A 7 From Heaven Basic On-Page SEO Elements Explained

I have performed On-Page SEO Analysis on hundreds of company websites at the market leader for 'Do-it for me' websites in Switzerland. Here I want to share my experience by explaining the 7 most important On-Page SEO factors you should be dead sure to get right.

First of all, there is On-Page and Off-Page SEO. When you are starting out, you will find out that in short term you have full control over your On-Page SEO, whereas Off-Page SEO is an activity that rather pays off in the long term. In the first stage, you want to make sure that your On-Page SEO is THE killer, because your future results can be depended dramatically on how well your website 'enters the market'.

Here is a quick breakdown of my 7 Most Important On-Page SEO Factors which I will explain in more detail:

1. Domain
2. URL Structure
3. Page Title
4. Meta Description
5. h1, h2, h3 titles
6. Image alt & title attribute
7. Linking to internal pages

1. Domain

Your domain name is your brand name and therefore the strongest element in SEO. In the past, people would often choose keyword domain names, because it had a huge impact on the rankings. These times are gone - Google has changed. Today it is not enough to just have a domain like www.seo-tips.com to rank high for the keyword 'SEO Tips'. Try it out yourself by typing it in Google. On which page do you see a domain containing the word 'SEO' & 'Tips'?

Regarding domain names, think of it as a chance to brand yourself. The domain is the address that you are going to present to a lot of people. If your customer asks how your homepage is called, you don't want to say: It's www.seo-company-usa.com. You will not rank high for 'SEO Company in USA' because of it. Chances are high that it will make it more difficult because you forgot about Off-Page SEO. Branding gets more backlinks than a spammy url.

Tip: Choose a domain with a high recognition value. Many times a brand-keyword combination are used. For example: www.spiceupseo.com. The brand is 'Spice Up' and keyword 'SEO'.

2. URL Structure

When you have chosen an appropriate domain name, you want to make sure that your subpages have a good url structure. Let's say you are an Online Marketing Agency called SpiceUp, and are going to create a subpage listing your On-Page SEO offers. A good url for this subpage would be www.spiceup.com/on-page-seo. The proper use of keywords in the url (after domain.com) are a critical success factor.

It gets a bit more interesting when you have more services to offer. Let's say you offer On-Page SEO, Linkbuilding, Social Media Marketing, AdWords campaign etc. In this case you are well adviced to group all similar pages in a subpath called '/services/'. The url of your subpage 'linkbuilding' would be www.spiceupseo.com/services/linkbuilding.

Google loves good site structures. It saves him time to index your subpages. Please do him a favour and he may prioritize your pages.

Tip: For subpages make sure that the variable that will be appended to the url summarizes the content of the page and sound SEO friendly. For example: www.spiceupseo.com/social-media-marketing where Social Media Marketing is the service you offer.

3. Page Title

The page title is both an attention grabber and a very important SEO element.

First of all, when a user makes a Google search, Google wants to return him a result list within 1/8 of second. To decide which webpage to list first, Google will often display one that has the search query in the page title.

The second reason is the stand out effect. Imagine you are walking through a book store, looking for a good SEO book. Which one will you touch first? Probably the book with the best title. A title that grabbed your attention. A title that is different than all others. The same is true in the SERP (search engine results page). If you get 10 results, will you always click on the first result? I don't think so. And even if. When the first page you clicked on, do you assume that you will find your desired information on the webpage in the second result? Google can never deliver all users a result page with all webpages in perfect order.

Tip: Include the keyword you are optimizing for in the page title. Don't forget to make it stand out from all the others. Make it clickable!

4. Meta Description

When you look at several books, you will notice that most of them have a subtitle as a teaser. In the SERP, the text below the Page Title is called the Meta Description. See an example below:

When you ask a book-seller to recommend you 5 SEO books that he has never seen himself, he would go to the stock and choose 5 books with the most appealing Title and Subtitle. Search engines may be no different. If Google was lazy, he would just take 5 webpages from its index that have a good Page Title and Meta Description combination.

Keep in mind that you don't only need to fill in relevant keywords in the Meta Description, but also try to make it appealing to users. The key ability needed here, is writing for both the search engines and people.

