If you're a business owner or a member of a marketing team, you probably know that businesses depend upon data. Tracking trends and patterns is what allows you to get ahead of the dips in the market, and make informed decisions on the direction of your company.

Those same rules that apply to business apply to owning a website. In order to deliver the best possible experience and ensure that customers from around the world are able to access your site, you need to understand from where traffic is coming from and how to leverage that information to your benefit.

Setting Your Site Up With A Tracking ID

Google analytics won't start collecting data from your website until you've implemented a tracking code into your website's files. The tracking code is basically a block of JavaScript code that will collect data about the html that visitor used to get to your site, any cookies that the visitors has collected during their browsing history, and information about what type of browser the person is using.

The importance of this information provides you with information on how to conform your web-site to the target audience, especially in terms of design. If customers are visiting your website from an eCommerce directory, you may want to modify those links so that the customers arrive at a landing page instead of a home page. If more customers are using smartphones and tablets instead of laptop browsers, you may have to redesign the site so that it is responsive and can be easily read from a small screen.

In order to track each individual page on the website, you will need to add a tracking code before the </head> code of your template. If you are using a site like WordPress or Joomla! that depends on templates, you may just have to add the tracking code on the main HTML index file. Keep in mind that it can take upwards of 24-hours for Google to begin collecting information and importing that data to your dashboard, so don't expect to see measurable results right away.

Tutorial: How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

Researching the Data

Once you insert the code into your site, it will begin tracking data from anyone who visits your site. This data is then sent back to the Google servers and stored in your Google Analytics profile. From there, you can determine what type of information that you want to look at.

The two features of Google Analytics that are often most useful to new users is the ability to track where customers are coming from, and the ability to see keywords that have been effective in drawing in audiences.

Traffic Origins

Open up your Google Analytics dashboard and click on 'Acquisition'. You should see a few options, but you want to pull 'All Referrals' so that you can the entire list of visitors.

Next to the referral path will show a few links with a number of how many people visited your site from that link. From here you can click on the link and find out the reason for the traffic. Maybe someone has written a review on the service, you can check to see if the advertisement campaign you are operating is producing results.

Keywords

Within the same 'Acquisition' directory is another option called 'Search Engine Optimization'. Click on this link and then click on 'Queries' to look up a list of keywords being used to describe your site. The dashboard will display an overview of up to 1,000 words or phrases used on Google that brought new visitors to your site. You can use this information to modify your posts and producing content to increase the results of certain key phrases that you feel would benefit your customer outreach.

Demographics

Underneath the audience tab, you can also track demographics. This little option will allow you to view the age, gender, and interests of individual users and segments of your visiting population. Say for example you run a senior care facility for the retired and want to put together a A/B split test to determine which advertising campaign works best. After adding the campaign to a landing page or section of your site, you can look back and find out if retired citizens are the ones responding to your ads, or if you are just bringing in traffic from younger generations who may not be interested in your services.

Custom Campaign Tagging

Custom campaign tagging is more of an advanced feature, but once you get used to the Google Analytics interface, you can use this to separate your campaigns and easily filter through data. Maybe you just want to find out who is coming to your site from your email newsletters, and not from the general site. Google Analytics will allow you to post special links to your content on those channels of communication and then view these results under the acquisition tab and then campaigns.

Determining What Works, and What Doesn't

Using the tools that Google Analytics provides at your disposal allows you to really determine what type of experience you want to provide your customers. Within the first month of use, if start to see trends or patterns in data that you feel you feel you can improve upon, you can use this information as a guide to edit your sites design and layout.

Getting used to the program might seem overwhelming at first, but once you jump right in and start playing around all the features, you'll get the hang of it in no time. Google Analytics really is an important tool that every website owner should have.

When search engines start indexing the pages on your site, they don't just focus on the writing. Web crawlers employed by services like Google and Bing shuffle through your site's structural code looking for any relevant information that they might offer to their customers. Some of the information includes things like backlinks, tags and even images.

Images make up a big part of any website. They help to excite the visual senses of readers and offer a little extra entertainment value. What most blog owners don't realize is that all of the photos that they upload to their site aren't confined to their site alone. Crawlers make sure that these images also show up within their respective search engines sites.

Image searches can have the effect of drawing in large numbers of new readers that were just looking through content in Google images. You can benefit from this traffic and increase your average subscriber by practicing image optimization.

