Thursday, 6 June 2013

Google PageRank update 2013 News.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 26 comments
PageRank is one of the factors webmasters considers in measuring their progress. Newbies are so obsessed with this PageRank thing that they Check PageRank almost weekly although they are familiar with the fact that its not gonna change until the next PageRank update. 
Google Page Rank update 2013

Google has updated PageRank quarterly in the year 2012: 

▌ 7 February 2012 

▌ 2 May 2012 

▌ 2 August 2012 

▌ 7 November 2012 

The only update in this year has been on 

▌ 4 February 2012. 


Going by the trend, the next update would have been in the 1st week of May. However, there is no still sign of it.

Google has updated it at a consistent base in the last year. There are predictions all over the internet with PageRank update rolling in the last week of June, still no one is sure of it. 

Now what if Google do not updates PageRank this quarter? 
This may provide a relief to blogs that have used black hat SEO and link building strategies like buying backlinks. However, for a small publisher like me and thousands other who are practicing healthy link building strategies,  its a sad news. An increase of 0 to 1 in PageRank is really a motivation to small bloggers. The delay or cancellation of Update this quarter will only make us wait for another 3 months to measure the progress. 

Hoping for the next update to roll out soon. Fingers crossed. !! 

mb.

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

How to change Blogger's default Template.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 26 comments
Blogger's worst thing you may have noticed is its years-old templates. The dashboard has been revised but the templates remains same. However, with time, there has been hundreds of third party templates designed and released for free to blogger.com users. These third party templates needs to be manually uploaded to blogger.com. Here is a quick tutorial to change your bloggers default template.
 

▌ Go to Blogger Dashboard > Template

▌Select Backup / Restore option from the right hand side upper corner of the template dashboard.

▌ Download full template before uploading any third party template. You don't want anything wrong with your already developed blog, so keeping a backup is always a necessary thing. 
 
Blogger Template Backup / restore
▌ Now, browse through your PC and select the template you wanna upload. The template will be uploaded. 


How to customize your already applied Template: 

▌ Go to Blogger Dashboard > Template. Select Customize. 

▌ Blogger Template Designer is open. Now you can adjust Widths, size, Background Images, Templates Fonts and many more. 


If you know HTML and javascripts, you can manually modify your site's design by going to 
Blogger Dashboard > Templates > Edit HTML. 

Important: Don't forget to keep a backup of your template before making any change. Always preview your template if you edit its HTML source, if its loading correctly, you are in right direction, else, you need to revert changes. 

mb.

Tuesday, 4 June 2013


Media.net is a contextual advertising network similar to AdSense with Yahoo! Bing network 
shaking hands with media.net to provide better revenue earning systems to publishers. Its relatively new to AdSense and is seen as better AdSense alternative. However, my personal experience till date is not so encouraging. 

▌How I got approved. 
There is no sign-up process. You request an invite from their website filling out all the details and they will manually review every site / blog. If they find your blog complying with their policies, they will accept you. I didn't have much problem getting approved since I already have optimized my site in accordance to AdSense program policies and more or less, its same for Media.net. You may want to read how to get approved by AdSense. 
 
▌Whats benefit of Media.net? 

○ The Ads are very much targeted and contextual. So you don't have to worry much about bad User experience. 

○ A very good customer support. Mail them any problem you have, and they will reply you within 48 hours. That never works with AdSense. 

○ Really less chances of getting banned like AdSense. Even if you are, you have someone to ask the reason, and most probably you will be replied. 

○ Ads are new. Visitors have become blind to AdSense ad units. Media.net provide new Ads sizes and units and customization is much easier and better. 
 
▌After Approval, 1st week. 
I placed one Ad unit each on 2 of my blogs. The earning was simply amazing. Yeah!! The minimum RPM was $2. i earned an RPM of even 18$ for one particular day. I was damn excited. I started replacing AdSense ad units with Media.net units, downgrading AdSense to second choice for earning. It went the same for almost 2 weeks. 

▌What Next!! 
zero RPM media.net
RPM dropped to zero! I thought it may be due to any traffic problem or my blog may not have generated quality traffic. But the RPM never really increased till date. I am still keeping one ad unit on each blog, but RPM is still zero. For the last 2k visitors, I have earned zero.


▌Why I switched Back to AdSense. 


