This week, we’ll be focussing on onsite optimization strategies and quick fixes that will give you a shot up the ladder. Less time, quick work and immediate results are what we are talking about.

Today, let’s discuss twelve super quick fixes for your blog that will help you get that extra boost on the search engines. If yours is a well indexed blog, I’m assuming that the results should show up in a week or less on the SERPs. Ok, so here goes.

1. Add an H1 tag to your headings and titles.
   Check your blog theme. Select your article title, and view “selection source” (use FireFox for this) and check if the title is put within an H1 tag. If it isn’t you will have to tweak your template and stylesheet to get this done. Make sure that every title is within an H1 tag.
2. Use of <strong> tags.
   You already know that strong tags are best weapons to highlight keywords to search engines. But have you been using it properly? Again select your article text, and view the source code. See if there are strong tags used at all. Strong tags should appear whenever you bold any part of the text. And the reason why you do it not only because you want to highlight a part of the text visually but tell to the search engines that those are your keywords.
   I wouldn’t really recommend you to use strong tags for each end every keyword you use in the article. Use it wisely and carefully. If you have been using them too frequently, slow it down.
   And, if you have been using bold tags instead of strong tags, convert all of those bold tags to strong tags, by tweaking your CSS.
   I would suggest you to use strong tags for phrases like “windows application download here” or “mac v\s windows article read”.
3. Don’t annoy readers with strong tag
   Now that you are using optimum number of strong tags, make sure that they don’t hinder with the readability of your blog. It looks awkward when every keyword appearance in your article looks in bold and readers would not get any clue on why the text is bold. Use your CSS wisely and make sure that all the strong tags inside the articles does not jut out as bold text, rather it should only look so in the source code.
4. Use “rel” tags for your links
   Rel tags are relatively not popular and this is the reason why I would insist on them. Rel tags are not used for normal external links but tag related items. So it means that using more tag elements would help, so use it wisely.
5. Use “title” for hyper links, internal and external
   The title tag too is not used wisely by bloggers because when you insert a link, people don’t really care to fill in all those details, instead only paste the URL. I’d suggest that you use “title” tags for all links internal and external as it gives quite a lot of information for the search engines about what the link is about. Be descriptive using the title tag with as less as 3-4 words, that might be the best practice, but feel free to tinker around ad find your best formula.
6. Use of “Nofollow
   No follow tags are not just for advertisements. You can use them wisely to design your page rank. Check all your external links (use a spider simulator or google webmasters) and filter out all those links (or the necessary) with nofollow so that you retain your page rank. Don’t use nofollow on all the external links, that will make google to flag your blog. Instead, may be check all those low PR pages on your site and analyze if there are lot of external links from them. If they are huge in number, reduce the juice flow by limiting with “nofollow” tags.
7. Rewrite your categories
   Categories and tags are great sources of content for search engine. So make sure you use sensible and worthwhile category phrases. A category like “Chocolate biscuits” makes more sense than “Biscuits”, so rewrite them and make them more descriptive so that search engines can elicit more information from them.
8. Avoid duplicate content or minimize it.
   We’ve made numerous reference to this situation. Use all those strategies like cutting short the article length in homepage, using nofollow etc to curb duplicate content issues.
9. Footer text tweaks
   Rewrite or rearrange your footer text if you have one with worthwhile information. If you have a copyrighted theme, you may have to keep the copyright information, but also make sure that you add information that gives you that extra mileage. More information on footer text here.
10. Page size
    Check your homepage file size now with this tool. If it’s on the higher side and takes time to load, you got to cut it short and use light weight code. Sometimes, when the theme is not CSS, XHTML valid this happens and particularly when you are using a fancy theme, it is common. I’d suggest that you cut it down and use good healthy CSS to trim down all those frills and tweak the code to a normal size so that, the page loads quick and makes crawlers indexing quick and easy, not to mention the readers pleasure.

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Many a times, I get asked, what do you do in social media marketing? And before I answer, there would be a warning saying - I already submit to Digg and other social media sites…so what is it that you do apart from that?

That’s an interesting question altogether. The fact is that social media marketing is not just about Digg, or submitting to a few sites as Digg. There is a much larger picture to be revealed.

Submitting to Digg is in itself a big chapter. We’ve discussed it on this article and this one.