Image Optimization Tip #1: Alt Tags & File Names

Visitors may love images, but computers don't. Computers are designed to do what you tell them without violating any of the parameters. When web crawlers come across images on a website, they really don't know what to do with it because they are made to collect information, not interpret it. The solution to this problem is to optimize images and appropriately label your alt tags so that they display the correct content when someone goes to look for it.

For example, let's say you upload a picture of your dog, and label the "alt" tag by the dog's name, 'Frank'. The web crawler is going to read the alt tag without ever realizing it's a picture of a dog; therefore, the crawler will come to the conclusion that it needs to display the image when someone run a search for 'Frank'.

The minor word choice mistakes may not affect the operations of your website, or how your image is displayed, but it will affect the search results of others and the traffic that comes into your website. Whereas you may have been able to attract the dog lovers in the world using image optimization of your dog tagged 'dog', you are now drawing in crowds searching for their uncle "Frank".

To include the alt tag, simply add alt="this is your alt text" to your image tag. Here's an example:

<img src="pug-dog.jpg" alt="frank dog" />

But you don't have to touch the html code of the image. Once the picture is uploaded, click on it and you will see the "Properties" setting. Add the alt text inside the box and hit OK:

This goes the same for file names on a website. You need to optimize images and file names on everything that you decide to save to your website directory so that this information can be appropriately indexed and be used as a search term. You could name the file of your dog Frank, "pug-dog.jpg", which would encourage the search engine to add Frank into searches being performed with the phrase 'pug dog'. Alt tags and file names play an important interpretation role between you and the machine that makes your blog possible.

Image Optimization Tip #2: Add A Caption

After uploading your images, you should always add a caption to the image, so that average browser understands what they're looking at. This gives your website a more professional appearance and will help to keep people on your page.

Not everyone that comes across your picture using a Google Image search is looking for your blog. Maybe they just want to download the image, and that's all you'll ever get from them. The important thing is that they found your photo relevant to their search, and decided to navigate to your site in order to save it for their own use.

The longer those users stay on the site, the better it looks for you because it plays a role in the "bounce rate". Bounce rate refers to when someone clicks on a link, realizes it's not what they're looking for, and then immediately goes back to the search engine. If you can reduce the number of times that this happens by providing captions and intriguing content that will make people want to stick around, your SEO ranking will improve.

Image caption and SEO

Image Optimization Tip #3: File Size

Improving your bounce rate can be tough because the attention span of the everyday Internet user is incredibly short. It may be as short as 8 seconds. High bounce back rates and slow loading sites can be the death of most blogs because no one wants to wait for the content to load. By the time your website finally loads with the content that you need, they could have easily visited two or more sites and found what they need from someone who was better prepared to handle their traffic.

Optimize images so that you are able to keep the file size as small as possible while retaining the quality of the photo. Images taken from DSLR camera - although they may look great - can be up to 1.4 MB in size if you take them directly off your camera and upload them on your blog. This type of space is massive for any everyday blog, and will hurt your SEO ratings.

Use Photoshop or one of many online services like Google Picasa to rescale your images or reduce the file size. Two services that can perform this ability for free and do a great job are Yahoo's Smushit and Kraken. When you access either site, they will allow you to upload the picture on the site and download the new image optimization versions for use on your Blogger site.

Putting It All Together

At the end of the day, the quality of your site and overall SEO ranking isn't just about what you have to say. It's the entire package of what you have to offer. Optimize images every chance you get and use the strategies discussed above. Now that you know that you might have been neglecting images all along, you can make necessary adjustments and start to see even better results from all your hard work.

5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog 

A blogger needs to know at least the minimum on SEO. For it, you don't need to be an SEO expert but you need to know the minimum so that your posts are well indexed in the search engines.

The phrase "content is king" is one of the widest spread Internet memes being used by so many bloggers, with the idea that you should focus on having quality content, while the rest don't matter much. This is not true. Quality content is important, but it shouldn't be the only concern of a blogger today. In addition to producing quality content, your text needs to be optimized for the search engines.

Boost traffic & increase SERP visibility with SEO

5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog

Now, let's see what would be the basics that any blogger needs to learn about SEO and other simple SEO knowledge. Below are 5 easy tips to improve the SEO of your blog:

1. Define the keyword

When you write a post, it is recommended to choose the keyword (or term) suitable for your text. What you want is that this keyword - or term - to be searched on Google, and then get your post among the top. For this, you need to use this keyword a few times in the text.

For example, here the keyword could be SEO, but this term is too generic and I could hardly get in the top for this search. Then I'll work with a phrase or a long tail keyword, so that this post will rank for the term "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog". I will use this phrase a few times, but without overdoing it.

