CTR: Tips for Improving Google AdSense Click Through Rates

If you use AdSense you know that the more clicks you get the better. Because of this we are constantly trying to improve our AdSense click through rate by optimising our Ad placements. Seeing a drop in your CTR? Maybe its time to start testing.

Heres some things to try to improve your AdSense CTR.
 

Google AdSense ads should be a prominent feature

If you want to improve your AdSense click through rate you should not have too many other options for people to click on. For example when they visit a post the AdSense advertising should be an option for them to click through to. If you do have any other links around the post or in the post they should be leading to another article on your website with more AdSense on it.

AdSense should look like part of your content

If you have links on your website that are blue then blue text ads for AdSense are a good idea because it will look like part of your content. Do not make the ads look ugly. They need to blend in and look like a menu or extra options to click on.

Great content improves your AdSense CTR

Can Google AdSense pinpoint what your content is about? If you are getting ads that did not relate to your articles then this would be your fault. You need to make sure that each article is clearly about one subject and is search engine optimised to help Google decide what adds to put there. You can use Google AdSense section targeting if you feel that Google is not giving you the right ads.

Experiment with ad positions

You cannot just play sure ads on your website and expect them to get a good click through rate. You need to optimise them in every way. Just because an ad position works for one website does not mean that it will work for you, therefore you need to do some experimenting.

Do Keyword research

What keywords are bringing your website visitors to your website? If they are finding your website by typing in a keyword that has a low CPC then this is not good for your earnings or your click through rate. Google AdSense wants targeted visitors to click on targeted ads. For example if someone searched for "free desktop wallpaper" and found a computer website with virus program adds they would be less likely to convert than a person that had searched for "virus software".

The best way to find which keywords people are using to get to your website, is to go to Google Webmaster tools.

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Simple Ways To Improve Your Bounce Rate

Improving bounce rate can dramatically improve the overall performance of a site.

From building a stronger community to boosting CTR, bounce can be the difference between the success or failure of your campaign.

So what can we do to improve our sites bounce rate? Well, there are hundreds, if not infinite amount of ways to improve bounce rates, the only limit is our time and imagination. But, to save a bit of time and effort here are 10 tried and tested ways of improving your bounce rate.

Add a Search Box

If users cant find what they are looking for on the page they're on they will often turn towards the search box to hunt down the info they need.

Adding a search box to your site is a must. Having a search box basically allows your audience to tailor your site to suit there needs and head directly to what they want.

Display Related Posts.

I've touched on this in a previous post. Displaying related content on our pages is a great way to encourage people to click around. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to add a related posts widget/plugin to the end of your posts. For more on improving bounce with related posts click here.

Split Writing Into Smaller Parts

Reading through line after line of text with no paragraphs, heading or basic formatting is just plain boring and many people wont have the patients to see it through to the end, so they leave (hey! don't leave lol).

Try to create small chunks of info that makes your visitors want to read the next chunk and so on. Getting people interested in your writing will definitely keep them on site.

Page Load Time

Unless the user is a big fan, they are not going to stick around to wait for a slow ass site to load. If our sites are taking longer than 10 seconds to load, we need to take steps to reduce the loading time.

Cut out unnecessary images, heavy scripts and generally cut objects from your page that is not
needed. Do you really need that Gangnam Style GIF jiggling in the sidebar?

Page Design

The design or the look of a site plays a big part on the bounce rate. If visitors don't like what they see when they land on a page they will not stick around to look through the other pages, regardless of how good the content is. Take a look at some of the top sites out there. What can we take from their design to improve our own sites?

Display popular posts

Showing popular posts is similar to showing related post. But instead of of information related to a post, you are showing what other visitors find interesting. For some it may indicate that its worth reading. The fact that a page is 'popular', is enough to make some people want to read it.

Just like related posts, there are plenty of widgets and plugins to help you out.

Open external links in a new window

External links are a bit of a touchy subject. On one hand you want to offer your visitors relevant and useful information which at times means sending them to outside content, and in the other you want your visitors to stay on your site. Right?

