps by which you can find out the analytical meaning of unique visitors, its importance in web analytics and ways how to identify unique visitors. Before that let’s understand what is unique visitors for a website?

Unique visitors

According to its name, unique visitors are people who visit your website or blog for the first time. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, Yandesk and other tracking tool uses visitor’s IP address, Browser Cookies, Registration ID and Use Agent to identify a unique visitor. These are called the identifiers. As soon as a visitor lands on your website or blog, these analytical tools track the data and record it within the panel. Every user generates sessions which helps website owners to understand user behavior.

Please note that a single user could create multiple sessions. While navigating the website or blog, users explore multiple pages which creates multiple sessions. Here is how you can analyze Page Sessions in Google analytics.

Identify unique visits in Google Analytics

In order to identify unique visits in Google Analytics tool you can follow given below steps.

Open Google Analytics
Click on Audience from the left hand side menu
Choose Overview
Set the date range from when till when you want the data.

That’s how you could get an overview of new visitors on your web. However, in order to analyze the behavior and deep understanding, you can explore the audience section in google analytics tool. All you need to do is click on “Behavior” and choose “New vs. Returning” under audience report menu. You will get the data. You can adjust the dates to shrink or broaden the data.

If you would explore the audience report, you can actually do the better analysis on user behavior.

You can also identify the unique visitors by doing regular traffic check under acquisition. All you need to do is, Click on “Acquisition” in top left menu on choose “All Traffic” & select “Source/Medium”. The moment you get report, you will get a column name “New Users”.

Along with users, you can get detailed traffic report under this option.

Benefits of analyzing unique visitors

As stated above, analyzing unique visitors helps us to understand the user behavior & user flow. By collecting the data, you can design your marketing campaigns. Also get maximum exposure by adjusting or re-designing marketing strategies according to data. Few major benefits of analyzing unique visits are:

It helps us in designing re-marketing campaigns.
Identify the attrition rate.
Measure website popularity.
It can help us in understanding user behavior/engagement.
You can enhance the performance of product/services page by identifying new visits.

Comment below if you find this information useful. However, you can also share your feedback or suggestions for this information.

Mobile Marketing tips and tricks to generate more leads

February 1, 2019February 1, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Mobile marketing is growing so fast that mobile searches has already took over desktop searches back in 2016. After the android revolution, every company or business owners are working so hard to built better mobile marketing strategies so that they could drive more engagement and fulfill their sales dreams. The number of mobile internet users is continuously growing which creates a big marketplace. Hence it is important for every business owner or company to cater as much as mobile audience by delivering the best results. Today I am going to share few mobile marketing tips and mobile SEO tricks which can help you to generate more leads. But before that first we need to understand what mobile marketing is.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing refers to the marketing method which is focused on a particular audience. By doing mobile marketing companies try to reach out specific audience on their tables, mobile devices and smart mobile by different methods. Majorly the methods are Mobile websites, MMS, SMS, Emails, Social media feeds and mobile applications. These many methods make it a multi channel online marketing method.

Mobile Marketing Tips and Tricks

Every mobile marketing method is unique. In order to perform better results, you can follow given below steps to enhance performance of every marketing method.

Mobile Website SEO

Mobile website SEO is integral part of mobile marketing. Building a mobile friendly website and creating mobile website SEO strategies is the first step of it. Given below are certain key points to remember while working towards mobile website SEO.

Build a clean coded website which search engines can index easily and give you faster results.
Always test your mobile website page load speed with google speed test tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ It is recommended to work through the suggestions offered
Built a response website layout.
Always use the light content such as images. Compress heavy banners and product images for better website performance.
Get a separate sitemap for your mobile website. If you have explainer or product videos on your mobile site then consider having video site maps for them.
Mobile searches drive great local traffic so you should focus on local SEO and provide content according to your product or services.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is another good way to create a better mobile view for visitor and enhance your mobile website engagement. Having less bounce rate and more engagement is key factor of getting SERP ranks.
Once you are done with the mobile website, List your site in mobile website directories.
While building backlinks for your mobile website, do not compromise with the quality. Build quality backlinks instead of quantity. It will give you better results for a longer term.

