Easily Make Your Blog Popular

Bloggers from all over the globe are trying to find ways to make their blogs the one everyone wants to follow. Believe you me, that is no easy task.

Boring blogs attract little or no traffic. You can add fresh content daily, update and use your blogroll, syndicate the content of the blog with a RSS feed, tag your posts, use search engine optimization or use lots of links and trackbacks but all of that will be useless unless you have created a blog that is eye-catching, unique, crazy or controversial. So bloggers, do you want to know how to make your blog popular?

Blogging gossip
Blog readers love a little bit (or a lot!) of juicy gossip, so tantalize visitors to your blog by adding a little bit of personal information. We all love to know what other people are doing with their lives and we also want to know if their lives are more interesting than ours. Add some funny or slightly risky comments and invite readers to add their comments. When visitors write remarks then answer them and ask them questions, make them realize that you are interested in their lives. Celebrity gossip is always popular, so read up on the latest celeb news and gossip, add your thoughts and wait for others to add their thoughts.

Secret sharing on Blogs

We all have a few skeletons in the cupboard and it does no harm to share a few of your deepest secrets with other bloggers. OK, you don’t want the world to know your business but, in general, blogs have to have pulling power to attract readers. You may have a few hilarious life experiences that you are willing to share with your readers.

Blog A cartoon Strip

Newsprint readers love to follow the daily cartoon strips so if you could create a unique cartoon character and make a daily cartoon strip this may help you to gather regular followers. Sometimes it seems that the world is full of doom and gloom and deep and meaningful conversation, so it is amazing when we read or look at something that is fun. Look at some of the well-known comic strips and see if you can generate some ideas.

Agony Aunt Blogging

If you are a good listener, you could encourage followers to share their problems. We all love reading the problem pages in newspapers, so why not make your blog a place where readers can share their problems. Encourage all contributors to add their thoughts to each and every problem to create on-going blog conversations.

Interview Fellow Bloggers   
Read some of the most popular blogs and see if you can arrange to interview those bloggers. If you manage to set up an interview with a popular blogger, post a record of the interview on your blog. Interviewing other bloggers will help you to understand why their blogs attract such a following, naturally it isn’t right to copy their ideas but it may offer you some inspiration.

Free Offers

Everyone loves getting something for nothing. Free downloads can be very tempting. Offer online tools, an eBook or create a free online class. However, if you are going to offer your readers a freebie, make sure the freebie is something good.

Blog About Competitions and Online Freebies

So many of us scour the Internet searching for printout money off coupons, voucher codes, bingo bonuses and free Sim card offers. If we have to look for hours to find these deals then it stands to reason that other Internet users are doing the same. Start adding these deals to your blog and update them on a daily basis – this will attract the bargain hunters to your blog. If you decide to promote special offers, you will need to update the blog daily to stay ahead of other sites.

Ask Other Bloggers for Their Advice

We all love to be asked for advice, so encourage other blog owners to offer you some of their words of wisdom. You may not want to take advantage of all of the advice but it is one way of encouraging others to read what you are writing. Don’t be afraid to make contact with other bloggers. If you read blogs that are particularly great then leave comments that invite answers. You will only make yourself known if you introduce yourself to others.

Blog your Weirdest Experience

Let’s face it, we have all had plenty of weird experiences – some have been far weirder than others. If something very bizarre has happened to you and you feel that you can share it with others, why not blog about it? People love hearing about unusual happenings, the weirder they are the better. Back the story up with pictures if you can.

If you really want to know how to make your blog popular, try introducing some of the ideas listed above. Blog readers don’t want to hear about the mundane things in life – they are reading blogs to escape the ordinary.

Best 7 Ways to Optimize your Facebook fan page SEO right now

Best 7 Ways to Optimize your Facebook fan page SEO at Presently

1. Choose the best name for your Facebook fan page

This may sound like a no-brainer. However, it's the most basic step when it comes to optimizing your brand on Facebook, and is also the most important.

There is always the temptation to stuff your fan page name with tons of keywords, like "Bob's Bakery - Muffins, Bagels, Cookies, Breads - Catering & Events." In actuality, having a name like this can hurt your viral growth rate inside Facebook. If you appear too spammy, your fans will be less likely to engage with your page, let alone share posts and updates with their friends. In fact, people can even hide your updates from their news feed - imagine the horror!

Don't be too generic either, though. Facebook's intent behind fan pages is that they represent real businesses, brands, personalities, etc. By choosing something too generic, like Travel, Sports, Fishing, etc., you run the risk of Facebook shutting down your ability to post updates and reach out to new fans.