Meta Description are not directly important to search engine rankings. It's the CTR (Click-through-Rate) that Google also uses to determine rankings. In worst case, your webpage will drop from rank 1 when the webpages below you get much higher CTR's. That's why you need to write catchy Descriptions because a higher CTR -> positive effect on your ranking.

Tip: Search the query you want to optimize your webpage for on Google. Look at the Meta Description of the high rankers. Ask yourself which one stands out and why? What do you need to write to appear clickable? Then write a better one.

5. h1, h2, h3 titles

Just like a book, a webpage uses headings to intelligently structure the content. Content is still king, but please don't forget to make the content readable for your users. If the user has difficulty reading, he will not share the post, and not even read it.

Google also uses headings to make their job as a 'result list returner' easier. As the

html tag is the first level heading of a webpage, it puts the most value to the h1, then h2, h3 etc. Google recommends to only use one h1-tag per webpage. For a blog post, you can set the Post Title as a h1.

tags would be good for further headings within the blog post &

tags can be used for other subtitles or navigation titles.

Here is an example of a solid On-Page SEO Structure:

Tip: Only use one h1 title! On the homepage, it could be your header. On subpages, I recommend to use it for Post Titles. As always in SEO, your titles should be SEO friendly and attractive to read. Use h2 to structure your post for better readability.

6. Image alt & title attribute

A lot of people forget or don't take their time to write proper image alt & title attributes.

Here is a short explanation what the difference between alt-tags and title-tags is:

The image title attribute is the text that shows up when you hover over the image. Whereas alt is short for alternative. The image alt attribute is the text that will be shown when the user has turned off images or the browser doesn't display images.

Tip: For the title attribute, choose a title that describes the image and delivers even more information to the user. The alt attribute should describe what would have been there if the user has turned images off. Most often these two attributes have the same text, which is ok.

7. Linking to internal pages

We talk about internal linking when we create a link from one webpage to another webpage of a domain. Internal links are passing link juice to the target link. Let's say you have a Page A that has a PageRank of 2. All links from Page A will be evenly distributed to the pages linked to, but only those links that are in 'dofollow'. You can specify the link attribute by writing . If you write nothing regarding 'rel', the default is always rel='dofollow'.

Internal links are also useful from a usability point of view, especially for blogs. Let's be honest. Blogging is a mess. One day you write about Linkbuilding, the next day you write about How to Write Better Blog Posts and for the next week you write a series about Facebook Marketing. Who will find your post about linkbuilding after a few months?

Tip: Create internal links to your old awesome posts. You want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to find your most successful blog posts. It's hard to see the articles you've work on fading away. So take your time to link back to it!

Content is King

You have heard this a 1000 times and now you will hear it again.

Getting these 7 Tips right is good, but not enough. You still have to write quality content. The point is to create great content for your readers and at the same time optimize your On-Page SEO Elements wherever possible.

General Writing Tip: Do your reasearch first. For which keyword do you want to optimize? Write it down and add some synonyms in a short list. Put this list away and write the content without worrying about SEO. Focus on creating killer content first. When you're done, come back and check where you can add keywords & synonyms. Change your boring Post Title to a snappy title. Publish.

Content is king, nuff said. And there is more to come from us!

Have a nice day
Stephan Tchen

Are Good Question Askers Better at Blogging?

I could have also modified the title of this post and make it: 'Are bad question askers worse at blogging?'

Blogging is about creating value to your readers. You only create value if you are an expert at a subject. and share your knowhow with them. Of course this depends on the type of blog. A gossip blog creates value by posting news up to date.

If you ask yourself the right questions, you will get a better understanding of a given topic. You have more knowledge that you can transfer to others. When someone asks questions, he’s interested. But this doesn’t mean that you just have to ask as many questions as possible.

Think of people working in the office. Who is viewed as interested and smart? It’s not really those who ask more often, it’s those who just ask better. Just like at blogging Quality over Quantity is true. Good questions can be easily answered thoroughly while worse questions will have to be answered with phrases like it depends.

Questions with no depth

Spotting people who are not very skilled in a topic is easy. If their questions doesn’t allow you to have a deep conversation, the case is clear.

Here is an example of bad set of questions in a conversation about blogging:

• Oh yeah, traffic. How much traffic do we have? Answer: 10'000
• How much money do we earn with AdSense? Answer: $100 / month
• That’s not a lot. How much is possible in future?