MMS (Multi Media Message)

Creative or enhanced text message are always visually better than simple text messages. But while doing mobile marketing, we have to be creative and use it wisely. Graphics Interchange Format is (GIF) is one of the best example here. Given below is one example of GIF image.

You can use different kind of graphics, ino-graphics, texts and creative content to make it descriptive and interesting.

SMS (Short Message Service)

SMS marketing (short message service marketing) is a technique that uses permission-based text messaging to spread promotional messages. Driving promotions by using text messages is another good mobile marketing method. All you need is a creative text which is descriptive and interesting enough to encourage user to raise a query. Queries generated by SMS campaigns are considered potential direct leads which you can convert into sales by putting fewer efforts. The people who are contacting business owners after reading text messages are already aware about product or services. All you need is skills to convert those queries into business.

Email (Electronic Mail)

Email marketing is basically the method of sharing commercial messages over electronic mail platforms such as gmail, hotmail, yahoomail, outlook mail, windows mail and other mailing platforms. By using emails, we can share rich content including images, videos and text. Email marketing helps you to interact with your audience while promoting your brand and increasing sales. Email marketing is the highly effective digital marketing strategy. The first marketing email was sent in 1978. Since then it is considered as the best and highly used marketing methods between small and big business owners.

Social Media Feeds

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites such as facebook, twitter, google plus and many more. As per the survey conducted by Globalwebindex, social media ranked number 2 for product research channels.

mobile marketing global web index — Image Source: Globalwebindex, GWI commerce, Q3 2017.

In above image you can see that people are using social media very frequently for product research. It shows that targeting social media for mobile marketing is a good idea to give a boost to your product searches. Most of the time social media is used on mobile platforms by either using mobile applications or mobile websites.

Mobile App Marketing

Due to increasing population of mobile app users, creating a mobile app and designing mobile app marketing strategy would definitely give you a better reach. Mobile apps have their own marketplace and audience. In order to rank your mobile app you can follow Mobile App Marketing Tips. Here you can learn all the tips and tricks to improve your app store ranking and can learn how to increase app installs.

SEO benefits of a business listing

January 30, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Major SEO benefits of a business listing

Before getting into SEO benefits of a business listing, I would like to tell you that it is not at all a ranking factor. It is a practice which can boost your SEO if you do it correctly. Applying white hat techniques for better rankings is always the best practice in search engine optimization. Listing your business is one of them. It is always a good idea to list your business online. Today we are going to learn major SEO benefits of a business listing in google, bing and other search engines. Also I will share some good tips to maintain your business listing to get better results. You will learn how can you generate Do Follow backlinks and use your business listing in Local SEO.

But first let’s understand What is business listing in search engines.

Business Listing

Business listing is basically the information of your business for local search results which includes complete information of your business. All the business listings includes following information.

Business’ name
Complete physical address
Support phone or contact number
Business website (URL)
Map Link

This is how a business listing looks like.

Here you can see the business listing which contains all the information related to TheSEOGuy

Things to remember while listing your business

Use the accurate information to list your business in search engines. You have to double check the information such as your business’s name, contact phone number, physical address and website URL before submitting it to search engines. The information should exactly the same in each citation.

Google uses the information from citations to verify the accuracy of a business’s contact details and ask the online authority of the business.

Avoid Duplicate contents

Whatever information you provide should be original because it is not possible to list multiple businesses under one URL. However, your business information can be pulled through to other online directories. If either of the details is incorrect, there is a risk of duplicate listings being created.

SEO benefits of a business listing

Free Business Branding

You can monitor the views generated by visitors and can use them to design a better business marketing strategy and SEO strategy for your website. Here in the image you can see the search flow. Discovery views shows customers who my business listing searching for a particular category, product or services related to my business.