Opening external links in a new window allows us to take advantage of both sides. Our visitors can view outside content but at the same time stay on our pages.

I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions just leave a comment. Thanks for reading

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Lower Your Blogs Bounce Rate With Related Posts

As we know, without traffic a web site is virtually useless so we take huge steps to increase our visitor counts. But a lot of us don't take into consideration how active these visitors are on site, after all, there is no point having lots of hits if know ones reading your stuff, right?

When looking at how visitors interact with your site the bounce rate becomes a very useful bit of info, and by knowing the facts you can work towards improving your stats. CTR a little low? You might want to check your bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate, put simply, is the percentage of bounced visits to your site.They jump in, they bounce out.
This is how Google describes bounced visits ...

• A user clicks on a link deep into your site sent by a friend, reads the information on the page, and closes the browser.
• A user comes to your home page, looks around for a minute or two, and immediately leaves.
• A user comes directly to a reference page on your site from a web search, leaves the page available in the browser while completing other tasks in other browser windows and the session times out.

A high bounce rate means people visit your page and leave almost straight away, a low bounce rate shows that your visitors are actually reading, participating and clicking around your site.
So you can see why it could be important to know this stat.

Improve Bounce Rate with related posts

To improve bounce rate we need to give users a reason to continue digging around our site and one of the easiest ways to do this is to place a related posts/content widget below your posts.

Related posts/content widgets usually display the title and sometimes a short summary of maybe 4 or 5 posts. Using thumbnails is great way of catching peoples attention. Check out the example image below...

By offering further information related to the content of the page or even something that looks interesting to read, you are not only supplying readers with a wealth of information you are keeping them engaged and more importantly on site.

Top related post widgets.

If you are interested in improving your bounce rate with related posts, here are a few third party related posts widgets you might want to check out...

LinkWithin

Link within is the related post widget I use here on VirtuaCash (may change soon). It is very simple to install on most popular platforms and you don't even have to sign up to use it.

NRelate

NRelate is very similar to linkwithin. You don't need to sign up to use it, although signing up gives you more advanced options. NRelate also allows you to make some money from your links.

Outbrain

Out brain is a popular widget that's great for customising using css. It also offers you the chance to make some money from your links, like NRelate.

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Are meta descriptions really that important?

SEO plays a major part in the success of any site and the 1st thing people usually do is to create or change their meta tags e.g Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords etc. OK, I'm going to assume most of you already know what meta tags are, for the rest of you, head over to this page to find out more...
http://www.virtuacash.co.uk/2011/09/how-meta-tags-affect-search-rankings.html

In recent years the way Google operates has changed a lot and its becoming more and more apparent that the use of meta tags such as the Keywords tag have become basically useless.

One meta tag that people still claim to be ultra important is the Meta description tag. The meta description tag allows you to describe your page to search engines, letting them properly index your pages and create the visible description for your pages in search results.

The thing is, if we don't use the description meta Google will create the description for us automatically, usually from the first paragraph of our posts. But what most people miss is the fact that by using a Static meta description they could be causing their page to show up in less search results.

If you have no meta description tag Google generates a description for you, and usually they pull the most relevant info from a page to display in searches. OK, I don't think I'm explaining this great, so here's an example...

I do a search for 'why cats like milk', this is one of the results that appears in the search...

Do Cats really Like Milk?
http://ilikecats.kitty/cats
This post talks about why cats do or don't like milk, random but hey hum.
 
Above is an example of a search result where the meta description tag is in use. The author created this static description and this is what will show most times this page appears in searches, but the page is not showing in results for the search 'My Cheshire cat is fat. Is it the milk?' for eg.

Here is an example of a page with no meta description tag but a descriptive opening paragraph...

Do Cats Really Like Milk?
http://ilikecats.kitty/cats
Cats in nature don't usually drink milk after they have grown up, where would they get it from?...
My cat got sick from drinking milk and I'm worried...