○ With AdSense, at least I know how i get paid. How much clicks I received and CPC. Media.net is not transparent enough. They don't tell you how you earned, whether it was Clicks or impressions that increased your balance. 

○ Each site needs to be approved. If i maintain 10 blogs, I have to apply for each blog separately. With AdSense, if you are approved once, you can place ads on any blog/websites that complies with AdSense program policies. 

○ Not suitable for blogger domains. If you have a blog blog.blogspot.com, then perhaps you will miss a good amount of visitors. Google has incorporated Blogger's domain redirection.  That means you will have to get approved for each of the domain separately .com, .in, .au, and the list is endless. 


▌Now what I am gonna do. 
I will keep this option for another month with a close eye on my earning. If the RPM sticks to zero, I will remove the Ads and believe that old rule, "AdSense is best". 

Have you tried Media.net? Whats your experience? Share with us. 

mb.

Monday, 3 June 2013

Creating a blog, either as a hobby or with the intention of making money, the top priority has always been to reach out to maximum people. And linkedIn is often missed out in driving traffic to your blog.
Driving traffic to your blog through LinkedIn/

The main reason why LinkedIn is not used effectively by other bloggers is the fact that Its not so social like Facebook, primarily considered as a job-seeking resume uploading website, and due to its somewhat difficult to use interface. 

However, if used consistently, LinkedIn can boost your traffic to a great extent and the major benefit of traffic from LinkedIn is that you get highly targeted visitors - Quality traffic.

Here is 5 ways of getting traffic from LinkedIn: 


▌Update your profile. Complete your profile 100%, add your own profile picture, and fill out all the details seriously. The more you look genuine, the more you attract people towards your shares and posts. If your profile is partially completed and weak, people may never read visit your profile or follow you or add you in their connection.
One more benefit of completing linkedIn profile is that your linkedIn profile is directly shown in search engines. Anybody going for a search of your name will likely to find you in search results.
Keeping a genuine account also improves chances of engagement with other people on linkedIn. Extending your reach is always beneficial. 

▌Increase Your Connections. Add more and more people in your connections. Invite them from your e-mail contact lists, other social networking platforms like Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. You can even add people whom you interact on linkedIn or who are of same interests/ niche to you. The more 1st level connection, the more your reach. Its good to build a connection pool of genuine people who communicate and engage with you. 


▌Join groups. Search for groups of your niche and join them. linkedIn groups are highly targeted and sharing articles with them will increase your visitors. Don't be frustrated not getting approved from some groups. LinkedIn groups are strict in their policies, and the moderators may not approve you in 1st place. Search for similar 'open groups' and you will still find the targeted audience. 
▌Create your own group. Its not a good idea for a new LinkedIn signed up user, but if you have spent some time on LinkedIn, and managed to have a good reach, create your own community. Put links of your blog in the group description. Anyone joining your group will go to read the group profile 1st, and that may convert into traffic to your blog. 

▌Engage with people. Join in the discussions in comments section, groups and walls. The more you communicate with people, the more you increase your reach. Moreover, if you consistently participate in group discussions, people will notice you more, and next time you post an article links in that group, you surely gonna get more visitors than earlier. 


So, If you have been missing your traffic share from LinkedIn, its not too late. Join, follow these points and earn some quality traffic. All the best. !! 

If you have any other point regarding generating traffic from LinkedIn, do mention it comment. I will update it in this post :) 

mb.

Sunday, 2 June 2013

Top 5 CPM ad networks 2013.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 32 comments
CPM is Cost Per Mile. You are paid on per thousand impressions. These are best suitable to those bloggers receiving a medium and high traffic and where the number-of-pages/visit is greater. You can try them individually and figure out which one works for you best. 

1. Burst Media.

Site requirements ▌ A minimum of 25,000 page views monthly. 
Payout methods are Check, PayPal and EFT in certain countries. Minimum payout is $50. 



Requirements is ▌Top level Domain.
                     ▌ A minimum of 500,000 unique visitors per month. (Yeah,!! that's too much).




Requirement is ▌A minimum of 3000 page views per month.




 ▌2 million page views per month. That means only estabilished sites are eligible. Not for small or medium publishers.


  

Site requirements ▌ A minimum of 30,000 unique visitors per month. 
Minimum payout is $100 through check, PayPal. 