Anyone can submit to Digg. But not all of them get popular, be it a great story or not. There are strategies you must follow while submitting to Digg, a lot depend on who the submitter is, what the crowd is, what your story is about, who are your contacts, how long have you been digging…and 1432 other things as well. And that’s exactly the reason why everyone’s story isn’t the top dugg one. Precisely, that’s why you need experts help on it.

Coming back to social media, there’s more to it than Digg. It’s about connecting the dots. Between you and your target audience.
Your target audience is spread out and scattered everywhere on the internet. But what’s interesting is that every online entity has a target audience. Be it a porn site, a scientists blog or a movie review blog. The problem why your site is not popular is because you have either not connected to your audience at all or that you are with the wrong audience.

And the initial step of a social media marketing campaign is to find your target audience, define them and track them. Studying them for their behavior and delivering them “food” is the final stage of social media marketing. It almost ends with it. Post this phase, you start getting results and the beauty is that the bounce rate is very minimal unlike SEO.

So essentially, Social Media Marketing doesn’t end with digg or SU, it only starts there. A careful full stretch social media marketing goes through as many processes and steps as a market researcher and an ad-agency would go through combined with that of an SEO. It is a healthy combination of all that, and only someone who is well verse in all of these fields can help you through a successfull social media marketing campaign, or else you get stuck with a few submissions on digg with one number diggs.

Before reading this article, you might have to check this article here by Rand, where he is suggesting 10 questions to the search engines.

I had replied to it over here with two more questions from my side to Google and here is Matt’s reply to my questions.

Well, basically I was trying to ask Google about sitelinks. I wanted to know from Google as to whether they would give us more control over the sitelinks as many of the links appearing there are not relevant.

We had a discussion on DailySEOblog over sitelinks over here once. Where we had discussed on how to control sitelinks using Google webmasters tool.

Okay now to the problem.

In the SEO Moz thread, I asked Google if they would give us more control over sitelinks. What I intended was that, we needed authority on the Google webmasters tool, which enables us to decide what links appear and doesn’t appear. The “and” is important here.

As of now, you can use Google webmasters to “block” any link that has already appeared on the sitelinks. But the main problem is that the sitelinks appear “automatically”. If there is a wrong link (Ex: - Title of your about page and link to an article page), then there’s nothing much you can do about it other than to block it and wait for another replacement.

For example, in this image -

It may be a big deal getting lots of fans on Digg. Most of us get minimum ten friend requests daily and there is a whole bunch of friends on Digg.Now, how many shouts do you get on email everyday from all of these friends? Quite some isn’t it? And how many do you reply to or digg? Well, keep the answer to yourself.

The question is - How can you effectively use the friends and community on digg to market your websites on Digg?
The answer probably is in the question itself - You are trying to “market” your sites.

Digg is a community where everyone is on the look out for networking. The basic motive of course is to harness the power of community. Let me take you through the process of “digging”.

Step 1.
Submit a story.

Step 2.
Shout/share it with your friends.

Step 3.
Grow your friend circle.

Step 1 and Step 2 are comparatively easier steps, but what matters most is the third one - growing your network.

How can you grow your network on Digg?

Anyone might have easily guessed that digging the maximum number of stories is enough to take you get popular on Digg.
Well, I don’t know about everyone, but this happened to me. I thought digging the maximum number of articles on digg can get me  popular. And I made it even a practice to digg a good number of articles every day, religiously. But, there was no big difference in the “popularity” as such.

Now, the bigger question is - What do you mean by popularity on Digg?

Well, popularity (or I’d call it power) to me is the power to submit a story and declare that this story is going to get 1000 diggs in the next couple of hours.

Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee and I wonder if the top diggers would say such a thing. But essentially, what all of us are aiming to is to be able to submit a story and when you share it with friends, all of them digging it.

I’d call it the the  Digg Power Quotient.

Digg Power Quotient = (No. of diggs on an article in an hour / No. of friends in the circle) / No. of diggs from the community in an hour

This may not be the best metric though sometimes because we’ve all seen cases where a guy with less than ten friends submitted a story that made it to the top. Excluding all those “miracles”, if there is someone who has a very healthy “Digg Power Quotient”, then I think he has the potential to make a story popular.

This article may not make any sense at all because Digg is an unpredictable community sometimes, and things can work at a totally different pace and dimension than expected, for the good or the bad. But some pointers on how to be a popular guy on Digg is interesting !

What practices will get you popular on digg?

Again, with all the unpredictability taken into account, let me share a few observations.