As you can see Google has automatically created a description from the opening paragraph and not only that, it has also added relevant text from elsewhere in the page.

The beauty of the results/pages with no description is that Google will create the most relevant, keyword specific description for you, based on the whole page not just a static meta tag. This allows your page to show up in more varied search results.

Say I had a comment about Cheshire cats at the bottom of the page, if I type 'My Cheshire cat is fat. Is it the milk? in Google, you may see a result that looks like this..

Do Cats Really Like Milk?
http://ilikecats.kitty/cats
Cats in nature don't usually drink milk after they have grown up, where would they get it from?...
I have a fat chesire cat? What do i feed it...

Now the page is appearing in searches like 'My Cheshire cat is fat. Is it the milk', 'why do cats like milk', 'My fat Cheshire cat is sick from milk' etc. 

As you can see Google has pulled the first few lines from the post and has also added text that contains the keywords 'Fat Cheshire cat' from the comments on that page (although in some cases Google will do this for pages with tags to). If the page was using a static meta description tag, it may not appear in that search results for 'Fat Cheshire cat' because of the lack of keywords in the meta description.

So, are meta description tags important?

Well in my opinion Yes and no, more no. They seem to be more important to submission sites that use meta tags to auto fill info on forms but not so much in Google. If anything, I have found that by only using a meta description tag on the home page and not on other pages saves you time, minimises duplicate content warnings, and allows your pages to show up in more varied searches based on the pages content and relevant keywords rather than the meta description. (You may have to use 'if' and 'else' statements to achieve this e.g if homepage, show meta description, else show blank.)

I think the thing that drives the popularity of the meta description tag, is the fact that people love to keyword stuff (which Google will penalise you for) and the fact that every next guru tells you that you will fail without it.

What do you think? Am I chatting rubbish? Am I explaining this all wrong and need to write it up a bit better? or do you agree with me? Please let me know.

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How to Check your Backlinks Easily with Google and Yahoo

As you all know, backlinks or quality backlinks are vital for the success of your site, page, article etc. and boost the chances of them making money online. But how can we easily and quickly check the number of backlinks we have without any programs or special tools? Well, the short video below will show you how to do a simple and fast backlink check using only Google and Yahoo search.

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List of Top Web 2.0 Properties/Sites for Building Link Wheels

Here is a big list of web 2.0 properties/sites to help you with link building. Most of these sites are perfect for creating link wheels (like in the image on the left) and the list is ordered by page rank.

Building link wheels

Try not to start building your link wheels to quickly, search engines like things to be as natural as possible. If you build them over a period of time like a few weeks, you should see an improvement in rankings.Also, try and make your link wheels simple then build upon them instead of making a vast complicated structure that will be harder to manage.
If there are any sites that you think should be added to the list, please let me know.

PR9

Wordpress.com

 

PR8

Squidoo.com  Weebly.com  Livejournal.com
Bravenet.com

PR7

Blogger.com
Blogsome.com
Wetpaint.com
Wikispaces.com
Xanga.com
Tripod.lycos.com
Tumblr.com
Quizilla.teennick.com
Viviti.com
Webs.com
Knol.google.com
Friendster.com

PR 6

Bigadda.com
Blog.co.uk
Blog.com
Zimbio.com
Gather.com
Diaryland.com
Edublogs.org
Opendiary.com
Sosblog.com

PR5

 20six.co.uk
Blog.ca
Hubpages.com
Blurty.com
Upsaid.com
Tabulas.com Tblog.com
Terapad.com
Shoutpost.com
Thoughts.com
Blogskinny.com
Free-conversant.com
Freeflux.net

PR4

Blogeasy.com
Blogstream.com
Blogstudio.com
Blogtext.org
Insanejournal.com
Journalfen.net
Journalhub.com
Bloxster.net
Bloghi.com
Mynewblog.com
Netcipia.com
Wikyblog.com
Blogigo.com
Freeblogit.com

PR3

Blogono.com
Blogr.com

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How to Edit your robots.txt file in new Blogger

If you have been on blogger for a while you will know that you couldn't directly edit your robots.txt file. The only way to change it was to use robots meta in your template. Now with the new upgrade to blogger we have access to this little but very important file. We can now change our robot.txt file from within our dashboard.