Reviews: A detailed reviews of these advertising networks are going to be done in coming posts. You may subscribe to the blog to receive all those updates. 


mb.

Saturday, 1 June 2013

Top 5 Ways To Monetize Your Blog.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 3 comments
There are various ways to earn money from your blog. Many webmasters start blogging for the sole purpose of making money but majority of them give up because they don't see any practical earnings in the beginning. However, money making from blog takes some time and the results are shown to those who continue even after seeing a little or no income at all in beginning. The real thing is to keep hanging up for some time, may be an year. 
 
Here is a list of 5 different ways of making money to your blog. Choosing the right option for yourself depends upon your niche and the way of your blogging and you should give a research as to which form will earn you more. Or you can try some for days, and find out the best one for yourself. 


1. Pay Per Click. This is the most widely used form of earning. As the name suggest, you get paid when a visitor clicks on the ads shown on your website. This method of earning is beneficial with websites/blogs receiving a lot of traffic, since only a small number of visitors will gonna click on your ads. The CTR (click through rate) is the number of clicks per hundred visitors. A normal optimized for ads website tend to receive about 3-4 % of CTR on an average. So earning from this method really needs a good amount of traffic. 
Some of the most widely used PPC programme are 

     ▌Google AdSense
     ▌Chitika
     ▌Clicksor


2. CPM Advertising. CPM is Cost per Mile. Instead of earning from the clicks you get on the ads, you get paid by the number of times the ads are shown to the visitors. Put it simple, the more pageviews you get, the more you earn, irrespective of any clicks. CPM advertisement is a sure shot mode of earning.

The rates are fixed per 1000 page views. That means if you get 10,000 visitors (page views) and the ad network is paying you a CPM of 1$, then you will make 10$. As you can see, for earning a small amount you need a lot of visitors. CPM advertising is best suitable for blogs with very high traffic. Getting a few hundred visitors will earn you penny for a day. The plus point is that you are sure of those pennies irrespective of clicks. 

There are various CPM advertising networks like

     ▌Casale Media 
     ▌Clicksor
     ▌BurstMedia 
     ▌Tribal Fusion
     ▌Value Click media. 

Some of these have minimum requirements. You can have a look on them by visiting their websites. 


3.  In-Text Ads. In-Texts-ads are contextual advertisements where keywords from your posts are selected and an advertisement is connected to it. The keywords are double underlined or dotted, and when a visitors hovers mouse on those keywords, the advertisement is pop up-ed. Here the payment is usually through cost per mile. The benefit of In-text advertising is that they don't take any space on your blog and normally do not lower your site speed. 

The two most widely used In-Text Ads schemes are

     ▌Infolinks
     ▌Kontera 


4. Affiliate Marketing. With this kind of advertisement, you earn commission from each sale that is done through your referral link. You write reviews about products and when some one buys any product through your referral, they pay you a commission. 

     Lets say a network pays you a commission of 5%. If someone buys a thing with cost price Rs 100,000, you will make Rs 5000. That's a lot of amount to earn from CPC and CPM ads.

Affiliate marketing is favourite among some of the blogger since chances of earning much more is higher. However, setting up a fan base, reviewing products, and compelling people to buy a product is a hectic task. 
Some of the affiliate Marketing networks are 

     ▌ClickBank
     ▌AffiliateWindow
     ▌Commission Junction
     ▌Amazon


5. Selling ads spaces on your blog. Selling ad spaces on your blog to display advertising banners is a good way of monetizing blogs. This is a profitable thing, since all the money comes to you and no middle person/ company takes a part of your income. The interested advertisers contacts you, a deal is done and you are paid for banners you display on your blog. These can be CPC banners or CPM banners depending upon the advertisers choice. 

You can still go to third party for managing of Selling-buying ads so that you don't have to deal with the complexities. However, then the third party will eat up a part of your income. 

The major advantage is that you have the option of deciding the minimum rates for the ads you will show on your blog. 


Do you use any other method to monetize your blog? Feel free to share it to the readers of this blog. Time to make some money. 


mb.

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

Unmatched Ad Request in Google AdSense.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 3 comments
If you are an AdSense publisher and monitoring your account regularly, you must have noticed "unmatched Ad Request". You can view it under Performance report > Bid type. 