2. Use the keyword in the post title

Now that I have defined the keyword, I will use it in the post title. This step is very important, and certainly will help you to get a better rank in search engines. As you can see, what I have in the title is the easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog keyword, along with other words to form an attractive and optimized title for SEO.

3. Use the keyword in the H2 tags

You must also use heading tags (h2, h3) in your posts. Here, I am using the keyword "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog" in a H2 heading. Do this always, because it also helps to become well positioned in the search results. If you don't know or don't understand what are the heading tags, I would suggest to do a further research on this subject.

4. Use the keyword in the text

Make use of your chosen keywords throughout the text. Especially in the first paragraph (please note that I have repeated the title in italics in the first sentence). But be careful when doing this, there is a maximum and minimum limit for that. A good keyword density is between 1.5% to 4.5% for best results. Less than that will have no effect and more than that can alert the search engines and your text might be considered spam.

5. Publish Posts with 300 words or more

Posts under 300 words have little chance to be among the top results in search engines. Of course, you will be able to rank for multiple keywords that are less popular with less than 300 words, but for the most competitive keywords that have the potential to bring a greater number of visits, it will be nearly impossible.

Thus, it is recommended to write posts with more than 300 words. It's not hard when you really understand the topic you're talking about.

Conclusion

As you can see, with some simple SEO techniques you can improve the traffic coming to your blog from the search engines. I hope you enjoyed these 5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog!

The search engine optimization (SEO) is a good chance to promote your blog on Google search results and other search engines. For those who don't understand how SEO works, I've posted some articles on this blog that may help, but it's important to understand that there are good and bad techniques that could have a direct impact on your ranking. So, in this post I'll talk about the terms known to those who are familiar with SEO - the black and white hat - and we will get to know what's good and what is not when we think about optimizing our website and its content.

What is black hat seo?

From the 'SEO dictionary', the term black hat has to do with the abusive techniques that will force the search engines to look at a specific site and rank it. This might work at first, but the algorithms can already see some of these techniques that have become common for a fast result.

Such practices to trick the search engines are, for example, the excessive use of keywords, especially in headings and subheadings; transparent keywords to the user - the so-called hidden text, automatically generated content, pages redirecting automatically to other content and more.

What is white hat seo?

The white hat has to do with the good techniques in the 'eyes' of search engines. These are considered ethical techniques for the ranking, helping, thus, the positioning of a website or blog. However, working the white hat is a process that requires dedication and results may take longer to appear (this is why so many people opt for black hat in order to 'try' something more 'effective') but the results could be much more stable and satisfactory.

Keep in mind that Google has good tricks up its sleeve to penalize anyone who doesn't act in accordance with the policies and rules of their website - this includes removing your page from any of the positions. Fair enough, after all, why Google would 'reward' somebody with the top spot if he doesn't provide good content for his users and, at the same time, doesn't meet the requirements of the algorithm?

For those who are interested and want to stay on top of Google search results, visit this webmaster guidelines page. There, you can find further information about how to create a good content, how the design of your blog/site should be and how to work with your links. There you can also find mentions about black hat techniques.

I'm not a SEO Expert, nor what you will read further is a top secret, but this is about the basic optimization that everyone should apply in order to write seo optimized blog posts. And with these techniques, effort, and a bit of patience, you can occupy the best places in the search results of different search engines.

Obviously, not all scenarios are the same, neither all blogs are positioned in the same manner, some might have greater competition than others depending on how popular is the topic that they handle; therefore, when it comes to web ranking, there's no specific time that applies for all. Having said this, let's get into the subject.

Focus on a topic

Whatever the topic of your blog is, when you try to write a seo optimized blog post, focus on a specific subject that has a clear purpose, with no distractions. For example, if you write about "Digital Cameras", then the beginning and ending of your post should be only about it. Don't start talking about digital cameras and end up telling about what you have done last weekend. A reader goes to a page because is looking for a specific information. So, unless it is not a personal blog (where you write about your daily life), do not deviate from the topic.

Define the post title

The post title should be short and to the point, so that you can briefly summarize the content of the post, but you shouldn't abuse this either. Although it has to be concise, don't try to 'save' words which might be keys to the search.

Examples:

Collection of all the cameras that have been released last year on the market

The best digital cameras of 2013

Clearly, the first one hasn't been defined very much, and the second one is not only more accurate, but it is also more relevant for what people are searching on the internet.

The keywords

Keywords are those terms that the most people are searching for on the internet and you should try focusing on them when writing a post; these keywords need to be included throughout the entire post, but be careful to not over-stuff keywords into your content.