1 - Digg ONLY relevant articles that are related to your interest.
In the frenzy to get more numbers, people go around digging anything and everything, and end up being everywhere. This may not look good on you if you are trying to build an image. For example, if you are a techno geek who blogs on technology, it makes sense for you to digg through articles in the technology corner and not the fashion and lifestyle section.
The reason is that, when people find that you are more active in one particular category, they’ll derive an impression that you are an authority on that topic and this is good for brand building.

2 - Participate in the community
In the rush to digg more articles, we tend to forget the fact that Digg is a community. A very sensitive community. Digg’s popular members are all very well networked and communicate with each other a lot on the digg platform. They see it more as a place to share thoughts with like minded people. And anyone who can’t adapt to this, may stand out of the crowd. And handling things single handed is not a good idea on digg.

3 - Comment as much as you digg
Rather than digging or submitting much , try commenting more, at least as much as you digg, and you will see the results. Commenting is a good way to generate interest among the community and gain trust. Here again, you got to really genuine while commenting or you’re gonna get burned out spamming.

4 - Create a circle of “trust worthy” friends
Friends are always good. The more the merrier. But make sure they are “trust worthy”. By trustable I mean, you got to make sure that whenever you send a shout, you get the story dugg by him. Well, it is not possible all the time, but a 90% hit ratio is satisfactory.There are a lot of guys who’ll add you and keep bombarding with shouts, at the same time never responds to your’s.

5 - Don’t digg stupid articles
Aww…did someone had to tell you this? These days there are lot of “spam” being submitted to digg. The titles make no sense, neither the description, nor the URL. If you are on a digging spree, it is most likely that you’ll digg one of those articles. So keep away from them so that, people don’t misunderstand you for a spammer.

6 - Respond well to shouts
Next time when someone see your shout notification in their email, they shouldn’t go “Oh no!  Not that guy again! “. The simple solution is that you have to respond well to others shouts whenever they send you one. Only then will the community recognize you a trust worthy guy.

7 - Create trust among the community
This is probably the most important and significant thing out of all these stuff mentioned here. And probably the most non-comprehensive. It is easy to talk about it, but to measure as to how much of it you actually earned is quite difficult. Simply because there are a lot of metrics that go into it, and it takes time to gain trust.

8 - Sharing is the key
While digging keep asking this question - “When is the last time I dugg a story just because it was interesting?” n
Essentially, the idea is to keep digging interesting articles from the web so that you can share it wit the world. Keep away your marketing interests and genuinely participate in the community. It will reward you.

Just a fancy title that one. Just got my hands on a Macbook, and it feels really good. It’s a sexy baby and an inspiring one.

Viewing websites on a Mac and safari is a great feeling to me as it reminds me every time of the quality levels. Every minute detail about the Mac is very impressive and it oozes out sheer brilliance in every application. Gradients, shadows, crisp lines, blunt corners and smooth curves it’s a beauty inside out.

I was always a Mac/Steve fan and always wanted to get one. I don’t feel pity for Windows or my old Toshiba satellite, it’s a bull and have stood with me during hard times, now that there’s a stallion in the stable, we might have some ego problems working together.

This is a great advancement on the Google custom search product. Now, Google allows you to customize your custom search by -

- Letting you chose the sites from the which the results are to be displayed.
now, you can type in the URLs from which you want the results to be displayed. Already Google lets the user decide whether he wants to search in the particular site or from the web. Now to top that, the admin (you) can decide as to from which sites the results should be displayed while the user selects “the web”.

- Letting you specify keywords so that the searches are related to those keywords
For example, if someone searches for “cat” it throws up all the results from the web related to “cat”. Now if you specify certain keywords already like “mba,management,cat exam” then when someone searches for “cat”, only results pertaining to the keywords you specified will display.

I think this is an excellent way to refine and show more accurate results on the custom search. How much of this improvement converts to clicks is to be proven though. More information here and here.

Another innovation from Google is here to help you deal with your regional language, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil etc on the iternet.
You can now try out Google’s new English to Hindi translation service, and the translated search feature that lets you query in Hindi, obtain search results for the translated query in English, and then see the Hindi translations of these results.
Bright idea this one!
Read more about the new service here.

It makes sense for someone to look for the ROI when he’s investing money on an SEO project right?
When dealing with clients who have a limited budget, one question that they are keen on is -

“What ROI would I get investing all this money in SEO?”

And I think that’s an interesting question because, in any other project, there is a ROI calculator, especially SEM. When you are opting for PPC ads, there is a clearly a mathematics involved. In PPC, you have a daily budget and you know how much traffic you get, it’s all out there in numbers at the end of the day.

