How To Do Image SEO For Blogger Blogs

Many of bloggers do not think of available possible ways of increasing traffic to their blogs. Most of us are contented putting labels in posts, giving good titles and effective writing in our posts. You can also use your images to bring good traffic to your blog by performing image SEO of your blogs.

Google has continuously looking for facilitating users and has been adding developments in its products in order to offer better experience to users. Google’s Image Search is also an advanced way to find out images / pictures on any topic. Even if users include ‘images’ or ‘pictures’ in search query, the results will be some different as the result page will automatically show several images related to the query and then normal search results will follow on.

Image SEO Importance

We will discuss here a couple of tips on how to optimize images in blogger blogs.

Using Keyword Rice Image Names

Using irrelevant, system generated filenames like alpha-numeric names for your images will not be helpful toward your image optimization campaign. Mostly, images are named like “DSC000329” or “2601201200034” and so on. These are because whenever you take a snap from either your cell phone camera or standard camera, it gives a system generated name to the image that is already programmed in the camera system.

However, before uploading your images to blogger posts ensure that you have given proper relevant names to your images. Saving your pictures with relevant and proper names is something you must consider during the time you sit for doing image seo. Let’s suppose you are uploading a picture of printed bed sheets, save your image as “printed-bed-sheets” or “printed-bedsheets” with its file extension.

Thus, using your keyword in your image filename will bring additional seo support for you through your images, aligning your image names with your alt and title text values as well.

Working with Image Tags

Normally, to enrich your posts with good graphics, you may insert two to three images inside your blog posts with text adjustments that fits best. Remember that whenever you upload an image to your blog there are some html tags associated with the image that you will need to run after for doing image seo for your blog. Although, there are many tags in html which can be used to specify images but for image seo following ones are important:

- alt tag

- title tag 

Alt Tag (Alternate Text for your Image)

alt tag refers to alternative text that describes your images to search robots. It tells search engines what the image is about so search engines can index it while fetching images to populate on images result page.

There is a simple way to add ‘alt tag’ to images in blogger that is as follows:

1. Upload the image to your blog post.
2. Click on the image and let the available options for images pop up.
3. Click on Properties
4. A Dialogue Box will be opened; click on the field with ‘alt text’
5. Insert your Alternate Text (Keyword) and click OK.

This is the simplest way to insert alt text to your image in blogger however if you are intrigued and wanna make things done yourself you can also insert alt text manually by with following steps:

1. After logging into blogger click on Edit on the relevant blog post.
2. Click on HTML (By default Compose Mode is active).
3. Find the code for image. You can find it by pressing Ctrl+F and write ‘<img’, if there are more than one images in your post then you will find this code more than one times. Identify Image by its details such as ‘src’ and sequence in your post.
4. Insert your alt text immediately after ‘<img ’ . like this:

                     alt=”YOURALTTEXTorKEYWORD”

Don’t forget to put space after ‘img’ and replace the words above with your desired alt text for the image.
5. Click Update and it's finished. 

Find this code in your blogpost html

Add highlighted code with img tag - Replace the quoted text with your own text

Title Tag

In the same way you can update your images with title tags. On Properties you have to click on the field with ‘title text’ and put your title for that image.

Optimize Image Tags in Proper Manner

Inserting alt and title tags roughly to all your images is not enough. You must use these tags fairly avoiding keyword stuffing. Never use many keywords for an image neither for alt text nor in title text.

Using full sentences and longer descriptions in your alt text will also lead to spoil your image seo efforts. Remember that you’re inserting ‘tags’ not writing a full description for your image.

For better idea of using what text for your image you can take help of Google Adwords Keyword Tool which will let you find out relevant keywords being searched around about any topic. It will help you get better ideas of keywords to be put as your alt text in your images.

P.S: Please share your experience or any help you further need by leaving your comments.

How to Hide Post Labels in Blogger

If you have finally decided that labels showing with each post in your blogger homepage or other pages are unnecessary and you have decided to remove them, this post is for you.

Labels in post footer sometimes might be of no use but even harmful for your blog as it may lead your blog to commit keyword stuffing. You might have already used labels in following elements of your blog:

-         Main Description of Blog

-         Labels Widget

-         In content/posts

Therefore, to avoid extra usage of labels, you could have been looking for ways to remove post footer labels from your blogs. 