These are actually good starting questions. But hearing someone already asking how we can increase our revenue before digging in deeper into the data, shows he sucks at asking effective questions in this topic.

Questions giving depth

10'000 visits or visitors? Per month or per day? If the traffic was per month, the revenue per visit (RPV) was 1 Cent, which is quite high. That makes it unlikely to increase our revenue as getting more traffic is generally more difficult than increasing a low RPV. If the traffic was 10'000 per day, our RPV would be only 0.03 Cent ($100 / 300'000). The reason for this low RPV may be supoptimal ad placing or less targeted traffic.

That's what I call giving depth to a conversation.

Let’s see what additional questions we could/must have asked:

• How many Pages per Visit do we have?
• How long does the average user stay on our site?
• What’s our bounce rate?
• What Click-Through-Rate do we have for which keywords and ad placements?
• What is the average CPC?
• What is the impact when we put the AdSense box at place x?
• Could we earn more money if we replaced them with affiliate links?

The list can be much longer. A good method for a blogger to find new ideas is asking himself questions that are as specific as possible.

When thinking about what to write next, consider this:

1. Start small with a general blog post.
2. After reading a part of your post, ask questions as if you were a reader.
3. Answer these questions in another blog post if the question is interesting enough.

Bam. You have a new blog post with depth :)

What is your experience as a blogger? How many questions do you ask yourself if you write a post? Do you consider yourself a good question asker?

Giveaway : Win 3 Premium Developer Packages To Elegant Themes

To celebrate the release of the awesome Divi 2.0 Wordpress Theme we have teamed up with Elegant Themes for our latest Giveaway.We are delighted to offer our readers the chance to win one of three Developer Packages from Elegant themes that will not only give you access to Divi but full access to 96 other premium WordPress themes.

Lets see how you can enter and win your Developer package worth $89 then take a quick look at the Divi Theme.

Update 30-05-2014: The promotion is over. Here are the email addresses of the 3 lucky winners:

1. brookeb811 (at) gmail dot com
2. samir (at) formsarena dot com
3. paranthamanganapathy (at) gmail dot com

How To Enter The Giveaway

OK let's make it as easy as possible simply share this post then comment with your Email to be entered.You can share the post on your blog or any of your Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc..Then comment below with your name and Email address.You will have to add your Email to the comment as we can't contact you otherwise !

Example Comment :  John Doe, I shared the post on my blog and my Facebook my email is mymail@gmail.com.

The Divi 2.0 Theme

The Divi theme is one of the most versatile WordPress themes available and with the 2.0 release it has got even better.Check out the Elegant Themes blog to see whats new with Divi such as the Divi page builder and new post formats.

The Divi 2.0 Gallery page will show you all the updated features you can expect on Divi.So why not enter our free Giveaway for your chance to get access to Divi and all the Great Themes From Elegant Themes !

The Giveaway will run for one week so I will announce the three lucky winners on may 28th.

Best Of Luck !

How to Share Blogger Posts or Pages to Google+

When you share Blogger posts/pages to Google+, an entirely new group of people will be able to find and follow you. Right now, if you access your Blogger dashboard, you'll notice that there's a Google+ tab which can be used to connect your blogs with your Google+ profile or page. If your Blogger blogs haven't already been integrated with a Google+ profile, you can go anytime to the Google+ tab and click on the Get Started button:

It's important to note that once you've upgraded your blog to connect with Google+, the posts or pages published on your blog will be listed on your personal Google+ profile. However, you have the option to select whether your content will be shared on your Google+ Profile or Page and associate some blogs with a Google+ page, while keeping other blogs connected with your profile.

How to associate your blog with a Google+ page

In some cases, you may want to associate a blog with the Google+ Page for your brand, business or organisation, rather than your personal profile. For this, simply access your Blogger dashboard, visit the Google+ tab and there you can swap the Google+ connection from using your profile page to a Google+ page linked with your account:

On the right, you'll have the following options:

- Automatically share after posting: This option is enabled by default on all blogs linked to Google+. When you publish a blog post or page, a snippet will automatically be shared publicly on your Google+ page or profile. You can disable this setting just by unchecking this box.
- Promote to share after posting: If you don't want your post to be published automatically, then you can check this option. This option will allow you to share only some blog posts, or share to specific circles.
- Use Google + comments on this blog: This option enables the new Google + comment system on your blog. This is also a new feature provided by Google.