What is Unmatched Ad Request basically? 
When a user visits your site or blog with AdSense Ad units, these Ad units sends a request to AdSense to display a relevant ad to the visitor. If there are no ads returned for this request, it is counted as unmatched Ad request. The ad units are then shown as blank spaces. 


The problem is not that you are getting Unmatched Ad Requests. The real trouble is that some publisher will have more of these requests than others. The chances of earning from these ad requests are NIL since there are no ads served and there is no clicks or impressions pay. 

Reasons for higher unmatched ad requests. 
  • Using link units on site. If you are using link units on a blog/site, there will be higher unmatched ad requests. This is due to the fact that a matched ad request for a link unit is counted only if a visitors click on them. Since there are hardly any clicks on link units these days, these all are counted in unmatched ad requests. 
  • Poor content. Chances are that your content is not receiving enough bidders due to poor quality contents. No one want to show ads on a web blog with low or bad quality contents. So, may be you are not getting enough ads as per ad requests. Some ad requests don't have ads to display. 
  •  Blocked list. If you block half of the advertisers, how could you fulfill all the ad requests your blog generates. So be careful about that. 
  • Unusual ad size. Square or rectangle and more frequently used ad sizes have more bidders and hence lower unmatched requests. Don't go for any unusual ad sizes. 

Although you know now what may be the reason for unmatched ad requests, you can hardly take any steps to shield yourself. Almost everyone keeps their filter list small. If you are approved by AdSense, there is almost negligible chances of poor quality content. And since Google is the leader in publishing-advertising market, number of bidders in most cases will never run out for an ad space. 

How to utilize unmatched ad requests to your benefits.?
This is where back up ads come into the picture. While creating ad unit, Google asks for back up ads in case there is no ads to display. Link one such another ads from any other publishing network you are using. This is the most you can do with unmatched ad requests. 

At last, you don't need to really worry about unmatched ad requests unless you are earning from AdSense. There is no any such negative aspects of it, and there is hardly anything you can control. You can at most write quality contents to attract maximum bidders, use more obvious ad sizes, keep your filter list small. 

mb.


Tuesday, 21 May 2013

How to Prevent Blogger domain redirection.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 1 comment
You must have noticed that Blogspot's domain has been redirecting to country specific domains. Google has taken this step to provide country specific redirection in order to maintain regional censorship. If a country prohibits the content of a blog, Google will stop servicing that content in that country. 



So what's the problem with redirection? 

Nothing if you don't care about your rankings, your ad campaigns and SEO practices. I am sure you do care about all these things. Here are some negative effects of your blogger domain redirection to country specific domain. 
  • Regarding Rankings: Most of ranking systems differentiate between .com and .in. If you go and find your alexa rank of your blog with .com and .in or .co.uk, they will all be different. Now what is happening is your effort to improve your ranking is distributed among different domains. 
  • SEO practices. So, your blogspot blog is hosted on .com, .co.uk, .co.uc, or .in domain? Isn't that a case of content duplicated?  And if you know a little about SEO, you must be aware that it will affect badly? Google says regarding the country specific redirection that it is trying that SEO practices remain unaffected but its only "trying". It is affected negatively. 
  • Ad campaigns. If you are with AdSense, its okay. But if you show ads of Media.net, where its compulsory to getting approved of each site to host ads, they will not count "clicks and impressions" for .in if you registered with .com. I personally contacted media.net representative about the problem, and what he said was, I have to manually submit all the domains. Now there are 100 countries from which I get traffic. Is it possible? They didn't get me to a solution. 
 Is there any solution? 
There is no problem without any solution. Personally, I have two of the best solution here. 
  • Get a custom domain. Custom domains are not redirected to country specific domains. Buy one for your blog. Its not so costly. Blogger provides domain in as less as 10$ for a year, and with other domain hosting services, its even lower. 
Not interested in buying a domain? Here is another solution. 
  • Go to Blogger dashboard > Template > Edit HTML. 
  • Back up your template in case something wrong happens.
  • Now search for the line <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>. Press Control + F and then search it. 
  • Just below the line paste these lines,: 
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;
var str= window.location.href.toString();
if ((str.indexOf('.com/'))=='-1') {
var str1=str.substring(str.lastIndexOf(&quot;.blogspot.&quot;));
if (str1.indexOf('/')=='-1') {
var str2=str1;
}
else {
var str2=str1.substring(0,str1.indexOf('/')+1);
}
window.location.href =window.location.href.toString().replace(str2,'.blogspot.com/ncr/');
}
&lt;/script&gt;
  •  Now, preview template to see if everything is okay. 
  • Save templates. The work is done. 
This javascript redirects country specific redirection back to .com domains. Although this will reduce site's loading speed, since there are two redirection, one from .com to country specific and then back to .com domain, but still its a good way if you really don't wanna go for a custom domain. 

mb.

