Best Ways to Enhance Your Article Ranking

Article marketing is readily one of the most popular ways digital marketers attract traffic to their websites. If your articles are ranked high by search engines, particularly Google, they tend to attract more organic traffic. The more traffic your articles attract to your website, the more leads you generate and consequently the more sales you make. The articles you write either directly on your website/blog as well as on other websites as a guest blogger must not only be of high quality and informative, they must be impactful enough to grow your readership. That simply means traffic. Getting these articles ranked high in the SERPs of search engines depends on several factors. The following are some tested techniques you need to make that high ranking happen.

    
Diligently Research Keywords

Keyword research is a key component in search engine optimization, SEO. Since your articles must be related to a niche and an industry, you need to diligently research keywords to determine which are most relevant to your niche. These keywords provide great and highly valuable insights into what people are looking for on the web. When you incorporate these keywords in your articles, they help search engines to find and rank your articles. These keywords, search terms or search phrases help your articles to rank high in the SERPs of Google. You can take advantage of the many keywords research tools online to determine the right keywords for your articles. When Google finds more relevant keywords in your articles than other articles, it is more likely to rank your articles higher than the others.

Be Consistent

Consistency is a key ranking component in Google ranking. To improve the ranking of your articles therefore, you must be consistent. When you are consistent in writing and without let, Google notices. This consistency together with some relevance of your articles will build up over time to prompt Google to rank your articles. Therefore, aside helping you to stay motivated in your articles writing, the buildup can stand you out in the ‘eyes’ of Google. That helps your ranking a great deal. A good ranking means good organic traffic.

Write Impactful Content

For your articles to rank high on the SERPs of search engines, you need to research and use the right keywords that are relevant to your niche and are heavily searched. Your content must not only be highly relevant for these keywords, it must also make sense for the context of your articles. Be careful not to overuse your selected keywords on any particular article. Doing so is keywords stuffing which search engines can penalize your content for. It is ok though to use your keywords enough times throughout the content. But if you overuse them, it will make your content seem like spam in the eyes of search engines. Search engines tend to ignore and even penalize any content that appears to them like spam.

Get Backlinks

You can reach out to other high value content or blogs in your niche to see if they accept guest posts. When you find any that accepts guest articles, you can create a compelling title for your articles on their sites. The aim is to get backlinks to your own website. In your guest articles, it is good to include keywords that your target audience might use to search for information on the topic of your articles. Doing so can help enhance engagement for the content. If your title is thus engaging enough, and you include the links back to other articles on your website in the Author’s Resource Box, you get valuable backlinks in the process.

 

Ensure Your Content is Original

Always make sure your articles are original and not copied from anywhere else. Search engines see copied articles as spam in the extreme but if they manage to rank them at all, they never rank them highly. For this reason, one great way to improve your article ranking on Google is by providing original content only. To write original articles, make sure you take quality time to research and write about topics in your niche that are relevant for your audience. Pass each article through smart software like Copyscape to determine its originality before publishing the article. This is about the most reliable way to make sure that you do not deliberately or inadvertently plagiarize any material from any other sources. This is very important because Google’s algorithms can penalize your page rank if they detect plagiarized material in your article. Making sure your articles are original this way may take time and efforts but really worth the while. If your content is judged by Google to be original, it will lead to an increase in views and clicks over time. That ultimately will lead to an increase in traffic and rankings on the SERPs of search engines.

Read the Articles You Link To

The essence of reading articles before linking to them is to find out if such articles can add value to yours or they will detract from it. Reading and understanding the articles you link to is therefore a great way to be sure you are not linking to a poor quality, junk or plagiarized material. Be sure to include relevant keywords in both the title and in the first sentence or two of your article. This is hugely important because these first few words are often used by search engines when determining how to rank content. Once the keywords on the article directly reflect what people are searching for on Google, it helps to enhance the ranking of the content.

Use SEO Tools to Help your Ranking

You can effectively use SEO tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to enhance the ranking of your articles. These tools are smart tools which allow for a more in-depth analysis of the competition and how well you are doing against them. They provide you many other valuable insights to help you rank better on the SERPs of Google. Your competition is made up of people who are in the same niche you are and are competing for attention with similar keywords. Moz’s tools help you to know what they are doing and how you can better do what they are doing to get a better ranking on Google.

