How many times did you feel your annoyance grow proportionally to the amount of time you had to wait for a website to load? Often enough. And you’re not the only one – a website’s load time can have a huge impact on how users perceive the brand and its products or services. Ensuring a swift upload of your website is one of your main tasks – here are some guidelines on how to do this and never get annoyed by a long load time again. (more…)
If you want your website to stand out from among your competitors, simply writing articles will not be enough to accomplish what you desire. Your articles must be SEO friendly. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means it is optimized to rank high on search engine return lists. There are a few points within your article that will make it SEO friendly, and here are the top things you need to know.
For many years Google has been using PageRank (PR) to classify sites based on authority. A higher PR site generally means higher authority and higher crawl rate by search engines. Google has been fighting against spam and black hat techniques since its very beginning. Earlier, any webmaster would gain backlinks either by buying links, commenting on other blogs, or by spam guest posting and increase their PR. Now Google is bringing a new card into the SEO game – Google Author Rank.
Google Author Rank is nothing but a measurement of the authority of your blog / website over the internet. Google has been trying to provide their customers with better search results ever since it’s birth and this how they are going to do it. They normally update their search algorithms over 500 times a year (lots of minor updates and some major ones). The recent Panda and EMD (Exact Matching Domains) updates have hit many webmasters hard. The Penguin algorithm has hit most of the spam sites with devastating effects and if you are one of them, you should read the rest of the article.
Many SEO experts have complained about their organic traffic disappearing overnight. Google with their recent updates have changed the very definition of Search Engine Optimization. No one knows what to do anymore. But what everyone knows (even if they don’t apply it) is producing unique, original and useful content is the only way to avoid being penalized by these updates.
You have to go for Google Authorship because Google wants you to. Google is the world leader in search marketing. With over 80% dominance in the search market, you have no choice but to stay on the Google’s good boy list. Organic traffic is the lifeline of any blog or website. To get organic traffic, you need Google and you have to listen to what they are saying.
Google Authorship will provide more authority to your blog. Your Google+ picture will be displayed in the search results which increases the CTR of your blog.
There is also a hidden benefit of it which has been confirmed by Google themselves. If someone clicks a link on the search result and goes to your site and spends a certain amount of time there, then presses the browser’s “Back” button, more results from your site will be shown in the results. This is a way of Google knowing that the user has loved your content and is willing to read more from your site.
According to Matt McGee of Search Engine Land, their research has calculated the time to be around 2 minutes. Here’s a snapshot (above) of the results after pressing the back button after a certain amount of time.
To get Google Authorship, you need to connect your blog with your Google+ account. If you still haven’t done it or don’t know how to, you can check out these tutorials (for Blogger | for WordPress) which both provide a simple step on how to do that. Just a few days ago, I received my official notification from Google on being accepted into the Google Authorship Program.
Like PageRank, the author rank would also be calculated using a series of complex signals that are received by Google. Well, according to Mike Arnesen of SEOmoz, some of the main factors that are going to be considered are:
• PageRank of the author’s content
• Number of comments on each post
• Google+ shares of author content
• Number of Google+ circles the author is in
• Social Media Followers (e.g. Twitter , Facebook , Stumbleupon)
• Connections with other high author rank authors
Google will take into account the PR of the author’s content and the factors above that I have mentioned and then combine with the Author Rank to give the best possible results to its customers. For years Google has been using PR to determine the authority of the websites. But, as we all know, PR can be manipulated by using black hat SEO techniques. This author rank is supposed to help Google bring to the top more relevant and good quality content, so those who are using black hat and spam link building techniques are surely going to be hit by these pretty badly.
Well, no one knows exactly when the Author Rank will come into play or if it has already started playing in the background and we haven’t noticed yet. Whether Google has already implemented this or not, it doesn’t matter. You should start concentrating on building your author rank now. Start producing quality content and forget about the spam guest posting and black hat techniques (if you have been doing so).
Building your Author Rank is a little bit different than that of building your authority (which you have done so far). I’m just going to list out some of the critical points:
• Start socializing with other reputable bloggers
• Connect with other webmasters on social networking sites (e.g. Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn)
• Start sharing your content on the social media (if you haven’t been doing so)
• Start using Google+ more
• Get in the circles of the reputable bloggers
• Start guest posting on high authority sites
• Start commenting on high authority sites
Well, that’s about it. So, are you planning to build author rank or what? What do you think about this? You can hit the comment section to share your views.
The above post was written by Lahaul Seth of Blog Tips Codes. He writes about blogging, SEO, and Internet marketing, and often gives away free code (such as his free version of Hello Bar), so make sure you check him out.
I recently signed up for the Daily Blog Tips Newsletter and received a tip about Google PageRank that I had no idea about, so now I’m here to share that tip with you…
What Is Google Page Rank?
Page Rank is Google’s numerical value that they assign each website on the Internet. This value is a whole number (no decimals) between 0 (PR0) and 10 (PR10), 0 being that the website is new or not linked to, and 10 being a super authority. PageRank is updated every three or four months and is recalculated every time.
While PageRank could be meaningless to the average Internet user, it has a great importance to bloggers, Internet marketers, and website flippers. PageRank can determine how much advertisements on your site should cost (for example, a PR6 site should charge more for ads than a PR2 site), the authority of a source, and even your Google search results (a PR5 website is more likely to show at the top of Google than a PR1 site).
How Page Rank Is Calculated
While nobody knows the in-depth, full equation to Google’s PageRank algorithm, some people know the general idea. PageRank is calculated by the amount of incoming links a website has. You could have an awesome website with 20,000 daily views and over 300 comments a day, but if nobody links to you, you’ll never advance past PR0.
The term that is often used when describing the value of a particular link is “link juice”. Similar to the juice in a battery, link juice determines the power that will be shared with the linked-to site.
So here’s how it’s calculated… Let’s say you have a website that has a PageRank of 6 (PR6). On that website contains only three outgoing links to PR0 sites. When Google does a PageRank update, they split your PageRank into link juice and divide it among the websites you link to. In this case, the PR6 would be divided by three (because the site links to three other sites) and shared with the other sites – each earning PR2. After the PageRank update, that PR6 website would cause each of the PR0 sites to become PR2. Of course, the algorithm is way more complex than this, but this is the general concept.
How To Increase Your PageRank
Now that we know how PageRank works, how would you go about increasing it?
There are numerous other ways to increase your PageRank, but they all go back to generating more and more incoming links to your website.
Disclaimer: It’s Not That Easy
My example that I used above with the PR6 websites making the three PR0 websites turn into PR2 after just one update was great for understanding how the calculations work, but it was not realistic at all. I don’t know a single PR6 website on the planet that only has three outgoing links. These outgoing links can be – navigation, sidebar links such as blogrolls, affiliate banners in the sidebar, links in the body of the blog post, a related posts widget, CommentLuv links in the comments, and links in the website footer. I would say that the average PR6 site probably has about 30-40 links on a page, which makes each one have a link juice power of about 0.2. This means that you will need 10 incoming links from PR6 sites (that have 30-40 links per page) to bring your website up to PR2. Of course, this is not 100% accurate because I do not know the full Google algorithm, but you can get the idea that growing your PageRank isn’t easy or quick.
The Key Is Persistance
If you keep trying and commit to building one link a day, your PageRank will increase with each update (every 3-4 months). Remember you can build links by commenting on blogs, submitting to directories, guest posting, and linking to your own content. If you comment on one blog every day and only earn 0.06 points of link juice, after three months of doing this consistently, your blog will earn 6 points, thus making it PR6.