Map views apart from SERP

Analyzing map views could help you to understand the visitor behavior. Within the Google My Business panel, you can analyze the map views generated by visitors. You can clearly see the number of views generated by customers by search listing and map listing.

This is how you can monitor the direct business leads generated. By reviewing customer actions, you can monitor number of call you received, direction requests and direct visits to your business website.

Direct Leads through local SEO

With the help of phone calls monitor within my business panel, you can monitor the phone calls behavior and days where you have received maximum and minimum calls. I receive most calls on Wednesday according to above image. It means I can easily focus on customer service calls on Wednesday. I can ask team members to get ready convert maximum leads by the number of calls received.

Getting a testimonial is always good but by the help of google my business listing panel, I can monitor the testimonial effect on my business searches. Here in this image you can see that when did I received the maximum testimonial benefit by image posted by one of the customer.

Can generate dofollow backlinks

If you use your business listing correctly, you can also generate dofollow backlinks. For this you can use the option to publish posts where you can share information related to your business and encourage visitors to check your services or information. Placing links smartly always works and give better results.

Given below is the example of one post which I shared via google my business posts.

You can see that I have placed the link of my blog post How to create best 6 second ads this would be a dofollow link and help this post to rank in SERP. This is considered one of the best SEO benefits of a business listing.

Conclusion

Listing your business online can help you in getting better results in local SEO and can also give you a chance to get better SERP results. Hope this information of SEO benefits of a business listing would help you to understand the importance of business listing.

If you have any suggestion or feedback related to this information then do comment below.

Learn the difference between Nofollow and Dofollow links

January 29, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Difference between Nofollow and Dofollow links

If you are new in Digital Marketing or blogging then you might hear the word nofollow and dofollow very often. It is a pretty common term between digital marketers who work towards website rankings. SEO (search engine optimization) method is almost incomplete without learning nofollow and dofollow links. Today I am going to talk more about these type of links and will share importance & benefits of nofollow and dofollow links in search engine optimization.

No follow links

These links are HTML generated links which are meant to reduce spam. I will try to explain this with one simple example. Hypothetically, you have a business which deals in services and have certain prodeucts. Imagine that a group of people are using your product or services and talking positively about it. Because of this your competitors or business rivals started talking negatively and created a myth between people about your product or services. In order to handle this situation, you would encourage your audience to ignore those rumors and concentrate on services. That’s the same we do when someone attack the website with spam links.

How to deal spam links within website?

Dealing with website spam by using nofollow links is easy. All you need to do is use attribute rel=nofollow Given below is the example.

You can see that I have added nofollow to all search terms because I don’t want search engines to crawl links generated dynamically by the search keywords. The major benefit of this practice is to reduce number of not found 404 errors. It’s because URL’s generated by search query are actually not pages and if search engines would crawl those URL’s it would give you not found errors in webmaster.

Most of the time we also use nofollow attribute rel=nofollow in comments, testimonials and review pages. Because most of the time we get the spam links, negative reviews and comments there.

How to deal with Spam backlinks?

While generating backlinks, we target the best domains with better DA/PA (Domain authority and Page Authority) but you might see some spam links targeting your website. In this situation you can follow the standard “Disavow” procedure and get rid of spam backlinks. Here is how to use Google disavow tool

Do follow links:

As it reflects, Do follow links are hyperlinks that allow search engine and humans to follow them. I’ve explained the nofollow with a hypothetical situation where you don’t want people to hear rumors by asking them ignore hoax news. It’s exactly the opposite. Do follow links are beneficial for website ranking and you allow search engines to crawl those links.

SEO Benefits of NoFollow links

Mostly this practice is to fight with spam and provide a clean and safe platform for visitors and inform the same to search engines such as google and bing. The lesser spam links on your website or towards your website creates a positive impression and help to gain better domain authority. It could help you in gaining better rankings in SERP (search engine result page).

