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How To Use Images To Improve Your SEO
This article is guest posted by Lior Levin.
Everyone knows that you should add images to your blog posts to make them more attractive. Blog posts with images look better, stand out more and attract more readers. If you are routinely blogging without images, you are likely wasting a good deal of your potential readership simply on the fact your content looks boring to those who find your words.
But can images be useful for SEO? Everyone knows that Google can’t “read” images like it can text nor are they truly searchable. Sure, there is an image search function, it only looks at text around the image and is not exactly the best tool for gaining traffic, especially after the recent overhaul.
Still, there are several ways that images can easily help you improve your SEO, including these 5 very easy suggestions:
1. Use Original Images
Google Image Search now has a “similar images” function that works moderately well. Images that are too similar to others on the Web are less likely to get attention from Google as the results try to focus on a variety of relevant images. If possible, use your own images, even if you have to take screenshots
2. Use Keywords in File Names
Load up your file names with relevant keywords. Make it clear what the image is and how it relates to the larger post. Try to separate keywords with a dashes to help the SEs understand what the keywords actually are.
3. Use the Title Attribute
Use the title attribute on your IMG tags as a means to add still more relevant keywords. Your title is a way to associate text with your image directly in a way that human visitors rarely see but SEs place high value on.
4. Use the Alt Attribute
Much like the title attribute, the alt attribute of the IMG tag is yet another opportunity to add relevant keywords. However, remember that the alt attribute is also used by screen readers for the visually impaired so make sure that this tag is also useful for human that might need to read it.
5. Link the Image
An image is also an opportunity to provide another link to a different page on your site. WordPress, for example, automatically creates a new page for each uploaded image and can link to that. You can also have the image link back to the post itself, which is useful if the post is scraped or otherwise misused.
In addition to the above steps, you may want to consider enabling reuse of your images, either via embedding or a Creative Commons License, to let others take advantage of them in exchange for dofollow links back. Depending on the nature of your site, the links from external domains may be much more valuable than the exclusive use of the images themselves.
All in all though, images are an often-overlooked but still very important part of a robust SEO strategy. Fortunately, it only takes a few seconds to turn an image into a powerful tool for SEO and, since you are probably putting images into your posts anyway, it’s time well spent.
In fact, the hardest part for many is remembering to take the steps, no actually doing them.
This blog post was written by Lior who works with an online task management tool start-up and also advises to a nursing tops company.
SEO Blogging Tips: How To Rank Well Without Losing Readers
This article is guest posted by Shaun Connell.
I’ve been professionally blogging for a little over a year now. In June of 2009, I was working full-time on my blogs for the first time. Whenever people ask me what the key to me going full-time was, I always give them the same answer: passive search engine traffic.
Search engine traffic is, for the most part, consistent and passive. Once you get about a thousand visitors per day, you’ll get about a thousand visitors per day. Every day. Whether you post or not. Search traffic is also valuable traffic — searchers are more likely to click advertisements, buy products, subscribe to newsletters — they’re more likely to make money.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a common myth in internet marketing and blogging circles that implies that you have to choose between making your readers happy and making Google send more traffic your way. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are a few ways to increase search traffic without ticking off your readers.
User-Friendly Ways to Increase Search Traffic
- Keyword Titles. My favorite method for writing titles is to put the keyword at first, and then a normal title afterwards. For example, this post is called “SEO Blogging Tips: How to Rank Well Without Losing Readers.” The obvious first two words are keyword titles. Doing this means the keyword is still in the title first thing, and yet the title is still easy to read.
- Link Building. Link building is the crux of search traffic. If you have a lot of links, you’ll have a lot of search traffic. It’s unavoidable. And your readers will never notice it. Try to manually build at least 5 links per week through article marketing and guest post writing. It’ll pay off in the end, I promise.
- Internal Linking. Internal linking is probably one of the most underused SEO tactics by bloggers. If you have a few pages you’re trying to get ranked on Google, link to them constantly in your own pages. I have a set of nearly 10 posts on every one of my websites that I link to from most of my new posts. This insures that Google and other search engines realize those are the most important and desirable posts on the website — giving them more authority. There are plugins that make internal linking almost automatic.
- SEO-Friendly Sidebar. Your sidebar is an important place to link to your most important SEO pages. Have a special widget that links to your most important articles, and use only keywords for the links. This helps with internal linking, and insures that every page links to the important pages.
- Search-Only Ads. While this isn’t technically a tactic for getting search traffic, it’s certainly a tactic for monetizing search traffic better. Find a way to make advertisements show only for search-engine visitors — this means you don’t upset your regular readers with too many ads, and can still profit from the easily monetized search traffic. Have your cake and eat it too.
A 6-Month Case Study
I decided to launch a case study to see how fast I could get a website to the top of search rankings for a competitive keyword without sacrificing the user experience of the blog. I registered a domain about gold coins (the most popular way to buy gold for small-time/private investors) and began to follow the steps listed above.
I uploaded an article every day that targeted a keyword. I made the content user-friendly. I did the SEO-friendly sidebar, internal linking, and consistently built at least 3 real links every day. That was it. Nothing else.