Share Blogger posts or Pages on Google+

If you have the Prompt to share after posting option checked, next time you publish a blog post, you'll see a share box inviting you to share your post with your Google+ followers. Note that the default circle is set to "Public" but you can modify your circles every time you choose to share.

Once you click the Share button, this post will appear on the profile or page to which you have connected your blog. Keep in mind that if you have posts scheduled to be published later, you will no longer be asked to publish to your Google+ stream. In this case, you can choose to Share your post/page at any time by clicking the Share link beneath a post or page.

You can also click on this option each time you want to share only certain posts, or if you want to retroactively share posts and you don't want to constantly change the setting.

As soon as you've chosen to use your Google+ profile on your blog, you can start sharing your content on Google+. If you haven't yet made the switch, click on this link to get started.

How to add Static Pages to a Blogger Blog (UPDATED)

A few months ago, Blogger has completely redesigned the section of the Pages, which now, looks very similar to that of the Blogger Posts. Now we will be able to manage the pages with more flexibility. For example, we can publish, delete or change many of them to draft at the same time - which has just the same function as the old Don't show option.

Among the options that we can find by hovering over a page and which we can see in the screenshot below are:

Edit: To access the editing panel and to edit its contents.
View: Open a new tab with the actual page.
Share: Share it on Google+ (which was not possible before)
Delete: remove a page.

In order to create a page, we need to open the pages editor from the button that says New Page. Almost every option tells us its function.

How to add a Web Address in the Pages widget

Many Blogger users wanted to know how can we add other web addresses, so that they display in the list of the Pages widget, since this option no longer appears in the "Pages" tab?

Well, now we will have to open the settings of the Pages widget by going to Layout, then click on the Edit link in the widget / gadget for Pages (if you don't have the Pages gadget, just click on the Add a gadget link and select "Pages" from the pop-up window). And from there, we will find the option that says: Add link page and we will have to type the Web Address in the second field every time we want to add a new page from a specific address or URL (see the screenshot below).

Another cool feature that has been built is that now it will be possible to add a search description, and in that field to add the text that we want to appear in search results. Until now, this option has been available only for blog posts.

This option will appear once you enable the Enable search description? option by choosing Yes. This will show up on "Meta Tags" by accessing the preferences for the search engines: Settings > Search preferences > Meta Tags > Enable search description?

Animated Zoom With Caption Effect For Pictures On Blogger

OK we all love image effects and we love them even more when they can be achieved using just CSS with no need for Javascripts.This effect not only added a neat slide out caption to your pictures but also the image will darken and zoom behind the caption.Check out the link to the demo below (Just hover over the Spice Up Your Blog screenshot on the demo page) and then I will show you just how easy it is.Make sure to watch the video tutorial at the foot of the post to see the effect being added to the demo.

Add Zoom Caption To Blogger

Click Here To View Full Post >>

Responsive CSS Timeline with 3D Effect for Blogger

Here's another amazing way to display our Blogger posts. By applying the following Responsive CSS Timeline View with 3D Effect on Blogger Posts, we will have a responsive timeline-like structure of the most recent posts and their thumbnails, along with some cool CSS effects. When clicking on the associated radio input, the posts snippet/summary will expand by changing their style and size and will rotate in 3D. The main structure of this CSS timeline with 3D effect is an unordered list.

To get an idea of what it looks like, you can visit this demo blog.

How to Add Responsive CSS Timeline View to Blogger Posts

Step 1. Go to Blogger dashboard > Template > click on the Edit HTML button:

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

Step 3. Type or paste the following tag inside the search box and hit Enter to find it:

Step 4. Just above the tag, copy and paste the following style:

Step 5. Search for the SECOND instance of this code below (hit Enter two times):

Note: depending on the template you are using, you could find more lines like this one above. Therefore, if you don't see any changes after saving the template, try to replace the last one, as well.

Also, please note that if you are using the Read more function, you may need to remove it in order to make it work.

Step 6. After you found - replace it this code:

• 
  
  
  

  
  

Step 7. Finally, click on the Save template button to save the changes.