For people that don't already know what a robots.txt is , here's a little explanation of what they are and how they are used within your site.

What is a robots.txt file?

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.

Robots are often used by search engines to categorise and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard is different from, but can be used in conjunction with, Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

Why use a robot.txt file?

Sometimes you may want to stop certain parts of your site being indexed in search engines e.g. archive pages of a blog. The easiest way to let search engines know that you don't want these pages crawled is to use a robots.txt. You can set different rules for different robots and web crawlers depending on your preferences.

But, not all crawlers will listen to your robots.txt file and continue to access your pages, robots.txt simply asks not to be crawled it doesn't block access. Most big crawlers will follow your requests.

What goes into a robots.txt file?

There are various things you can put into your robots.txt file. Here is an example of a basic robots.txt file...

User-agent: * Disallow:
The example above tells all robots to visit all files because the wild card * specifies all robots.

User-agent: * Disallow: /
The example above tells all robots to stay out of a website.

You can also tell robots to not crawl specific directories. It would look something like this...

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /private/

For more information about robots.txt and what can go in it check out the wiki here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

How do you edit your Blogger robots.txt file?

Well, you cant really edit your Blogger robots.txt but you can use your own custom robots.txt info.

Blogger already has a robots.txt file but you cant edit it. When you create your custom robots.txt it will override the default rules and display your custom robots.txt info.

To create a custom robots.txt in new blogger...

1. Log into your dashboard and navigate to Settings and then in the dropdown menu select Search preferences.
2. At the bottom of the page you will see a section called Crawlers and indexing, in that section is Custom robots.txt.
3. Hit the Edit button on the right and enable it.
4. Enter you custom robots.txt rules and save changes. Done

Im not going to tell you exactly what to put in your  custom robots.txt, because each site is different and needs different rules. Before you start using robots.txt make sure you have properly researched the necessary rules for your type of site and you know exactly what you want crawled and not crawled.

Warning

Improper use can prevent your site from being indexed properly in search engines, so make sure you read a bit more about it and know what you are doing before proceeding.

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Using Google Webmaster Tools like SEO Pros

In this video Maile Ohye shows us how to use Webmaster Tools like a real SEO. She covers areas like reducing duplicates, utilising Search queries, and boosting PageRank along with many other useful bits of information. If you are looking for ways to enhance your pages SEO and traffic through using webmaster tools, then you will find this video very interesting.

Thanks for the vid Maile!

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11 Easy to use SEO Tips for Simple Optimisation

If you are looking for quick and easy to use SEO tips that you can implement right away with not too much effort, your in the right place.

These tips are not listed in order of importance, they are all definitely things to think about whilst creating pages.

These easy SEO practises are sometimes overlooked by even the best marketers and SEO gurus, but they can be very beneficial in the short and the long term and potentially make you more money online. You don't have to use all of the tips listed here but at least think about a few of them when creating your next project.

Beginning of Title

You should try to position your strongest keywords at the start of the title. Sometimes search engines can give the  first few words of a title more emphasis, the order you place your keywords can make a real difference.

Length of Title

Try to keep page titles short but descriptive, around 65 Characters is a good length. If your titles are to long they will be truncated by search engines, so its best to keep them short if possible.

Don't think about Page Rank too much.

It takes time to build decent page rank, so concentrate on creating as much quality content as possible, let your site age and soon your page rank will grow. Even sites with low pr can out rank pages with high pr.

Backlinks, quality not quantity.

Its always better to obtain good quality backlinks to your site over a long period of time than obtain a whole bunch of low quality links in a short space of time. The speed at which you get backlinks can affect rankings, so take it easy. Bad backlinks can have a long term affect on your sites rankings.

Keyword Stuffing

We need keywords in our pages, but don't over do it. Stuffing excessive amounts of keywords in your pages will have a negative effect. you want to make your content look natural, search engines love it.