Example:

During the fourth week of the technology, there were many products that are utilized today, and the most famous experts gave a speech on them.

At the opening of the fourth Technology Week, the experts talked about various topics, including how to choose a digital camera, had discussions about the pros and cons of the iPad, and which are the best smartphones.

In the first example, we have written without paying attention to any terms. While, in the second one, we used phrases that are searched on the internet by the most users.

So, the most popular keywords should be included wisely without cluttering your posts with them, or it can be counterproductive.

Again, these keywords should be included in the posts title, as well.

Rely on synonyms

While it's a good strategy to use specific keywords, we should not limit ourselves to a single word. It is recommended using synonyms because users do not name things in same way and using less keywords, we can avoid leaving the impression that we are being too repetitive and insistent.

Examples:

For those who like good quality pictures, Nikon D7000s Digital Camera is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes great pictures.

For those who like good quality images, Nikon D7000s is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes excellent pictures.

In the first example, we have repeated the word 'digital camera' and 'pictures' twice. While, in the second one, we used the digital camera keyword once and changed the word 'pictures' with 'images'.

This way, the reader will find a greater diversity of words and might enjoy the article more.

Using bold and italics

A good practice when you write seo optimized blog posts, would be to make the keywords bold by wrapping them in strong tags, so that they will stand out from the rest. But keep in mind that this shouldn't be done with CSS, but with HTML, i.e. they should not be tagged with font-weight: bold; but rather with <b> or even better, with <strong>.

Examples:

For those who like good quality images, Nikon D7000s is a 16.2 megapixel digital camera that takes excellent pictures.

The result seems to be the same, but it is not. Although these three keywords are in bold, only one is more attractive to robots, which is the first:

For those who like <strong>good quality images</strong>, <b>Nikon D7000s</b> is a 16.2 megapixel <span style="font-weight: bold;">digital camera</span> that takes excellent pictures.

The same goes for the italics. Use them for highlighting important words, but don't place them between font-style: italic; but rather between <i> or even better <em>.

For those who like <strong>good quality images</strong>, <em>Nikon D7000s</em> is a 16.2 megapixel <span style="font-style: italic;">digital camera</span> that takes excellent pictures.

Again, the first one has a better chance of ranking than the others. Thus, it is recommended to highlight the keywords in bold and italics, or to put them between <strong> and </strong>, or between <em> and </em>.

Using External Links

Some may say that we shouldn't use links in the posts because this way we are giving away our Page Rank. This is not quite true. Using referral links to sites that have already shaped their credibility, will also help us to shape our own. Certainly, we should not flood our posts with links, but we can do it when is needed and especially with sites that talk about the same topics as our own.

Another important thing to mention is that, we should avoid putting the typical "click here" or similar texts. When you put a link, the anchor text should be fairly descriptive.

Examples:

<a href="Link URL">Click here</a> to know more

More information about <a href="Link URL">digital cameras</a>

In the first example, the anchor text is not relevant and descriptive, but in the second it is.

Rank with your images

Posts with images are not only visually appealing, but might help the reader to understand what you are talking about. So, whenever you can, use an image in your post to illustrate the writing, but don't overdo it. Many images or very large images can slow the loading time of the blog.

New and relevant content

You should focus not only on writing many posts, but also making them relevant to your readers. New and original content is more attractive to the search engines, than a copy & paste (actually, the last gets penalized). So try to write new stuff, even if you think that all has been said. Each person has a different way of saying things.

Also, always get informed before writing a post. Do a research and see if the information is valid; based on that, you will gain the trust of your readers.

Final Words

With these few techniques you can increase the chances of ranking your posts higher in search engines. As I mentioned earlier, these aren't things that no one heard about, but I know that many are beginners and may not know how to write seo optimized blog posts.

It does not hurt repeating that the results won't appear overnight, but with some effort and patience, you should see the desired results over time.

The qualities of a blogger should be attended at all times in order to become someone popular on the internet. A blogger should have plenty of ideas for creative writing, along with a truckload of motivation. The results sought will not come overnight and there's no guarantee that this will be easy.

These are the two things that you need in order to fulfill your dream of running a successful blog: a lot of exclusive content and readers' loyalty. In each case, time is required to develop the success. This is a process and not a short-term event.

Related: How to Write SEO Optimized Blog Posts

Top Qualities To Become a Successful Blogger

Here are three qualities of a blogger who as a site administrator will need to have, if your goal is to manage a successful blog.