Now, we will need to make some small adjustments in order to make the posts date appear correctly:
Go to Layout and click on the Edit link just below the Blog posts area. When the pop-up window appears, check the date option and choose to display the date in the following order (date/month/year):

Note that you can also hide the posts date by unchecking this option.
Finally, click on the Save button and that's it! View your blog and enjoy this Responsive Timeline view with 3D Effect on Blogger posts. If you need more help, please leave a comment below.

Credit: tympanus.net

How to Enable Google Plus Comments in Blogger

How to Enable Google Plus Comments in Blogger

Long time ago, Google proudly announced their new integrated commenting system which is now available for users who have created a Google+ profile and connected it with their Blogspot blogs. This way, Blogger users will be able to use Google+ as a commenting system for their blogs, while comments from Google+ will automatically appear on their blogs.

For those who haven't yet upgraded the Blogger profile to a Google+ profile, here's a tutorial on how to associate a blog to a Google plus page. Once you have connected a blog to a Google+ profile, you'll have a new "Use Google+ Comments on this blog" setting on the Google+ tab of your blog. To enable the Google plus commenting system, just check the box next to this setting:

As soon as you've enabled the feature through your Blogger Dashboard, you'll have the following features:

- Threaded commenting system: the threaded system will allow a reader to reply to other comments on that post, thus the conversations will become much easier, more effective and more enjoyable
- Public and private comments: this ensures a better privacy for your visitors which can make their comments either public or private
- Edit or delete comments: your visitors will be able to edit any comments that they wrote even after publishing, so they don't have to write another comment explaining the correction
- Google Plus One (+1) button in comments: we can up-vote any comment by clicking this button. This is a great feature which could also help you to get some traffic from Google+
- "Also share on Google+" check box: with this option which is right below the comment editor, we will be able to share a specific comment on Google+ and thus get more traffic!

Things to consider before adding the Google Plus Comments in Blogger:

- the Google Plus commenting system won't work for private and adult blogs
- If you are using a third-party commenting system like Disqus, your comments might not be retained when you enable Google+ Comments
- If you change domain name, comments will be gone. Therefore, it would be highly recommended to implement the Google Plus commenting system only after you've decided to use a custom domain name
- If you choose to allow comments pending moderation, you will have to visit the post in order to approve, hide or delete comments before they are publicly visible
- Only registered Google+ users can comment, this means that visitors who don't have a Google+ account will not be able to comment on your blog

How to Enable Google Plus on Custom Blogger Templates

If you are using a custom blogger template, the comments might not show up after checking the "Use Google+ Comments on this blog" setting. In this case, we will need to apply the following trick in order to enable it on custom templates:

Step 1. From the Blogger Dashboard, go to Template and click on the Edit HTML button.

Step 2. Click anywhere inside the code area and press the Ctrl + F keys to open the Blogger search box.
Type or paste the following line inside the search box and hit Enter to find it:

Step 3. Just below it, paste this code:

Step 4. Click on the Save template button to save the changes... and that's it. Now we should be able to enjoy the Google Plus comments in our Blogspot blogs.

Happy commenting!

Display Blogger Posts in Grid View with Thumbnails

Grid View with Thumbnails is a script for self-hosted Blogger blogs which will display blog posts as a thumbnail grid of images in homepage and archive pages. Instead of sending your blog visitors to a page that displays all the posts in full length with a large image which takes up too much space and requires too much scrolling, now you could have a clean page that displays a gallery grid, with thumbnails and post titles, linking back to the source post for that thumbnail. Let's take a look at what it could look like in this demo blog.

If you have a wallpaper or photo blog that would benefit from displaying a thumbnail grid style layout, look no further. Here's how you can add Grid (gallery) View to Blogger posts.

Adding Grid (Gallery) View to Blogger Posts

Step 1. Log in to your Blogger account and go to Template > click on the Edit HTML button

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

Step 3. Type inside the search box and hit Enter to find it.

Step 4. Just above the tag, add the following script and style:

Note:
- If you want to make the post thumbnails larger, modify the 200 (width) and 170 (height) values in blue
- To change the default thumbnail for when there are no images, replace the URL in red with your own.

Step 5. Click on the Save template button to save the changes and View your blog. Now you should have a nice grid view on your Blogger posts. Enjoy!