But does the same happen with SEO?
Some questions SEO’s are expected to answer are -

• Can you guarantee me a number one/two position?
• How much traffic will I get if I spent X amount of money with you?
• What will happen if I don’t reach a good position?

Now, it’s not difficult to answer these questions you know. More than answering these questions, what helps is “educating the client”. The client would be only familiar of PPC campaigns and online advertisements, the ROI of which he calculates by using the simple formula of “No. of visits/No. of purchases.”

Unfortunately, this simple formula when applied in the SEO perspective becomes a little vague. If you had all the numbers in place for SEO, probably a formula similar to the following would have  made sense. (For product selling/ecom websites)

ROI on SEO = (No. of goals achieved x Price of product) - Cost to SEO

Where no. of goals achieved is no. of sales or subscription/ visit to a check out page.

Conversion ratio OR Efficiency of an SEO = (No. of organic visits(traffic) / No. of goals achieved)

Things are more tough in the case of non product selling websites.

Here the core metrics would be (i) Page Views (ii) Traffic and (iii) Subscriptions

The above formula can be tweaked to suit them.

For sites dealing with subscriptions as their final objective.

ROI on SEO =  (No. of subscriptions x Effective revenue from Ads) - Cost to SEO

Conversion ratio OR Efficiency of an SEO = (No. of organic visits(traffic) / No. of subscriptions)

Basically, any website that employs an SEO can take the organic traffic to be their primary goal. The rest depends on what the goals are and what the revenue model is.

Most of the times, if SEOs can ensure a boost in “value traffic” then things become easier to handle. And interestingly, this is where many clients gets into disagreement. Increasing traffic is not important, but “value traffic” is.

What is the difference between “traffic” and “value traffic”?
Traffic is only numbers. You can employ 10 guys from around the world to Digg your articles to get traffic, it’s no big deal. But the question is whether it that traffic is converting into results. The SEO Efficiency ratio calculated will show how effective the campaign is. There might be 10,000 new visitors but only 100 new subscriptions. Which means the traffic is not relevant.

Meanwhile, “Value Traffic” is the one which has come from relevant sources, through a pull strategy, in the right amount. This traffic is likely to have more conversions as compared to the “bought” Digg traffic. There might only be 500 new visitors but 400 new subscriptions. But this makes more sense to the client.

So essentially, even though it is tricky to find ROI ratios on an SEO project, if you dig into the details and have clear cut ideas on what the metrics are, it is quite possible. I have an inclination to believe that SEO Efficiency is far more better than SEO ROI though.

Hey, do you have a doubt on SEO? I’ve opened a new forum at DailySEOblog, to let you ask those questions and discuss it with the community. Many a times the doubts I get on emails are interesting that it’s worthy to share it with others. The articles on them are fine, and I’ll keep doing that, but just more than clearing the doubt, i thought it’s important to pool in others ideas and discuss it. So we have a forum.

Check out the DSB How To forums here.

It’s a very simple forum with all the basic features, no fancy stuff. The idea is to enable everyone to learn from practical experiences, and guide through the trouble shooting process of SEO. There are a few categories I’ve already put up, but if you think more in needed, please feel free to let me know and we can work it out.

Thanks to the beta testing community for reporting me errors and providing suggestions on the board.

Someone who doesn’t want his name published asked me this question -

What are different ways to earn with different type of advertisements for an average blogger, and would like to know what are other sources of income for an average blogger other than advertisements.

Average blogger here means who does not have large amount of traffic coming on his site and also who is not popular.

This sounds very interesting to me. I was wondering why he wouldn’t google down the information. Because there are already thousands of blogs on “making money online”. Well, I did the same and found that all the information on the web is not really helping the “average blogger” as he puts it. An average blogger is someone who doesn’t have loads of traffic and doesn’t enjoy a “guru status”.

So every money making guru us speaking of monetizing using affilate ads, adsense and image ads, but how effective is it on a blog with less than 100 uniques a day? The guys who advice this is probably enjoying a thousand uniques a day and it makes all sense for them to put up a chitika minimall ads or an ebay affiliate ad, but not for an average blogger.

So let’s get down to the facts.

First off, a little clarification on the “money making theory” and the “buy a Ferrari with your website” dreams.

There are two models of monetization models available as I see it. (let me known if you have more.)

Plan A.

Create a website that’s targeted to the search engine traffic.