Patience

A successful blog is a product of time and effort and for this, you will need patience. As I said before, the results will not appear quickly overnight, so it is important to realize this from the start. If you are constantly trying to develop new and creative ideas for writing on your blog and, at the same time, you are worried whether you will see any results, this will only make things more difficult.

The building of a successful business online is a "long term" effort and you must decide if you accept this challenge or not. This is one the most important qualities of a blogger.

Credibility

Much of the traffic of any successful blog results from its unique content, as well as its credibility. In fact, the quality of what's in the site, will have a direct impact on what will become viral visitors that are coming to your platform. If you will provide quality content, people will talk about your blog, and once they do it, others may come to see what you have. It depends on you to publish useful and accurate information and your readers will do the rest.

Consistency

Maintaining a steady stream of creative writing ideas is vital to be able to constantly update the blog. The frequency of publication to a proper schedule is related to the amount of time you have available and your level of motivation. However, it is recommended to establish a sort of consistency, so that people can schedule their own visits accordingly. Just remember that the more often you write, the more people will visit, so their loyalty will grow faster and their referrals will be extended.

To become a popular blogger, it is important to have a healthy source of creative writing ideas, along with a lot of patience and motivation. Ultimately, it will be up to you, as a site administrator, to provide the three qualities of a blogger that we discussed above, who is searching tirelessly his goal of having a successful blog. In the end, your own motivation and patience will be the glue with which all the elements will be put together so that your dream will come true.

Although many insist that blogs hosted on free servers, such as Blogger, are not ideal for getting your blog well-ranked, the truth is that a blog hosted by Blogger can be really fast and well positioned on the Internet if you are using the right SEO tools.

Now, given the latest updates from Google, the best would be hiring a specialized person. However, if you don't have the resources or you want to learn doing this job alone, you can choose to begin with the natural SEO.

Here are some tips to do natural SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Natural SEO Techniques for Blogger

Pick a Good Domain

We must try having our keyword included in the domain name, and even if this may sacrifice our branding, we can use the redirection.

Create Value Added Content

Not only rewrite articles, or write like they would be intended for us. When writing our posts, we should consider our target audience, i.e., giving advices, tips, suggestions or guidance on specific topics and aside, use links, anchor text and key phrases.

The topic of the links is important

They should be of quality and while, it's no longer required to place five or ten links within the text of your website, now what truly matters, is to make the link relevant to the context.

Finally, the domain, in value-added content and a right use of the internal and external links, will prove to be useless if we don't try to update our blog constantly.

How often should you update your blog?

You don't have to do this on daily basis, even if this may be ideal as, this way, we could achieve a greater relevance in search engines. But don't forget about your blog either. Let's say, two or three times a week would be enough. What should not happen is updating only three times a week and doing nothing next week.

Keep in mind that search engines happen to pass daily on our blog in order to index our content.

I hope that you find these SEO tips useful and if you would like to receive more tutorials by email, subscribe for free to this blog, check out the facebook page or add the RSS feed.

Many think that Google AdWords is the only tool dedicated and available to perform a study such as a keyword search, but it isn't so, today I refute this idea by collecting some alternatives that, although are not equal to Google AdWords, at least encourage us to make good keyword analysis for the SEO of our website.

Going back a bit, for those unfamiliar with the main features and tools of Google AdWords, we can find a very simple interface yet complete in every sense.

- AdWords appearance has changed, however there is a chance of returning to the old design;
- allows you to place a phrase or keyword, a web site and use the categories;
- for a better keywords search, you can apply filters such as location, language and add custom fields (competition, local or global monthly searches, CPC, Ad share, etc.);
- displays keyword ideas in columns with the amount of local and global monthly searches and approximate CPC;
- you can download keyword ideas, search results in a format to open with Excel.

Having recalled and refreshed the memory a little with the characteristics of AdWords, now it is time to learn about other options both free and paid.

Google AdWords Alternatives

Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing may not be the tool that we had first thought of, however it wants to provide the best conditions for studying keywords.

After we register, to access the tool, go to Diagnostics & Tools and click on the second option on the list: Keyword Research.

SEMRush: Other freemium alternative that displays a very complete report of a particular keyword or website. However, it has limitations and if you opt for a PRO recurring plan you need to pay a monthly membership from $69.95 per month.

Ubersuggest: This nice and simple online tool searches keywords suggestion as well as potential titles for an article. Personally, I recommend it 100%.

Keyword Eye: If you are looking to perform a keyword research on a particular region, Keyword Eye will be your help. It also has the option of requesting the display of search volume or AdWords competition and a full report of anchor text, keywords and domain.