Quick Tip: The first word in your fan page title is given the most weight (importance) by Google.

2. Create a custom fan page vanity URL

After your fan page has 25 Likes, Facebook gives your you the ability to create a unique URL (or usernames as Facebook calls them) for the page. Because URLs are heavily weighted by search engines, it is vital that your fan page URL reflects an aspect of your business.

If, by some misalignment in the stars, you find that another fan page has claimed your business' name already, make sure to include what your business is about in the URL.

You can check out some different username options Facebook offers before selecting your one for your fan page.

3. Use keywords in strategic locations on your fan page

Just like traditional websites, keyword optimization is the most fundamental form of on-site SEO. The most important pieces to pay attention to are the About section, Mission, and Company Description, since these areas are actually pulled from your fan page as SEO elements.

Here is an example of how a search engine would index your page:

SEO Title = Your fan page name

Meta Description = Fan page name + the About section of your page

H1 = Your fan page name

To optimize your page for local searches, it is very important to include your Address, City, State, and Zip. For product-related searches, the Company Overview, Mission, and Products fields should be filled in with your appropriate information.

Quick Tip: Just like your website's meta data, you may want to consider using a brief, 140- character description for your fan page so your whole message displays in the search engine's snippet.

4. Include your phone number and address

As surprising as it sounds, there are a good amount of businesses out there that don't include this type of info on their fan page. As a majority of your sales may be from online traffic, it can appear to be not quite so important for you to include. But remember, indexing your brand for local search results is crucial to growing your Facebook fan page.

In addition, Google places higher importance on pages with specific information like your business's phone number and address. So, pages that include this type of data can effectively increase your brand's overall SEO.

5. Backlink to your fan page on existing channels

The more inbound links to your page, the more authoritative your page is according to Google, and you will be ranked higher. That is why it is very important to bloggers when they have their content linked to from other websites, blogs, etc.

This same principle applies to your Facebook fan page. So, where it is appropriate, include a link to your fan page from your other digital channels, like your website, blog, and Twitter profile.

 6. Optimize Facebook fan page status updates

When posting updates to your Facebook wall, remember that the first 18 characters of a Facebook post serve as the meta description. So, take advantage of the option when Facebook prompts you to "Write something..." since that text will be considered the SEO title for that update. Including direct links to your small business website in your updates is also a good practice to follow.

Quick Tip: Just like your fan page's name, Google places a higher importance on the first word of your update, so you may want to consider making that a keyword.

 7. SEO for Facebook Notes

Facebook Notes is something that is very under-utilized. When used appropriately, Facebook Notes can provide your fan page with an effective way at increasing your overall SEO. The SEO elements pulled in from Facebook Notes are:

SEO Title = the title of your note

Meta data = Your fan page name wrote a note titled, your note's title

Facebook Notes gives your page the ability to create multiple "pages" underneath the main fan page. Notes are also a good way to expand on special offers or events that your business is hosting and have them indexed in search engines.

Bottom line for Facebook fan page SEO

Don't forget that the overarching objective of Facebook SEO is adding to the value of your overall brand. It is important to pay attention to the comparison between raw traffic and engagement level.

While using the methods above can help boost your SERP ranking, the most crucial part is that it coincides with an awesome product and incredible engagement to grow your following.

November Index is Live!

This month we're bringing you a special holiday treat: two Mozscape indices in the month of November! We just released the latest index, and you can now find fresh Mozscape data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This index is similar in size to the previous Mozscape index with about 76 billion URLs. The heavy computing AWS machines we moved to in October, detailed in Anthony's blog post, has saved significant amounts of time in our processing schedule thanks to almost no machine failures.

This time saved means more time for the Mozscape engineers to work on exciting projects, like tuning the final configurations in our own private cloud! We've been running a similar sized index in our private cloud located in Virginia alongside the index releasing today. It's running a bit slower as we continue to tune and dial the last pieces, but we hope to be running a hybrid processing solution early next year. Running an index in the cloud and an index in our own private cloud means fresher index data for you and our applications!  

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

76,668,945,929 (76 billion) URLs
664,205,988 (664 million) Subdomains
136,202,352 (136 million) Root Domains
892,544,725,878 (892 billion) Links
Followed vs. Nofollowed
2.31% of all links found were nofollowed
56.61% of nofollowed links are internal
43.39% are external
Rel Canonical - 13.91% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
The average page has 73 links on it
62.28 internal links on average
10.54 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

Page Authority - 0.35
Domain Authority - 0.19
MozRank - 0.24
Linking Root Domains - 0.30
Total Links - 0.25
External Links - 0.29

This histogram shows the crawl date and freshness of results in this index:

As you can see from the histogram, this index has some pretty fresh data mostly coming from October and the first week of November. The freshest data in this index will be from 11/10 when we started processing, and a good percentage was crawled late October and early November. 