SEO Benefits of DoFollow links

Major SEO benefit of DoFollow links is good rank. If you are providing better & safe platform for users and sharing quality information then search engine crawlers would give your website or blog a better ranking.

Pro Tip: Getting dofollow backlinks from a platform where you have full control is always good. For example social platforms such as twitter, facebook or tumblr. If you have full control then you can delete, edit or create backlinks according to you.

Hope this information of Nofollow and Dofollow links would help you to understand better about it.

Google Image SEO Tips: Image Optimization for SEO

January 23, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Google Image SEO Tips: Image Optimization for SEO

Recently Google has updated its policy for search engine results for images. Every SEO professional is aware about the importance of Google Image SEO. It gives us an additional option to enhance traffic and generate backlinks in easiest manner. If we build backlinks by using images, we can generate some high quality backlinks which are not at all easy to generate by text or any other format. Because of its importance in web content, search engines built strong metrics and encouraging website owners to optimize images for better SEO results. Today, I am going to share few amazing Google image SEO tips which can help you drive more traffic.

Use of ALT attribute for image description

Images are easy to remember by humans and help us to drive engagement and kill the bounce rate at the same time. It’s very easy for us to convey our message to website visitor by placing an image or info-graphic. But search engine crawlers are not humans, they are bots and in order to make them understand about image property we use “ALT” text which is a description of image for crawlers. Google and other major search engines don’t look for all images. Being a website owner it’s your job to let them know about your website images.

Why “ALT” attribute is important in image optimization?

Everyone has internet access and most of the time internet speed is good but imagine a situation when a user is viewing your website on a browser that is slow because of internet speed and unable to show images. Or the browser does not support images. It would be hard for the user to understand web content. For example your website contains steps with pictures and user is not able to see pictures.

Let’s take another example; hypothetically a visitor is using alternative technology such as screen reader which has no function to find images then visitor would not proceed further on your website or blog. But if you are using “ALT” attribute correctly, you can solve this problem with ease.

Avoid Generic Names

There are billions of website which provides information and have images but not every site use customized names for each and every image. Usually website owners upload images with generic names such as image.jpg, pic.jpg, abc.gif, xyz.png and 123.gif and sometime its date formats. Instead of following this practice, use customized names which can give you a chance to use more keywords with images.

But do not over stuff images with keywords. Keep it simple and short for example:

Good practice: seoguy.jpg

Bad Practice: best-seo-platform-seoguy.jpg

You should always avoid stuffing additional keywords in image name. It is a myth that adding keywords in image names could give you additional SEO benefits. It is not at all a good practice for Google image SEO

Create Image Sitemap

Creating image sitemap is another way to let Google and other search engines to inform about website images. It helps search engines bots to crawl all images of website. You can follow Google guidelines for Image Sitemap to take help while creating image sitemap.

Deal with Decorative images

Any non productive image is considered as decorative image. For example background images, button images, borders images and image frames. The best option to deal with decorative images is using CSS stylesheets or applying CSS when it is required. Use CSS to define background color and borders. If needed you can create frames and adjust background textures as well.

Pro Google Image SEO Tips:

Use png-8 to cut down the size of a GIF image
Use compressed images instead while using for banners and wallpapers.

Content Syndication Strategy for better content marketing

January 22, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

Content Syndication Strategy for better content marketing

Building a good content syndication strategy requires a lot of efforts, researches and hard work. It is because syndication is not at all a simple process. It has involvement of multiple platforms or channels. Majorly content syndication can be done on web syndication platforms, broadcast syndication platforms, search syndication platforms and print syndication (Electronic) platforms. But before getting into content syndication strategy, let’s understand more about syndication.

What is syndication?

Syndication refers to the method of selling something for publication or broadcast to multiple channels such as newspapers, periodicals, websites, stations, etc. Basically it is a method of using content on multiple domains or different channels.