Include a Title and Meta Description

Creating optimized titles helps your articles to rank better in the SERPs of search engines. If properly done, it will help your articles to stand out from the rest in the eyes of search engines. Title and Meta tags act like some kind of guides to direct search engines to what is in your content. If your title has a meta description, it acts as some kind of snippet that shows up below your title on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You must however be sure that your meta description is between 100-150 characters in length. This provides a visible and easy-to-notice summary of what your article is about. It is usually long enough to induce more curiosity without necessarily delving into deeper details about the article.

Wrapping Up

Taking steps to help your articles rank high on the SERPs of search engines is a very smart thing to do if you are into articles marketing. First is to write quality articles and with the relevant keywords in the content. Next is to get search engines to notice them and possibly rank them. The foregoing tips and techniques are very handy in that quest. Why not give them a try?

5 Simple Ways to Enhance Your Domain Authority

No good internet marketer can afford to ignore the Domain Authority, DA, of their websites. Even though Domain Authority may not have direct effect on the SERP ranking of any website, it somehow helps to provide some insights which help to improve SEO efforts that directly impact on the ranking. There are web tools you can use to measure the DA of your website. Your website DA could be high or low depending on the efforts you are putting in to enhance its performance. What you should immediately suspect when your site has a low DA score is that it has serious issues like spam backlinks and keyword stuffing which are harmful to the site. Next is to take conscious and deliberate simple steps all aimed at restoring the site DA which will in turn impact your site SERP ranking. By knowing all the factors that influence the ranking metrics of your website, you can take steps to have any problems fixed immediately by way of preventive measures to prevent the DA score from further dipping. Here are 5 simple things you can do.


 
#1. Choose the Right Domain Name

This is a given if you want to make any impact at all in internet marketing. If you don’t have a domain name yet, it’s time to get one. A great domain name is good for branding and SEO, the reason it must be carefully chosen to help promote your brand. It contributes immensely to enhance the credibility and trustworthiness of your website. These in turn help to make possible higher Click Through Rates, CTR, and consequently the conversion rates of the site. They impact positively on your SERP ranking and Domain Authority. Because you need a good domain for easy identity of your brand and easily recognizable, it is best to settle for a domain name that is short, catchy and relevant to your site niche and business identity. Marketing experts advise that the name should be devoid of symbols and uncommon spellings and syllables as these do harm a domain’s readability and memorability.

#2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Right now, the whole world is on the move. People are doing business and marketing products on the go. Thanks to hand-held smart devices which have become extremely very popular worldwide. With over 4 billion unique users accessing the web through mobile devices, it is one huge market any serious marketer cannot afford to do without. You can easily get left out of that huge market if you are unable to optimize your website to make it mobile friendly. If you are a marketer and you cannot optimize your website for mobile users, you hugely risk losing about half of your web traffic. That no doubt will negatively affect your DA score. A responsive web design with the appropriate apps can help make your website mobile friendly.

#3. Always Optimize Your Content

The way content is treated on your website is one of the most important factors that affect the DA score of your website. Apart from helping your brand to build a solid and formidable audience base, quality content is also a delight for Search Engines. Quality content best appeals to Search Engines’ algorithms that prioritize websites with valuable information. That makes it imperative for you to continually optimize your content for better results. Web masters can help you do this for a small fee. If however you have the knowhow yourself, you can routinely incorporate niche-based keywords, customized meta descriptions while adding internal linking in your content. Doing so helps to increase the Click Through Rates, CTR, on the site while greatly decreasing the bounce rates.

#4. Produce only High Quality Content
 
For online marketing, content is king. Your content must be designed for persons and not search engines. That is why you must make sure to always produce unique and informative quality content on your website which attracts visitors and keeps them long enough on your site to notice the brand you are marketing. Creating a linkable high-quality content can also help you to gain high-authority links pointing to your site. High-authority links with characteristic high DA scores and SERP rankings means such websites already have well established authority and trust with search engines. By associating your site with such high authority websites, search engines are likely to deem yours just as reputable and trustworthy as well. By adding external links from high authority sites, it encourages such linked sites to visit yours mostly out of curiosity. Your website gains immensely when such sites link back to you if they like your content. That way, you can eventually build a great and beneficial network within your niche. That helps to enhance your website DA and your brand.