Within six months the website ranks top 10 results on Google for “gold coins” — an extremely competitive topic that takes on almost every gold dealer in the nation, including hundred-million dollar companies. The site is also on page 3 of Google for just the keyword “gold”, which is effectually taking on every major investing, financial, economic, and news site on the Internet — almost every major money-related website has a section on their site about gold.
But the rankings didn’t happen because of any “guru” powers or “secrets” or any complicated positive-thinking philosophy. It happened because I followed the simple SEO blogging tips above. Content, internal linking, links = success. It’s literally that simple.
What other SEO blogging tips do you have to share?
About the Author: Shaun Connell is a full-time blogger and runs over 6 blogs, including a financial planning blog where he teaches readers everything from getting out of debt to learning how to make money online.
How to Establish Yourself and Your Blog Locally
This article is guest posted by Melvin Dichoso.
We’ve been all taught that in order for us to make money blogging, we need to target large countries like US and Canada. The main reason behind this is because the audience from that country is more profitable than the audience in your location, for example here, Philippines.
Although there is nothing wrong in that, we must also not forget that establishing our local presence is equally as important as getting readers from those countries. The fact is our local demographics would still dictate how credible we are on a certain field.
While getting traffic from bigger countries is a lot easier, establishing a presence in your own country could mean more because its almost unrealistic to get press coverage from other countries, or get clients if you’re doing consulting and even get yourself popular. Building a personal brand plays a crucial role on your profitability as a whole and I’ve seen a lot of bloggers that are almost unknown in other countries that make huge money online mainly because of the reputation they built here.
So since last year, I started working my butts off on getting known here more and building relationships with prominent figures here. In this post, I am going outline the different ways to promote yourself and establish your expertise locally. It starts now:
1. Attending Conferences related to your Niche
Although not all niches have specific events assigned to them, there’s still a good chance that there is one for your niche. I wasn’t so keen on attending conferences and events here until last year when I realized that I need to start networking with my fellow countrymen.
Just last month I attended iBlog 6 Summit and it was really a huge opportunity for me to introduce myself and connect with people on the same industry. Attending conferences whether big or small is definitely the first step. Make the most of it, network with people, and build relationships because these people are either going to be your future customers or business partners.
2. Getting Into Local Forums
When we do forum marketing, what we usually aim for is the quantity of members. Oftentimes, we go to sites like Digital Point, Sitepoint and WarriorsForum because they have a huge number of members. That being said, we should never forget that we can also participate in local forums and still reap the same benefits. Why? Because in local forums, most people are likely to listen to you, communicate with you because they know you are something that they can be trusted considering the fact you’re on the same country.
3. Turning into Your Market Leaders
When I was getting started, I was lucky enough to have people like Carl Ocab and J. Racoma (two prominent people here) walk me through all of the things I need to get through to get started. Although its unrealistic to all of a sudden try to make friends with big people while just getting started, you can definitely work it out at a time.
You can start out small by just simply commenting on their articles or reaching out to them through social media. Then you can shoot them a private message. Just remember not to be annoying or demanding too much. Remember, relationships just like anything are built over time and there’s no point on rushing things.
4. Running Local Advertising Campaigns
If you have the cash then certainly you can get running faster. Pay-Per Click is one of the quickest ways to generate traffic so thats the first one you may want to use. Use Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing and target your local audience and make sure your ad is running ONLY in your country.
Through testing and tweaking, you can improve your campaigns and have better conversions. This is not cheap since youre paying per click so make sure you scale your campaigns carefully before diving into it. You may want to make sure that you know the terms and services as well so you’ll not be wasting your precious money.
5. Holding Contests
There’s no other quicker way doing this than holding contests. Again this may require an initial investment on your part or if you could get sponsors, the better. Make sure you strategize your contest since there would be obviously some people who would join your contest for just the sake of joining it.
You can determine the success of your contest by observing the drop-off rate. If you are getting 1000 visitors a day during your contests and after the contest it drops to 20 a day then that would be considered as a failure.
In running contests, make sure that it is properly aligned to your niche and to the audience you are targeting. Its hard to make people stick to you when they aren’t really interested and all they care for is the contest.
Getting into local Scenes and establishing your presence can be quite a bit tricky. After all, you need quality more than quantity but the problem is low quantity is a factor even from the start (Unless youre from US).
The key in all of this is overdelivering something, and building relationships. It doesn’t happen overnight but with the 5 methods I mentioned above, it wouldn’t take that long for you and your brand to get known in your own location.
Melvin is a fellow Filipino blogger and internet marketer who blogs at MelvinBlog Dot Com where he aims to share all his experience in the industry. If you like this post, make sure you subscribe to his feed or at least follow him on twitter. ;-)
Zac Johnson Six Figure Affiliate Blogging
Ahhh… internet nowadays.
A lot of “free” stuff. Yes, with the quotes because those “free” stuff comes with its own – wait for it – catch.
You get this “free” trial of magic pills that will help you lose weight, they’ll send you more pills and charge your card.
You get this “free” DVD about internet marketing, they’ll subscribe you to their newsletter and charge your card.
They all have a catch.