Search engine spiders discourage use of unnecessary keywords on a page which is sometimes used to increase keyword density for the targeted keywords. It is to remember that keeping extra ordinary amount of keywords/labels on the page is not advantageous but will bring disadvantages from seo point of view.

Another advantage you may gain by hiding post footer labels is to reduce your page load time. Of course, if your page is set to display some posts on the homepage, let’s say, it is set to 10; removing labels from posts will definitely be helpful in speeding up your blog page load time. 

So it is time to normalize your search engine optimization efforts for your blog; here are the steps to remove post labels from your blog main page:

-         Login to Blogger

-         Click on Layout

-         Click on Edit HTML (Save / Backup Current HTML as a precautionary step)

-         Mark check on “Expand Widget Templates”

-         Press Ctrl+F to locate the code which causes display of labels below each post.

          This is the code section in your HTML:

<b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
  <data:postLabelsLabel/>
  <b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
  <a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond='data:label.isLast != &quot;true&quot;'>,</b:if>
  </b:loop>
  </b:if>

-         Find the code and delete all these lines; sometimes this section is encircled within a div, if so you can delete it altogether with div opening and closing.

-         Click Preview button before saving to check the changes.

-         Save Template and it’s finished.

Who Should Take Care of your Social Media?

Your new company is looking to expand to the next level with your online presence. Social media is a necessity of any online PR efforts so you want to start there. However, you’re unsure whether to handle it yourself or hire a firm to post, tweet and reply. On the one hand you’re the best person to represent the company you love, but others have way more expertise than you do. To help, here’s a breakdown of your options.

In-House

Keeping social media administration within the company comes with its own benefits. For one, a trained worker in your company is more likely to have specific knowledge of your product or service. This provides them with an edge to come up with a strategy that could be more tailored to your special needs.

Also, you’re guaranteed that an in-house social media administrator will spend their time on your business and your business alone. A social media/PR agency or professional will have several clients to dedicate their time to and thus possibly missing an opportunity someone wholly dedicated to your company might not.

Agency

A social media/PR agency will most likely have a professionally trained staff that is used to working in the specific and often quirky world of social media. The agents will be more attuned to the ins and outs of the business and may have solutions your in-house worker might not know exist.

You also might benefit from the environment they work in. If a strange issue arises, an agent can consult with the many peers at the agency to solve it. If it’s an established agency, they most likely have a database of past successes and can pull from that to best help your company.

On top of that, there’s a degree of separation that could come in handy, especially during a crisis. If your business receives negative press, someone associated with your company may get upset and do something drastic. A third party organization like a PR agency should handle it with no emotions attached.

Social Media Consultant

While not possessing the resources of an agency, a contracted social media consultant will most likely be able to dedicate more time to your company. While agents may be assigned public relations work as well as social media assignments (people assume they’re the same, but they’re quite different), a contracted social media expert works solely in this field.

As they already work with sites like Facebook and Twitter, they probably have many colleagues they consult with to get fresh ideas on how to best boost your company. With this, they tend to be a combination of an agency with an in-house worker.

That “degree of separation” the agency has may also come into play here, but potentially not as pronounced. Since the consultant’s client list will be smaller, they may take things as personally as you do when a customer complains or insults the company. However, if they’re doing their job correctly, this won’t happen.

Which option would work best for your business?

By Mickie Kennedy, founder and president of eReleases, the online leader in affordable PR distribution since 1998. Download the free whitepaper LinkedIn for Business, a must-read for the well-networked PR professional. Follow eReleases on Google+, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

How Does Google Analytics Improve Affiliate Marketing Conversions?

Google has come under fire recently for encrypting organic search referrals, so that webmasters see “not provided” instead of the searcher’s keywords in their referrer logs. This change has led to some webmasters questioning whether there’s any point using analytics at all.  That reaction is understandable, but it’s taking a rather simplistic view of the analytics service and what it has to offer.  Even with the removal of keyword data for an increasing number of searches, Google Analytics still has a lot to offer online marketers.