Use multiple video hosting sites

Videos that pop up in Google search results aren't just from Youtube.
Make sure you upload your videos to various video hosting sites to maximise your chances. Vimeo is a good alternative choice.

Search Engine Friendly Site Navigation

Using Flash for navigation on your website can be bad news if you aren’t aware of how to make Flash objects accessible and web-crawler-friendly. Search engines have a really tough time crawling a website that uses Flash.

Unique Meta Data

Giving your pages unique meta descriptions will prevent duplicate data in search engines.
Every page should have its own set of meta data; it is just one of the things that helps search engines get a better grasp of how the structure of the website is constructed.

Image alt tags

This is something I need to think more about myself but image alt tags allow you give your images a description. Why do this? One reason to use image alt tags it so that if your images don't load for any reason the alt tag or description will be displayed instead. Your pictures will also do better in image searches.

Anchor text

If you can try to use keywords as anchor text for your links, and try to keep the text around links as descriptive and relevant as possible.

Number of links

Try to keep the number of links on any one page low as possible. I know this can be very difficult sometimes but over 100 is too many.

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How to submit a Full XML Sitemap for Blogger

Getting your site indexed with Google is key to the success of every site. Googles index is the most famous and well used search index on the Internet, so it makes sense to focus on them as a primary source of traffic.

Most sites will eventually be indexed if they are live long enough, but who knows how long it could take for Google to crawl your site and index you?

The great thing is Google and most major search engines offer us a way to 'guide' them to and around our sites so they can index us quickly and efficiently. These little gems are called Sitemaps.

How to Submit a Full XML Sitemap for blogger.

Submitting a Sitemap of your blogger blog to Google and other search engines is a fairly simple process. Nearly every blog nowadays have an RSS/Atom feed and most blogging platforms provide this by default, like Blogger. Your Sitemap is basically your RSS/Atom feed displayed as an XML Document.

The default URL for blogger Feeds look something like this...

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default or http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

You can submit this Feed as your Sitemap to help google find your pages, but there is a big problem with using the default feed.

It only displays 25 of your latest blog posts. What if you have 500 posts? You want all of them indexed right? Instead of submitting the above Feed you want to submit a Full Sitemap.
A full feed URL looks like this...

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 

The part in red means it will display posts from post 1, and the part in green means it will display a max of 500 post. So, you can see with this sitemap you will be able to submit up to 500 pages of your site.

Visit the link below to find out exactly how to add your Sitemaps to Google.
http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100283

What if I have more than 500 pages?

Simply submit a second Sitemap with a slight difference. Change the start point (the red part) to 501 like this...

http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

With the two site maps you will be able to submit page 1 to 500 and page 501 to 1000.
If you want to add more pages just change the start value e.g 1001, 1501, 2001 etc.

Hope this helps

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SEO Friendly Blog Post Titles the John Chow way

As most of you already know, your blog titles are one of, if not, the most important factor in ranking well with search engines. The problem is there are numerous ways we could go about creating SEO friendly post titles, everyone seems to have their own way of doing it.

Even though there are various methods or strategies for thinking up seo friendly post titles one thing is common to all of them, keyword research. Keyword research can take a lot of time when done manually,  so aren't we all glad that there are many automated (well, semi) ways of doing this tedious task.

I have previously posted about keyword research using Wordtracker and Gtrends , but i came across this video by John Chow that demonstrates a neat little Wordpress plugin called Keyword Winner. Using this plugin you can do post title research from within your post editor as you create a blog post.

Check it out below and let me know what you think.

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Free Niche Keyword research with Wordtracker Gtrends

A lot of you have probably seen all the hype from marketers telling you to buy the latest next thing in keyword research, guaranteed #1 spot. You probably also heard of niche market research programs like market samurai. The real and blatent truth is you can do good niche keyword research without the use of an over hyped program and of course, for FREE.
There are many ways to do market research, but this post focuses on Niche Keyword Research using Gtrends at wordtracker.com.