Plan B.

Create a brand, that will get you popular with the knowledge you share.

Plan C.

Create a combo of both. Brand and search engine traffic.

Plan A - works well and helps you make loads of money if you get the basics right.
It works like this -

Phase 1 (Reaping Traffic)
Do extensive keyword research => Find out the best high paying keywords and the top searched ones related to your niche => Write great articles on them => SE optimize your site that it get’s on top of SERPs for the targeted keyword => Get the traffic

Phase 2 (Content hook)
Once the heavy traffic is around, you got to make sure that it converts in to clicks (money) and page views (retention).
For this a hook is required on the content. Make sure you write more reviews. Make sure that you give less links on the content, so that people get attracted to the ad links. Also, give directive information, not an extensive one like the wikipedia, but one where the information is available, but it will leave the reader looking for more of it.

The idea is that the search engine traffic are predominantly “information seekers”. And they are on the lookout for finding the thing they want from all around the web. And they are the perfect target for you.
- They are likely to click on links.
- They like product/service reviews.
- They like shorter articles.
- All the AdSense gimmicks like above the fold, blending ads etc works on them provided they aren’t ad-blind.

Shortfalls
The problem with this model is that they may not give you “value traffic”, there will be higher bounce rates and less subscriptions. You can curb that by providing “out of the normal” delightful content, and standing out from the rest, like Labnol. But sometimes it’s also possible that if you don’t SE optimize the site, you end up having a website that’s not attractive to the search engines as well as genuine readers.

Plan B
This is a much more relaxed environment where the focus is not on money but content and knowledge sharing. The author or the admin focuses more on delivering quality content and this itself becomes the marketing pitch for the blog. You may not get loads of traffic from the search engines because you are not writing about the gadget that was released yesterday, but you are writing about something you are comfortable with and you have expertise on.

Here, you may not get great CTR on the ads, but the following will be loyal and if you are selling a service or product, it’s easier to sell your services.

Now, having discussed about the two models - Let’s see how a low traffic blog can monetize it.
Honestly speaking, traffic is good. If you can manage traffic somehow, it makes sense for the advertiser to advertise on the blog. But this is not always possible, and you have to go through a phase where you are building traffic, and is not really up there, but still you need some sort of advertising.

1. Subscriptions
Traffic and subscriptions are related but subscriptions are more valuable and appealing than traffic to advertisers. Subscriptions means that there are people following you and they value your ideas. So if they recommend a product/service those many people following you would be trying out the product. So getting a good number of subscribers is a good idea to woo in advertisers.

2. AdSense Ads
AdSense is the friend of everyone. Since they don’t take into consideration your traffic details for approval, anyone can use them. Now the problem is that, if you don’t know how to utilize it, you better not use it. So if you don’t have heavy traffic, you might want to focus on high pay out ads that give more money on lesser clicks and lesser impressions. You will have to find out ads related to those niches, and blog about them. This is totally your call because it might piss off your already existing reader base, so you may want to do it elsewhere, it’s up to you. But they key is to get more money from less traffic.

3. Image Ads
If you are an expert on your niche, then chances are that even if you don’t have heavy traffic, there might be advertisers interested to advertise their product/services on your blog. This is just because whatever little traffic you have, it is loyal, which is attractive to the advertiser. Small ads with the 125×125 pixel do well these days, and they are much sought after too.

4. Product and Service Reviews
If you have a good following and some authority on the topic you are blogging about, there is the option of paid reviews where you can review products and services. It is not good to offer links for paid reviews as Google does not entertain it. But if you can “nofollow” the links and do honest reviews, both your readers and your advertisers will be happy about it and you can make some good money. The basic idea is that you should have some authority in the field, whatever it is.

5. Offer a service
Many people want quick money with no or less efforts and for the same reason this is an often neglected method. But I very much recommend it. Find out what you can do for others like for instance if you are good at writing, write blog posts, if you are good at social networking , try to build a good network that you can sell off. The idea is to find your USP and sell it online through your blog. There are professional guest bloggers, professional Digg specialists and Stumble Upon traffic generators available and they are paid well for doing what they are good at. Think about it.

So essentially, these are the main branches of methods to make money online, there are lot more available but all that makes sense only if you have a decent amount of traffic. Though I believe that there is scope for making money with less traffic, it is suggested that your efforts be to make your blog unique with rich content and unique followers, because if a blog stays without traffic for a long time, I don’t think anyone would be interested in it.