Friday, 17 May 2013

New Contact Form widget for blogger.

Posted by Unknown on 00:00 with 1 comment
Someone told me that "Blogger has introduced a new Contact Form Widget". So, I checked it within minutes. And I find it simple yet extremely useful to connect to people in personal. 

Now, First thing is "how to add the contact form widget to your blog". 

Go to Blogger Dashboard -> Layouts -> Add a widget. 


Select More gadgets in the left panel, and Add a Contact Form

After adding it to your blog, it will look like: 

Here, I have provided the Title, Anything personal? Write here. You can put whatever you want. 

Now, whats the benefits after all? Why anyone should care about it? 
  • First of all, anyone who wants to interact with you and not finding any platform to do so, its a great way. 
  • Its a great way of accepting guest posts. You don't need to ask people to email you. Just make a page for guest post submission, and add the widget to that page. 
  •  You can ask for ads through this contact form. "You wanna place your ads on this blog? Contact here.." -- something like this. 
  • May be more. 
The only worst part of this widget is its so-simple unattractive design. Its lame actually. If you are already using it, share your opinion. We will love to read it.

mb.

Thursday, 9 May 2013

Cost per Click is the amount an advertiser is willing to pay for the clicks that are generated on the ads shown on your page. AdSense has a bidding process in which different advertisers bid for the ad space on your blog and the highest bidder gets a chance to display their ad. AdSense on its own ensures that the most paying ad is shown on your page so that you earn maximum. Its not in your control to decide to decide the ads or to fix the amount for charging. However, by following some of the basic practices, you can increase you Cost Per Click for the ads and earn maximum from the adsense. 

Practices to increase AdSense Cost Per Click.
  • Enable all of your ad units to show both text and images rich ads. When you limit a unit to show only a particular kind of ad, either text or image ads, you are limiting the number of bidders and thus lowering your chances of earning maximum. Lets get it with an example. Suppose you have limited a ad unit to show only text ads. And you receive a CPC of 1$ on it. What you miss out is that there may be an Image ad that is willing to pay more than 1$ per click. By increasing the number of advertisers to compete for the ad unit, you are increasing your chances of getting higher bid than you get normally. So, its always better to enable all ad units to show both images/media ads and text ads.
  • The first ad unit that appears in your blog's html receives the ads with maximum CPC. Suppose you have put three ads units, one as a leader board, a sidebar, and one at the bottom of your posts. Now, naturally you will wish that the highest paying ads are shown on leader board, since there are more chances of people clicking on them, so you have to put the leader board AdSense ads first in your html code. You may achieve this by trying and testing. 
  • Keep your filter list small. Filtering majority of ads for whatever reason will ultimately lead to less advertisers competing for your blog, and hence less earning.
  • Developed countries CPC are usually higher than under-developing countries. You will get a higher CPC from US than from India. So, building a country specific audience will limit your reach. Its also not at all advisable to target only US audience. You are paid for Indian clicks too. Whatever it is. The point is, don't limit your audience to a particular country and try to build a follower list of countries like US, UK, etc. 
The ultimate goal is to allow maximum number of advertisers bid for the ad space on your blog. The more competition, the more earning. By enabling both rich media ads and text ads does this only. 
However, in doing all these practices you must avoid some points. 
  • Don't believe that writing for high paying keywords will earn you more CPC. This is a good practice unless you over do it. You are writing for people who reads you. Don't over do it. Moreover, Google says that it don't encourage any such practice.
  • Don't use multiple accounts. Its a violation of terms for Google and your account will be suspended as soon as they discover it. 
  • Don't change the behavior of AdSense Ads in any way. Its not permitted under Google terms and conditions. 
Most of the publishers learns from experience. Keeping these points will certainly help you in increasing CPC for AdSense ads.
If you have any point in your mind, mention in comments. It will be a privileges for me and my readers. 

mb.