The video below by Mark Flavin takes you through the process of using this awesome free keyword research tool to find the right niche market for you.


Gtrends: https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

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Niche Marketing, What are the benefits?

There can be great benefits to niche marketing, by creating a targeted niche marketing plan not only will your targeted keywords ranked but also the 50 or so that Google will rank for relevance and authority in your niche. This can help you drive quality traffic for a long, long time. What is Involved in A Marketing Niche Strategy? To reach the top of niche markets you need strategy. This can involve meeting the requirements of on and off page SEO, helping you to gain good rankings on search engines and high quality relevant content that attracts a target audience.

On Page SEO can Include:

• Niche Targeted Keyword in the title, first sentence as well as the tags. The body of your article should contain approximately 1.4-1.5 % of your niche-targeted keyword. So for every 100 words you will need to have around 4-5 of them.
• The most important on page strategy you can implement is by writing in "campaigns", what I mean by this is writing and publishing 4-5 blog posts along with 2 articles that are all related keywords of your niche market.

Niche marketing this way will give you the benefit of the search engines attention and shows that you are both an authority on this niche and have relevant content linking back to the keyword you are ranking for.

Other on page SEO considerations:

• Word press plug ins suchas Digg-Digg, all in one SEO and XML site maps are also essential for ease of syndication and site optimization.They also make it quick and easy for visitors and peers to share your connect online

Off page SEO can include:

• A content syndication plan, and peer support network by which you can share and syndicate each others content. Utilizing this niche marketing strategy is vital as it all goes towards your back links count when being ranked.

Using a niche marketing strategy, you can go into any sub niche selling any product or service and use it to rank in the top pages of the organic search listings. Be consistent with your campaigns as this lifts your page rank, which in turn also goes towards your ranking. The benefits of niche marketing are well worth the effort when you end up with a free lead generation formula that will go on working for years to come.

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How do backlinks effect Search Rankings and traffic?

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that websites search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.

Websites often employ various search engine optimization techniques to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.

Some methods are free for use by everyone whereas some methods like linkbaiting requires quite a bit of planning and marketing to work. Some websites stumble upon "linkbaiting" naturally; the sites that are the first with a tidbit of 'breaking news' about a celebrity are good examples of that. When "linkbait" happens, many websites will link to the 'baiting' website because there is information there that is of extreme interest to a large number of people.

There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. 

Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable 'editorial vote' for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage.

Another important factor is the anchor text of the backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. Anchor text and webpage content congruency are highly weighted in search engine results page (SERP) rankings of a webpage with respect to any given keyword query by a search engine user.

Increasingly, inbound links are being weighed against link popularity and originating context. 

 This transition is reducing the notion of one link, one vote in SEO, a trend proponents hope will help curb linkspam as a whole.

It should be noted that although many people will say building too many links too quickly will get you penalized, it actually will not. If it were possible to be penalized for building too many incoming links, people would target their competition for penalties by building "too many" links.

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What are Backlinks and How are they used? Off Page Optimization

Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. 

In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.

Inbound links as votes

Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a web page). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
Wikipedia



How do backlinks effect search rankings?

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Blogger: How to Add Dynamic Meta tags To Your Blog

Meta Tags are key to the success in search engines for any website or blog. If you have not already, you should add Meta Tags.

This post will show you how to add Meta Tags to your Blogger page which will create unique tags rather than creating duplicate content.

How to Add Dynamic Meta Tags

1. Log in to your blogger account >>Design >> Edit HTML
(Make sure you backup your template before editing)

2. Find this tag by using Ctrl+F

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

3. Paste below code after the above tag

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content='ADD YOUR WEBSITE DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/>
<meta content='ADD YOUR KEYWORDS HERE' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>

4. Replace PUT YOUR WHATEVER HERE with your description and keywords.

5. Click Preview to see if your page loads correctly before committing to changes.

6. Save Template and exit. Done

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Your Content Does Matter. Content rules

Making a content-rich website is the key to succeeding online, but "content-rich" doesn't mean having Harry-Potter-length content. You need a collection of short but informative pieces.