#5. Regularly Edit and Remove Bad and Spammy Links

Most Search Engines particularly Google are highly intolerant of spammy links. Regular algorithms deployed by Google easily detect spammy links and links stuffing and they punish such websites very severely. That is why expert marketers always advise that it is best to avoid linking your website to low-authority and shady websites. With the use of reliable Web spam score tools, you can regularly review and edit your content to remove bad and spammy links. That helps to improve the good health of your website, its DA score, Spam score and the overall reputation of your website.

Top 5 SEO Mistakes Bloggers Must Avoid

Daily and in the past several years, the digital marketing landscape has had tremendous and very significant changes. The reasons for these changes emanate from the fact that bloggers are becoming more knowledgeable and serious about blogging business, and the search engines are becoming smarter by the day. Nobody wants to lose out amidst all these changes. Bloggers have discovered that blog posts which specifically use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give relatively more opportunities to rank in search engines and get customers to visit any site. Whether you’re new to the blogosphere or you have been blogging for some time, it pays to be aware of some of the most common SEO mistakes relative to blogging. Significantly, some SEO mistakes may seem basic because they occur often. Even at that, they manage to hinder many blogs from achieving optimal search engine rankings. Optimizing blogs for SEO may be a very tedious business, but it is necessary if you’re looking to reach your audience and compete against others in the blogosphere which a highly competitive atmosphere out there on the Internet. Here is a list of the top 5 SEO avoidable mistakes which many bloggers routinely make.

01. Not Inserting Internal and External Links in Your Blog Posts
 
Inserting links on blog posts help to prove to search engines that your content is valid and relevant. Internal links should link to a core or pillar page on your website, as well as direct readers to a related blog. If your blog includes a topic that has been mentioned in another blog post or web page, you should link back to that page. Internal linking helps to keep visitors on your site and helps surface your other authoritative pages to search engines.

02. Failing to Optimize Title Tags

A real grave error if optimizing title tags is overlooked. This is because title tags are one of the most important aspects of search engine rankings. Readers and search engines use title tags to determine the relevancy of any blog content. The real reason you should always keep your title tags targeted towards a keyword whose popularity you must have chosen using any relevant keyword tool before optimizing for it.

03. Keyword Stuffing

This is at times known as blackhat technique in SEO which many search engines now frown at. It should be avoided at all cost. Expert bloggers now know that keyword stuffing, that is, including keywords as much as possible in your content, is readily one of the most common SEO mistakes many bloggers make. It can be avoided by sticking to one or two long-tail keywords to center your blog post around. Long-tail keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. They invite and encourage visitors to read your whole post and seek more information from you thereby helping to recognize your expertise.

04. Poor Page Copy

Blogging is a highly competitive business and the attention of online surfers is always very limited unless there is something unique that helps to arrest their attention for a while. Therefore, when writing a blog, you must keep in mind that you are writing to help people solve their problems. Your blog is not meant to impress search engines but to impress real people. For this reason, you must endeavor to keep your content light, informative, educational and entertaining. A good content is one that can be easily understood and is visually appealing, utilizing the simplest language while discarding unnecessary jargon.

05. Not Writing Enough Content
 
Out of pure laziness, many bloggers tend to write too little content. Search engines have no respect for content that is too scanty. Besides, writing short posts can hurt your reader loyalty. When search engines identify your blog as “low quality” simply because it doesn’t have enough content, it is extremely difficult for them to rank. Expert bloggers now recommend an ideal blog post of 300-750 words. Don’t get caught in the web of not writing enough content for your blog. If you do, it can rub off negatively on your blog ranking. 

 

Quickest Ways to Improve Your Blog Ranking

Webmasters and online marketers now rely heavily on blogging to improve their website’s ranking on search engines. That is because they have come to realize that blogs have become a powerful source for online marketing. However, many newbie bloggers still fail to know that without proper SEO, many blogs never get to rank high in search engines.  The real reason their blogs and websites remain relatively unnoticed by web surfers. Therefore, if you want to utilize your blog for effective marketing of your business, you’ve got to do all you can to improve your blog’s ranking by search engines.