Saturday, 4 May 2013

SEO practices: Quality content is the king

Posted by Unknown on 22:47 with 6 comments

A site with quality content will attract more visitors naturally. No matter how beautiful you design a site, if you don't have good content no one will read you. Creating good quality and useful content will influence readers more than anything else on your blog. When a person searches for something, and he finds it exactly on your blog, chances are that he will refer your content in his circles thus increasing your reach. In blogging world, "Content is king" is over-used word and rightly so. You cannot expect huge traffic in the absence of Quality service. 

You may want to read the earlier parts of SEO practices. 

Best practices for quality content.
  •  Easy-to understand. Write it up for an average person. You won't find anyone reading your blog with a dictionary in his hand. Always write keeping your audience in mind. If i come across any article that put strain on my mind while reading, I will simply switch over to another.  Keep it simple, break a very long sentence in two or more, and always try to keep it free from spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. If you are not that much good in English, ask your friends or colleagues to rectify it. Using too difficult words to understand is a bad idea. The user always have the choice to another good written and easy to understand articles. You have to out perform them.
  • Stay focused on the topic. Do not deviate from the topic. Stick to the plot you have chosen to write about. Talking about several topics in the same article is not a good idea. Choose a topic for an article and always organize your content around it. A little variation in the content is okay, with proper sub headings and paragraphs. The basic idea is if user comes to you looking for "Link building strategies", he should read that only. While writing an article, if you come up with some random and altogether new idea, write it down on a piece of paper for your future posts. Simple!!
  • Create unique content. The primary question is "Why someone read your article if its already written on web"? Why yours only. Everything is over-written on web. Search a topic and you will find thousands of websites in the results. The main aim is to compete to those websites and to be proved better than them. At some point of time writing about a topic, you may find that there is no new thing in your mind about it. well, you can then include some charts to describe it more, take the help of pictures and statistics to prove the point. Lastly, If you cannot come up with new ideas, at least put that idea in a unique manner.
  • Write for people, not for search engines. Its not the search engine that will read your content or benefit from it. Write for people. Search engine is a just way of discovering your content. Avoid using too much keywords since it may annoy the readers. What if I use "SEO practices: Quality content is the king" all over this post, will you enjoy it? You won't even come back to my blog again. Putting keywords in texts is a good SEO practice but it should not be done too much. Many webmasters agree that putting a keyword every 100 words of text is the best policy and I agree to it. You may have your own standards but keep in mind not over-doing it.

If you have in any other point in your mind,  feel free to discuss it in comments.

mb.

Friday, 3 May 2013

 Here, I give you two URLs.
  1. http://y2do.blogspot.com/2013/05/best-seo-practices-improving-structure-of-URL.html
  2. http://y2do.blogspot.com/2013/05/asdckefwk234mkvesvk4fwdefsdfjiw3t2k4.html
In both the above URLs, which one you find more easier to remember? Can you identify what the post content is with the second URL?

URLs are the first thing you see or type in a browser. Creating a descriptive URL helps in keeping your contents organized on one hand and friendly for those who want to link to your article on the other.

There are certain benefits of Using descriptive URLs.
  • With a descriptive and easy-to-remember URL, you provide an option to a visitor to remember it and visit you again. 
  • URLs are displayed in search engines and people searching a particular query usually see the URL before visiting a site/blog. With a meaningful URL, you are increasing your chances of Search Engine visits. 
  • If the URL contains relevant words instead of random digits and alphabets or some IDs, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page. 
How to select a better URL structure.
  •  Create URLs that are relevant to your page contents. People may guess what you have written by just reading it. 
  • Be short but use words to create one. Picking some words from the article itself and framing a better URL is a better idea. 
  • Put keywords in the URL itself. 
  • Avoid using /article1.html type URLs. 
  • Do not using too lengthy URL that it don't even fit in browser :P Being descriptive don't mean you put the whole summary of content in the URL itself. 
  • Use one URL for one article. Having different locators for the same article can be bit confusing.
How to create a custom URLs.
You can create a custom URL in blogger dashboard while creating a post.Usually the permalink or the URL of the post is taken from the title you use for your article. 


You can see that the URL is taken from the title by default. 
To change the URL according to your need and preference, click on custom permalink. Blogger will ask you to enter your choice and create the permalink accordingly as shown in the below picture. 