Collection

The more articles you have on your site, the more internet surfers you can capture. Because search engines provide page-by-page results, articles on different topics show up in search results for different keywords.

So if you have a lot of articles on different topics, searchers can find your articles in the search results for a wide variety of keywords - hence, more traffic to your site. In reality, however, not every article generates the traffic directly from search engines. But having a large collection of articles generates consistent traffic far better (because there is less of an effect on algorithm changes) than the average SEO.

Length

Many people think longer articles are better, but that is not so. Ideally, your article can be read within 60 to 90 seconds. This is how long the average person will pay attention. For my newsletter content, I try limiting the length of articles to less than 300 words. Considering the fast-paced behavior of internet users, I'd say 300 words is still rather long.

Special Concerns

If your target audiences are members of low-literacy groups, such as children or people with developmental disabilities, writing short content will become more critical. Low-literacy users need more time to read any given article than average-literacy users do.

Also, average-literacy users often scan and find the part of an article they want to read, but low-literacy users generally cannot do this; they read your content from top to bottom. Pay extra attention to every word you put in the articles to determine if each one is absolutely necessary.

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How meta tags affect search rankings

One of the most popular myths that just won’t go away is that if you put the right keywords in your meta tags, you’ll achieve a high ranking in search engines. Sorry, but meta tags aren’t the magic bullet you may have been led to believe...

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are hidden pieces of code that sit at the top of your website and provide information about your page. To see them, in your browser menu, go to “View” and then either “Source” (for IE) or “Page Source” (in Firefox). Then, look for any piece of code that starts “meta”.

There are all sorts of meta tags you can add to your page, but when search marketers talk about meta tags, they are usually talking about “keyword” and “description” tags. In the late 90s, meta tags played a much more prominent role. All you had to do was throw good keywords into your meta tags, and there was a good chance you could get a high ranking.

Then people started abusing the system and search engines wised up. Now, meta tags are virtually useless when it comes to achieving a high rank in search engines.

What Good Are Meta Tags?
So, you might be wondering – why bother? Just because search engines don’t use them to rank your website, many of them do use your description tag to display information about your website. Yahoo generally displays a portion of your description tag and MSN will usually display most of it.

That means, you want to make it compelling so that it accurately represents the content on your page and entices people to click on your URL. Remember, on any given page, you’re competing with anywhere from 10-20 other URLs. If what you say is relevant, it will catch searchers’ attention and they’ll click onto your website.

What About Title Tags?
Some marketers lump Title tags into the general category of “meta tags”. I don’t consider them such, but I’ll briefly address them here. Title tags are snippets of code that tell your browser what to display in the little blue bar at the top of your web browser.

Take this article, for instance. The blue bar should say “How Do Meta Tags Affect Your Search Rank? | Search Engine Marketing Tips” I put the title of this article, which has good keywords, in the blue bar as well as the general keyword “search engine marketing tips.”

Your title tags are extremely important and actually can influence your search engine rank. In fact, if you’re looking to appear for a specific keyword in search results, you should include that keyword in your title tags. They are also what is displayed in search results and whenever someone bookmarks your page, so like your “description” tags, they should let readers know what type of content they’ll find on your page.

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How keywords affect your sites rankings

This article explains a few things about SEO, and if you're interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you don't know.

We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we’ll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren’t at all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool – it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It’s a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on...

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page’s keyword density. These tools are good if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, as they’re very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn’t a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won’t be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one’s really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure – you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

I trust that what you've read so far has been informative. The following section should go a long way toward clearing up any uncertainty that may remain.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine’s algorithm is different. Here’s a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.

2. Page title.

3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).

4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).

5. Meta tags (especially description).

6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).

7. Alt text (the ‘alt’ descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you’ll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

As your knowledge about SEO continues to grow, you will begin to see how SEO fits into the overall scheme of things. Knowing how something relates to the rest of the world is important too.

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