At first it offers a free plan with limitations and to enjoy all other benefits, we have to pay $9.99 per month.

Google Analytics is a platform created with the purpose of helping us to track the number of visits and page views on our blog, which also uses several filters to check exactly from where the visitors are coming via standard or custom reports.

Google Analytics is the leading free tool that has a good relationship with the internet marketing and offers suggestions and improvements or benefits for our website.

As Analytics is part of the variety of Google tools like Blogger, many bloggers still don't know if it is possible to add the tracking code in Blogger. Implementing analytics in Blogger is very quick and easy, so you don't need to be experts or web developers. Here's a small guide for placing the Google Analytics tracking ID on our blog.

Implementing Google Analytics on Blogger

1. Do you have a Google Analytics account? Then it's perfect. If you don't have one, please Register.
2. Within the account, we'll go to Admin and in the Property column, click the menu, then click Create new property, where we enter the information from the website.

3. Click on "Get Tracking ID" and it will provide a box with a code, select and copy the code (CTRL + C).

4. Now let's go to our Blogger account.
5. Look for your blog and click on it, then go to Template > click the Edit HTML button and paste the code previously generated in Analytics before the </head> tag (CTRL + F in order to find it).

And this would be the entire procedure. Within about 24 hours, we shall see the first statistics of our blog in Google Analytics, otherwise check the following:

- Double check that the code has no spaces or characters.
- Doesn't have errors in the configuration
- There are no poor implementation of the filters.
- The Flash plugin is working or javascript is enabled.
- You will have minor issues if you are receiving visits from China (this conflict is not yet solved, according to Google).

The Alexa Rank in its time may have been pretty important for the SEO, however, these days is already losing its importance due to the changes in the algorithm that Google applies from time to time.

The company displays information about visitors of a website, which in turn, classifies this in a ranking, generating estimated statistics about visitor traffic and links pointing to the website. In a few words, the Alexa Rank does not directly affect SEO, but rather serves as a reference for measuring the traffic type, popularity by country and other metrics.

If you would like to enrich or have a good Alexa Rank of your website, here some ways to do it, with short-term results.

5 Ways to Increase the Alexa Rank

Daily Content: Try to publish at least 2 articles per day and within a month you may start to see some changes in the Alexa ranking.

Install Alexa Rank widgets: Besides notifying about the results of your Alexa ranking, they will also provide an estimate of how many backlinks your website has. There are three types of widgets: button with ranking and links, the other one with the ranking only, and finally, a graph with daily records of visits. Traffic Widgets

Alexa Toolbar: From experience, I would recommend installing the Alexa Toolbar, because once we access the website, Alexa will count this visit and thus, we may get better results in the ranking. Besides this, the toolbar will also provide you more information about the backlinks of a web site, popular pages, reviews, and more.

Request a review: To calculate the Alexa ranking of a website, not only the amount of daily and monthly visits will make a site popular, but the number of reviews or opinions made with stars will also play a role in the ranking. Ask your readers to do a review or purchase Alexa opinions about your website.

Number of backlinks: As I said before, the number of visits and reviews about a website used to calculate the Alexa rank, and the total number of quality backlinks, may increase the likelihood of achieving a higher ranking for your website.

We know that SEO Off Page refers to the search engine optimization techniques that can be done outside of your website, such as link wheels, reviews, social bookmarking, social media (references and followers), sidebar links, among other techniques. However, without a proper on-page seo optimization, all would sum up to a non-optimized webpage without quality, which will not reach the traffic expected to have. This is mostly because search engines (especially Google) pay much attention to the alt and title tags (for images), meta tags, internal links, robots and so on, in order to display the content of your web page to the user who made a specific query in the search.

To never fall in this depression of search engine optimization, you can choose a good and reliable blog platform like Blogger. If you are working only on Blogger, here are some on-page optimization tips that might help you to become successful in the blogging world and increase the daily traffic to your blog.

Basic On-Page SEO Tips For Blogger

Optimization of the robots.txt file: besides alerting Google search engine, this file also helps us to prevent certain pages being indexed by Google in order to protect our blog against duplicate content issues.

Title optimization: In the default blogger template, post titles are not optimized properly for the search engines. To solve this, we need to touch some code in the design and optimize both page and post titles.

Image optimization: Whether your blog is about pictures or images as general topics, by simply adding a keyword related to articles, compressing the image and putting the title="" and alt="' tags, we would be optimizing SEO On-Page a little bit more.

Internal links: Internal links within posts on our blog will not only increase page views but will also help us to be well ranked in search engines.