Content Syndication

Content syndication is a method of republishing content on other sites in order to reach a broader and bigger audience. Basically, content syndication is when a post, article or any other piece of content from your website or blog is featured on a popular site that is relevant to your website or blog category. For example, if you are dealing in X services or have X services information on your website or blog, and you are publishing same article/content on different channel which has similar information related to your X services/information then it would be content syndication.

Let’s take the example of TheSEOGuy. It is a platform of Search Engine Optimization information. You can get answers of few difficult SEO questions. I publish information here and try to write similar information on different internet platforms which also have search engine optimization information such as Google Webmaster Blog, SEO Blogs, SEO product Websites and public forums such as Quora.

How to build better Content Syndication Strategy?

Now we know the difference between syndication and content syndication. I hope its clear enough to understand that building a good content syndication strategy could give you better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results. But the question is, what are the key points to remember while building a strong content syndication strategy?

I tried to collect few best steps which you can include in your content syndication strategy and can get maximum exposure. Given below are the points to remember.

Use of Snippets:

While sharing or posting your content on different portals, try to use snippets instead of posting the whole content. It’s because the purpose of content syndication is to drive traffic to your website or blog. Be creative with words and use right anchor texts to link your blog while sharing information.

Use White papers

White paper domains or platforms are considered as good marketing platforms. Because the documents are shared by trusted vendors and have trustworthy information in it. If you are using any white paper domain then do share the right information. Do not brag about the content. Instead use correct and accurate information and cite your domain so that visitors could search about your website or blog.

Create E-books

Creating E-books for content syndication is another fine example of a good content syndication strategy. It helps to built trust between users. Once a visitor downloads or starts reading e-books, it gives your site better engagement. Offline E-books often help in word of mouth as well. Whenever users download your e-book with high quality content, they would talk about it and share it with others.

Share case studies

Generating original high quality information is the best way to reach out more people. You can follow this practice by generating few case studies which can only be found on your platforms. Use snippets while sharing content and encourage users to visit your platform. This type of content has the lowest bounce rate and multiple sessions which is the best thing for a website or blog.

Target do follow portals/blog/forums

If you are reading this article about Content Syndication Strategy, then I can assume you already know the importance of Do Follow links. While using content syndication method, target the do follow portals, blogs and forums. It will give you more SEO benefits along with engagement. Apart from reading broad audience, you can get good SEO rankings if you are targeting do follow portals.

Pro Tip:

You can also refer “How to create high quality backlinks for any website” for better assistance while building content syndication strategy.

Hope this information would help you to understand the concept of content syndication and better use of it. If you find any mistake in this information then do comment below.

SEO Friendly URL: SEO Best practices

January 19, 2019 Ravi Kumar Rana

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. We also call it web address. URL is one of the most important part of Digital Marketing. Having a business domain related to your business is always recommended. But we are not here to talk about domain. I have already shared some good information on Importance of Domain name and extension in SEO earlier. Today we are going to talk about SEO friendly URL. We can create the best SEO friendly URLs if we follow the right steps and can get the better SEO results. So before getting into steps let’s understand what is SEO Friendly URL.

SEO Friendly URL

SEO Friendly URL is a well optimized URL which helps search engine crawlers and users to understand web content at the same time. Creating SEO friendly URL is a process of making set of URL’s which is descriptive enough to access and understand by Bots (Search Engine Crawlers) and Humans (Website Visitors). There are certain parameters which we can follow to create or generate the best URL types. Given are few SEO best practices for creating SEO Friendly URL

Using Content in URL

This is not about creating a lengthy URL to describe your content but using accurate word phrases to describe your content. It should be descriptive enough to make users understand about the content by simply reading the web page URL. It is also good for search engine crawlers. They can easily understand your content by going through a clean URL.