Here are some tips which can help you to quickly have your blog ranking high in search engines:


 
Get Your Blog on Social Media
 
These days, social media is where everyone seems to be. As a result, you get to find social networking sites in almost every corner of the web. Because of the popularity of social media sites, they have become the best places to meet people with the same interests online. That makes them very ideal places where you can get important links. You can easily create a brand name and improve your brand popularity on social media if you regularly post high quality articles which get noticed and attract comments from readers.

Do Blog Commenting
 
This is particularly very helpful when you comment on blogs which are already very popular. The popularity of such blogs somehow helps your comments to be indexed by search engines. That helps your own blog ranking as well. Adding relevant comments to other’s blog posts is another effective way to increase blog traffic. You must be sure your comments are relevant to the topic and informative enough to attract comments. When readers find your comments useful, they naturally get more curious to find out more about you. That consequently attracts clicks on your link back to your own website or blog. That means more traffic!

Give Your Blog Wide Exposure

To boost your blog’s search engine ranking and traffic, you must explore all ways to give it maximum exposure. One of the best ways to do so is by syndicating it with RSS feeds to give it full exposure. With RSS feeds, whenever any modification or addition is made on your blog, your audience gets updated quickly and seamlessly.

Do Social Bookmarking

This is one online activity which only experienced hands in the business can use effectively. When properly done, bookmarking helps immensely to increase both traffic and search engine ranking of your blog. Technically, what social bookmarking does is to allow your blog users to save and create a collection of their favorite bookmarks, categorize them and later share them with other users. These other users can further subscribe the bookmarks to other’s lists and even add bookmarks from other lists to their own. This way, your blog gets further propagation thereby getting exposed more and more. The more bookmarking you do, the more blog traffic you get and that helps your search engines ranking a great deal.

Tips for Writing SEO-Compliant Content

As every online marketer very well knows, targeted traffic is very crucial to succeeding in affiliate marketing. The more targeted traffic you can drive to your website, the more the sales you can make. Therefore, your first duty as a marketer is to explore credible ways to build traffic to your affiliate marketing website. You can’t get organic traffic if important Search Engines like Google are unable to locate your website easily then rank it for searches. That is what is technically called SEO, Search Engine Optimization and it usually takes some techniques to get it right. Part of those techniques is to have a good placement for your website on Google SERP pages. If you do that correctly, you will attract more visits, which is good for affiliate marketing, especially if it is targeted. SEO is a very important success factor in affiliate marketing and it all starts with the content. By using these tips, they can help you to go a long way to create content that is search engine friendly.


 
Here are some of the techniques you need to get your content ranking high on SEO.

Choose Your Keywords Correctly: First you must decide on your keywords depending on the niche business you have settled for. This is where keyword research comes in. This you can do by using Google web technology tools to find keywords relevant to your affiliate marketing niche. Before writing a content, you should always have your chosen keywords in mind because every post must contain one or more of your chosen keywords for effects.

Target One Keyword at a time: You can’t afford to be aimless with your content creation. For that reason, every piece of content you create should have a clear purpose with a keyword as its unique identity. For best results, each article or piece of content should target one main keyword even if with some expertise, you may choose to add a few secondary keywords which help to capture clusters of long tail keywords related to your main keyword.

Use the chosen Keyword in Important parts of the Content: What counts here is to try to add the keyword in the right places on the content. Experts recommend that you place your keyword most preferably in the title, in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and in between. Adequate care must however be taken not to stuff your content with keywords as Search Engines like Google are now smart enough to detect such gimmick. If they do, they could penalize you severely for it. It pays to also include keywords in the alt-text of images.

Use Hierarchy in your Content: If you want to make your content easy to find by visitors, you must use hierarchy in it. This involves the use of Headers and Sub-Headers to show relationships between the different sections of your content. When visitors find it relatively easy to find and navigate your content, it makes them happier. The happier your site visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to stick around to view and hopefully click on your affiliate promotions. Search Engines too also love Headers because Headers provide them useful clues which help the Search Engines to better understand what your content is all about.

Build Internal and External Links: Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Therefore, when writing a new content, you must endeavor to find older content that is relevant to your current content and add links pointing at them. It is not smart to just embark only on promoting your affiliate marketing links. Using appropriate links also helps to promote your older content. Once you complete any article, it helps to also link to it from some of your older content making sure you use the main keyword in the anchor text of the internal link.