Google New Panda Update 21, Impacts 1.1% Of US Queries In English

Google New Panda Update 21, Impacts 1.1% Of US Queries In English

Did you feel it yesterday? Some did, a slight shaking in the Google results. Yes, it was real. Google’s confirmed to us that a Panda Update happened yesterday.

Google said that worldwide, the update will impact about 0.4% of queries that a regular user might notice. For those searching in the United States in English, the percentage is higher. 1.1%, Google says.

This marks the 21st confirmed Panda Update by Google and stays in keeping with the roughly 4-6 week release schedule. Here are all the releases so far:

 Panda Update 1, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
 Panda Update 2, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
 Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
 Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
 Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
 Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
 Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
 Panda Update 8, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
 Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
 Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
 Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
 Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
 Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
 Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
 Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
 Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
 Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
 Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
 Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
 Panda Update 20 , Sep. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
 Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)

The notations tell what percentage of Google’s queries were estimated impacted by the Panda release, when this is given.

How Google+ is Best For Your Business

Google+ has been receiving mixed reviews since it launched less than a year ago. Introduced as a Social Media tool, it felt nothing like one. As the months passed, changes were implemented almost weekly that steered Google+ more towards a familiar social media format, yet the inconsistency “message” of what it was all about kept many users at bay. Circles and the +1 confused more than a few and businesses were unsure about how to use brand pages as an effective tool to promote their product/service. So the question is – should your business be active on Google+?
Yes. Starting right now.

On May 31, Google Places was removed and replaced with Google+ Local Pages – a major leap for Google+ serving as another indicator that Google is making moves to further solidify its position as not only the dominant search engine, but as a priority for a business’ online social presence.

Below, I’ve created a 10 item list to explain why your business should place Google+ at the head of its social media marketing mix:

1. It’s Bigger than You Think

Sure Facebook has 900+ million users, but after only about 12 months Google+ has over 400 million worldwide. Google+ Brand Pages are growing at a faster rate than on Twitter. Do the math on both and the implications for the future are clear.

2. Easy Set Up

Compared to Facebook, Google+ set up for personal and brand pages are now much easier, as are those pesky Privacy settings.

3. Integration of Platforms

The genius behind Google+ is its complete integration with the other Google platforms that your business probably uses. Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa and Chrome (as your browser) may already be in your daily rotation and thus adding Google+ as your lead social media tool will streamline your daily efforts. If you are using none of the above, then you should – your competitors are.

4. The Search Implications of Circles

Google+ Circles are far more than just a fun way to group your interests, friendships, and associations. When your Circles are properly created and you are engaging potential customers within your Circles, their future Google searches are then influenced by their association with you as a business. If they are logged into their Google account, they have a better chance of finding your business in a search query for your category – if you have one another in the same Google+ Circle.

5. Superior Mobile App

Both in design and usability, the Google+ iPhone and Android App is far superior to that of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the rest.

6. Automatic Photo Upload to the Cloud

Photos uploaded to Google+ go directly to the cloud for safe keeping. Better yet, if you use an Android, you can activate a setting to automatically upload any photos taken from your mobile directly to the cloud (under a private account).

Conclusion

Brilliant features aside, one glaring piece of evidence that Google+ should take precedence in your business’ Social Media campaign is this – it’s Google. Google isn’t going anywhere and every move they have made over the last few months indicates that they are slowly but surely rolling out the one social network that is here to stay. The search result implications alone demand that your business starts developing a strong Google+ presence, yesterday.

Google Issues: Crack Down On Low Quality Exact Match Domains

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean sites with keywords they hope to rank for in their domain names are now doomed. Rather, the change aims to target low quality sites that might be riding on on the basis of exact matching.

For a broader perspective on Google algorithm updates, see The Return of the Google Dance on our sister site, Marketing Land. As for ranking factors overall, be sure to see our Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors.

This should come as no surprise, as Cutts said a couple years ago that Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank well when they shouldn’t, in some cases.

Likely over the coming days, you will see shifts in the search results where many sites that may rank well based on being an exact match domain may no longer rank as high in Google’s search results.

The head of Google web spam fighting team Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that Google will be rolling out a “small” algorithm change that will “reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains” from showing up so highly in the search results.

Cutts said this will impact 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. He added it is “unrelated to Panda/Penguin. Panda is a Google algorithm filter aimed at fighting low quality content; Penguin is one aimed at fighting web spam.