Blog's loading time: When you start with a blog either new or old, it's important to offer a user experience filled with a fast loading time. Search engines give higher priority to a faster blog than to a slow or saturated one.

Using Google Webmaster Tools: After making sure that your blog is 100% SEO, this amazing Google tool will provide you support with both fast indexing and broken links, HTML improvements, page errors and many other specific suggestions for your website.

Got any other ideas or thoughts about natural and positive techniques to improve the On Page SEO on a web page?

Express them in a comment!

An important part of a good SEO is the implementation of meta tags, which are commonly located in the header of our website, that are being, in the same time, invisible to users visiting the site. Well, to be more succinct, these tags have only one purpose: to include information about the page such as author name, date, key word, description, title, among others.

However, here we will only mention one, which is the meta description in Blogger. This description will appear as a fragment in the search results and as a description when sharing on Google+, Facebook and other social networks. A clear and precise description increases the chances of getting more clicks or visits.
As we will work only on the Blogger platform, here I will leave a little guide to easily add a meta description.

Meta Description in Blogger

The first thing we will do is going to our Blogger dashboard and from there, go to Settings > Search preferences > Meta Tags > Description and click on Edit.

Then check the box "Yes" to enable search description. Finally, click the "Save Changes" button.

Adding Meta Description To individual Posts

Now we will focus on adding the meta description to individual pages. Simply edit the page or post, look for the Search Description setting, and there we enter the text and save by clicking the Done button.

And that's it. However it is best to test if it works and we will do so with the MetaChecker online tool, where we only have to introduce the url of a post or page, click Analyze and then it will show the results, including a complete analysis of keywords, on-page seo , meta tags, URLs, current server status and a rating bar that goes from Horror to Excellent.

If none of the meta descriptions appear (rarely fails), we can do the process manually, but it requires us to touch a bit of code. In this case, go to Template > Edit HTML and insert before <b:skin><![CDATA[ the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription != &quot;&quot;'>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
</b:if>

Of course, we will use again the previously mentioned tool to ensure that the description is placed correctly and if all goes well, our blog would be ready to face a good SEO.

What is a Google AdSense "Page Impression"?

The page impressions or page views - how much time a user stays on your website and how many pages are visited. This is one of the most important things when talking about advertising. Page impressions are the result of good high quality traffic which is mostly based on the quality of the content available on your blog/website. If you build high quality content then people will enjoy navigating through your site and therefore, create page views.

In general, AdSense reports show the following fields of information:

• Page Impression: how many times the page or pages containing the AdSense advertisement was shown to your blog/website visitors
• Clicks: the number of times visitors clicked on an advertisement from your site
• Page CTR: The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. (1) In most cases, a 2% click-through rate would be considered very successful, though the exact number is hotly debated.
• CPC: is Cost Per Click. That is what Google pay you per click.
• Estimated earnings: Your account balance for the time period selected. This amount is an estimate that is subject to change when your earnings are verified for accuracy at the end of every month.(2)

Below are some ways that could help you to increase the page impressions:

1. Navigation Menu

Create a navigation structure that is clear and easy to follow. You want to make sure that once you have a visitor, they can easily make it to other parts of your blog. Creating links within your blog pages is one of the best ways to increase the number of impressions for your website.


2. Posts Summary on Homepage

A very good method to increase your page views is to have a summary of your posts on your blog/website homepage. That will force visitors of your blog to click on posts link / read more button in order to see the full article. To show only a part (excerpt) of Blogger posts, read this tutorial:
Automatic Posts Summaries for Blogger with Thumbnails

3. Improve Blog/Website Load Time

If a blog’s pages load very slowly, then visitors will eventually lose patience and stop visiting more pages, sometimes sooner rather than later. A blog that has quick loading pages is a pleasure to browse and it encourages more clicks.

4. Add a Popular Posts widget

Another great way to engage your readers to stay more on your site/blog and to browse through your content and make more pageviews is to add a Popular Posts Widget where you share some of the best posts on your blog.

Here are some nice Popular Posts widgets for your Blogger blog:

Popular Posts widget above Blogger Posts
Multi-Colored Popular Posts widget

5. Add a Random Posts Widget

If you have loyal visitors who come to your blog on a daily basis, a popular article widget will become boring just because they see it every day, with same posts. A random posts widget will mix the articles so that the probability for a post to repeat will be very low.

Want to add a Random Posts Widget for your Blogger blog? Then take a look at this tutorial:
Random Posts widget with thumbnails

6. Link to Related Posts at the End of a Post

Displaying a related posts is a smart way for keeping your site visitors around. The widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.