Social Media Tracking

Social Media is becoming an increasingly important marketing tool. Many webmasters get a huge percentage of their traffic from social media mentions, shares, likes and retweets. If this sounds like your business, then the reach tracking and social media monitoring features of Google Analytics will probably be more important than the now dying-out keyword tracking feature.

Intelligence Alerting

Intelligence Alerts are a handy feature of Google Analytics that will warn you if your campaigns go over-budget, or if you see a drop in conversions, a sudden spike in traffic or anything else out of the ordinary. Intelligence alerts are incredibly useful for busy webmasters. Simply define alerts for the things that are important to you, and Google will notify you by email when those things happen, so you can log on to your control panel and find out more about what’s going on, then fix the problem or take advantage of the circumstances that have caused the traffic spike.

Goals

Now we’re getting to the true meat of the Analytics service. If you aren’t using Goals, you are missing out on a huge intelligence advantage. Webmasters can define all kinds of goals. You can set up goals for “Subscribe to my email list” or “buy my product”, and then watch people as they navigate your site and travel along that goal. Tracking goals in this way is important because it makes it easier for webmasters to see what’s going on with their users. If you are losing a lot of customers at a certain point along the conversion process you can investigate that page and correct whatever issue it is that is driving customers away.

Goals and conversion funnels are an invaluable marketing tool that let you watch what consumers are doing on your website. This tool is great for fixing problems with squeeze pages and signup forms, and figuring out why your conversion rate is not as good as it should be. You can visualize your Goals using the analytics goals funnels function.

Affiliate marketing is a complex task, and you need to have everything finely tuned in order to be successful. If your keyword choices are poor, your SEO is weak, or your squeeze page ineffective, then your business will not be a success. Google Analytics, when used in conjunction with Webmaster Tools and AdWords, can help you to measure, track and understand what is going on with your website.

This article has been written by Philippa L on behalf of the Twist Forum. Philippa has a great deal of knowledge regarding affiliate marketing and has decided to share this knowledge with other affiliate marketers to improve their conversions.

How To Use Press Release Submission Effectively For SEO

SEO Press release is similar to a standard press release with just one difference. SEO press release will have content that is optimized for SEO to provide greater search engine visibility. By using PRs you can keep the journalists, prospective customers and existing customers updated about the products and services offered by you. Many businesses nowadays use press release submission as part of their SEO campaign to increase brand awareness. If you are interested to know more about what a PR is, click on the following link,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release.

It is important to ensure that you write it properly caring the guidelines discussed in this article. It should contain embedded links that will direct users to relevant pages on your website. When a good SEO PR is submitted and distributed through a good press release distribution service, it will find its way into other third party websites and this will build a powerful set of backlinks to your website. This will improve the search visibility of your website as you have established a strong set of backlinks. In this post, we will look at a few tips that will help you to create it in a SEO friendly way.

Tips for effective SEO press release submission

Include your primary keywords

• Keywords are the most important aspect of any SEO strategy and therefore you should include your primary keywords in the press release
• Research to identify the primary keywords for your business
• Ideally, you should have your primary keywords 2-3 times in the press release.
• Ensure that the keywords are spread out and are not bundled close to each other

Create a compelling headline using your primary keyword

• Headlines play an important role in attracting users to your work
• The average length of a headline is 70 characters. So create a headline that will wow your audience within the 70-character limit.
• The title has to be short, sweet and attractive.

Create a content relevant sub heading

• Use the sub heading to provide information on the content
• The sub heading is as important as the headline and therefore it has to be attractive and relevant to the content and the headline

Use relevant links in the press release

• The content in the landing page for the links that you use has to be relevant to the content that is present in your PR
• Double check if the links you have provided work before you make your submission
• Do not link the same page to the keywords. Use different landing pages for maximum effectiveness
• Try to provide third party links inside that talk about research or surveys in your area of business. This will help bolster your work.

Provide current information related to you company

• Towards the end of the press release, add information about your company. Ensure that the information provided is the latest.
• You can add a few lines regarding your products or services as final additions to the press release.

Add images

• By adding a compelling picture, you will be able to attract more audience to your submission.
• Pick an image that is relevant and unique for maximum effectiveness.

Matthew Anton is the co-founder of BacklinksVault.com, a company specializing in SEO and Social Media services for over 8000 active businesses.