I have not worked with WordPress, so don't know the process for it. You may search it on web, or if you know it already, you can mail me the steps along with some snaps and I will provide a recognition to your support along with a link back to your blog. 

You may like to read the earlier chapters of Search Engine Optimization. 
Seo: search engine optimization Introduction. 
Learning seo: working with titles and metatags.

mb.


Page titles is the entry for visitors to the home of contents and information. Having a poor title will tell them to leave without getting in. Getting a good, relevant and unique titles should be first priority in Search Engine Optimization. 




Unique title for each page. Did you ever find two of the chapters in the same with the same name? Create unique title for each of your post. Don't repeat any title. This is not a compulsory thing but still its the ideal thing to create a different title for each post or article. 

The <title> for you post is the what is displayed in search engine results. Chances are that user will visit you if the title really attract him. I said that earlier, Titles are the opening doors to the vast information you have written in your blog. If you don't keep them good, you are allowing people not to visit you. 

Use descriptive but brief title. There is no point putting a complete two line sentence in title only. Make it brief but highly relevant to whatever you have discussed in the post. You should use some of the keywords related to the article. However, avoid keyword stuffing. Search Engines don't like it and it will degrade your performance. The best practices as suggested by my blogger friends is a title of about 5-6 words relevant to the article with 2-3 keywords accordingly. Avoid too long title, and keyword stuffing in titles. Using a keyword or two is a good practice.

Use meta-tags to describe your article. You cannot put the complete description in the titles. A page description meta-tags tells the search engine about the summary of the page. When a search result is presented, along with title Google may use your meta tag in description in that result. Writing a good description will increase chances of your visitors. However, always try to
  • provide accurate description in meta tags.
  • avoid keywords-only description. 
  • avoid using the complete post in meta-tags.
  • using a unique description for each page. 
Meta tags is a summary to the articles which you have written. And this summary is shown to the user searcher. A person by taking a glimpse to the meta-tags can decide whether to visit the site or not. So, writing a good meta description is a necessary thing for you. 
These two aspects, the titles and the meta-tags are the first steps towards the optimization of a blog / site for a search engine. 

Providing the  details of how to insert meta tags is not my aim here. You may Google search it, and you will find thousands of people helping you out.

Previous Chapter: Search Engine Optimization Introduction. 
You may like to read the next chapter. Best seo practices: improving the structure of URLs

mb.
What is SEO. 
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It is a process in which by following certain practices, you may lead to better rankings in search engines. Getting on first page of Google is the most needed thing for a webmaster. Although, there is no particular way of getting onto first page of Google since it takes  a lots of factors into account, still by following certain optimization practices one can hope for better placements in Search Engines.

Is SEO really necessary? 
The answer is Yes! There are 100 billion (approximate) searches per month. Don't you want that
100k is for your blog? You may get a good amount of visitors through social media and other different marketing ways, but the problem with them is you need to spend your time consistently with them. With SEO, you do it once, and get paid for that for a long period of time.

SEO comes first in priority? 
No. Your content comes first. Writing for a Search Engine should not be the way of optimization. The ideal thing is write for your audience, and then apply different optimization policies in order to get in Search Engine results. Focusing too hard on Search Engine Optimization may lead to degradation of Quality of articles you write. Your final audience are users, not Search Engines. The only thing is its good to take the best step when you can. 

What is Organic search results? 
Organic search results is when you are listed in search engines (you of course refers to your website) naturally without paying to it. You must have seen paid results in Google Search Engine or Bing, but it don't counts to organic traffic. SEO affects only organic results. 

As you can see, "Ad related to adsense" category is the paid one. The second result is considered to be organically discovered and searched. SEO deals with the optimization for organic searches. 


Many webmasters considered it a waste. Is it? 
For them it may be. Depends on preferences and choices. If you are good at social media marketing and have a huge fan following there with tons of traffic from there, then perhaps you won't listen to Search Engine. However, if you are really looking forward for a long term investment in 'getting traffic', SEO is the thing for that. 

How to learn SEO practices. 
This article is the Introduction part dealing with the definitions only. In coming posts, I will share with you my knowledge and my SEO practices with you. There are thousands of articles already written and hundreds of e-books and you may even Google Search them. 

You may follow the blog to receive the upcoming posts about SEO.

Next Chapter: Working with Titles and Meta tags.

mb.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...