If you don't have it on your blog yet, see this Related Posts Widget tutorial for Blogger blogs: Add the Related Posts Widget with Thumbnails to Blogger


7. Add internal links to your content using related anchor text

Include a link in a new post to related information in a previous post. When you link to a previous post that you've written you should consider doing it so with descriptive words of the post, rather than generic words. (don't use simple words like "click here for more"). Adding links to previous articles will determine your visitors to view articles and automatically will be converted into page impressions.

8. Provide links into your social networks profiles or forums

Share your blog links on Facebook, Twitter or any other websites or popular forums. Answer to questions on the web. But be careful to not be too intrusive and always try to give pertinent info.
You wouldn't want to support or to be considered as a spammer, don't you?

9. Add a search box

A lot of websites does not have a search box. As a result, the visitor will leave the site if he didn't find anything further relevant. For best results, you should be using the Google custom search widget. You can embed the Google search box directly in your blog. The search results will be more relevant than those that are provided by your default search box.



10. Add Social media buttons 

Give your visitors multiple options to tweet, bookmark and share your posts via Facebook as well as save your whole blog. Put social icons below your post and in the sidebar, make them visible and let them be found easily.

11. Use a clean background for your posts and readable fonts

Avoid dark backgrounds, tiny and sophisticated fonts, and make written content the visually most distinct part of your blog. If your main objective is to deliver a message and get the visitors reading your stuff, then you should make this process comfortable for them.

12. Advertising

And finally, getting people to your site may just be a matter of getting the word out. By using pay-per-click advertising, you can create an inexpensive advertising campaign to get more people to your site.

Following these tips will surely increase your blog's page views, which will make your blog traffic high in the future. Good luck!

This tutorial will explain you how to optimize images before uploading them on your blog. Generally, most of people don't optimize images before uploading it to Blogger as needed. Optimizing images should be done if you want to improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or your blog or site. Learning the correct and proper way of optimizing images in blogger is very important as well.

Google Image search is used widely for finding quality reference images, icons or photos. A great percentage of our blog traffic depends on Image search. When we are downloading images, most of the time they are saved with odd names and we don't take any interest in modifying the name. So we should always consider two things when uploading images on our blog - the proper use of the alt tag and changing the name of our images or pictures with the proper keyword.

1. Change Image Name with Keyword

When we are downloading images from the internet, generally they are saved in local drive with some very odd names like untitled.png, img.png etc. So changing these names with appropriate keywords is always helpful. For instance, if I want to add img or untitled in this post, then I would definitely change these name with those words - or keywords - that would describe the best my content; thus, if I want to add an image to a post about seo topics, then I would name it something like SEO.png or optimize-image.png so that it would be relevant to the post content.

2. Use alt attribute

Search robots cannot read multimedia, be it graphic images or flash. An image is meaningless for search spiders if it is not defined (tagged). Therefore, in order to tell the search robots what the image is about, we can add an alt tag to our image code - when we upload a photo inside the post editor, click on the image and below it, click on the Properties link:

After clicking on the Properties link, the Image properties box will popup. Inside the Title text section, type a relevant title for your image and below, and in the Alt text section, type a short description of your image... then press OK.

It is recommended to write short sentences to describe your pics and to keep the description limited to 4-5 words. Less is better. Also, make sure you don't use the same words, try to mix up your image keywords.

These are simple tips for SEO image optimization which are not only effective for your SEO but can also boost your traffic. If you are wondering how to get images for your blog, please read this tutorial: How to upload images and get the url of your pics

This is called "Blogger/blogspot Title Swapping". Swapping blogs title can help boost your position in search engine results page listing and also increase clickthroughs. From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perspective, page title is the most important element in your blog in terms of ranking well in search engines. If you look at your browser's title bar you will notice that Blogger's default templates display your blog title in front of each page or post title. So page title would normally be displayed as:

After swapping the blog title, it will be appearing like this:

This kind of placement will be also appearing in google search results. The reason why you should put post titles at the beginning is because users are more likely to search for specific post content rather than the actual name of your blog. So having the post titles at the beginning increases your chances of being found.

How to optimize blogger post titles

Step 1. Log in to your Blogger Dashboard and go to Template > Edit HTML

Step 2. Click anywhere inside the code area and press the CTRL + F keys to open the Blogger' search box

Step 3. Type or paste the code below inside the search box to find it:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Step 4. You need to replace the code above with this one:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>

Step 5. Click Save Template and you are done!