Use of Keywords

Similar to using content keywords, you can also include best keywords in URL which have good search volume and can describe your content. Preferably you can include long tail keywords related to your website content. It is a best practice to optimize every web page around one keyword, and this keyword should be included in the URL. You can add the keywords in the beginning of the URL, as search engine bots read & give preference to the keywords in the beginning of URL instead at the end of URLs.

Tip: Do not over stuff URL with keywords. It is not at all recommended or a good practice. It can also cause penalty sometimes. So be careful while stuffing keywords in URLs. Overstuffing keywords can never make SEO Friendly URL.

Special Characters in URL

While creating SEO Friendly URL, it is recommended to hyphens (-) because it helps search engines to read your web URL easily. Hyphens are used to separate words in URL Phrases and create better readability for both users and search engines. But what are the special characters in URL’s and what to avoid?

Special characters are the identifiers or parameters which are used to show data on a web page. For example if you are showing a particular category or page which is fetched by query or code then it will show up the parameters URL’s like “?”, “=”, “%”, “&” “_” and symbols such as + or *. This is very common while we use dynamic URL. The best option to avoid this situation is to create static URLs for your website or blog.

Static URL: https://www.abc.com/category/information-page-1

Dynamic URL: https://www.abc.com/category/testproduct/B012T0S7M6/ref=s9_acsd_top_hd_bw_b29C1vT_c_x_w?pf_rd_m=A1VBAL9TL5WCBF&pf_rd_s=test-search-4&pf_rd_r=X37YGB14RG5KT7YYNA77&pf_rd_r=X37YGB14RG5KT7YYNA77&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=400c31e7-ba3c-5cde-9e3e-b61425e881ce&pf_rd_p=400c31e7-ba3c-5cde-9e3e-b61425e881ce&pf_rd_i=1968120031

Upper and lowercase in URLs

Always use lowercase in URLs. Never use capitalization in URL while you are working to create SEO Friendly URL. Search engines can decipher from uppercase and lowercase letters in URLs, which can lead to duplicate URLs and loss of page rank.

Refer given below image for example:

Keep URL Short & Avoid Similar Words

It is good to have descriptive URL with focused keyword but do not exceed the length of URL. However there’s no specified length of URL is defined by search engines. But it is recommended to keep URL between 90 characters for better readability. Do not repeat similar words in URLs if you really want a SEO friendly URL.

For Example:

Use of sub-domains

Use sub domain wisely because search engines are bots and it’s hard for them to relate content between domain and sub domain. They can consider the sub-domain content as duplicate content which can affect your SERP rankings. Until it is required, try to use sub folders instead of sub domains.

For example:

Limited use of folders and subfolders in URL

Do not include unnecessary folders in URL’s. It is not good for a SEO Friendly URL. Avoid them until you really need to describe your content. The URL should be clear and should have better readability.

In above example, you can see the use of folders and subfolders. You can consider them as clean & SEO Friendly URLs.

You may also read about How to change URL Parameters of website.

Pro Tip to create SEO Friendly URL:

Learn better use of Canonicalization method to use it while creating canonical URLs. Also do your keyword research deeply before creating a focus keyword for your content and URL. You can use the tools such as Google Keyword Planner for this. And it would be great if you know how to use breadcrumbs. If you can use breadcrumbs correctly, you can get some additional SEO benefits in SERP Rankings.

Conclusion

Creating SEO Friendly URL is not an easy task. It requires a lot of work to get best output. If we follow right steps then only we can generate a better URL structure. Over-stuffing keywords, special characters, capitalization and dynamic URLs are not recommended for better SEO results. But creating static URLs, use of necessary folders, use of keyword and hyphenization could help you in generating a SEO friendly URL and better results in SERP.

Hope this information would help you to create better URL structure for your website or blog. If you have more suggestions or feedback regarding SEO Friendly URL then do comment below and help me in providing quality information. Keep visiting TheSEOGuy for more fresh Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Answers.