Well, not all…
If you get Zac Johnson’s “Six Figure Affiliate Blogging”, there is no catch. Why?
Because Zac is making *a lot* of money with affiliate marketing that he doesn’t need to push or squeeze any dollar from you ;-)
It’s a 93-page ebook, free, no-fluff.
I personally think you’ll like it and I vouch for it.
Plus Zac is really a pretty good guy so aside from reading the ebook which is insanely informative, I suggest you contact him and try to get to know him – he’s a very kind dude :-)
It walks you through the process of building a blog, creating a brand
that generated Zac over $xxx,xxx a year with blogs
Click here to get Zac’s Six Figure Affiliate Blogging
The Ultimate Blogging Theme 3.0
I won’t beat around the bush, I’m really excited to show this video to you:
I hope you liked it :-)
In addition to that we’ve added a “custom stylesheet” and “custom functions” file so that you won’t lose your customizations when you upgrade in the future.
The new UBT is also iPad ready and of course, compatible to all browsers.
We really did a lot of stuff and it’s a major jump from the last 2.1 version that’s why we are relaunching with all the launch propaganda, mailings, etc. on…
May 18th, 2010
It will be limited though, check back soon or if you want, you can subscribe to the notification list.
Of course, we will not be sending you any “promotional stuff”, spam you or any of those uncool stuff :-)
More Revenues With Less Traffic On Your WordPress Website
This article is guest posted by Mike Ndegwa
WordPress(WP)is a great content management system (CMS) recommended widely by Internet marketers. The beauty of it is it’s ease of use plus it’s loved by search engines.
WordPress was initially meant to be a blogging platform but being an open source CMS; numerous plugins and custom themes have been introduced that allow users to do all sort stuff on their websites. WP is used by Internet marketers for various online business models:
- Blogging – short for web logs where an Internet marketer identifies a niche and positions themselves as an expert and from time to time publish information related to that niche.
- Sales Pages – I bet You’ve seen those long websites with copy (content) that sounds like a conversation has bonuses, testimonials and of course an order button, that’s what am referring to With custom WP themes you can implement sales pages in matter of minutes
- Membership Sites – WP capabilities to make posts private or password protected and only viewable to authorised persons has made it the preferred CMS for Internet marketers.
- Review Websites – If you operate an affiliate online business model, then pre-selling is vital for you to achieve high levels of income. you can therefore use a WP website to review products
- Email Marketing – With permission based email marketing a landing page is required to capture and confirm contacts and also lit terms of use and privacy policy, without which most email marketing platforms wont accept you to run campaigns on their site.
There are many more uses for WP in relation to making Money Online, you can share your ideas on the comments section below.
Let’s get way back on track:
Q. How Can you increase revenues on your wordpress web site without put any extra effort on the traffic you get per day?
It’s possible to increase revenue, but the ‘how to’ depends on the profit or monetisation strategy you have in Place.
On this post I’ll show how to boost revenues if you run any of the following monetisation strategies:
- Adsense/ Banners
- List Building
- Affiliate marketing/ Sales Pages
Adsense/ Banner Advertising
You can increase revenues to your WP Adsense website by using the Pagination code. The pagination code splits one post into multiple pages with a numerical navigation i.e. 1 2 3 e.t.c just place this code on the html side of the post where you want your post to break
<!–nextpage–> i.e. less than sign, exclamation mark, hyphen, hyphen, nextpage, hyphen, hyphen, greater than sign
This code is similar to the more tag only but it can be used as many times in a post.
How does this increase your adsense earnings?
- Increased pages per post. If you show Ads at the bottom of every post, than that means if you had one post paginated into three the reader will have to see the Ads 3 times by the time they are done reading the article. This also applies to the banner advertising monetisation model
- Cut reference links – This is a bit sneaky, if you publish ezine articles on you blog, the condition is that you must publish the whole article including the reference link. Now you don’t want visitors leaving through an external link immediately they land on your site. SO by breaking the post severally you keep the external link further and get to show your ads severally.
- Search engine Optimization- Arguably you get more links to a single post. If you have used headers 1,2, 3 at the beginning of each ‘page ‘ (broken post) the search engines will give you more search result pages (SERP’s) per post as opposed to if it was published as a single post.
List Building
you can use Pop-Overs (also known as Pop-Ins) to capture emails. there are various plugins. I use WordPress Popup Scheduler by Damien Oh. It has lots use including scheduling welcome messages, detecting repeat visitors, you can embed capture forms and feed sign ups e.t.c. the possibilities are endless on this one.
Affiliate Marketing/ Sales Pages
Increase you affiliate conversions by activating the on exit rescue plugin. This plugin is premium but you can get it free here on this link
once you upload and activate plug-in go to settings and select exit rescue and configure your affiliate link. You can also use this pluging on a wordpress sales page to give an offer of 10% discount or some bonuses. I make 80% of my product sales on the Exit offer page. With this I can conclude that exit rescue combined with a good offer will quadruple your conversions
Do affiliates Work So hard?
“Discover The Lazie$t Way to Generate $29,486/ Week Without Selling Any Product or Owning A Web Site … Revealed at: Supreme Cash System | Make Money Online
To your Success,
Mike Ndegwa
